Demo out on 22 February 2011

**Cheetah** · 02-25-2011, 04:22

I fought the demo battle several times and I have not found the problem mentioned here.

Running speed of infantry is indeed fast but walking is not fast at all. Morale works, flanking works. I have not seen insta routs unless you put your lone ashigaru in front of the whole enemy army. Supported units fight and samurai units fight for a reasonably long time. Ashigaru die fast, but they are peasants. Horses running around are actually the horses of dead samurai, i.e. out of the game anyway.

**Kocmoc** · 02-25-2011, 11:40

Originally Posted by Cheetah

I fought the demo battle several times and I have not found the problem mentioned here.

Running speed of infantry is indeed fast but walking is not fast at all. Morale works, flanking works. I have not seen insta routs unless you put your lone ashigaru in front of the whole enemy army. Supported units fight and samurai units fight for a reasonably long time. Ashigaru die fast, but they are peasants. Horses running around are actually the horses of dead samurai, i.e. out of the game anyway.

Im all with you here. Running speed looks good and the moral is fine. Its still a bit too early to judge on this, but thats my first impression.
Insta routs i couldnt find, flanking and rearattacks looks good. So far the gameplay is okay.
Some bugs, running and giving order still works not perfect.

**Lord Adherbal** · 02-25-2011, 14:07

I played the historical battle several times, my conclusions were:
-Run speed is very high
-Arrow volleys seem too powerful. I imagine if you had an archer duel opening a MP battle the side with just 1 less archer unit will be annihilated in no time. I doubt there is much time for light cavalry skirmishing during the archer duel either.
-I completely surrounded whole blobs of enemy units several times. The results were disappointing. The AI has higher quality units, but I feel that's exactly what surrounding should counter. It doesn't. The first 2 yari cavalry units took forever to destroy even when completely surrounded, and casualties on my side where very high. Other times the blob just broke through and routed by forces. I have the feeling since RTW surrounding no longer affects fighting performance, only morale. Meaning that if you can't actualy break them, a stronger unit will still cut you to pieces no problem.
-Yari ashigura units breaking before I even had time to get another unit around the flank of the attacker. Sure they're peasants and it will up against a higher level katana unit, but if they can't even be expected to hold half a minute the RPS gameplay seems a bit too extreme. Peasants or not, yaris are supposed to be a defensive unit, right?

**Kocmoc** · 02-25-2011, 14:23

Originally Posted by Lord Adherbal

I played the historical battle several times, my conclusions were:
-Run speed is very high
-Arrow volleys seem too powerful. I imagine if you had an archer duel opening a MP battle the side with just 1 less archer unit will be annihilated in no time. I doubt there is much time for light cavalry skirmishing during the archer duel either.
-I completely surrounded whole blobs of enemy units several times. The results were disappointing. The AI has higher quality units, but I feel that's exactly what surrounding should counter. It doesn't. The first 2 yari cavalry units took forever to destroy even when completely surrounded, and casualties on my side where very high. Other times the blob just broke through and routed by forces. I have the feeling since RTW surrounding no longer affects fighting performance, only morale. Meaning that if you can't actualy break them, a stronger unit will still cut you to pieces no problem.
-Yari ashigura units breaking before I even had time to get another unit around the flank of the attacker. Sure they're peasants and it will up against a higher level katana unit, but if they can't even be expected to hold half a minute the RPS gameplay seems a bit too extreme. Peasants or not, yaris are supposed to be a defensive unit, right?

I cant agree. Speed is just fine and i dont think that archer are too powerful.
You speak about the firevolleys? or the standart shots?
Standart arrow shots are not that good at all, you can look at the combat statistiks and watch the kills, which doesnt seem high.
Imo, the archer kill not enough, in a frontal h2h rush, the archer wont kill enough to bring some good value.

Units dont get killed or rout, no idea what battle you played, but i have no trouble at all to flank/rear and get units done quick.
Yari cav might not be the best choise, with heavy cav it works pretty good.

I played the battle a few times, and i had no problem at all, to rip of the center quick and move over to the left.

All in all, it looks okay so far. Hard to judge it all on this demo, but saying that the game/units are too fast is ....

**TosaInu** · 02-25-2011, 15:28

Steam just updated my demo.

Did you put them on spearwall Lord Adherball?

**Nelson** · 02-25-2011, 15:35

Originally Posted by Kocmoc

Im all with you here. Running speed looks good and the moral is fine. Its still a bit too early to judge on this, but thats my first impression.
Insta routs i couldnt find, flanking and rearattacks looks good. So far the gameplay is okay.
Some bugs, running and giving order still works not perfect.

I must agree with Kocmoc and Cheetah. Nothing about speed or morale seemed out of sorts to me. Good troops fight on even when surrounded. Lesser men break and that's what I've seen. Fights that I thought should be short were. Engagements that I thought should be prolonged were indeed longer.

One does need to switch to walk if the default is run but that is hardly a game breaker. This is a demo and as such is not going to tell us all we want to know about the game mechanics. What it has shown to me is encouraging.

**Lord Adherbal** · 02-25-2011, 15:48

My conclusions come from 3 attempts on the historical battle. Probably not enough to get a perfect feeling about the game, but I didn't like what I saw. Interesting to see some of you vets disagree.

I guess I'll wait and see what people say about MP when the game is out. I couldn't care less about SP if MP isn't any good.

Did you put them on spearwall Lord

I think you mean guard mode? Otherwise I might've missed a feature entirely :P
AFAIK guard mode only makes them hold position, and doesn't really affect their performance?

**Kocmoc** · 02-25-2011, 15:51

let me add another thing about archers. Once you use open formation (what the AI doesnt do) the kills drop even more.
I get myself into some better testing this weekend, but the demo give me the impression, that archer are not good enough.
Now, the battle isnt surely perfect for testing, but if you consider the kills on closed formation, this isnt good at all.

Look back on old STW/MI and remember, how many men got killed by missles when you rushed or got rushed.
Right now, i bet, that you wont win, if you face a melee frontalrush. If you open formation, the losses will be pretty low.
I didnt look into friendly fire, this will be another story, since i wont get a clean killnumber while playing this demo.

more testing needed....

**Nigel** · 02-25-2011, 16:38

Hi Adherbal,

spearwall is actually something different to guard mode.
When you activate spearwall for your yari ashigaru, they move to a closely packed formation and lower their spears to fend of any attacks. May be worth trying out.

On a little sidetrack :)
My experience was quite like your own. I loved STW and MTW/VI, but was rather disappointed by the "get it over quickly" battles of RTW and stopped playing after that for a long time. Now I returned with buying a copy of Napoleon TW, and that one I have quite enjoyed. I find those battles sufficiently slow paced to allow for some actually quite nice tactical thinking and have not regrettet getting a copy of that game.

Good to see that at least the opinoins on the STW2 demo seem to be divided. I am still hoping that it will turn out good, when we get more experience with it.

**Monk** · 02-25-2011, 16:39

Originally Posted by Lord Adherbal

I think you mean guard mode? Otherwise I might've missed a feature entirely :P
AFAIK guard mode only makes them hold position, and doesn't really affect their performance?

Yari ashigura have a spear-wall formation that causes them to tighten up and ready spears. Its great when used to repell a charge since even higher quality troops (like Katana Samurai) will flat out lose to Ashigaru if they charge into the spear wall.

**Lord Adherbal** · 02-25-2011, 16:47

Well I just gave the battle another try, looking more at individual unit performance instead of the overall battle. I must admit the results where better than my previous impressions led me to expect.

And I did completely miss the spear wall ability

Good to see that at least the opinoins on the STW2 demo seem to be divided. I am still hoping that it will turn out good, when we get more experience with it.

Agreed. In fact hearing some STW/MTW vets disagree on my initial ranting and my latest test run has increased my hopes a bit again. Looking at how much stuff they're adding to MP it would be such a shame if gameplay was not up to standard.

I enjoyed ETW MP for a while, although I played it solo with random teammates and opponents which didn't improve the experience. The need of a no art/mortars rule additionaly spoiled much of the fun. I passed on NTW. Was (and am) hoping STW2 would (and will) bring back the former MP fun.

I'll shut up now and await MP reports next month