four dumb questions; feel free to flame me!

[Darth Wart]

1. I have two computers on my desk, side by side. Both have excellent video cards and both have Shogun fully installed. My friend and I want to play each other at my house (a la "Battleship"), with the two computers linked but facing away from each other. Presumably there would be no lag since they would be "docked." Does anybody know how to do this? I heard you at least need windows 98 to dock 2 computers (and I have that), but I can't find where to do it. Control panel? Will this even work? Is there any way to get two computers to play Shogun against each other without having to go over the phone lines?

2. When you assault a castle, it says "do you wish to end the siege?" If you click YES, you apparently get to end the siege ONLY with the army you dumped on the castle. The other armies in that province will not back you up and enter the battle, right? In other words, if you want to "end the siege" with everything you've got in that province, you have to dump every single army individually on the castle, right?

3. when you arrange your guys on a hillside by left clicking the terrain and dragging them into shape, they march into that formation. Great. Does anybody know how to get them to RUN into that formation?

4. I have heard conflicting things about which gun troops work in the rain and which don't. In the manual it says that arquebusiers won't work in the rain, but musketeers will. But in the Prima Guide it says that NO gun troops will work in the rain. (Or maybe it's the other way around.) In any event, somebody please set me straight.

[Rob]

1. The most common way of doing this is by using network cards, but I presume you do not have these. It MIGHT be possible to have some kind of serial link between the two PCs but I've never done that in Win98.

2. Yes.

3. Press CTRL-R to make your men run.

4. No gun units work in rain whatsoever.

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Rob Hojo

[solypsist]

good work, Rob.

[Rob]

I think it's part of being a moderator, to answer all these bloody questions http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

I've done some more checking and I think it's possible to make a network connection using just a serial (RS232) cable. My Windows 2000 help file has something on it.

Check your Win98 help file for stuff on Direct Connections.

If you want a more permanent connection, proper network cards are the way to go. They're fairly cheap and the cabling isn't too expensive if you don't need long distances of it.

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Rob Hojo

[Bloodbane]

Death Wart, Im not sure how your funds are, but LAN kits are available at most computer stores. They usually arent that expensive, under $100 definitly. Perhaps you can get your friend to go half and half with you. The kit comes with 2 network cards and the cables and drivers needed to hook the two computers up.
I suggest you not even try to hook them up using a serial port, it just isnt fast enough. A few years ago before cable modems were common and everybody had a net card, a friend and I tried repeatedly using serial cables and never had any luck.

Oh, and if you have a cable modem hooked up to your computer, then you already have a network card in your computer, so you just need to buy one for the other computer and you will be all set http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/smile.gif

good luck, LAN games rule