Neither the publisher EA or the developer CA were involved in making the stat changes of WE/MI v1.02. WE/MI v1.0 was messed up because the programmer who had balanced STW was not with CA at the time WE/MI was developed. There were plenty of good ideas and highly experienced players in that v1.02 beta, but I think not enough appreciation of just how hard it is to balance this game. Actually you cannot balance WE/MI multiplayer because the cost of weapon and armor upgrades are incorrectly calculated. In the end, too many stats were changed in an attempt to make the gameplay better than STW, and we ran out of time to properly test it. Samurai Wars for MTW/VI has taken 4 months and hundreds of battle tests to balance it, and it might still need some adjustments. As I recall, the WE/MI v1.02 beta lasted 6 weeks.

The conservative thing to do would have been to keep the original STW melee unit stats and movement speeds, fix the guns and work on integrating the new WE/MI units into the STW gameplay. I think we could have done that successfully in 6 weeks. We would still have had the weapon and armor upgrade problem, but players could have disallowed those broken upgrades in multiplayer with a rule. Of course, this is all in retrospect, but I can remember thinking at the time that we were biting off more than we could chew. I personally put in over 200 hours on that v1.02 beta.

At the time of the WE/MI v1.02 beta, I didn't know what the gun parameters were in STW because the projectile stats were hidden in the main exe. Now that I know they were power 4 in STW and the accuracy hadn't been changed, my setting of power 3 with increased accuracy and lower velocity was right on the money to reduce back kills while retaining the same kills/volley on the target unit of STW.