I love the X-Pack, thank you Target/CA/EA

[Koga No Goshi]

Seriously not just kissing butt here, but I thought with all the negativity I should point out that the more I play the expansion, the more I love it.

I badmouthed it at first because I went straight into custom mode and did a Mongol Heavy Cav test against the old and new Japanese cavalry and saw how "imbalanced" they were. Also, I've had some technical probs getting the game to work correctly, but most of it has been cleared up so far. (Still having some lockups and crashes in MP mode that I don't have at all with the original, but hope to resolve that soon).

By far this game's greatest strength lies in the changes and additions to the single player campaign. To a lot of people here on the forum, the game is ONLY good or bad insofar as how it affects online play. However, I have a sense of proportion and seeing there's usually fewer than 60 people playing online at any given time, I know as I'm sure the producers do that this game is only played online by a tiny fraction of all the people who buy the game. So priority is/was naturally given to single player mode, and this paid off.

I love the fact that you can choose starting periods, and that the new starting configurations are so historically correct. (Even the ronin clans and taisho names!) One of my original disappointments with STW was the fact that the clans all stayed the same in the same regions, and weren't even in their historically correct provinces.

Also, the small touches and improvements have greatly enhanced gameplay.

I love that the AI turn goes by faster and it moves its armies a lot faster.

I like that there's a "confirmation sound" when you tell an assasin to kill someone, cause sometimes you weren't sure if you clicked right on the "yes" in the original and then the ninja or geisha didn't do anything the next turn.

I LOVE the ability to retrain and add upgrades. Probably the most frustrating thing about single player in the original was I'd build this nice great army and as I used it I had to constantly churn out a neverending stream of replacement units. Plus those archers who were honor 4 or 5 but were down to like 17 men were useless before. Now I can use a "primary army" to kick butt, retire it to the home province to refill unit strength and then just move an "occupation army" into the new province.

I love that Shinobi each reduce a province's loyalty by like 25% each instead of about 2%. You only need 2-6 now to get a good rebellion going as opposed to about 30 before.

I love the rebellions where the hidden heirs of destroyed clans can resurface and re-establish their clan! This rules and puts the "Ronin Horde" phenomenon to bed.

I love that strategic units (emissary, ninja, etc.) can use ANY port to move around the map! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

I love the new Historical Campaign Battles (Nobunaga, Tokugawa, Hideyoshi, Kublai). They're awesome. You even get to be Nobunaga encircling Mt. Hiei and destroying those evil stupid greedy flesh-eating so-called Buddhist moneygrubbing warrior monks!
Who could ask for more?! I love Okehazama too. This is so cool, actually getting to play the real historical battles I always read about but had to just "pretend" I was fighting in Shogun or Nobunaga's Ambition before. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

I love the reduced building cost/time. I can actually get a working empire going in less than 20 years now. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

The Battlefield Ninja R-O-C-K-S! This is probably the coolest unit in the game (and I'm not even really a ninja fanatic).

The new music is really cool.

Thanks guys for the good work! I could go on with more things I love about SP but it'd take quite awhile. I can't say much about MP yet because that's the part of the game I'm still having tech trouble with, but I hope to get into it soon.



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Koga no Goshi

"Nandai"
Since time began
the dead alone know peace.
Life is but melting snow.

[MagyarKhans Cham]

i am glad to hear the single campaign is well done...

but the real battles are online my friend

[KumaRatta Yamamoto]

This is your opinion MagyarKhans. It is shared by most of the patrons here but not by most of the people who buy and play the game.

I personnally prefer the SP because i get to use strategies (map of japan-turn based) and tactics (battles).

The MP can be fun also, but it is not real. IT's a bit of role playing fun, no more, no less.

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KumaRatta Yamamoto Sonkei soshite yuki Ratta Ichizoku. Come and visit us : www.rattaclan.homestead.com (http://www.rattaclan.homestead.com)

[Hosakawa Tito]

I also enjoy the single player campaign,for all the above listed reasons.What do you think about the reinforcements coming from different parts of the map?It seems some don't like it,but personally I enjoy the challenge and the change in tactics to combat this.I haven't played multiplayer yet,I'm having too much fun with the single player campaign and all the options.

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Diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell so that they look forward to making the trip.

[DragonCat]

Great Post, Kaga, Hear, Hear!

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DragonCat
"On the prowl . . . ."

[jskirwin@yahoo.com]

I wonder how many users of the game actually play online. I would bet that the vast majority of players are like me - going head to head with the AI most of the time. Why? Some of us aren't living in dorm rooms, have children/mortgages/jobs, and just simply don't have the time except in small chunks.

That said, it's as if STW has been reborn. I'm having an absolute blast playing the thing. What's more, I found that a bug that had prevented me from loading it while DirectX was running has been fixed. Now the game is even more visually striking.

Kudos to CA and EA for re-making simply the finest strategy game ever.

Oh, and Koga: how does Oda set fire to Mt. Hiei? I look forward to playing that one since I used to live within Hiei's shadow.
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The Buddha is a gyoza. If you find the Buddha, eat him.

[This message has been edited by jskirwin@yahoo.com (edited 08-17-2001).]

[Shiro]

Excellent post, Koga! I think you've expressed the unique joys of the expansion quite clearly.

[Magyar Khan]

perhaps i must reduce the troopsstats bigtime to have any fun with the campaign.

guys, the real battles are online but we lack the possibility of campaign play so a battle is just a battle.

we have a major clan war campaign running, but with just a little help from our CA friends it could be much better done.

[Magyar Khan]

hmmm i was thinking, Kuma?

did u really played some 3 vs 3 online games with 6 equal and strong opponents. i can tell u there is much more involved than just moving units around. in a 3 vs 3 real tactics come alife. in a costumbattle or in a sp campaign it is just taking advantage of the big mistakes of the AI, who i am sure of he wont learn from anything.

i am very confident that there is more depth in a 3 vs 3 with strong players than the single player campaign.

[Pachinko]

Koga...Hear,Hear!!

Quote I know as I'm sure the producers do that this game is only played online by a tiny fraction of all the people who buy the game.So priority is/was naturally given to single player mode, and this paid off.[/QUOTE]

Pachiko

[Algesan]

Quote Originally posted by MagyarKhans Cham:
i am glad to hear the single campaign is well done...

but the real battles are online my friend[/QUOTE]

I will second that that is your opinion and if that is where you get your fun, more power too you. I am waiting on the CD key fiasco to be over to join the online ranks and expect I will have a great deal of fun. However, being able to craft and command an army fitted to you and your style is not always the best test of a commander. Keeping a dynamic balance between what you have and what you want by having to deal with the big picture is better IMHO. Having to fight and win with what you have scraped together in that key province is a lot of fun.

I did notice that nobody was interested in my idea of an online minicampaign or tourney in this post: http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/001625.html

Perhaps it is old hat, perhaps people aren't interested in the concept, but this would be an interesting idea to me with a balance of tactical and strategic concerns. I admit the idea needs more work on some of the numbers.

[Magyar Khan]

u ever visited www.campaign.club.tip.nl (http://www.campaign.club.tip.nl)

it is an ongoing campaign with a lot of diplomacy and intrique involved

[Algesan]

Quote Originally posted by Magyar Khan:
u ever visited www.campaign.club.tip.nl (http://www.campaign.club.tip.nl)

it is an ongoing campaign with a lot of diplomacy and intrique involved[/QUOTE]


Yes, in fact I was going to work on a ronin slot for the campaign, but I must first temper my sword in online battles.

[TakeshidaSo]

All the points made as to why its a great expansion are valid. They just didnt touch on the tactical battlefield portion of the game. The linear tactical engine was the heart and soul of STW, and I think the Morale structure operated perfectly. Most ancient battles had few casualties up until the time the army routed. The greater number of losses occured during the pursuit. All the talk about "my enormous kills", often came from killing routing troops. The pursuit portion of the battles were just as critical as skirmishing, and the initial melee. STW has the realistic feel of ancient warfare. As a tabletop miniature gamer, for many years, I can say STW battles kept my armies in their cases. It doesnt matter if the tactical battles are Online or in the SP campaigns; MI shouldnt replace the realistic Morale system of STW with a more user-friendly one, just to make it more popular. In my long online experience, people who were willing to discuss and\or learn about morale factors, became better and better tacticians. I think this learning curve has been replaced with a need only to become familiar with the units, and how to match them up. The need to understand morale, and use it to your advantage, seems to be removed in favor of a more sanitized version of war. Maybe less realism will the make the game more desirable, and make it more like a lot of other games I can think of. I know this could very well be the intention, but I dont have to like it.

[Nelson]

Kudos to Koga!

[Koga No Goshi]

Thanks for the comments, guys!

Magyar: I know you and many other people find most/all of the fun in online gaming... I enjoy it too, but I do love the campaign mode and also sometimes I just want a break from online gaming because there is always an element of competitiveness/ego/tension in online gaming. It's fun to see your hard work to get better at the game pay off when you beat a good player, and I do enjoy that competitiveness once in awhile, but to really relax and have fun I play single player. Also, I challenge your statement that the "real battles are online." If you could do adjustable koku for the different sides, I'd agree with you. In real life, armies do not have EXACTLY the same amount of resources to work with, exactly the same amount of military units, etc. etc. Online battles are a very sanitized, fair, 1:1 setup, which is good for an MP game but really not all that realistic.

Takeshida: I'm not sure if you're new to the forums or not, but I've just recently started seeing your posts around, so welcome (late welcome?) and I enjoy reading what you have to say. (Especially when you were backing me up in OT! hehe) Point taken about morale, and I agree with you. Although sometimes I was frustrated in online play with original STW that it seemed more about inflicting morale loss and routing the whole enemy army (hence in some cases all guns and monks was the best possible army) rather than outdoing your enemy in a fight, the drastic cut to the importance of morale is one of the X-pack's weaker points. Perhaps in a patch they'll find a better middle ground. *Definitely* I disagreed with entire whole untouched units walking off the battlefield in original STW, so I'd rather see something a little more in the middle. (Maybe the same morale rules as the original, but a unit must sustain at least 10-15% casualties before it will rout?)
What do you think of that idea?



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Koga no Goshi

"Nandai"
Since time began
the dead alone know peace.
Life is but melting snow.

[Polar]

Hmmm seems I'm the only one agree with Magyar here....

I admit I havnt even finshed one single campaign, all I play is MP. This is only the second game I play online. All other strategy games I played before was SP, and many are better than STW in SP part, but the MP part of STW makes the game outstanding! Even losing to another great human being feels much better than beating the stupid AI.

You dont have to agree with me, you may still enjoy SP, but you can't say that online players are only a minority group. The only reason not alot of people play online is the poor support of online community by EA...

The units are not well balance for MP, the poor chat room design, the lack of bug fixing, the server cant even handle more than 100 players!(look what happened during Tenki tourney)

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Polar the ugly

[Koga No Goshi]

Polar,

That wasn't my point. I said anyone with a sense of proportion would realize that waaaay more people are buying Shogun than playing it online. Way more. Tens of thousands more. The priority of who to market to went to the people who play the SP mode only, and that part paid off. They could make MP a huge priority, but I'm just as happy not paying $9.99 a month to play it online.



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Koga no Goshi

"Nandai"
Since time began
the dead alone know peace.
Life is but melting snow.

[Catiline]

This thread doesn't belong in GD. Noone posts in praise of the xp here http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

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Oderint dum metuant

[Polar]

Agree with Cat!! All praises for the xp are offensive to the poor europeans who dont have the luxury of buying xp http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/wink.gif

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Polar the ugly

[Polar]

Lets ban those who says "thank you EA"! http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/biggrin.gif

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Polar the ugly

[This message has been edited by Polar (edited 08-17-2001).]

[Koga No Goshi]

I think it's pretty fair to say I've had more trouble than most will with this game. I had every tech prob, from seeing smeared bar codes on my strategy map to the game not opening at all to the screen flickering to black and totally freezing up when I tried to go to MP from the main menu... and on top of all that, when I first bought the game I got home and they were both Disc 2, had to return it and they told me at the customer service desk that it'd been happening all day "The manufacturer really screwed up this one," they said. Yet I still have good things to say about it, despite all that. Some people are getting totally hung up over one or two issues and claiming the expansion is a TOTAL LOSS because of it... (things like "totally ruined it", "destroyed the game", etc.) yet they are still playing it and demanding fixes so it can't be so horrible that they put it away and won't ever play it again. That's my reasoning anyway. http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gifIf you ask me, from my fairly new perspective to Shogun online gaming (only been doing the original online for maybe four months or less) it was a LOT harder and there were a lot more problems starting off from scratch in the original and overcoming the gun/monk thing than it has been to learn to overcome the Mongol heavy cav. That's my opinion. It took me about 3 months of online play to even begin to counter gun monk armies, and I still semi-regularly lose to them when used correctly against me.... but I can already beat mongol heavy cav. (though I'm not bragging and saying I could beat anyone using them or anything like that. Just saying they're not the instant-win deal that gun/monk armies often were against non-experienced players).



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Koga no Goshi

"Nandai"
Since time began
the dead alone know peace.
Life is but melting snow.

[KukriKhan]

Points taken Koga; I watched your posts in Tech Spt cover the gamut of problems. You've been thru the fire, my friend. Anyone who can get Eradosan scratching his head is worthy of recognition (reading 'Rado's info for 2 months has certainly increased my understanding of my PC's guts more than the previous 2 years of hunting info on the web).

I was set to disagree with you about the relative value of MP vs SP. Because I like MP immensely: win or lose, nothing beats human-to-human interaction for me. I use SP on Expert for practice, MP for proof.

But then you alluded to numbers. Tens of thousands of game-owners, seldom if ever going online. And I can't deny: you're right in a business strategy sort of way, which I admit EA et al must adhere to. If I owned stock in EA, CA or GI, I would demand it.

So there it is: I agree with you, despite my first inclination. MI IS a great enhancement to the original game...I just wish they'd clear up this "Invalid CD code" thing soon, so I could test my alleged (by me) new battle skills against unpredictable humans.

[KumaRatta Yamamoto]

Magyar Khan: You mean play a 3 vs 3 with nobody dropping or no incredible lag ? NOPE, never had the pleasure. I did try and try and try and try though, but it never happened sadly (yes screen resolution 600X800, smoke and fauna off, pressed f1 and f5 to turn off icons and small tactical map).

After a while MP just bored me,no depth, but a lot of lagging and using the "bugs""/limits of the battelfield mode, always playing on the same type of maps (not to hilly),same type of climate (summer, no rain), with same type of army, using the same type of tactics. May the one who knows best how the mechanics of the game works win!!! Tedious and pointless.

Hey everyone is different, you like the competiton in MP, you are highly motivated by winning and you disdain SP. That's cool!

I have fun taking my time to plan and try things out in a full campaign, i like using the strategical units, i like to immerse in the atmosphere of the game. Can't do that in MP.

This said, i do go on MP, but it's for fun, so i seek out specific very relaxed players that i like a lot.

[JAG]

i am with magy on this a real fight online with all equal players is a hell of fun!

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

WarlordWarrior

[TakeshidaSo]

I dont understand why it matters if its SP or MP. The tactical battles should be a realistic attempt to simulate the morale effects on units, whether it's SP or MP. The campaigns can allow for unit honor to be whatever is required. The online game shouldnt have the Morale system of STW altered so much that it loses what the people who played there most often believe was an accurate portrayal of morale effects. Especially when you could always turn up the koku or use the Morale or Fatigue settings before. That doesnt mean they all agreed with the power of the monks or that guns didnt cause friendly fire. The AI cant compare to a human player who has played even a short while, and has only a little ability to analyze. The online battles allow for team tactics, or failures of co-operation; whichever comes first. You cant improve if you dont go online, and the online options allow almost any settings you want to use. Well, I mean the STW options, of course.

[KumaRatta Yamamoto]

Takeshidaso: I agree that in SP or MP the tactical battle engine is the same. The main differences are in SP: each side does not bring an army built from the same amount of koku (you can be outnumbered or vice-versa), neither the same quality of troops or taishos(honor, type of troops, upgrades), the AI will use the terrain and the climate (no camping in MP, not a lot of games in winter either), the mongols can't tech up, no daimyo that u can fight with and i am sure i am missing other things..Balancing things out is another game completly.

[bran]

I love the game... Once again I play single player... It Rocks espeically when you go back and play the orginal stw...

Thanks CA

[Gothmog]

Quote Originally posted by Koga No Goshi:


I love the new Historical Campaign Battles (Nobunaga, Tokugawa, Hideyoshi, Kublai). They're awesome. You even get to be Nobunaga encircling Mt. Hiei and destroying those evil stupid greedy flesh-eating so-called Buddhist moneygrubbing warrior monks!

[/QUOTE]

Can't agree more, I personally found the idea of overpowered warrior monk disturbing. Buddhism is about caring, loving, and self-disipline. And the monks in STW (or maybe even in sengoku jidai) are complete opposite to everything I know about that Buddahism. Corrupted just like the so called crusaders of the middle age. That's why I dislike that unit to the core (of course it has nothing to do with Ronin monk packs always giving me hardtime in the full campaign).

[Koga No Goshi]

For as much as Oda's name will always be blackened by what he did at Mt. Hiei, despite his self-serving motives what he basically did was stop priests from bullying around people at naginata-point and pushed them back into monastic/religious concerns. Which, for all parties considered, was quite a good thing considering the behavior of the Buddhist sects when they went militant...



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Koga no Goshi

"Nandai"
Since time began
the dead alone know peace.
Life is but melting snow.