I’m sure you’re overwhelmed with games right now, what with the November release explosion and Steam sales sending you through the back-catalogues, but if you have a spare week to fall back in love with The Creative Assembly’s strategy chops, here’s a good excuse. Total War: Shogun 2′s Otomo Clan pack is out now on Steam for $6.50; as previously detailed, the new pack is pretty keen on firearms, with plenty of new gunpowder units and bonuses for the titular Otomo clan. Check out the trailer below and peruse the Steam page for more information.

Source: Steam

Not enough variety in your Shogun 2? The Otomo Clan Pack DLC, which you can pre-order now from Steam for $5.84, aims to add a bit more colour with the addition of a new playable faction. The Otomo Clan are best buds with Portugese traders, and so have access to quite a few more gun-riffic units than other clans.

Otomo Clain Traits include the ability to recruit cheaper gunpowder units, take cheaper missionary actions, convert clan religions faster, and import Matchlock Ashigaru units quicker as well.

New units for the Otomo Clan include Portugese Tercos armed with matchlock rifles and swords, Otomo Donderbuss Cavalry who ride around on horseback and fire proto-shotguns, and Otomo Matchlock Samurai who deliver disciplined volleys of rifle fire before wading into melee. Phwoar.

Source: Steam

Modders of the Total War series — also known as “98% of players” — will be very excited to see learn that the Shogun 2 Assembly Kit has now arrived on Steam. The tools allow “ground-up modification” of the game, even including a reworked TEd editor. Most promisingly, the kit includes Steam Workshop integration which means one-click mod installs through Steam — also known as “the best thing ever” are now a reality.

“Until now though there’s never been a useful set of tools that really opened up the possibilities in the game the way we knew they (the community) wanted,” waxed Creative Assembly’s Rob. Bartholomew. “However, while we gear up for Rome II’s release next year, I’m happy to say that the team were able pull out all the stops and put together a kit we hope will really inspire them.”

Modders have long criticised Shogun 2 for having core sections locked off an unaccessible, forcing them to use unorthodox techniques to achieve their desired results. This new kit should hopefully make a lot of people very happy.

There has been a pretty major patch for Total War: Shogun 2, which is a delightful 40% off on Steam at the moment, that will fix some of the game’s more annoying multiplayer bugs, as well as a few crash bugs. There’s a pretty long list of fixes, but fixing the desynchronisation in a multiplayer campaign will pretty much be the highlight of everyone’s day. There are some shader tweaks and some smoothing out of some animations as well, as well as improving compatibility with AMD Radeon HD 7 series of graphic cards. As I say, it’s a pretty extensive list, so if you’re interested, check out the full list over on Steam.

Source: PC Gamer