Archery range bug

[Puzz3D]

There is a lot of things which needs to be addressed in MTW2, still game engine is not as bad as some people think.

It's better than RTW engine. Well isn't that great!

One question Puzz. You have have made a programme for STW engine. How come that if following info is correct no one know more about STW engine then AMP or Kocmoc? They surpased you despite having less theoretical background knowledge. Maybe because they had more practical understanding of the game engine itself? I guess this could be the answer.

They don't know more than I do, but they are better players. Just the same, I do ok. I won a 2v2 tournament back in STW, and Kocmoc and Magyar were a team in that tourney. I beat the team that beat them. Kocmoc was on the STW/MI v1.02 beta team with me, and he didn't display any deep understanding of the engine. He and Magyar were self identified "feel" guys. They called Tosa and I "number" guys. They don't know by how much to change a numerical stat to get a desired effect. Ask them if M2TW is better than original STW.

Amp seems to focus on utilizing exploits. For instance, he didn't want the swipe bug fixed in MTW. He also doesn't publicly reveal exploits when he finds them because then other player can use those exploits against him. That's just the way he chooses to play the game in a competitive fashion, but he's still a great player. I don't like that approach to the game because it's unfair to new players. My feeling is that everyone should be on an even playing field after maybe 25 battles or so as far as understanding the game mechanics. There shouldn't be hidden exploits in the game that they have no way of knowing about that other players are taking advantage of.

Even CA programmers didn't understand STW engine good enough. They made STW but they did not know how game actually works. This sounds paradoxical but not until you find out that they lost vs amp, koc and magyar.

The gameplay in STW was probably better than they ever imagined it would be, but it wasn't an accident. LongJohn made some very good decisions on how to balance the whole system. Having said that, the resultant gameplay in MP probably exceeded even his expectations because he once said that balance to about 25% was good enough, but STW was balanced much better than that. I would say it was balanced to better than 10%, and that's around the level of imbalance of which a multiplayer can take advantage. The warrior monk wasn't out of balance by more than 10%, and yet players could exploit that, and it took an expert player to defeat it. So I agree with you that the reason CA has never been able to repeat the success of that first game in terms of MP gameplay is that they messed around with something that shouldn't have been changed so much. The move to hundreds of units and many factions made the thing impossible to balance anywhere near the balance of the original game.

In Samurai Wars we just used LongJohn's original starting as a starting point, and changed it very little. It models the gameplay of original STW as played at 5000 koku where you could sell off honor on the ranged units. You can't do that in MTW, so the ranged units are priced lower to reflect the value that multiplayers came to find was best by experience. We raied the morale of the units because in STW you bought units at honor 2 which adds +4 morale, but in MTW/VI you buy them at valor 0 so no morale is added except the hidden +2 that was added in VI. After playing Samurai Wars for a year, we found that some of the lower morale units needed another +2 morale to be useful. We also had to adjust charge values because MTW/VI charge works a little differently than did STW charge.

And I do not doubt that AMP or Kocmoc would find exploits in STW mod if they would be playing it. That's for sure.

We got AMP to test Samurai Wars. He and Swoosh did find an exploit with cav units, and we fixed it. Magyar also helped test Samurai Wars, and we adjusted cav archers based on his observations. We had about 10 top players testing Samurai Wars.