So what YA all thinking

[Shoko]

Patch been out a while now,so most are use to it by now.
So over-all is it better,or do a couple of units need some final adjustments?

[BakaGaijin]

I've actually not spent much time with it, 'cause I've been in more of an air piracy mood lately. Oh, and it's finals week now, too (feh!).

First impression, though: it's good. The Nodachi seem a tad bit gimped, but it's not that bad.

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Disappear into the Darkness!!

[MountainSoul]

i personally feel that guns are still firing too quickly , i would like to see there reload rate slowed down to at least one minute please, and this still doesn't accuratley recreate the actuall firing rate of 15th century guns which was much much slower but i feel this would be a good tweak for the game.Also as they would fire slower maybe a higher accuracy rate at very close range would be able to balance the slowered rate of fire.This would bring a new level of skill into using guns i feel and would also reduce their level of usage on the multiplay field.It would mean u would have to time your volley perfectly to make the maximum damage count for there would be a good minute of melee following before another volley could be produced and if someone has 6 guns or even just 4 then its flank city baby here i come.

[Khan7]

Well, please offer evidence that a gun would take a full minute to reload. I mean, if we're talking about a gun that an single person can actually carry around, about .50cal.. alright. It's unloaded.

So you pour in a certain amount of powder.. put cloth over aperture, but projectile on cloth, put cloth over projectile.. *ram, ram, ram*.. stick another wick into the fuse aperture, strike a spark, hold it steady..

Sounds to me like 30 seconds, frankly. If someone has better information, please point me to it, but I think the new reload rates are pretty good.

Matt

[MountainSoul]

oooohh naaaaasty, is it just me or is someone following me around the forum.As far as i have been led to believe these early muskets took quite a few minutes to reload caus u actually had to make sure the thing was clean before u fired it again or u ran the risk of the barrel blowing into your face not very pleasant...strung out in single file the guns are firing about once every mid 20 odd seconds i would say.This is very unrealistic.

*looks over shoulder.... was that a shadow??? a stalker??? lol i suppose i get death threats next 8)

[Erado San]

And realistically every Shogun battle should last at least a day, as no battle in history was ever decided in a few minutes.

Guys, I appreciate the need to be acurate, but that can simply not be modelled into the game. Face it. One minute reload may be accurate. So in an entire battle of ten minutes a musk unit can fire 10 rounds. In any real battle they would fire many more. You can't solve that paradox. The question here is not so much whether it is realistic, but how does it play? Have the battles gained in fun and challenge? Do you still get many boring gunfights and rushes?

[MountainSoul]

gunfights are enormously boring to me and i prever to use cav and guns in unison and back that up with a good open ranks melee rush when the time is right or if it presents its self, its not for me to say what is good and what sux about the game because basically i'm just thankful that someone actually developed it in the first place... but i do think it would be far more interesting to have a reload rate of one minute... it would totally change the game around again new tactics new styles would emerge once more and most of us would be starting from square one again which personally is where i like to be.oh and yeah there is a lot of factual evidence apart from reality supporting my statement that guns took up to 3 minutes to reload involving many detailed movements and actually the arquebus was the fastest to reload at about two minutes and was used mainly in a skirmishing manner of letting off a volley fall back again blah blah blah

[Rath]

I'm not sure why, but since the patch im actually using monks again instead of upgraded no-dachi.

If i had to change one thing...hmm maybe give Naginata better morale...but that is only a very small thing because overall the patch has done an excellent job.

[Puzz3D]

Rath,

The ND was set back to it's original STW combat values. Hence, the WM re-emerges as a useful unit. Also, Naginata do have better morale now.

MountainSoul,

Longer reload on guns would be correct, but there is a game quirk that causes problems. If a ranged unit is on fire-at-will and an enemy unit comes within range, the first firing animation shoots no projectile. Also, if you move a ranged unit or change targets, it starts the reload cycle all over again. Those factors work against using very long reload times since the unit will almost never get off an effective volley. Even so, I think a slightly longer reload on guns would be a move in the right direction.

MizuYuuki ~~~
Clan Takiyama ~~~

[Nelson]

I think the guns are fine. The reload speed seems appropriate to the pace of the game even if it is a tad quick vs reality. The arques are more destructive now (right?) but that's OK since it helps to compensate for their other drawbacks. I never noticed the first volley bug but then I seldom let missle units fire at will.

My attitude about guns is basically that 16th century daimyos adopted them readily for a reason. Namely that they were very effective. As long as the game models them as the dangerous weapons that they were I'm satisfied. I would like to get the AI to build them more often. I know there is a file that sets build habits for each clan but I haven't messed with it yet.

[Gothmog]

I tend to let my missile units to fire at will most of the time, as it greatly cut down the friendly kill.

As many have pointed out, guns are still very very powerful for it's very common that 60 muskets can kill over a hundred even in short battles.

Archers, however, seem to have been boosted a bit too.

Maybe it's a misconception, but it seems to me that the Archers now are less likely to inflict friendly kills than guns now, quite opposite to what I observed from the original STW.

[Kraellin]

i did a bit of research on the web about early guns while testing for this patch and what i found was that the Dutch arrived in Japan in the 1590's. the dutch at that time had what they called 'Serpentine muskets'. these muskets had a reload time of 2 minutes or more, but let's just use 2 minutes. at 2 minutes, with your men in 3 ranks, that would be 40 seconds per rank that they would fire...in good weather. arq's ostensibly would take longer, as they were bigger, heavier and thus clumsier.

the other thing i researched to help determine how guns shld work was actual measurements of distance in the game and actual firing ranges of various guns. if you're familiar with how the game editor works you know that the map is made up on 'tiles' or squares. there are ways to determine the length and width of each tile and what i found was that each tile is roughly 100 feet by 100 feet, or 33.3 yards by 33.3 yards. thus 3 tiles is 100 yards. at best, a tile is 110 by 110 feet, but i just used the simpler figure of 100 x 100.

now, guns of that era also had a much longer range than originally allowed in the game. various guns had various ranges, but typically a musket could fire 250 - 300 yards and still have some penetration power. thus, at 300 yards, that would be the equivalent of 9 tiles. the current guns in the game will open fire at a range of 2 1/2 tiles and have an 'extended range' of 1 1/2 tiles, whereby, if the bullet misses its original target it will continue to travel 1 1/2 tiles and then stop. so, the overall range of guns in the game is 4 tiles max. if you then use take the 9 tiles as max and subtract that 1 1/2 tile extended range, guns would open fire at 7 1/2 tiles. the overall number of tiles on a small map is only 20 x 20 tiles. thus, if both sides in the battle had guns and given this longer range and given that there is a 2 tile wide 'red zone' around the entire perimeter of the map, guns would open fire as soon as everyone was deployed.

also, because of the way guns were modeled in the game, there is an 'accuracy curve' to gun kills over various distances. however, this curve was found to be somewhat off from a real world model. your kills at max range could sometimes be better than at much shorter ranges. trust me on this one. we tested this EXTENSIVELY!

frankly, i like, and pushed for, longer range guns with slower reloads, but even i had to fudge on the real world times and distances due to game mechanics and limitations. i think my final recommendation was gun ranges at 5 tiles, with an extended range of another 1 1/2 and reloads of 45 seconds for muskets and 60 seconds for arq's. by the time i figured all this out and submitted this, guns had already been decided upon and there was a deadline to meet, so my guns didnt make it.

also, with such a long reload, muskets in rain become one-shot nellys, essentially. and of course, arq's dont work at all.

and for all those that cry 'history' and 'realism', you shld also know that the current cav speeds are not representative of real world speeds. you may think cav are fast now, but in fact, they are only running about half of what a real world cav unit would run. half! again, using some real world standards applied to the game models, i tested out some cavalry speeds and tested them in custom battles. these suckers run almost as fast as the scroll rate in the game. and the little suckers become a bit blurry and jumpy in screen updates and i've got a 64 meg vid card with a 1.2 gig processor and 512 megs of ram and a broadband internet connection. imagine what someone with a 56k modem, 64 megs of ram and even a 500 mhz computer is going to have to put up with in an online game.

if we all had mega gigahertz machines and the maps were 100 tiles by 100 tiles or better and we all had super fast, very stable internet, and the servers could keep up, we could model things very accurately. but real world models arent always the best way to go in computer games. the game models are 'condensed' for better, simpler game play. history MUST be thrown aside at times. we dont abandon it, but we do have to re-write it at times.

i'm all in favor of using real world values in a stats mod, but not as the default stat values. i'm currently working on a real world stat model, but only as a hobby horse kind of thing. if i ever get it done i'll post it on the .org and you can see for yourselves. in fact, if you guys want to post 'accurate, historical, data' on the mods forum AND give your reference sources, i'll consider this data for the mod. just remember that some things CAN'T be done in the mods. we cant change the monetary costs of units. we cant mix differing units types into the same unit, like ashi with samurai. we also cant currently change the sprites or look of the units. and there's prolly some other things you'd want to change that cant be done either.

all in all, the patch did a very good job of balancing game play. history and accuracy are ALWAYS going to take a back seat to game play in gaming models...ALWAYS.

still, it can be fun trying ;)

K.


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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.

[Erado San]

Hehehe...

Krae, I remember discussing the cav speeds. Heck I believe we only stopped short of calculating the weight of the saddlebags...

And you're musk ideas were very good. We discussed them, but the final idea came in on the day of the deadline... Thought I went nuts!

Wadda you think, Krae, should I open up that forum for public view? It won't show the hundreds of mails that went through my mailbox, but it might give a nice idea...

[Nelson]

Kraellin, I always advocate an "accurite" approach to the Total War series. For me more real is more fun. But I temper my wargamer impulses with the knowledge that the game has to be fun for lots of people not just grognards like me. I know you guys (Puzz3D also)have an eye towards reality when you explore changes to our favorite game. That's why I could apply the patch with confidence. Besides, I can still tweak some things myself!

[BakaGaijin]

Those musks actually sound like tons o' fun! They would be indicative of the general superiority of firearms to most other units, but the long ranges would give enemy units, especially cav, ample time to close in after the opening volleys. On the other hand, it might give a good reason to hold musket fire, "whites of their eyes"-style, since there might only be one or two shots fired, anyway.

Should be interesting to see the mod. And to hear what Matt has to say about his exploits in gun modding.

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Disappear into the Darkness!!

[Jaguara]

During the Napoleonic wars muskets were firing three rounds per minute for a well drilled troop. Earlier weapons would be significantly slower, of course. I do not doubt Kraellin's (sp) figures of 2 minute reload.

However, based on the compression of a day long battle into 60 minutes, can we complain about a 20 second reload?

And as far as range accuracy and speed accuracy...I still think of each man in my army as representing 10, thus those distances are really 10 times what they might appear to be and then the speeds are not so crazy. The only trick is relative speed to infantry...

But overall I say historical accuracy is best, and would result in the best balance...but the problem is, we do not always know what historical balance was...

(Heh, the lengths I will go to to justify things in my brain...)

Jaguara

[Puzz3D]

The difficulty with the gun model is that drag on the bullet is not taken into account. The bullet has just as much power at max range as it does at point blank range. If you make the guns very effective at short range, then they are too effective at long range. If you knock them down at long range, they are too weak at short range. As you increase the range, the problem becomes more and more apparent.

When I tested long range, slow reload guns in custom battle, the ai did poorly with them. It left all the muskett units far behind without protection while the infantry advanced. One unit of NC completely destroyed 6 units of musketts. I don't think they ever fired a shot because they were moving around so much.

If anything, the musketts are still a little too effective, and I see many players using gun limits in online play. Although the reload is 12% longer, the infantry lost about 25% in foot speed, so, their ability to frontally assault guns is dimminished. The cavalry has a better chance of reaching a gun now, but, if the gun is on hold and backed by another gun or yari infantry, forget it. You'll just waste your cav unit.

Different stats for online and offline play is probably what's needed for best gameplay.

MizuYuuki ~~~

[Nelson]

Ultimately the game has to FEEL right. Time needs to flow in a way that SEEMS to reflect a reasonble pace given what we know about the era and the fact that we are playing a game. 45 minutes for a big battle can SEEM like all day so that's fine. The current rate of fire SEEMS right given the speed of movement of the various units. It's the gross disconnects that plague some games that Shogun avoids in such grand style. I.e Stronghold. While I have enjoyed it to a point, in Stronghold infantry can walk up to a castle tower and knock it down in just a couple of minutes! There is no need to use engines or ladders at all! Now that's a crappy time scale!

My biggest faults with accuracy usually involve ahistoric (crossbowmen) or flawed (IMO) units (monks) or unlimited availability. BN and kensai are fun but I use them very sparingly. Happily these are all issues I can deal with myself for the most part.

[longjohn2]

I haven't had a chance to look at the latest patch yet (maybe at the weekend), but I thought I'd make a couple of points about weapon firing distances.

Firstly, the maximum theoretical firing range of a weapon, is not that important. Bows as well as guns have a maximum range of 200 - 300 yards, and more if using lightweight arrows. What is important, is the range at which at a unit of men finds it worthwhile to expend the ammunition to fire a unit sized volley. That is one reason why weapon ranges are set the way they are.
Secondly, there is the question of scale. The battles in Shogun are quite small compared to the numbers that would have engaged historically (maybe about 1/20th). However, the aim was to provide a big battle experience, and that would be compromised by allowing missiles to be fired too far, and thus fire to be concentrated too much in one spot.

Incidently, the ground scale I've always worked off is one tile = 40 metres, so guns and bows had a range of 100 metres.

[Puzz3D]

In the online game, guns certainly lend an urgency to the situation when you are under fire and it becomes apparent that you are not going to win the ranged battle. You have to go to plan B, and move to it decisively. In online games I played with weak guns, it was clear that they would simply cease to be used if left like that. In the online Sengoku game, I'm seeing all unit types being used which is nice from a gameplay perspective.

MizuYuuki ~~~

[Kraellin]

erado,

you do and i'll come over there and pummel you soundly about the head and shoulders with the butt-end of an arq ;) let sleeping mistakes lie.

and actually, i did take saddlebag and saddle weights and riders and armor and weapons and if they'd gone to the bathroom first, into account. lol. and tosa had the audacity to actually alter my stats! hehe, i actually do like the final horse speeds now though.

and yes, my guns were johnny come lately. yuuki and i did test them, but the others had already pretty much decided upon what we now have. ah well.

nelson,

yes. i agree. and yes, we had to temper a number of things, including tempering our tempers at times. the aim is indeed game play...well, at least for most of us. there's prolly a few history folks out there that now consider us 'the unforgiven'. the trick is to model for real world accuracy and then adjust for real game experience. in other words, if history doesnt quite model itself well, then change history ;) but we did attempt to use some real world models. and yes, if you dont like it, mod it ;)

and nelson, we were quite fortunate in our group to have those that played by numbers and models and mechanics and those that went by feel, when testing all of this. you can indeed have everything exactly correct by the numbers, but if it doesnt feel right, then it isnt right. kocmoc was invaluable in this particularly. generally speaking, if kocmoc 'felt' it was right, then we knew we were on the right track ;)

baka,

yup. i liked em, and yup, they were indeed very effective in stopping a charge by just about anything by using the 'whites of their eyes approach'...just dont get caught in the rain with them. it did change the nature of guns in our battles. they became more of a defensive weapon, rather than the current offensive style. the longer reloads forced one to be more careful about gun placement and gun firing which would have been more or an accurate portrayal in those times.

jaguara,

see longjohn2's post about compressions. it's quite true. and as for history, i've often wondered about various quotes and references i've seen in here. one could look at 15 battles and get an idea of history for a given area, but what about the 30 he didnt look at? and one certainly has to allow for history as written by the victor as well. one of my bug-a-boos with the original stw and history was, you could not take a smaller number of units of higher honor and beat a larger number of units at smaller honor. but history has plenty of accounts of such happening and i've even seen a few quotes in these forums of such. when the mongol expansion came out i was somewhat elated that one could take a smaller mongol force and beat a larger japanese force. yeeha!

puzz3d,

yup. drag. hehe...many discussions in our secret forum about the 'power curve'. i think i fell asleep during some of our tests on that one. and the ai...arrrrrggghhh! i'd give all guns a 10 tile range and the bloody ai would march his guns up to within one tile before he'd open fire...rofl...if he had anything left.

hehe, we dragged longjohn2 in! ;) excellent!

hi longjohn :)

i disagree as far as "Firstly, the maximum theoretical firing range of a weapon, is not that important. Bows as well as guns have a maximum range of 200 - 300 yards, and more if using lightweight arrows. What is important, is the range at which at a unit of men finds it worthwhile to expend the ammunition to fire a unit sized volley." my expectation was that *I* want to be the one that determines that range. if the max effective range is 300 yards then i want to be able to tell my men to open fire at that range, regardless of whether they can hit anything or not. i was a bit disappointed when i first found out that the open fire range was quite a bit different from the max effective range and that i couldnt really adjust this.

i do agree with you, in theory, about the big battle experience. we also found the same thing. everything has to be scaled down. i just didnt scale down quite as much as you guys did when it came to guns ;) but hey, i've always liked weird...just look at some of my maps ;)

40 meters...hmmm, that's closer to tosa's model. he had 1 tile at about 42 meters. (for us yanks, 40 meters is 40 x 1.094 or 43.76 yards). tosa based his tile distance somewhat on cav speeds, i think, and how fast a horse would go across a distance. i used the heigth of a man for one model. i said the average japanese man was 5 ft tall, or at best, 5 1/2 feet. if you look at the ys yari, it's exactly twice as long as a man's heigth, which would make it either 10 or 11 feet. if you then lay this out end to end you'll see that it takes exactly 10 ys yari's to span a tile. thus, i said 1 tile = either 100 feet or 110 feet. i then based everything else on this. at 40 meters per tile, the average japanese man would be 2 meters tall, or 2 x 1.094 or 2.188 yards tall or roughly 6 1/2 feet tall. this just didnt work for me. yup. it's nit picking ;)

and the other thing to mention here is that my appreciation for the amount of work that went into this game by CA has gone up 10 fold. they managed to stuff one hell of a lot of detail into one hell of a game. that any of this works at all and that we can even have these sorts of discussions is testament to a rather remarkable piece of design and coding. until you start tearing into even what little we tore into, you cant truly appreciate what is there and how it all works. i can only imagine the amount of hair pulling that went on at CA during all of this ;)

ya know, erado, this thread is starting to look somewhat like some of our posts on the 'secret forum' ;)

K.


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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.

[Moriboy]

Though many nods to accuracy in one form or another were made for this game, I for one think the game is astounding, and have no complaints whatsoever. The thing just "feels" right.

I did have a question about the new WE 1.02 patch though. I downloaded & installed it but when I first boot the game, the red marching troop screen still shows version 1.01. I know I'm loading it right, as the screen states that it was successfully installed. When I play the game, I really can't say that I notice any difference, especially in the cavalry charges.

Anyone?

[Kraellin]

moriboy,

it's not installed. if that screen doesnt show 'ver 1.02' then it didnt install correctly. i had a similar thing happen with the civ 3 patch. it installed perfectly, or so i thought, but the version number never changed. and when installing that patch, it also told me that it had installed correctly. come to find out, it did indeed install correctly....to a blank folder in my C: drive. try running the install again, but make sure the right path is used to your game folder. you also may have to erase those files in the wrong folder, as i believe there is an executable that may try and run if you dont.

K.


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I'm sorry, but i never apologize.

[Yomama]

To whomever fixed the reinforcements issue:
THANKS!!!x4

RE: musket reloads: one of the 'artforms' in designing games is knowing when to sacrifice realism for gameplay. STW developers are pretty much dead-on.

I did have the AI do a 'suicide' attack with 170 men against my 650. But Hey, knock yourself out!

[Gothmog]

Quote Originally posted by Yomama:
To whomever fixed the reinforcements issue:
THANKS!!!x4
[/QUOTE]

Huh? Reinforcement issue was fixed? When?

AI's reinforcement works fine, but the player's reinforcement ... well, don't count on it.

Check one of my recent post:

http://www.totalwar.org/ubb/Forum1/HTML/002689.html

[longjohn2]

Interesting thoughts on groundscale Kraelin. Actually it was never really precisely defined, but 1 square = 40 metres happens to give an easy conversion to the internal units the game uses. Shooting ranges, man heights, move speeds are all based on what feels right rather than anything really objective, so you can assume any scale you like really.