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Oh dear. Sometimes it is best not to know these things. And I was waiting for the patch before reinstalling on my new PC. Looks like I'll be waiting for the expansion now. After all the hassel of getting them to fix the bug in VI - where everybody died at the same age -I'm not too hopeful.

I do wish CA would dump Activision so they could properly support an otherwise excellent game.

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all i can do is shake my head

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GAH!

I mean... err... well...

GAH!

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One more thing when you play on VH AI gets +7 at melee attack stats,
but because we found out that missile units (peltasts, legions, ...) use their missile stats there should be no difference between easy-medium-hard-very hard am i right?

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I don't know. The +7 might apply to missile stats as well. I tried to test this a couple of times, but I can't get the idiot AI archers to stay put and pepper me with arrows. They like to run up to my heavy infantry as if they wanted to do melee. I need to try it again, but I got pretty disgusted with the pathetic AI the last two times I attempted it.

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Can you blame them, they get super stats in melee as well as the +7 from VH, they really want to cut down legionaries with that pocket knife of theirs

But RTW is becoming worse and worse, it could have been the best game ever if everything worked as it supposed to, that's what you get when the only thing that matters is Activision and their money....Gah! Or they could atleast give good support like Paradox games does, but I guess my final decision about them will be based on the future patch, but it looks bad now.

I wonder if it would be possible for people with good coding, programming and skinning experience to get together and take their time to produce a great game, without being rushed by some fat boss with a cigar named Dick. I mean gather a group of good men and make a sort of "garage game" but a quality one. A very good example of this is a small company PopTop, they made Tropico and Train tycoon, two very great games another one is Paradox games with Crusader and similar games ( true, they are buggy, but atleast they try to fix it giving excellent support )

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So the devs are aware of the problem... now... or is it only now?
http://p223.ezboard.com/fshoguntotal...ID=19232.topic

Obake Date says:
"Whether or not they will be able to fix it in time for the upcoming patch........... I don't know."

Can I therefore infer that it ISN'T already fixed in the upcoming patch?! It's probable that Obake and Shogun already have the patch readme by this time so they might be able to tell fairly easily. Or perhaps a dev told them they'd be on it?!

If they haven't fixed it yet, I'm voting for giving CA another 2 weeks. Yes, only this one. Yes, I think it's THAT important. Another delay means another furore but it's still better than having the patch end of January and living with this bug till an expansion.

Personally I'm not touching the game with a 10-foot pole until I have some reassurance that it is going to be tackled. What's the point of researching economics, diplomacy, etc.. when core aspects of the game are ruined? Any previous MP/SP battle results would be rendered invalid by this... and modders would need to make radical and heavy adjustments...
I'm pushing heavily to get this one fixed, even if it takes a month instead of 2 weeks. Can we agree on this?

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I couldn't agree more. We've already waited this long and another couple weeks would make no difference to me.

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I can tell you that Obake most certainly have not read the readme, he is a moderator (administrator), but not an employee of CA. He knows as much as everyone else most of the time. The Shogun of course might know, but that does not translate into the moderators know.

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This is bug is clearly related to the bug that has units with secondary weapons not automatically switching to them for melee combat. On the other hand if CA was already made aware of that bug then it stands to reason that they probably caught the major bug we've been discussing in this thread.

I still cannot get over the fact that such a glaring bug was overlooked by CA, their Q&A people, Activision's Q&A people and the TW community since the game was first released! I guess it is true when they say "S--t happens!"

Well thanks to Obake Date's post in the Com we know for sure that CA is aware of the bug. Now what the TW community ought to do is let CA and Activision know that we want this bug to be fixed in the upcoming patch, regardless of the delay!

I would gladly wait another 2 weeks to a month for the patch if it means squashing this bug now and forever!

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I fully agree. No point in playing (or re-installing in my case) until this issue is fixed.

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It is plain sloppy. There are so many stats that don't work right, or backwards that either the QA was poorly structured, or a decision was made that they did not have time to fix what was found. So you can't necessarily blame QA and you can't necessarily blame the development team, it might have been a management call.

When I've done software evaluation from the user side, I tested basic functionality of as many features as I could--literally going through each menu and each field checking to see if things worked and then to make sure that they made sense or were accurate (the real time consumer.) I often found show stopper bugs that way and had to work with the developers to get them fixed so that we could actually use the product.

If you are doing in house beta testing properly, you should be running through all the stats in game to see if they are being applied as designed. Clearly, that was not done or the results were ignored. I've seen this working from the software developer's side as well. It isn't pretty when the QA is cut short or if a decision is made to ship with major known bugs rather than fixing them.

I'll give the community more credit, Spino. This is not the sort of bug you can track down without modding and the hardcore modding community is a much smaller subset. Many players from across the skill/experience range had been commenting over oddness with skirmishers/archers fighting harder than their stats would indicate. We also had been puzzled by the power of pila units in combat with supposed equals or betters. Unfortunately, we were taking CA's word for how the secondary stats were implemented. If CA had provided some sort of in game toggle/function to show unit stats in combat...then we could have tracked this down much sooner--scratch that, we WOULD have tracked this down sooner because it would have been glaringly obvious to anyone who used such a switch. Instead we have had to rely on kill rate testing--and that takes statistics to prove unless one puts in truly silly numbers.

The fix looks to be straightforward. The animation already switches properly (part of the reason it was not found earlier) but the stat switch isn't happening. It shouldn't be hard to get the combat engine to switch stats at the same cycle--or find the bug that is preventing it form occurring. It is very, very likely that the code is already there, but has some small bug that is disabling the switch.

However, even if the fix is easy, there is still a finite retest/recertify time period required. I'm guessing that if it was not already found and implemented in the patch, then it will take at least two weeks and more likely a month minumum. And that is assuming CA doesn't have to go back and do unit/faction rebalancing as a result of the change.

Now for the good news. This gives the community more leverage to ask for a follow up patch to fix any major issues not resolved in this one. When you have a new 3D engine and new combat engine, limiting yourself to one major patch is NOT a user friendly idea...unless you do an incredible job right out of the gate.

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I don`t think that this bug is as critical as most people think.
We have played for like 3 months, and the balance of the troops did not seem wrong to anyone.
I have not seen a songle topic wich claimed that legionaries are much stronger than they should be. Actually, everybody thought they were just fine - until now.
Once or twice somebody complained that (cav)archers can deal with cav pretty well, but most of the time the cav still wins.
So what I am saying is that this bug is annoying, but most people are acting way too hysterical.
A bug that stays unnoted for such a long time cannot be so serious.

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Actually, looking over the numbers, it's not that surprising.

In general, the bug gives most missile units a +3 to +5 added attack.

The archers are big winners, but since no one knew it, people weren't using it. Even with a 7 attack, I'm not likely to use them as infantry much. Just as I don't like to use my Chosen Archers that way. Like many others, I had noticed an annoying tendency for archers to stand up to my generals in melees, but given all of the possible bonuses (morale, snow, forest, elevation, exhaustion, difficulty, etc.) it's hard know that those archers were tougher than expected because of some bug.

The other clear big winners are the pila/jav charger units, most of whom get +4 over what's documented. Mitigating this is all the same bonus issues described above, plus the fact that it's +4 on a much higher starting number so it's not as big a percent boost. Other civs' jav chargers don't get seen too often, so this is mostly a Roman benefit. This probably didn't get noticed because the Romans are supposed to be good. One even suspects that they were balanced to the level of goodness they are with the bug embedded, and if not for the bug their melee stat would be higher anyway.

After hearing about the bug, I had a look at my unit table to see if there's a unit I would use radically differently with this knowledge of the bug. I think the answer was probably not. Except maybe some of the horse archers.

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I am willing to wait more than 2 weeks for this fix, chances are there will be side effects to fixing this. Aside from play-balance issues, the attack stat may be used in computations other than straight combat. It has been noted that the AI tries to "match up" units when the battle lines come together, I would assume it is comparing attack/defense stats as part of this. Which attack stat is it using? Maybe this explains some of the odd decisions being made by the AI. It's unlikely, but maybe this is one factor leading to the town square/under fire bug. "They're shooting at us, let's charge them!", "No way, look at those attack values!"

It does surprise me that CA or the QA would not notice this. I would assume CA can log battles and look at the combat results on a per-attack basis. Granted, this would be boring work to parse through those logs, but still...

Also, does this bug exist in the unpatched version? Maybe this was introduced in the first patch.

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I am inclined to blame management as well given RTW's 'September or bust' ship date. But given the 'big deal' nature of this bug I am simply amazed that it slipped through the cracks and stayed hidden for so long!

Ok. I have seen this sort of thing happen before and yes, it isn't pretty. As a fellow strategy gamer I wonder if you recall a horrendously incomplete and buggy game known as Napoleon 1813? I still cry myself to sleep over that one.

My post was not meant to taken as an indictment of the TW community! But as I said earlier, given the sheer number of people (especially modders) who have played and dissected this game since its release it is somewhat incredulous to find out, 3-4 months after the fact, that such a huge bug was staring us in the face the entire time!

From your mouth to CA & Activsion's ears...

One can only hope. However, based on the moderator posts over at the Com this massive patch is seemingly 'it' for RTW until the release of the expansion pack. Should this 'Secondary Attack' bug not be addressed by the upcoming 1.2 patch then all we're going to get is a quick fix patch to address said bug along with other issues/bugs created by the 1.2 patch! Once that is done I think we're going to have wait the release of the expansion pack in late 2005/early 2006 to get further tweaks, features and bug fixes.

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"They're shooting at us, let's charge them!", "No way, look at those attack values!"

Drone, I think you have a valid point there.I did a few tests on peasants v dacian archers to see how missile stats affected archery kills.At 7 attack for the dacians the peasants would always rout before getting in charge range.At 5(and below) attack dacians the peasants would charge and engage.This is regardless of archery kills on the peasants as sometimes att 5 would sustain more kills than att 7 under near identical conditions as possible.

This suggests to me that an opponents attack value does have a bearing on opposing forces morale.

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la dee da... la dee da... gotta love it

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wonders happen when the future is dark
so maybe it will happen again CA

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Ok, Shogun has responded now at .com. CA Comments on Missile/Melee Bug This bug was not caught by CA. Fortunately, the fix must have been easy. CA's comment so far is that the play balancing is not so effected that they need to make major changes.

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Indeed, it also means that the bug will be fixed in this patch and not in a next one. I will no longer need to fear sending my cavalry against these thrice damned headhurlers

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Thanks Red Harvest!

Here's the text...

The Primary-Secondary Weapon stats issue and the Patch
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
What can we say? Strange things happen in software development. That's no excuse, but we are now clearing up the problem.

Firstly, we'd like to thank players for finding this issue in Rome: Total War. We've calculated that the community has now spent 17,000+ man years in playing RTW. Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to match the dedication of our players so we hope you can forgive us for the lapse in not spotting this bug, which was introduced late in the project. We're less than happy that we missed it. Even if we'd put everyone involved on the project into testing (and stopped putting any cool stuff in the game) it would have taken about 300 years to match your efforts, and we're pretty sure that most people wouldn't have wanted to wait for 300 years for the game to be published. :)

We've now addressed the problem. In the current build units now use their secondary weapon values where appropriate. Archers and skirmishers, for example, now 'know' to use their knife or shortsword combat values instead of their missile values. The main results of the fix is that some missile troops won't be as effective in hand to hand combat, and lance armed cavalry will be more effective than is currently the case after their initial charge. We're now playtesting to make sure that unit balancing hasn't been affected in any overtly strange ways and that combat results are what we'd exect them to be. You'll be happy to know that so far, so good...

This late change does mean that other patch elements have to be retested. As a result, the patch has been slightly delayed and won't be available when we expected. But, having monitored the forums, we know that this is an issue that needs to be addressed. We also know that you're eager for the patch. We are too, but we want to do the job *properly*. That's going to take slightly longer than we thought it would.

So thanks for your continued patience. In the meantime, the game still works and is extremely playable. Once the patch is out you'll find that is even better.

Wonderful news!!! So I am guessing we'll have to wait another week, maybe two beyond the original estimate which saw a late January release date for the patch. That's fine by me.

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Wow, it's incredible that they have managed to patch with such speed (barely a couple of days since the bug was first discovered). Thank you CA for the prompt response.
As for any slight delay, that's no problem at all for me, in fact I'd say take your time and make sure it's really balanced. If CA could tackle this bug in so short a time, it's more than possible that the coming patch will address many issues. I heartily look forward to it.

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Interesting. If the attack values are used in other calcs, which one is chosen? When charging archers, their attack value should decrease once melee ensues (once the bug is fixed). Does the AI make situational decisions based on the two stats, does it know how make the opposing unit use the lesser attack?

Hope this bug isn't the tip of a problem here. I've been writing software for a long time, so I know how little things can get embedded throughout code. Judging from Shogun's post, this should be the end of it.

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This engine really needs some sort of toggle to show full unit stats *in use* at that time for both friendly and enemy in actual combat, not pre combat. I would like to see numeric values for morale, attack, defense, fatigue, anything else that would be relevant as they happen/change during battle. It is not something I would want on during normal play, and it would probably need to be disabled for MP, but it would be great for learning how units work, how the whole fight sequence works, what "special abilities" really do, etc. Right now, we don't have descriptions from CA on how the engine works, so having this sort of tool would be great for learning the game. It might help out the QA efforts as well...

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Yes, more detail for battles would be nice and also some outlines for game mechanics.

There were exact calculations for Shogun (http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/gui...un/p10_01.html)
and I think Medieval wasn't too different (correct me if I'm wrong).
We also had a Shogun Academy website (now archived in the org as a doc) where some of the vets around actively contributed to it.
Rome's calculations on the other hand was mentioned by Jerome as different. I wish he had elaborated a bit more since we can't really see what's going on behind the scenes, which means we can't really know what's working or not working. Of course we can look at kills... but that's a very rough and inaccurate measure.
I believe with a rough outline and some battle details, modders would be able to make tweaks more easily without a whole lot of playtesting and balancing.

I remember that pressing F1 brought up a handy screen of units and their totalled up stats, which was nice to see exactly how strong a unit is. Also as mentioned previously by vets around here, in the older games there were also battles indicators like "feeling safe on a hill", "happy that flanks are protected", etc... which would provide some clue as to how morale was faring. Unfortunately that's gone.
I know I'm rehashing old topics but sometimes when the old stuff is good I really do hope it can be ported to the new engine.

I guess part of the reason why the management part of the game has been dealt with in more detail in the Ludus Magna forum, is because it is easier to figure out. Looking at the Settlement Detail, Trade Detail screens, comparing overviews between turns are all comparatively easier and a whole lot more accurate than figuring out this missile/melee bug for example. Thank god the modders caught this one in time.
As you can see, we are not making a whole lot of progress on XP related issues which also appears odd as some players have mentioned that units can go up 1XP by just sitting around (?) (I won't say it's bugged or not bugged as I don't have hard evidence... and asking modders to crack the saved files to see where XP is stored is a tall request).

So all in all, we'll benefit from more info. The community only wants to make the game better and more bug free and we can help out more easily if we have some added info for battles. When we do have enough data, issues are more easily tracked down (ie, therother found out an odd tax anomaly between tier 2 and tier 3, see https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=37831).

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