Sanurai Warlords X

[Tomisama]

Samurai Mod - Multiplayer Mini Campaign X

Samurai Warlords Battle for Otrar Province.

This Sunday July 30th 2006 at 18:00 GMT (7 pm BST UK – 2 pm EDT US).

18:00 hours or 6 PM GMT

8 PM in Germany and Italy*
7 PM in United Kingdom*
2 PM in New York*
1 PM in Chicago*
12 PM in Denver*

*daylight savings time

The map for all Matches is to be fought on (fl)_O_Otrar - Arid Summer.

Requires MTW/VI 2.01 and STW_Mod_BETA5 with samuraiwars_v10b stats.

All Battles played at 10k, all realism settings on, default unit size, with no time limit, and corner camping is expressly prohibited.

No specified Attacker/Defender roles, and no private agreements on rules are allowed.

Lordship will be won by the Contestant with Best Total Kill score, minus their Total Losses.


Good Luck and Have Fun All :grin:

Everyone is Welcome!

:charge:

As the Campaign stands:

http://www.clanwarscomp.org/warlordmap.html

[Puzz3D]

I won't be there today.

[Tomisama]

Sorry Yuuki-san, will miss you.

But now maybe some of the rest of us will have a chance ~;p

I hope you can make it next week Saturday. We are trying to arrange a Saturday meeting so that Barocca join us.

Hope to see you then :bow:

[barocca]

well i'll be online saturday August 5th 1800 GMT
hopefully someone else will be there too....

[Puzz3D]

I'll be there at 18:00 GMT.

[Tomisama]

Sorry guys, couldn’t do any preparation for Saturday.

Real Life has been holding me captive almost all of last week.

Finally made it online late Sunday afternoon.

Was there any combat Saturday?

Any scores to report?

I just couldn’t make it :trytofly:

[R'as al Ghul]

I couldn't make it on Saturday, either.
Yuuki told me he had a battle with barocca. They've used different new stats iirc.
On Sunday only Yuuki and me showed up, everybody else (I've seen H_K_George and 7b7Bottom) was playing the vanilla game.
So, no results to report.

:bow:

[Puzz3D]

Only barocca and I were there on Saturday, so we took the opportunity to play a 1v1 with the new stat. So far the new stat is looking good after playing several test battles with it at 9k. I think it's a definite improvement over the 10b stat.

BTW, I saw Wolf_Space (Spacecadet from STW days) in the foyer on Sunday, and he said he would try to install STWmod. Also, Tosa plans to play this coming weekend.

[Tomisama]

Ok then :bow:

I believe we should go ahead and move to the next map.

There is precious little time to complete the competitions for all of the Provinces before MII. And with the only encounter for this one soon to be 2 weeks old, it seems somehow fitting we give our salute to the winner we do have, and push on.

I hosted the game but desynced at the close (which has been fixed and thoroughly tested btw).

If my score readings are correct Ducky took the honours with 720-553 =167.
Alex was right behind with 800 Kills but unfortunately 665 losses, and a score of 135.

Is that correct?

[Tomisama]

No response I take as no agreement. So we will continue on Otrar this next Sunday at 18:00.

P.S. Barocca-san said that he would be able to make it this Sunday :bow:


18:00 hours or 6 PM GMT

8 PM in Germany and Italy*
7 PM in United Kingdom*
2 PM in New York*
1 PM in Chicago*
12 PM in Denver*

*daylight savings time

http://www.clanwarscomp.org/warlordmap.html

:charge:

[Puzz3D]

So we will continue on Otrar this next Sunday at 18:00 GMT.

I can make it.

[L'Impresario]

Well, the scores are correct Tomi.

Last weekend I was out of town, but this time I can make it as well.

[barocca]

i'll be there
:-)

[Tomisama]

Great :grin:

I will try to be there an hour early (around 17:00) for any one who wants to warm-up in a practice game, but the competition games will not start until after 18:00 hrs.

GOOD LUCK EVERYONE!!!

:bow:

[Tomisama]

P.S. And because there were some questions about this recently.

Please Note:

The restrictions on upgrades was removed from the rules a while back. And I don’t believe we ever entertained a limit of same units. But both upgrades and over 4max are allowed, though generally considered to be a waste of money, these are not dishonourable practices.

:bump:

[barocca]

I am afraid i am not going to make it, Tomi is in the foyer now,
but in a game at the moment,

something has come up to which i must attend poste haste
hopefull i'll be able to make it next sunday, so far that look ok.

Good Luck and have fun all of you
Cheers,
B.

[Tomisama]

Just Missed you B. I left game but you were already gone.

It was a miserable day anyway. One or two Contest Games completed (one I was not in so don’t know). Spent the whole day battling desync (other peoples this time). Successful pervious and later vanilla VI games seems to prove that it is somehow related to the Mod.

There was a record number of people wanting to play, but the game god would no grant us his (or her) favor.

I don’t know what to do now.

This is happening far too often for us to go on.

Oh as far as the winner of Otrar Province, I believe Lord Alex had the best score for the day. But need this confirmed…

P.S. Could the “–strictserver” add on be causing less of an error tolerance? If so, would the trade off be so bad. Grasping for clues here :inquisitive:

[Puzz3D]

I had severe lag on mouse and map scrolling and could see men through buildings and on top of the unit icons on 4v4 and 3v3 games, but 1v1 was ok. I updated my WinXP ATI 9800 Pro video driver recently. It will be difficult to fix this because I don't see the lag in single player custom battle. I may have to revert to my previous video driver. I switched to Win98 and tried that to play in the 2v2, but my machine locked during that battle because I turned on hardware sound mixing forgetting that it causes the lockup.

The desyncs on Sunday were being caused by 2 players. One eventually fixed his problem by reinstalling the game, and the other had to sit out. Once the next STWmod version is released these install issues should diminish, although WinXP compatibility issues might start becoming worse.

Tomi, if you want to stop the current STWmod CWC event due to these technical problems that have increased so dramatically in the past 3 weeks, that's ok. It is wasting too much of people's time at this point. We might still play some casual games by arrangement with a small group of players using MSN. Thanks for your efforts to promote Samurai Wars.

[R'as al Ghul]

Patience is a virtue. A virtue that was needed and shown by all participant Samurai.
It's a pity that it was not rewarded by thrilling battles as it should be. I have to utter my respect for all players who stayed and participated in test games.
Personally I had the impression that the publicity that the mod received in the last weeks and especially on last Sunday was really high. It seemed that more and more people in the lobby were interested in playing it.
It's very unfortunate that the evil Lord Desync decided to prey on us. The Emperor is not amused at all.

My suggestion at the moment is that I can create a new self-installer including the 40MB download from Yuuki's sig and some new stuff. There're several versions out there and I'd have to check them all out to see what's where and where we might have caused problems.
I've for a long time played with a different version than everyone else. But the difference was mostly graphics related and didn't interfere in the past.
When we all have the same version, it should work a bit smoother.

Other things to consider are the game-options and the strictserver switch. I often experience lagging ín large battles. Yuuki had the same problem last weekend. This may due to the fact that I've all settings maxed out. (it shouldn't be since my machine easily meets the specs). It's also not clear to me if strictserver is an obligation and if those that can't host anyway should have it too.

So, shall we attempt to release a new installer before we release the next version?

:bow:

[Puzz3D]

Everyone should be using -strictserver in their shortcut otherwise you can go out of sync and not know it which will cause your game to progressively diverge from the other players in the battle. We started seeing more desync after several players who hadn't been using -strictserver put it in their shortcut.

Of greater concern to me is the fact that you can apparently have a problem with your install that is going to cause desync, but that isn't detected when you join a game. This wastes a huge amount of time for everyone in the battle. STWmod is incompatible with just about every other mod out there with the exception of DUX which uses the JSGME installer. A new version of STWmod might help because it would force everyone to reinstall from scratch. We could include the new 11b stat which just shows up as a new era, and I'll adjust the xbow for SP campaign. The unit prod files are also simplified which might help, and all the corpses will now work in SP.

[Tomisama]

Look guys, I really don’t want to give this thing up. It has been something to look forward to every weekend now for some time now. And when I wasn’t able to make it online, it put a major dent in my week. Ok, so I’m a Samurai Wars addict, that’s all there is to it!

Even with all of the frustrations of waiting for new players to install, for even numbers of players to show up, and through testing to solve desync problems, our community has grown to now 23 Samurai Warlords participants.

Welcome our latest, Bear Bottom, Bear Dej, and Hunter UncleMarius :wink:

This last Sunday may have been a bit over whelming because of the extra desync problem ‘plus’ some basically normal drop problems. But as has already been said, we did solve desync by testing and reinstall. So lets keep going :charge:

Of course if there is any way that at least the multiplayer portion of the next revision could be pre-released, that would be wonderful. But even if that is not immediately possible, I still want to continue with what we have. Are we still on, or do you think we should wait?

:book:

[Puzz3D]

I think I can solve my lag problem by using Win98 and solve the lockup by unchecking hardware mixing of sound in the game's options. I'm reluctant to backtrack on my WinXP video driver if I can avoid it.

You can see by all the driver problems that players have with Total War games that the game bypasses the API. This might get higher framerate, but it causes the game to become obsolete sooner.

[Tomisama]

I have to do a little work this morning, but barring any problems, will be online on time for those who want to continue.

On my way in any case :dizzy2:

[R'as al Ghul]

Look guys, I really don’t want to give this thing up. It has been something to look forward to every weekend now for some time now. And when I wasn’t able to make it online, it put a major dent in my week. Ok, so I’m a Samurai Wars addict, that’s all there is to it!

Let's all give Tomi a hand for confessing and welcome him to our Anonymous Samurai cycle. :grin:
Hello, my name is R'as and I'm a Samurai Wars addict, too. :laugh4:

Anyway, I'll be there. Let's check out if we can reduce our problems when we have lowered the sound settings. I didn't have enough time yet to put together a new version.

:bow:

[Kalle]

I reinstalled this mod now (used it a long time ago also) using yuukies signature, will that give me the correct verions of everything that you are using?

And what is this strictserver thing??

Ah yes it all seems to work neatly :)

Best regards
Kalle

[Tomisama]

Good to see you on Sunday Kalle :smile:

Welcome to Samurai Warlords!

Yes Yuuki’s signature link to the “Samurai Wars updated” version is correct.

Now check to see that your games desktop icon’s preferences link reads:

"C:\Program Files\Total War\Medieval - Total War\Medieval_TW.exe" –strictserver

The location is wherever you have installed the game, but there should also be a space –strictserver at the end. If not, you can add it to make sure your game does not diverge from the other players.

Watch this forum for postings of upcoming Province free-for-all Matches (almost every weekend).

Great to have you with us :grin:


http://www.clanwarscomp.org/warlordmap.html

[Tomisama]

Well to report on this last Sunday, four of us met and had several games “without any desync”. We all did get dropped at one point, but that was a GameSpy thing :grin:

As the Battle for Otrar province had never actually been finalized, we continued to play on that field. And in our final game witnessed a stupendous win by MizuYuuki. With undeniable victorious 1079 Kills, minus a modest 392 Losses, which leaves a whopping Score of 687.

Congratulations Yuuki, Lord of Otrar Province. We salute you :bow:

I will be updating the Contest Map shortly.

[Puzz3D]

Thanks Tomi. That game could easily have flipped the other way, but your plan to shift to the left and attack while the opponent's armies were separated by that rock formation worked. I know your attack on Alex was repulsed, but it seems I was able to interdict his pursuit enough for you to rally some units while at the same time keeping enough forces ready to halt R'as' attack on me.

We have a good player, Kalle, now interested in Samurai Wars. We successfully played a 1v1 battle, so his install is working. I think he can play up to about 21:00 GMT weekdays, and hopefully can play on Sundays.

[L'Impresario]

Yes, was a good game but I don't think it could have flipped any other way. I took a bad decision that condemned us, and only by severe mistakes could you lose that one.
I and R'as weren't split, but I was too hasty to attack, don't know the reason honestly heh
The moment I decided to for the center was the critical point, and it served no real purpose at all: I had most of my cav away, I wasn't in a good formation, I didn't take time at least to tell R'as where to go exactly. It just occured to me that attacking the center was a good idea. With the great mobility advantage that we had, any other move would 've offered us a great advantage in securing victory.
It was one of those situations where there are 10 ways to win and only 1 to lose, and still you select that last one heh
In fact, I consider it you made a mistake by splitting, we could have just go for one of you and the other would be hard pressed to help him. Specifically, I should have done the logical thing and move backwards, in order to draw Tomi who'd like to use his gun superiority while I would place my cav on either flank, or just tell Ras to attack Yuuki, and use my cav to help gim while withdrawing towards the action and away from Tomi, who had a large infantry force to handle and no cav to send for help.
Tomi attacked me while I was routing from the stupid frontal attack versus his and Yuuki's guns, and I used only one heavy cav to disrupt them, while not maintaining unity of both inf and cav. If I was to follow such a bold tactic, I should 've at least moved my cav en masse to the guns after resting them from their initial worthless router chasing.
The irony is that you moved exactly the way I had hoped from the start, and I made sure that Tomi would go towards the north and I then offered a bait in order to get his cav. It seems that due to that I became overconfident, as everything was going according to plan and you moved to take position on the axis I wanted (N-S). Anyway, such things happen, but it's amazing how one can't see his obvious mistakes while having quite some time to tackle them heh

[Puzz3D]

You caught Tomi in a great cav trap. He lost his HC gen (60 men) and 2 YC (120 men) while you only lost half of 2 HC units (66 men) and a few from each of your 3 YC (15 men). However, you lost the gun battle and your infantry is weak since you had 6 expensive cav units. If you backup, you're in a depression where Tomi can shoot you, his YS protect his left (although they do eventually go too far afield and that should have cost us the battle), and our center looks weak. I'd say a center attack is correct, but with both you and R'as hitting the center at the same time. I'm not sure doubling me would work because tomi's monks will sweep across, but it might since his YS would be completely out of play.

[Tomisama]

This was a fascinating battle to me. As I was eating breakfast this morning I decided to review the replay again. This time I took some pictures of the radar. I wasn’t too careful about specific points, and what I ended up with really does not do justice to all of the complexities involved. But here it is.

I (green)made a major error in the beginning not seeing Alex’s (yellow) hidden cav. I should have known better, as the opportunity was too ripe. But after taking it, was still satisfied with the result, as I had temporarily distracted Alex from the push on Yuuki (white). This may have had the result of disjointing any coordination with R’as (red), which cost them the battle in the long run. Who knows :wink:

http://www.clanwarscomp.org/samurai/00000000.jpg

One thing (of many) that is really not really apparent above, is Yuuki’s cavalry (the group of white lines to the right), which seemed to draw our opponents deeper to the south than they should have gone. And then melted away into the woods :smile:

Great fun guys :bow:

[L'Impresario]

Actually I hadn't even seen Yuuki's cav there heh
But the further south he was (or could be drawn) the better, as that would increase the gap between you and him, although I had no plan of attacking Yuuki during the game, it just didn't occur to me heh


If you backup, you're in a depression where Tomi can shoot you, his YS protect his left (although they do eventually go too far afield and that should have cost us the battle), and our center looks weak. I'd say a center attack is correct, but with both you and R'as hitting the center at the same time. I'm not sure doubling me would work because tomi's monks will sweep across, but it might since his YS would be completely out of play.

First of all I took some extra losses with my cav in order to increase the certainty of trapping the entirety of Tomi's cav, thinking that not only would this provide a severe mobility disadvantage to him, but might as well prompt him to attack soon thereafter. And I really thought for a time that he'd attack, so I was willing to leave my guns get attacked if that meant inflicting some damage to more expensive units. But he stopped there, and I was surprised, because he increased the gap between him and his ally.
Then it seems I thought that cutting them in half would be a good idea, but if one thinks about it for a sec or two, it isn't.

Mistake#1 was that even though a bad decision was taken, that didn't mean that bad execution should follow. And bad execution it was indeed, once you settle for a course of action you must take care of "externalities", so we could have fared much better with a concerted attack and one that involved all inf and most cav. No use of that superior mobility was made.


Mistake#2 was the plan as a whole. Attacking the center meant attacking a line of guns and Yuuki's cav behind them. So in effect we were attacking "ground" and not the enemy, presenting our flanks in the process.
As I had superior cav forces, my army units should diverge and make the opponent follow a similar path and then converge to a single point, using speed and maneuvre. If we were to attack Yuuki, Tomi would be forced to move his men across the field, but I don't think they'd arrive faster than YC or HC, or even my own inf, being relatively closer to the woods. A Cav or two could then be used to harass Tomi's units on the way to aid Yuuki and I 'd preferibly move all cav units behind the enemy line, striking at any exposed targets or engaging Yuuki's cav away from the main fight.
By withdrawing I 'd offer my cav greater room to move and flank, while making it easier for R'as to help me, and any extra infantry/ gun fatigue at that moment favoured me.

Lots of choices there, but I managed only a bad attempt at attacking guns frontally while getting flanked and having some important units idle, and that caused a chain rout even before the mainstay of the enemy armies could approach me.