MT2W:Where are we now??

[Puzz3D]

Well, we have what I call "byproduct balance". MP is basically a byproduct of SP. If the SP game is such then the MP version will be good if not then not. SP will be ofc balanced by SP criteria so there is no guarantee that it would benefit MP. Shogun was good because it happened to have a very simple and reasonably well balanced SP game.

If the unit balance is improved via MP feedback it improves the SP game. This can be seen in the Samurai Wars mod for MTW/VI which has a strong SP campaign on the normal difficulty setting using units that were playbalanced in MP. When the units are unbalanced the strategic AI doesn't know which units are unbalanced, but after a while the human player figures out which units work better and will buy more of them giving the human an advantage in the battles. The greater the unbalance in the units the more advantage the human player can get.

In an old interview back before Shogun was released, Mike Simpson touted the inherent playbalance that the Sengoku period provided as an advantage for the gameplay. I wonder what happened to this kind of thinking at Creative Assembly? It's as though Creative Assembly found out that playbalance isn't particularly important to sell games, so it isn't cost effective to spend a lot of time playbalancing. This kind of thinking no only hurts MP gameplay but also hurts SP gameplay.

Same holds for maps. Maps were good as long as they were made by humans (in Shogun and in MTW), as soon as maps were generated from the campaign map they were useless in MP.

You could attack in Shogun MP at least in team games on any campaign map with a reasonable chance of winning with the exception of bridge maps. In fact, hilly maps like the original Tosa map or Mimanska were favorites of some teams to attack. This was possible because attritional play was dynamically balanced with positional play. This allowed the initiative to be an important tactical advantage which the attacker could utilize to overcome the static tactical advantages of the defender. This was quite an achievement in gameplay design considering that the attacker had no advantage in combat power over the defender.

How about no ashi rule? I don't remember if it was stw or mi.
Anyway I liked MI - funniest battle I have ever played was when I killed 15 units into 1 minute and then I was killing one val 9 kensai for 10 minutes :)

The no ashi rule came in with MI. A no ashi rule was never used before MI and neither was a 4 max of one unit type rule used. These rules were both consequences of unit imbalance. The ashi was imbalanced because the weapon and armor upgrade costs were miscalculated, and the 4 max on guns because the guns were overpowered. Forseeing problems in unit balance in MTW due to the large number of unit types in the game, LongJohn coded a 20% tax increase on more than 4 of one unit type, but I wish we could get rid of that tax in samurai wars because we don't need it since the units are all fairly well balanced. A well balanced game doesn't need unit purchase rules.

Anyway I liked MI - funniest battle I have ever played was when I killed 15 units into 1 minute and then I was killing one val 9 kensai for 10 minutes :)

The kensai unit is a problem because the battle engine can't properly handle single man units. Even without the battlefield upgrades in MTW/VI, I was not able to balance the kensai in MP and had to eliminate it from the unit selection. It's still present in SP, but players complained about it being able to kill whole armies of 3000 men. I reduced it's combat power, but now it's underpowered and the strategic AI clans suffer if they spend a lot of money training kensai. There is no optimal group of combat parameters for the kensai that I can identify that will make it balanced against 60 man units. Also, you can't depend on guns alone to be the counterunit for the kensai. But, you have identified and are an example of what I think is a basic reason why we aren't getting a better balanced game out of Creative Assembly these days.