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Yamaga Shimazu
12-13-2000, 16:12
Hi fellow taishos,

recent historical updates, 2 months of testing, and a prolonged testing session lasted for 6 hours yesterday, have definitely pushed me towards the second phase of development of these rules.

I am posting them in here so that everybody knows what we are testing both in and offline and to be able to organize testing games faster.

These rules are easy to follow and introduce the player into a new way of playing shogun. Monk rush, Mongol hordes, monster troopers and other (in)famous and irrealistic events will no more take place.

The purpose of these rules is to give a new significance to the game. When players agree to use them in battle, victory will be achieved by tactics and not by unit shopping and smart koku usage.
Honor will no more make 7 monks stand when 53 have been killed and fights to the last man will not occur. Ch'i/cheng, ambush, manouvering, manual and automatic skirmishing and formation commands will now be the key to victory.

Of course these rules are far from being perfect or complete. I am the first one saying so.
Much work needs to be carried away still but i already see the game behaving better.

Any discussion, comment or suggestion will be appreciated, all i ask is that u test them with and without me before complaining or appreciating.

I will be personally available here at the org, on the ea server, via e-mail (dmihqp@tin.it) and icq (# 58294718).

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NOTE: When talking of SAMURAI, i am meaning hc,yc,ca,sa,wm,nd and ng.
When talking of ASHIGARU i am meaning ya,ar and mu.
As u can see, the ys are now off limits. This brings an advantage to the cav units since the worst they will face will be ya.
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1) TAISHO : The taisho must be samurai.

2) HONOR : the maximum honor the player can get for a samurai unit is 5. While the maximum honor ya can have is 2. Gun equipped units have their own honor rules, please refer to rule 4.

3) RATIO : ratio of sam/ashi units is 1-3.

This means the best an army can have is 4 samurai and 12 ashigaru. If a player has 2 samurais then, he must have 6 ashigaru at least. To be able to get a third samurai, the player must also be able to support it with 3 more ashigaru units.

4) Gun units : Gunners have their own rules which try to balance the (1) gun scare, the (2) fire through friends and (3) inaccurate max range factors, with an extra koku cost and a honor limiter for gun units which is different from the one of ya.

The cost of gunners is 500 per arq and 600 per musk. The honor of the guns is fixed at 0.
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How to buy a gunner at 500 if the cost displayed is 100 ?
Well, if gun unit is bought at last, this is very easy.
Let's say the player has bought his army and needs 2 more ashigaru units to remain in correct ratio.
If the player chooses that he needs 2 gunners, then, he must have, at the moment he is to buy them, 1000 available koku (or 1200 if both of them are musks).

So if player has 2400 koku left and wants 2 musks, he will buy the gunners, lower their honor to 0 and consider he has spent 1200.
He can now spend only 1200 koku of those 2400 the game displayed available.

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This is it.

The most difficult thing of all has been to balance the gun cost with their performance.
As ashigaru, gunners should rout but in battle they are really difficult to catch for their fast skirmishing speed.
With a fixed honor of 0, they will rout though, instead of shooting back behind their friendly units...and it is realistic to me. If i had to fight with a club against a sword, a yari, a katana, or a naginata i would run for it.
The honor fixed at 0 will grant fewer kills than archers...and this corrects the fact that in reality archers have much a better range than guns. It helps as well with the -fire-through-friend- issue though guns will still be lethal in combat.


The battles have been tested at fixed koku value of 5000 per army.
The increasing of koku will unbalance the game again...and i repeat, With these rules, koku are not important. Tactics are.

Kraellin
12-14-2000, 00:21
hehe, you didnt actually think we wouldnt reply before testing this system did you? actually, i have tested this, or almost this, with yamaga and it does change the game and possibly reflect reality a bit better.

i dont agree with his reasoning about: "Honor will no more make 7 monks stand when 53 have been killed and fights to the last man will not occur.". there were some great battles in history where the odds were very much against a group, yet with honor they faced their overwhelming odds and did 'fight to the last man'. and frankly, i like this aspect of shogun.

but rather than simply criticize his system i offer up this approach to his rules. i have not tried this except on paper, so this is totally untested. if you accept that yari ashigaru cost 100 as your base unit, then simply multiply the game's cost of ALL the other units by three. here i'm using his figures of 1 samurai to 3 ahsi as my reasoning. this is based on buying units at honor 2, the default. but instead of raising just the cost of all samurai's, i raise the cost of ALL other units, including guns.

this doesnt take into effect the cost of honor at all and perhaps someone could work out those costs. and some may still think that guns would still be too cheap, but it occured to me last night that the simplest way to balance ashi's against samurais would be to simply raise the cost of all units but yari ashigaru.

thus, you might, with a base 5000 koku game get something like this:

general: YS 600
archer: SA 900
archer: SA 900
archer: SA 900
guns: AQ 300
guns: AQ 300
infantry: YA 100
infantry: YA 100
infantry: YA 100
infantry: YA 100
infantry: YA 100
infantry: YA 100
infantry: YA 100
infantry: YA 100
infantry: YA 100
infantry: YA 100
_________________
total cost: 4900

this leaves 100 points to put to honor. this assumes all units are honor 2 and of course you'd still be able to take honor points off units and use it to buy other units, but if honor for ALL units cost 3 times what it does now then this would make honor more costly. by making honor cost 3x even for yari ashigaru you'd not get too many all high honor YA's.

what i'm looking at here is a way to make an editor more easily tweaked with a fixed set of rules for doing so. i'm not trying to invalidate yamaga's suggestions, but simply to add to them. i've tested his system with him and it is a pretty good system.

guns and honor seem to be the 2 things that get skewed with the current game that make for rather odd game play at times. most seem to think that guns are too cheap and that honor is too easy to come by. by simply raising the cost of ALL units but YA's and raising honor costs of ALL units and by tweaking the cost of guns, i think we could come up with a decent somewhat realistic system.

and i have two more suggestions to make here as well, initial cost vs maintenance cost and starting year. in the campaign game it would make sense to have an initial cost of raising a unit and then a separate cost of maintaining it. this would then reflect things like guns were VERY expensive to make, especially compared to bow costs, yet very cheap to maintain. since in multiplayer games we are raising an army instantly, or going out shopping for one, it's my opinion that this shld more reflect the initial cost of the units and their training and equipping. the multiplayer game is more like hiring mercenaries for a temporary job than equipping a standing army to help you hold onto a territory. therefore, equipment costs and training are more important than the costs of maintaining a unit over a year's time.

the other point that i would suggest for the editor is to add a feature of 'starting year'. guns didnt come into play until the european traders brought them over in whatever year it was. by adding a starting year feature, the host of a multi game could simply allow or not allow for guns at all by setting the starting year after or before guns were available in japan. simple. this might also even be used for other units. maybe someone could look into when different units came into being in japan and figure out a schedule for allowing or not different units to be used in the game.

ok, my apologies, yamaga, for turning your new thread into something it isnt ;) but the other thread was getting long anyways. i've just carried it over into here ;)

K.

Vanya
12-14-2000, 03:13
I was just wondering as to what these rules everybody was referring to were!!

Thanks for posting them! Now I don't feel ignorant.

The ONLY thing I don't like is the usage of different costs that the normal ones. Do you really expect players to sit in front of their PCs to calculate how much they spend using your cost list vs that of the main list? I would say simplify the rules to use existing cost values, keep the honor limits as they are and perhaps limit the number of gun units to a max of 3. With these other cost values, I dont think people would really give them a chance (I know I wouldn't, especially if people will say I cheated because my math sucked 'cause I spent 3 more koku than I should have because of these funny costs...).

Rob
12-14-2000, 03:26
Yes, this is a problem. There might be ways around it, by making an unofficial patch for the game. This would change the in-game costs of the units. However, this is difficult to do and may also promote cheating. AFAIK the 'koku cheat' works along similar lines...

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Rob Hojo

Yamaga Shimazu
12-14-2000, 16:17
Kraell :-)

this system is slightly different.

As to fighting to last man, i know that there were battles where big odds were evened up by great honor deeds. It happens still with this system, but just more rare.

but rather than simply criticize his system i offer up this approach to his rules. i have not tried this except on paper, so this is totally untested. if you accept that yari ashigaru cost 100 as your base unit, then simply multiply the game's cost of ALL the other units by three. here i'm using his figures of 1 samurai to 3 ahsi as my reasoning. this is based on buying units at honor 2, the default. but instead of raising just the cost of all samurai's, i raise the cost of ALL other units, including guns.

The costs are standard...only changed one is the gun units cost. truly interesting this thing u say. though a calculator is needed
;-)
Get in touch for the tests pls.

No system will ever be 100% correct...we have still a big limit to surpass and its the 16 units on battlefield per army at one time.
Then the system of honor which represents experience/training/morale.