What is 103 about?

[hellas1]

Hi everyone,

I have read about 103, is this a patch to patch over v 1.02 of STW:WE?

and What the heck is MP anyway?

Domo Arigato Cats.

[Ludens]

I have read about 103, is this a patch to patch over v 1.02 of STW:WE?

and What the heck is MP anyway?

To answer you last question first: MP is short for multiplayer.

1.03 is an unofficial patch for the "Mongol Invasion" expansion and the Warlord Edition of the game. It was made by the fans and not by CA. It does not adress any bugs, but instead changes the stats of the units as to better balance the gameplay.

I was not present at the time, but I understand that after the release of MI many fans felt dissappointed with the MP gameplay. The official 1.02 patch did not solve this. Muskets were too strong, cavalry to weak. MP became "shoot and rush" instead of "maneuvre and flank", like it used to be in S:TW. Therefor, a couple of fans created a community patch that would return the balance back to the original game. This patch was called 1.03, and affected the Japaneses unit only. I don't know if the patch is still used (Drisos will know), but I don't think so, as it was hardly used even when it came out. Most players prefered to stay with the original stats or perhaps didn't even know there was an alternative.

There is also an unofficial 1.05 patch to balance the Mongol units, which have been neglected in 1.03. This patch is the work of one man though, and I understand it is not entirely balanced.

[Drisos]

Hello again Hellas1,

well I think ludens explained all to you. people are now playing 1.02 in multiplayer (MP ). I never seen anyone use 1.03... well I guess it was used sometimes a while ago. but I'm too new to know about that.

basic reason we play 1.02 is that we like it. what ludens said about musks and cavalry sounds infarmiliar to me... maybe the 1.02 stat was changed sometime? otherwise why do we like it? weird...



ps: Ludens, good to see you again in Sword dojo. after you was one of the first to welcome me, I haven't seen you around sadly.

[Shambles]

The muskets really are to powerfull in v1.02 But we over come this with the maximum 4 of same unit rule,

The problem with the 1.03 stats and the other stats is that Not to many people know of them, Also people were having difficulties installing them, as they needed to be placed in a certain directory, And people were told to back up there origional stats files, Which can seem intimidating for newer players or people who arent 100% computer literate.

Toga had made a stats swaper, ( a little exe file that helpfully allowed you swich between 1 set of stats to the other "needed 1.02 isntalled")
But its not unusual for stats or mods made by fans to be abandoned for mp purpouses,
If the vast majoraty of people dont use the mod its difficult to get enough suport for it,
And without enough suport, When you arive in the foyer with v1.03 and every 1 els has v1.02 It wont take more than 10 mins for you to go and change back to v1.02 so you can play a game.

Where as it wouuld take considerably longer for you to explain to othere people why its worth there time and effort to go find this file download it and install it then restart there game and come back,

Its just the way things go with this sort of stuff.

ShambleS

[Puzz3D]

The muskets really are to powerfull in v1.02 But we over come this with the maximum 4 of same unit rule.

This doesn't really correct the problems with v1.02. You can see this because v1.02 was designed for 7k koku, and yet everyone plays it at 10k. That's because guns get too many kills per volley which causes units to rout too easily, and they are achieving this in 3 rank mode with only 1/3 of their guns firing which effectively increases their ammo by 3 times more than was intended and increases their rate of fire by a factor of 3 as well. As far as I'm concerned what this means is that, if you win the shootout, you win the battle, and you can win the shootout between 4 gun units by a large enough margin to shoot down the entire enemy army in 30 seconds of unreturned fire from the enemy's 4 guns. I can't tell you how many players I saw hunting for the edge of the maximum open fire range with their guns so they could get in that 30 seconds of unreturned fire, but it was a lot of player who did it. Fire at will does not automatically cause a unit to open fire at max range, so you cannot leave your gun units unattended at all. Clever players would make a diversion off to the side, and when you came back from attending to that your guns were shot to hell and all you could do then was rush your melee units into a withering fire. The gameplay came down to being an expert with those 4 gun units.

Players increased the koku to 10k to boost the morale of their units with upgrades so they can have some chance of not routing under fire. That causes a problem with yari ashi which then have to be eliminated from the game which removes a very important unit from the gameplay. Another issue is that the defend value of guns is too high which means that, even if cavalry reaches the guns, it has difficulty beating them in melee when the guns are in hold formation. HC and NC were supposed to be able to frontally charge and defeat guns at 7k koku.

The other major issue with v1.02 is that the flanking tactics are messed up. This happened because CA improved the network code which speeded up the game. Some players on the team that made v1.02 wanted to slow the game down so that they had the same level of control they had in STW, but the only thing there was time to address were the movement speeds of the units. So, infantry was slowed down, but the fighting speed wasn't slowed down. Therefore, infantry lost it's ability to flank before the combat of the fighting units was resolved. This necessitated keeping cavalry moving fast so there would be a flanking aspect to the gameplay. Unfortunately, that makes the game very difficult to play and also overpowers the cav somewhat relative to the much slower infanty. The resultant gameplay of STW/MI v1.02 is nothing like original STW.

[Just A Girl]

So do you think more veterans would play if we Used the 1.03 stats?
or maby if we used the v1.01 stats from the stat swaper?

if we make it so that the lil tournie's I run Requier you to use a certain Stat, It should not be to difficult to get all curent stw players to use Whichever set of stats that work the best,

Im prety shure if any 1 knows Which stats would be the best its going to be puzz3d.

Im also aware that Most of the old stw players now play MTW and a stw mod (if they want to play shogun) or they play RTW,
But i hope that some times. they may find it in their hearts to come play some shoggy,

[Puzz3D]

Many players don't like to use custom stats and some can't get them to work. We got a very good response to the current CWC Knights of Valor tournament for MTW/VI using the official stat with some rules imposed to improve the gameplay. One thing you could try for STW/MI v1.02 is to eliminate the muskets and play at 7k koku. That gives an average of 437 koku per unit which is plenty to build a 16 unit army. Once the muskets are out of there, the other units can make better use of their individual capabilities. The YA is important in driving off cavalry due to its high footspeed, but would not be a super unit because its lower morale will be in a range where it cannot operate independently without great risk of being routed. It's boarderline, but I think playable without restricting the YA at 7k. You still have the arquebusier for a gun unit, but it's outranged by archers, has a slower firing rate and can't shoot in rain; up close it's still devastating. This means archers will rise in importance, but they are very vulnerable to cavalry an have to be protected. The archers are very dangerous to ND, WM and YA. YC and CA can also be hurt by archers since their higher armor is offset by being a larger target.

I could come by and play some games using these rules, but I can't get there before 21:00 GMT on weekdays. I might be able to find some other players to bring with me, but they run WinXP and have had some problems running STW/MI.

[Ludens]

But its not unusual for stats or mods made by fans to be abandoned for mp purpouses,
If the vast majoraty of people dont use the mod its difficult to get enough suport for it,
And without enough suport, When you arive in the foyer with v1.03 and every 1 els has v1.02 It wont take more than 10 mins for you to go and change back to v1.02 so you can play a game.

Where as it wouuld take considerably longer for you to explain to othere people why its worth there time and effort to go find this file download it and install it then restart there game and come back,

Its just the way things go with this sort of stuff.

Very true, sadly. But then, most MP players don't frequent the forums, so how could they know about unofficial patches?

ps: Ludens, good to see you again in Sword dojo. after you was one of the first to welcome me, I haven't seen you around sadly.

Thanks. University kept me away for some time. Anyway, the Sword Dojo has been way too quiet for my liking. One of these days I may go back to S:TW for the challenge. I played one custom game last month, and the A.I. scared me simply by the way it advanced in formation. I got roundly trashed in that battle. R:TW has made me rusty.

[Drisos]

One of these days I may go back to S:TW for the challenge.

I like that idea!!!

[TosaInu]

The authors of 1.03, shipped the new stats with a bat swapper that allowed selecting either official 1.01, official beta 1.02 or fanmade 1.03. There were 3 different flavours of this distribution: exe, self-extracting zip and zip. They also contained the required DLL to allow running in XP.

Problem with the zip version, is that Microsoft has a logic differing from other toolsmiths. Extrating the zip to the root STW folder worked fine for all known zip tools, except XP's built in one. XP zip adds another directory which has the same name as the zip file, and puts the zip content in there. The swapper quits working then, and as none of us had XP during release, it took a bit to figure out why it didn't work for some.

As the official EA server acting up more and more and RSW made a neat tool to run a foyer/matchmaker server your own, a bat file to swap between the official EA server and a fan hosted one was released too.

[Togakure]

What Puzz3D has said, immediately above, is true. However, you never know until you try.

The last large 2v2 tournament was sponsored by The Home of the Masterless/Kas and was a 1.03 tournament. We had 16 teams, 2 players per team--a total of 32 players. Granted, some didn't show for their games and lost by default, but we did complete the tournament (after about 6 months, lol). We saw the return of some players from the "old days," including Puzz3D and TosaInu (who, incidentally, eliminated Kas and me in 4 very fun games).

Though there are far fewer STW-MP players active now, the tourney you are proposing is 1v1 and only requires 8 players to proceed. You might be able to attract the requisite number, even if you use 1.03. I do think it would be important to develop and test an installer for the stat, make it available for download, and provide support for it. But I've seen your abilities and know that you can do this via your website.

Keep in mind that 1.03 is quite a different baby than 1.02. You may want to play a few (even a lot) of 1.03 games to see if it meets your expectations. One thing for sure--there are far fewer people familiar with it, so it will "level the playing field," so-to-speak. However, If someone who is familiar with its nuances participates (Sasaki, Pao, Puzz, et. al.), the rest will be at a considerable disadvantage against them unless they familiarize themselves with the differences in the stat and practice a whole lot.

[Just A Girl]

Im glad of your post toga,
things had taken a negative turn Atleast theres a shimmer of light in your words,
The bleak coldness of puzz3d's post had left me a little dissheartend.

and with the legal worys over the prizes the whole project, Was/is begining to look like a daunting task.
on a plus side thoug...
Im shure a Installation module can easily be made,
along with a suport page for each and every 1 of the most common stw porbs.
Including how to log in to fakeserver 1st time using windows xp.
(I already can due to installing a fat32 formated hard disk, and i will soon experiment with other methods)

I would realy like to see more poeple play this wonderfull game.

but im begining to run out of ideas.

[Drisos]

but im begining to run out of ideas.

I really appreciate your efforts to keep this here alive... and indeed it's very frustrating when it does not seem to work. but don't worry, for instance we had some 3v3's again last friday, and also some games on saturday. Anskar entered the foyer after a while of absence and he can host as well...

Myself I've just found the UGLI boards and will try to help people there get on to server... Elmarko said he'd try!!

and I added some msn adresses lately... I found them on old websites etc and if they haven't expired in the meantime some stw vets might pop up in my msn I noticed some had expired... but some didn't. one was taken by someone else I had a talk to some person which I have no connection to at any way.... but certain adresses I think would not be used by people not from tw... so I have some hope