Total War: SHOGUN 2 Units Roster: Ashigaru & Samurai Picks

Picking the wrong frontline in Total War Shogun 2 can drain your treasury in a single bad siege, so knowing the unit roster before you recruit saves turns, money, and entire provinces. This breakdown of Total War Shogun 2 units walks through every major category — cheap ashigaru, elite samurai, cavalry, and naval options — so you can build armies that match your clan, your economy, and the campaign moment you happen to be in.

The Total War Shogun 2 Unit Roster at a Glance

The base game ships with a tight, well-balanced roster that splits cleanly along class, weapon, and faction lines. The Core campaign feeds you peasant levies for the early game and unlocks samurai formations through province buildings and technology, while the standalone Fall of the Samurai expansion replaces most of those line infantry with rifle-armed regiments by the late 1800s. According to the official store page on Steam, the base game launched on 15 March 2011 and still holds a Very Positive review record near 92 percent from roughly sixty-eight thousand Steam reviews — a strong sign that the underlying roster design has aged well.

Three pillars define how every Total War Shogun 2 units entry behaves on the battlefield: Unit Class (infantry, cavalry, missile, naval, or specialist), Weapon Family (yari spear, katana, no-dachi, bow, matchlock, or rifle), and Tier (levy, ashigaru, samurai, elite, or general's bodyguard). Each pillar interacts with the others — a yari ashigaru will always lose to a yari samurai in a straight push, but pairing a yari wall with bow ashigaru behind it flattens enemy cavalry charges without spending a yen on elite troops.

These seven buckets cover roughly 80 percent of the battles you fight. Special formations like warrior monks, ronin, and the unique O-Tsuma Bune naval units round out the edges, but the core army-building loop is built on the ashigaru-to-samurai pipeline that has defined the series for over a decade.

Why the Ashigaru-to-Samurai Pipeline Matters

Early-game campaigns live or die on whether your ashigaru can hold the line long enough for your economy to mature. Once you secure three or four safe provinces, the same recruitment slots pivot toward samurai, and your army composition has to evolve with them. The Total War wiki entry on Shogun 2 confirms that ashigaru are the cheap, quickly trained peasant infantry, while samurai need specific province buildings before they can be recruited but outperform ashigaru across nearly every combat stat.

Ashigaru Units: The Backbone of the Best Early Armies

Ashigaru are peasant conscripts raised from the rice-farming population, and they form the bulk of every clan roster in the early campaign. They are not glamorous, but in the right hands a stack of yari and bow ashigaru can out-perform a samurai-heavy army at a fraction of the upkeep cost. This section is the practical Shogun 2 ashigaru guide you'll come back to whenever a new campaign opens.

Three ashigaru families matter in nearly every battle because they cover the three combat roles — melee anti-cavalry screen, ranged skirmisher, and gunpowder volley — at the lowest recruitment cost on the Shogun 2 unit roster, letting you field a 20-stack army on a fraction of the koku a samurai equivalent demands.

• Yari Ashigaru — Spear infantry, your default anti-cavalry screen. Cheap, available from turn one, and devastating against mounted charges when you brace the formation.

• Bow Ashigaru — Skirmishers with long range, ideal for softening enemy lines before melee contact. They fold quickly if cavalry reaches them, so keep a yari block between them and the enemy.

• Matchlock Ashigaru — Firearm infantry unlocked later through province buildings. Slower reload than samurai matchlock, but cheap enough to flood a settlement with volleys.

Yari Ashigaru Stats and When to Recruit Them

Shogun 2 yari ashigaru are the most-recruited unit in the entire Total War Shogun 2 unit roster because they solve two problems at once: they hold the line against cavalry, and they cost almost nothing to maintain. In exchange, they break easily under sustained missile fire, and their melee attack stat is low enough that a katana samurai duel will usually go badly for the peasant.

Use yari ashigaru as the frontline screen in any stack that contains more expensive units behind them. Place them in a long, shallow line, set their stance to "defend" or "brace," and let the enemy crash into the spear wall. Their defensive stats are good enough that even elite katana samurai will grind down on the points for several seconds before breaking through.

Bow Ashigaru: Range and Roles on the Skirmish Line

Shogun 2 bow ashigaru are the cheapest ranged unit in the game, and they outperform their tier by a wide margin when you place them on a hill or behind a river. They share a 200-unit ammo pool with most bow units in the game, which sounds generous but burns quickly when the enemy brings cavalry to flank them. Pair them with at least one infantry block in front, and they will delete enemy morale before melee contact even happens.

Common roles in any Shogun 2 unit tier list place bow ashigaru firmly in the ranged DPS slot — a cheap, high-volume missile platform that excels at dismounting yari cavalry and breaking yari ashigaru morale before they reach your line, but one that folds instantly if a no-dachi samurai or cavalry samurai reaches melee range because their melee attack and melee defense stats sit in the single digits. Treat them as a force multiplier for your infantry block, not as a standalone line, since their 200-unit shared ammo pool and minimal armor mean every shot has to count.

• Pre-battle softening: Open the engagement by ordering them to volley at long range, then pull back behind your melee line.

• Skirmish screen: Use their superior missile range to deny the enemy's own bow units a clean firing arc.

• Naval support: When defending a coastal province, anchor them on a tower or behind a wall and let them shoot anything that comes within 150 meters.

The synergy between yari and bow ashigaru is the foundation of every best units in Shogun 2 list that you will find in the community. It is also the composition that veteran clans use in the early turns before the samurai buildings come online.

Samurai Units: When the Province Buildings Unlock

Samurai are the elite backbone of every late-game stack, recruited only from clans that control specific province buildings. According to the Fall of the Samurai Steam page, the standalone expansion even rebalances the late-game economy around a single question: do you keep recruiting traditional samurai, or do you switch to Western-style rifle regiments? The base game's Mastery of the Arts tree handles the answer in a different way — through the Bushido military reform path, which is split across a series of technologies that progressively unlock samurai formations.

There are six samurai families — Katana, No-Dachi, Yari, Bow, Matchlock, and Warrior Monks — that show up in nearly every campaign, and each is locked behind a specific province building chain, so their battlefield role depends entirely on the settlement upgrades your clan has invested in. The Bow and Matchlock lines require an archery range or gunsmith respectively, while the melee variants demand a sword hall, dojo, or naginata workshop, which is why a clan starved of specific buildings will simply never field that family, no matter how rich the treasury gets.

The matchlock samurai are the single most expensive unit in the base game's roster, but they earn their upkeep by deleting an entire ashigaru line in two volleys. No-dachi samurai, on the other hand, are the highest melee attack unit in the game and can break a braced yari wall in under ten seconds if they catch it from the rear. Pairing both of these units with a screen of bow ashigaru creates the kind of stack that the How To Build Your ARMY guide by The Viking General walks through in detail.

Samurai Province Buildings You Need to Plan Around

Recruiting samurai is not a question of gold — it is a question of province buildings. Each major clan must construct a dojo, stables, and gunpowder facilities in specific settlement types before the recruitment option appears at all. Here is the minimum build order that any clan needs to unlock the elite roster:

1. Temple (any settlement) — unlocks Warrior Monks.

2. Sword Dojo (castle town) — unlocks Katana, No-Dachi, and Bow Samurai.

3. Yari Dojo (castle town) — unlocks Yari Samurai and Yari Cavalry.

4. Gunpowder Dojo (castle town) — unlocks Matchlock Samurai and Hand Mortars.

5. Stables (castle town) — unlocks Yari Cavalry, Katana Cavalry, and Naginata Samurai Cavalry.

A common mistake is to build every dojo in the same province, which lets you recruit from one place but cripples your recruitment capacity. Spread the dojos across three or four castle towns, and you can field a full samurai army in two turns when a crisis hits.

Cavalry, Naval, and Specialist Units

Beyond ashigaru and samurai, the Total War Shogun 2 unit roster includes a long tail of cavalry, naval, and specialist units that often get overlooked. The community-shared TOP 5 BEST UNITS breakdown consistently ranks a cavalry general or two as a top-five pick, and that single data point tells you how much impact mounted units have when used correctly. For a deeper dive into how the yari cavalry compare to ashigaru on the open field, the Shogun 2 katana samurai reference page covers the melee tier list in full.

Cavalry Roles in the Shogun 2 Meta

Cavalry in Shogun 2 split into two distinct schools: yari cavalry and katana cavalry. Yari cavalry counter other cavalry and excel at chasing down routing units, while katana cavalry are shock troops that hit a missile line like a hammer. Both are extremely expensive to recruit and maintain, so they are typically reserved for clan leaders and a small cadre of elite cavalry units in each stack.

• Yari Cavalry: Charge bonus of 16, perfect for rear-charging an engaged enemy line.

• Katana Cavalry: Higher melee attack, but lower charge — better for sustained combat.

• Naginata Samurai Cavalry: Hybrid role, only available to a handful of clans.

• General's Bodyguard Cavalry: Mounted bodyguard, high stats across the board.

Naval Units and the O-Ataka Bune

Naval combat gets far less attention than land battles, but it decides wars at the strategic level. The O-Ataka Bune — a fast, flammable sea vessel packed with matchlock-armed marines — can board and capture an enemy trade ship in under a minute, and a small fleet of them can blockade an entire strait. If you are planning a campaign that involves a lot of sea lanes, the dedicated O-Ataka Bune breakdown explains how the unit's fire damage interacts with enemy crew morale. The bigger Sengoku Bune and the trade-only trade ships fill out the rest of the naval roster, and the late-game Fall of the Samurai adds steam-powered ironclads that can bombard coastal provinces from the campaign map.

Specialists: Kisho Ninja, Warrior Monks, and Flaming Arrows

Kisho ninja are the most situational unit in the entire roster, and they are also one of the most rewarding when used correctly. They can scale castle walls without siege equipment, sabotage province buildings, and assassinate enemy agents — but they are useless in a straight fight. Warrior monks, by contrast, are a hybrid melee-healer unit that can buff nearby troops in the field, and a single unit of warrior monks attached to a siege assault will out-perform three units of ordinary ashigaru on the walls.

Fall of the Samurai and the 1864 Boshin War Roster

The 1860s expansion replaces the traditional ashigaru-to-samurai pyramid with a Western-style rifle economy. By the late game you are fielding Armstrong cannon batteries, Gatling gun sections, and modern rifle regiments that fire at ranges that make the base game's matchlock samurai look like firecrackers. According to the Fall of the Samurai overview, the unit curve is built around obsolescence — a campaign opens with traditional units close to the base game's roster, then research pushes them aside in favor of Western formations.

The tier list effectively resets once you cross into the Fall of the Samurai expansion, because the Boshin War rebalances every traditional Total War Shogun 2 unit category around modern ranged firepower and combined-arms doctrine. Matchlock-armed yari samurai and bow ashigaru — the backbone of the base game roster — drop several ranks almost overnight, while Line Infantry, Repeater Rifle Infantry, and Armstrong artillery climb to the top of the best units in Shogun 2 tier discussions. Clans that banked on cavalry charges get punished hardest, since carbine-armed dragoons and modern Gatling gun sections shred melee units before contact.

The transition window is roughly 10 turns, and it punishes players who committed to a full traditional army too early. If you want a clean explanation of which clans survive the technology shift best, the Rise of the Samurai review page walks through the campaign arc in detail, including how the faction balance changes once modern research is unlocked.

Late-Game Rifle Picks That Replace Samurai

Once the Armstrong gun and Gatling gun research is complete, your best units shift dramatically because the underlying damage model and range brackets change — a single Armstrong Gun Battery volley (high missile damage, long range) will melt a Yari Ashigaru block before it can close, and Gatling Gun Sections shred cavalry charges that previously defined mid-game engagements. The community tier list at that point looks like this:

• S-Tier: Armstrong Gun Battery, Repeater Rifle Infantry, Imperial Guard Line Infantry.

• A-Tier: Gatling Gun Section, Shogunate Line Infantry, Mounted Infantry (carbine).

• B-Tier: Traditional Katana Samurai, No-Dachi Samurai, Yari Samurai.

• C-Tier: Yari Ashigaru, Bow Ashigaru (mostly obsolete by this point).

The fall-off in traditional units is sharp. A yari ashigaru that was a frontline king at turn 10 is a liability by turn 50, because enemy rifle regiments can delete them at ranges their own bows cannot reach. Plan your recruitment to mirror this curve, and your late-game stacks will dominate.

Building the Best Army Composition in Shogun 2

A tier list only matters if you can turn it into an army that actually wins battles. The composition pattern that holds up across both the base game and the Fall of the Samurai expansion is straightforward, and it scales from turn-one stacks to late-game doomstacks. If you want a second opinion on how multiplayer veterans build their armies, the Shogun 2 multiplayer veteran units breakdown covers the meta in detail, including retainer picks and the specific samurai builds that high-ranked players run.

The Four-Slot Composition That Wins Most Battles

After dozens of battles across Fall of the Samurai and the base Shogun 2 campaign, the most reliable armies consistently organize their Total War Shogun 2 units into four interlocking roles that cover each other's vulnerabilities: a yari anchor to hold the line, missile support to grind down attackers, shock infantry to exploit gaps, and cavalry to collapse routing units. This four-slot logic beats rigid tier-list picks because the unit roster's stats — melee attack, melee defense, reload skill, and charge bonus — interact asymmetrically, so raw power means little without role coverage. A stack built on this template can pivot from defensive siege duty to open-field aggression without rebuilding, which is why veterans lean on it for both Realm Divide and legendary campaign runs.

• Slot 1: Yari Line — Yari ashigaru or yari samurai, four to six units, set to defend and brace.

• Slot 2: Bow/Missile Support — Bow ashigaru, bow samurai, or rifle infantry, two to four units, positioned behind the yari line.

• Slot 3: Shock Infantry — Katana samurai or no-dachi samurai, one to two units, held in reserve to exploit a breakthrough.

• Slot 4: Cavalry — One unit of yari cavalry or the general's bodyguard, used for flank charges and routing chases.

This composition works because each slot covers a weakness in the others. Yari holds the line. Bow softens the enemy. Shock infantry finishes them. Cavalry cleans up. The total cost is roughly 4,000 koku per turn for a 12-unit stack, which is sustainable by turn 30 in most campaigns.

Clan-Specific Picks and the Best Clan to Unlock Everything

Some clans get unique unit access through their province building chains, and a few of them — notably the Otomo, the Ikko Ikki, and the Hattori — can recruit units that other clans cannot. If you want to start a campaign with access to the most diverse unit roster, the Total War Shogun 2 factions page ranks each clan by recruitment breadth. The Shimazu and Chosokabe, for example, get a small but elite samurai roster, while the Ikko Ikki skip samurai entirely and lean on warrior monks and yari ashigaru.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best unit in Total War Shogun 2 for early campaigns?

Yari Ashigaru are the best early-game unit because they cost almost nothing to recruit and maintain, are available from turn one, and counter cavalry effectively when braced. Pair them with Bow Ashigaru behind the line and you have a low-cost stack that can hold territory until your samurai buildings come online.

Are samurai worth recruiting in the base game?

Yes, especially Katana Samurai and Matchlock Samurai. The katana samurai win melee duels and shock infantry engagements, while matchlock samurai can delete an entire ashigaru line in two volleys. The upkeep is high, so recruit them after you have a stable economy from at least four safe provinces.

How do Fall of the Samurai units change the tier list?

Traditional units drop sharply in value once Western research is complete. Armstrong Gun Batteries and Repeater Rifle Infantry replace samurai as the late-game backbone, and most ashigaru formations become obsolete by turn 50 in a Boshin War campaign. The transition window is roughly 10 turns, so plan recruitment to mirror the technology curve.

Can I recruit ninja in Total War Shogun 2?

Yes — Kisho Ninja are available to the Hattori clan and a handful of others through the Shinobi province building. They cannot win a straight fight, but they scale castle walls without siege equipment, sabotage province buildings, and assassinate enemy agents, which makes them one of the most useful specialist units in the entire roster.

What is the best army composition for new players?

A four-slot composition works for most new players: four to six units of Yari Ashigaru on the front line, two to four units of Bow Ashigaru behind them, one to two units of Katana Samurai held in reserve, and one unit of cavalry for flank charges. The total upkeep is roughly 4,000 koku per turn, which is sustainable by turn 30 in most campaigns.