Was it really this bad?

**Irinami** · 02-23-2005, 17:05

I was reading the Shogun Academy, checked some of their linked forum articles here on muskets. In particular, this one gave me a chuckle. They sounded like old samurai and bushi. "Those guns and muskets are too powerful! There is no way a peasant can beat a samurai, this is ridiculous!" I laughed. No, really, I did laugh. There's a reason the unification of Japan and the subsequent invasion of Korea used muskets. Same reason that when Japan finally came out of her shell, she used the firearms of the day instead of samurai with their o-yoroi.

So was it really so bad when MI came out? Or am I just seeing the difference in style between gamers and sim fans?

**Sasaki Kojiro** · 02-23-2005, 17:59

Well in MP the concern is for balance and fun games rather than realism. And guns were unrealistically powerful. Shooting in the rain, shooting through hills...

**Puzz3D** · 02-24-2005, 16:42

Somebody at Creative Assembly who didn't know what they were going jacked up the power on guns from STW's value of 4 to WE/MI's value of 16. This screwed up the RPS playbalance and the morale system. To compensate, CA had added +12 morale to all units, so yes it really was that bad. We got the +12 morale removed in WE/MI v1.01 which made the gun problem even worse. To my knowledge no STW player had ever complained that the guns were too weak.

It was so bad that CA allowed a community beta team to rebalanced WE/MI v1.01, and I was involved in that effort. The mandate of that beta team was to reduce the effectiveness of guns. For some reason which I still don't fully understand and without my knowledge, on the last day of the beta the gun's power that I had set and which had been approved by 5 of the 8 beta team members was increased from 3 to 5, and sent to CA as the final stat without being tested. I protested when I discovered that, and the stat was recalled. Three 1v1 test battles were then played, and I was able to secure a compromise value of power 4, and that was forwarded to CA. Later, when I ran tests on these power 4 guns I found that the kills on the target unit were equal to WE/MI v1.0 which meant that guns hadn't been reduced in effectiveness at all, but it was too late to recall the stat. This non-reduction in the effectiveness of guns on the target unit was a consequence of increasing the accuracy and reducing the velocity of the projectile to lower the back kill ratio and reduce the distance over which back kills occured which was something that many players wanted done. The muskets in WE/MI v1.02 are supposed to be power 3 because they have higher accuracy than the muskets in STW.

The guns are incorrectly balanced in WE/MI v1.02. There is no doubt about it. After WE/MI v1.02 was released, online participation whet up from 30 to 60 a peak times for about a month and then gradually dropped back to about 30 on average over the next couple of months. WE/MI online attendance never got anywhere close to the 100+ participation we had in STW at peak times which just goes to show that WE/MI v1.02 didn't achieve the objective which was to restore the good playbalance which was present in STW. Samurai Wars for MTW/VI brings the game back closer to STW v1.12 playbalance by using the original STW stats with some modification to account for differences in teh game engine.

**Irinami** · 02-24-2005, 17:50

Wow... that's a LOL that almost actually was out loud. Seems like there was one person with a skewed view of things and a big ego ramrodding issues. EG maybe this person misunderstood the power of firearms--it wasn't just that they were powerful (they weren't terribly) or accurate (they weren't really), it was that you could field a whole mess of them pretty darn easily. Hell, in straight koku or gold/silver blocks, it probably cost the daimyo more per gun than per warm body to hold and fire it.

Hmmm... with our experiences with EA here in Orlando, I would not be surprised if it was one of their people who did some ramrodding. Good games. A-hole management.

Thanks for the answers, I do appreciate them. It really helps to understand the game and community.

**Puzz3D** · 02-24-2005, 19:56

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.

**Minamoto Yoritomo** · 03-01-2005, 01:42

Is it fixed in 1.03?

**TosaInu** · 03-04-2005, 14:29

Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro

.. And guns were unrealistically powerful. .., shooting through hills...

They don't. It's a mix of several other issues that can, in the right conditions, result in a phenomena that appears to be this.

**Sasaki Kojiro** · 03-04-2005, 16:22

Originally Posted by TosaInu

They don't. It's a mix of several other issues that can, in the right conditions, result in a phenomena that appears to be this.

Yeah, technically they were shooting over the hills and the bullets were coming down the other side and killing men back there...works out to the same thing.

**Irinami** · 03-04-2005, 17:24

Plunging fire!! This is still done; the M249 SAW manual, the M60 GPMG manual and the M2HB manual all have directtions on how and when to apply plunging fire--that is, indirect fire via small arms. Very cool. With a slow and heavy projectile like that of a muzzle-loader, it would be possible at much closer ranges.