So I still like the game and it's still probably the best total war game to date, but the end game has me kind of depressed. Realm Divided is too harsh and quite frankly, ridiculous. Having your money plummet to nothing because you're no longer trading because every ******* nation, even your allies have declared war on you just sucks. There were literally 2 new 2000 man armies marching into my territory every other turn.
I'm going to take a different approach next game which I think I'll have more success with, but right now, it just seems like a bull**** way to artificially inflate the difficulty. The end game in Rome was great, I'd argue perfect for this type of game. The end game in Medieval 2 was complete bull**** in that horse archers **** everything up, but at least you could reasonably deal with that because they were limited to 5 or 10 armies. This is just infinite 2000 man armies streaming into your territory.
I was talking to Spunky and he seemed to have some success by bribing off the Shogun, but you shouldn't have to do that in order to compete.