Well, I'm going to take this opportunity to once more promote my new Khan7's Archive on STW Modification 1.0, which is a very good database and tutorial (and the only one so far) on modding STW. One point of especial interest is that I think I have found the source of the new morale behavior, namely in a unit attribute, "unroutable", which all non-ashigaru Japanese units have.

Anyway, the guide provides useful info on how to alter any of the units to whatever your imagination can dream up, as well as instruction on how to make your own campaigns, along with all of the info you need to perform these tasks. You can fix the morale "bug", mod it up for the American Civil War (as I plan to do), and probably play all of this online. And of course you can create as many campaigns as you want, with nearly the whole and full flexibility the developers themselves used. Put your e-mail addy here or contact me at gengiskan0@cs.com to get a copy. The LEGAL location for this discussion is in the mods/patches forum.

Now to move on to topics that won't raise the ire of the admins for being in the wrong forum. First of all, muskets are supposed to have some LIMITED usefullness in rain, but with reload times and accuracy suffering greatly. This is more or less realistic, and intended (and has been discussed on this forum a while ago).

I'm guessing the reason for no Mongols vs. Mongols is the way they handled morale-- they added a very strong "oh crap we're scared of mongols!!" attribute to all Mongol units (i.e. they scare people). Mongols also kill quickly, which makes for quick routing. For this reason they gave most of the Japanese units the "unroutable" characteristic (at least this is my theory..), which helps take the edge off of some of this.

So if you put Mongols vs. Mongols, you have to armies that are scared to death of eachother, will kill eachother quickly, and don't have the "unroutable" attribute, and therefore I'm guessing will probably rout eachother completely within seconds and the *lucky* guy who ended up on the slightly better side will have like his taisho hang in there and be counted as winner.

Also, the guy with all skirmishers in his army wasn't daft-- have you checked these things out??! They kill like hell.. they are nearly invulnerable to missle fire, they can defeat any Japanese cavalry unit easily in melee, can hold their own against infantry in melee, and their javelins are DEVASTATING, with about 80% of the effectiveness of thunderbombers-- except no big worries about blowing yourself to bits! There are no counterunits for these except maybe Kensai, so it's pretty much mostly countertactics, and given the power and versatility of the skirmishers those tactics are going to be hard to implement against someone who knows how to the skirms.

As far as Ashis vs. Ninjas, whether or not they would *realistically* (i.e. real life) rout would in my opinion depend on a few things-- whether they were isolated or had many of their comrades nearby to boost them up and also pressure them not to run, and in general what's going on around them, whether things they are seeing with the rest of the battle are going to give them a bad feeling about fighting. In any case I'd say it would be realistic that if they were getting mopped up they would RETREAT or fall back, but as in this game there is no retreating, only routing, I'm not sure if I can totally condemn the way its being handled.

Anyway, good review, brings up good points, many of which have already been dealt with in this forum, but good review anyway.

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Khan7