Alright, let\'s settle this; (Non) Official WE Facts of the Day Post:

[Lord Aeon]

Warlord Edition Fact of the Day for Monday, August 20, 2001:

One unit of MHC with full armor and weapon upgrades and honor 9 costs: 7199 Koku.

You may be asking yourself, "Why is this important?"

Well, for the simple reason that it is then IMPOSSIBLE for someone to take 16 units of honor 9 MHC with full weapon/armor upgrades into battle. Even with the koku limit set to 99999, you simply do NOT have enough money to buy 16 units of them.

At the same time, it is TOTALLY POSSIBLE for someone to take 16 units of Honor 9 Yari Samurai into battle with full armor/weapon upgrades...

Implications for multiplayer balance? You decide. I'm just bringing the facts. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

One of these every day until the whining stops (although i will confine it to one thread, of course)! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif

P.S. I sincerely hope i haven't offended anyone... that wasn't my intention.

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"You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple."

[Lord Aeon]

In fact, folks, it's even worse than that. I have found that it is indeed impossible for one to take 16 units of Honor 9 MHC WITHOUT ANY weapon or armor upgrades.

You can squeeze out 15 units of honor 9 MHC, and one unit of honor 8 MHC before you run out of koku. (limit set to 99999 koku)

At the same time, a unit of H9, A3, W3 Yari Samurai is almost 4000 koku cheaper than their MHC counterpart.

Wow, that's 2 facts for one day! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif

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"You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple."

[Yoko Kono]

ah but who wins?
do the mongols prevail or dost thine noble young samurai triumph?

1 mhc at 600 will lose to 1 ys costing the same(at hon3 with upgrades) with yari takin 10-20 losses

[Lord Aeon]

LOL, you stole my FotD for Tuesday!! Guess i'll have to come up with something else... http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

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"You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple."

[Lord Aeon]

I'm gonna give you good people a third FotD for today, because i don't think it can wait 'til tomorrow:

I've done a few tests, and by no means have i taken a decent-sized sample (so don't blast me for not using great experimental design). This was done with Yari Samurai vs. MHC, all H9, with full weapon/armor upgrades.

Anyway, here goes:

On a Fine day/Fog/Wind:
Mongol Heavy Cavalry wins 71.4% of the matches.
Average heads lost per win: 37.8

In Rain/Heavy Rain:
Yari Samurai wins 55.6% of the matches.
Average heads lost per win: 41.2

My tenuous conclusion:
YS are very capable of defending against MHC. For the cost, YS are a very good counter for MHC, and at the same time MHC still retain their title as "most feared unit of the time period".

Now, i haven't done a t-test or anything, so take the following with a grain of salt:
It sems as though MHC struggle noticeably in adverse weather conditions. There was also virtually no distance or rough terrain between the MHC and the YS, so any other fatigue factors are not tested for.

Overall: Are MHC invincible?
No, probably not, but the verdict is not in yet.

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"You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple."

[Khan7]

Oooh, here's another fact, even if it's not quite on-topic-- Naginata Cavalry performs on par with Yari Samurai!

Oh well, that's my random fact for the day..

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Khan7

[Lord Aeon]

Another note on the "tests" i performed:

They were all done with me charging as Mongols... i think i might have done a better job as Japanese than the CPU (Normal difficulty).

In fact, i'll try that out... let y'all know for tomorrow's FotD.

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"You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple."

[JAG]

i don't think many ppl (vets) are going to be playing 99999 gam,es out of principle that half, the strategy of picking units is gone! well that is what i think and that is y i play low koku games (2k - 5k)

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Watch out for that. . . . . Dam too late!. . . the story of my life!

WarlordWarrior

[DragonCat]

I think you've missed the point Jag. What he is proving is that even at extremes the Mongols don't win the koku battle. So no strategy is lost. At any koku level, the Japanese will be able to spend their additional koku on more upgrades than the Mongols can affort and thus be able to balance.

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DragonCat
"On the prowl . . . ."

[Catiline]

Remember gentlemen that the whole point of spears is that they beat Cav, be they MHC or not. Now I don't have the xpack so I can't get too involved in the argument, but it seems to me that we've forgotten the paper scissors stone aspect a bit when discussing everything interms of cost effectiveness.

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Oderint dum metuant

[KumaRatta Yamamoto]

Catiline: against the MHC , the spears have to teched up a bit or else the MHC wins. But in my view, that's OK. The MHC are suppose to be the monster they are now (All of the Mongol units are strong).

Have not play a lot of MP since getting the game , but in SP mongol campaign this makes sense.

This gives the mongol invaders a boost at the start of the game, and keeps the pressure on to conquer quicly because as time goes by....The japanese army can tech up and offer a stronger resistance (and if too much time is offered to them, the tides will turn against the Mongols).

[Lord Aeon]

Mornin', folks, time for the WE Fact of the Day for Tuesday, August 21, 2001:

"Hannibal" comes out on video today...

LOL, that wasn't really it. OK, here goes:

I performed more tests (very simillar to yesterday's tests), this time playing as Japanese vs. attacking Mongol MHC. As it tends to get boring, i'm not going to post the numbers, but suffice it to say that i only lost once in MANY battles.

Now, i'm conceding that this may be a function of the difficulty setting, so i plan to increase it to hard/expert and perform the same tests; but if you are perceptive, you will see that the difficulty will probably not make much of a difference. The rock/paper/scissors feature seems to be still alive and working quite well.

More on this at another time... i'll let this marinade for awhile. Stay tuned for tomorrow's FotD where we discuss morale, routing, unit honor, that little rout button, and individual soldier honor.

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"You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple."

[This message has been edited by Lord Aeon (edited 08-21-2001).]

[Vanya]

I ran a cute little test: 1 kensai vs 1 sanda boma. I put the sanda boma on a hill and made the kensai charge uphill at them. I did this 10 times. Numerically, the odds were against the kensai 12 to 1...

(I put the sanda bomas on a hill so they wouldn't blow themselves up. This way, I kinda give 'em a chance, ya see...)

Results were:

Kensai won all 10! Even with the bomas dropping all around him, he still managed to dodge the flak and make it up the hill to carve a piece of out of the terrified sanda bomas! Kensai (obviously) lost none in the wins and usually took about 60% of the bomas, mostly as they ran for their worthless lives!



[This message has been edited by Vanya (edited 08-21-2001).]

[UglyElmo]

LOL Vanya, I have been using my kensai as thunder bomber chasers for quite awhile now. HEHE Ninjas do a very good job as well. Only problem is if your kensai gets caught up in a fight with another unit between the kensai and bombers. Then the kensai will die sometimes before getting anywhere near the bombers. But of course, the bombs take almost half of the enemy unit the kensai is fighting with it! hehe The best strategy for beating Thunder Bombers is to run a unit past them and get on the upper side of the hill. They will attack you, but now their bombs land amongst themeselves! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif The MHC can be beaten cheaply, but the mongol army is a very quick one and has many missile unit types as well as some tough foot soldiers. If the mongol army can shoot yours up a bit, then the effectiveness of the yari sams are reduced to where they will now be beaten easily. It takes some work to become good at the mongol units, but a good player that knows what he is doing, will win as mongol most of the time, but not with an ALL HVY CAV army.

[VoodooChild]

The outcome of any battle is usualy determined long before the first arrow is shot or the first sword is swung.

Combined arms tactics will have to be used more in MP games in order to come out on top of the r-s-p game,and the general who applies it better will likely win.

[DragonCat]

I agree absolutely VooDoo. The game is maturing and has gotten better.

Kensai vs the Thunder Bombers is brilliant! They can't hit the broad side of a barn anyway. Best strategy is make them chase your kensai into a mass of their own units. Odds of kensai dying= very small, odds of most of enemy being Thunder Bombed= 99%.

We played with them in a King of the Hill tournament. Talk about massive destruction. If you are not familiar with King of the Hill, imagine everyone's troops trying to fit inside an area the size of a phone booth in the middle of the map. Now imagine thunder bombers going nuts throwing into the phone booth with everyone inside. We could hardly finish we were laughing so loud!

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DragonCat
"On the prowl . . . ."

[Khan7]

Actually, in my opinion, the Thunderbombs not taking out Mr. Kensai sounds like a load of you know what, but oh well.

But in my opinion the best Mongol units are not the MHC or the thunderbombs-- they are the skirmishers. Danged things are invulnerable to missle fire, tear cav to pieces in melee, have an inf vs. inf melee capability just above SA and just below YS, and those javelins, with their greater reliability, number, and firing rate (along with a somewhat severely overblown effectiveness, imo) will tear up any unit on par with thunderbombs and without excessive friendlyfire concerns. There is no effective counter unit, except perhaps Kensai, who can *magically* escape death from missles and tie the unit up in melee for a while..

Anyway, though because of the darned serial number fiasco I can't currently play online, I'd bet that the Mongols are going to turn out to be distinctively and rather consistently superior in online play.

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Khan7

[Algesan]

A skirm will take out a Kensai fairly handily. However I don't have a problem with the bombas and skirms missing the Kensai in melee. What mainly seems to happen on the approach is that the Kensai runs under the missiles, he is far more agile than a full unit. I do have a problem when the bombs burst all around the center of the line where the Kensai is engaging, killing all the bombas in the center, but leaving the Kensai untouched.

[Lord Aeon]

What do you mean! The kensai is blessed by the Buddha! He can walk through fire and dodge javelins, arrows, and bullets just like Kane in Kung Fu. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

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"You have offended my family, and you have offended a Shaolin temple."

[DragonCat]

My fact for today: Background

Played a 3x3 last night online and we defended on a steep hill. Was a friendly game, and the attackers chose the map.

Of course, there was enough lag so that you could really track what was happening frame by frame.

Saw several instances of units routing (Glory Be!) when they were hit hard and from several directions and especially as they fatiged.

I finished the battle with all 16 units intact (I was a defender and my units were never put in a situation to cause them to rout)- even one musket unit with only 5 members left. The attackers lost a lot of their army during pursuit while they were routing.

So today's fact of the day: IMHO- Routing is alive and well - dare I say BETTER, than before.
(OK, I know I'll pull some heat for that last statement- but it is just my opinon based on over 80 competitive online games on with the new server). I say it because I am not happy that a vocal minority is making it seem like there is no routing at all. With few exceptions- (Swoosh being one), I don't see many of the people complaining playing online much.

So I am the other vocal minority, saying there is little if any morale problem- IMHO.

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DragonCat
"On the prowl . . . ."