The Castle provides gamers with a single, intuitive dashboard for all their pre and post battle decisions and elevates the game from a tactical action title to a strategy focused epic.
It plays a very important role in the Samurai Warriors 4 Empires as it is essentially a command centre from where the player can regulate interior and foreign affairs, formulate political and military strategy, and utilise their allied officers’ skills to grow their army’s number, power, and loyalty.
Starting of as a cluster of small rooms and growing to a multi-tiered stronghold, players can use the Castle interface to assign various tasks and Magistrate titles to their most trusted and valued allied officers. These tasks can vary from Recruitment to Diplomacy and from Development to Strategy. Regardless of the direction the player chooses to take, a careful, skill-based selection of allies will wield better results (i.e. more soldiers, more allies, more gold etc).
As relationships are pivotal to all Empires games, pairing allied officers with a friendly disposition will create high synergy, which would produce faster and better results. Furthermore, since all officers in Samurai Warriors 4 Empires are based in historical figures with real personalities, assigning them to an appropriate position will generate unique suggestions and trigger specific events!
Aside from recruitment, commerce, provisions and the other domestic and political affairs, the Castle can also be used to prepare for battle. The Military Magistrate would analyse the situation and will make proposals to aid in battle, Foreign Affairs Magistrates would suggest alliances and diplomatic interventions, while Strategists would present the player with ideas for sabotaging and weakening the enemy. With their assistance, players can then choose how to charge the battlefield: how big an army to take along, how many provisions or gold to invest, and whether a diplomatic solution is preferable to conflict.
In this way, Samurai Warriors 4 Empires blends the best of the tactical action battle gameplay with an easy-to-learn in depth strategy system to create the most exciting instalment in the Empires franchise for years!
Samurai Warriors 4 Empires is scheduled for release on 11th March 2016 on the PlayStation 4 (physical and digital), and the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita handheld system (digital only).
