============================================================= ================== Dynasty Warriors 2/3/4 =================== ================= Shin Sangoku Musuo 1/2/3 ================== ============================================================= =============== Advanced Game Mechanics Guide =============== ========================= FAQ V3.0 ========================== ============================================================= A FAQ by ENAY V1.0 August/11th/2003 - First Version V2.0 August/18th/2003 - Added more info and sub categorised longer sections, many new sections have been added also, along with extra info in existing sections. This FAQ was big enough as it was, but now it's twice the size. :) V3.0 August/24th/2003 - Not much this time. Added some stuff Fixed a few grammatical errors and added more information to the section with the invisible horse and an extra section about clipping. This document is Copyrighted 2003 ENAY. Dynasty Warriors 2/3/Extreme/4 & Shin Sangoku Musuo 1/2/3 are trademarks of Koei (c)2000/2001/2002/2003 http://enaysoft.co.uk/ enay@enaysoft.co.uk The latest version of this FAQ can always be found at:- http://enaysoft.co.uk/ CONTENTS:- 1.0 INTRODUCTION 2.0 A.I. 2.1 ALLIES 2.2 ENEMIES 2.3 BODYGUARDS 2.4 PATHFINDING 2.5 BATTLE ORDER 2.6 ATTACK ZONE 2.7 STATIONARY 3.0 BATTLE CPU PROCESSING 3.1 REGIONS 3.1.1 STATES 3.2 Z ORDER 3.2.1 1 PLAYER MODE 3.2.2 2 PLAYER MODE 3.3 MORALE 3.3.1 EVENTS 3.3.2 KILLING ENEMY GENERALS 3.3.3 KILLING ENEMY TROOPS *** IMPORTANT *** 3.3.4 KILLS IN MULTIPLES OF 50 3.3.5 1000 KILLS 3.4 ON AND OFF RANGE PROCESSING 3.4.1 MORALE 3.4.2 OFF RANGE<->ON RANGE 3.4.3 PROCESSING TRICKS 3.4.4 SPECIAL HORSE CHARACTERS 3.4.5 BEHIND THE SCENES PROCESSING 3.4.6 BOULDERS 3.5 PERSONAL TROOPS AND RESPAWN POINTS 3.6 THE LEGENDARY INVISIBLE HORSE AND INVISIBLE ELEPHANT 3.7 CLIPPING 4.0 USEFUL TACTICS 4.1 CONTROLLER 4.2 ITEMS 4.3 CHARACTERS AND CHARGING UP 4.4 INCREASE POWERUPS 4.5 INFINTE COMBO 4.6 BONUS POINTS 4.7 9999 4.8 ARCHERS 4.9 MAXIMUM MORALE AND SUB GENERALS 4.10 MOUNTING 4.11 REINFORCEMENTS 4.12 NEVER GIVE UP! 5.0 SOME PROBLEMS WITH DYNASTY WARRIORS 4 6.0 IDEAS THAT I THINK SHOULD BE ADDED TO THE NEXT GAME 6.1 KINGDOM LEADERS CHOOSE SUB BOSSES 6.2 PRESS SELECT TO INSTRUCT GENERALS 6.3 R3 MENU 6.4 TAKE OUT AUTO AIM 6.5 A FEATURE TO DIABLE DUELS 6.6 MORE INFO 6.7 A BETTER SURVIVAL CHALLENGE 6.8 GENERAL BODYGUARD 6.9 SUB GENERAL SPEECH 6.10 4 PLAYER MODE USING TWO PS2 UNITS ============================================================= ============================START============================ ============================================================= 1.0 INTRODUCTION Welcome! Ever since the release of Dynasty Warriors 2 I have been addicted to the sheer fighting excitement of this game. The release of Dynasty Warriors 3 improved so much over the original that it was a very wise purchase for me. I've been a big fan of scrolling beat-em-ups for many years but the Dynasty Warrior games definitely are the most original games to date. Then of course came Extreme Legends and Dynasty Warriors 4. Although I found a few things in Dynasty Warriors 4 a step backwards, almost a game between 3 and Extreme Legends. Being a games programmer myself, I find the AI (Artificial Intelligence) in these games fascinating. To some extent you really do feel like you're in a massive war. And for me this is what makes the game so fun. Each battle is rarely the same twice. And the 2 player option is just fantastic. I'd highly recommend anyone to buy any of these games. The aim of this FAQ is to explain how the game mechanics work and how to exploit them to your advantage. All examples used are on the assumption that the game is played on hard. I like a challenge and as such have never played it on any other setting. So in which case some of my techniques might be a tad overkill for the Normal or Easy settings. Also, if you're the sort of player who completes every single level by manually going around and killing all the bosses yourself you may find this FAQ interesting reading as there are other fun ways you can play the game and get your armies more involved. If you're reading this to find all the special weapons or cheats etc then you're looking in the wrong place. There are many other FAQs dedicated to those. This is for people who are really into the game and wish to know more, and ways in how to enjoy the game just that little bit extra. There are also some tips at the end of the FAQ which really help me to always win. Suffice to say I've played these games a lot, in excess probably of 1000 hours, I have a pretty good idea how everything works. I shall start off simple but get progressively more complex in my descriptions. To get the most out of this FAQ I recommend you to start from the top and read through from start to finish. This is because I introduce concepts at various points that are later expanded upon later in the guide, of course you're free to do as you please but you may understand better if go through the FAQ in the order I have written it. Remember that in my guide I have made up some terminology to describe some factors or features that the game involves, these words are exclusive to this FAQ. I know what I'm talking about but I needed to make up some words that you would find easier to understand, for you to take on board. So basically, a lot of slang words are used, so I can make more sense quickly when describing things in detail without having to constantly explain the same thing over and over again. Also, in this guide bosses and generals are the same things. I will often say enemy general and then say boss halfway through a sentence, I apologise for this but they are the same thing in reality. I just can't help saying one or the other at seemingly random intervals. Sorry. Don't worry if you don't understand everything in this guide. You may not, but I hope some people find this guide helpful. For most, it'll be an amusing and interesting read after playing the game. And I apologise in advance if I haven't made myself clear. I also haven't proof read this FAQ so I am sorry for any spelling errors or grammatical faults. Yes, even by V2.0 I still haven't checked this guide for any errors. Ah well. Enjoy! ============================================================= 2.0 A.I. A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) plays a big part in this game. There is a lot of it going on and without it, there wouldn't be much game. I will be explaining each type. In general, enemies move around in sets of five. Four of which follow a leader, usually a rank above the rest. For generals this tends to differ but generally armies move around in small clusters of people. _____________________________________________________________ 2.1 ALLIES The allies are your friends, they help you in this war. You cannot hit your allies and nor can they hit you. They will move around the map according to which enemy generals are alive and whether certain events have happened. They will also hang around with which general they are assigned to. See '2.5 BATTLE ORDER' for more details. In many cases helping your allies, especially the generals will be the key to completing almost every mission. Without any allies to your aid, it will be very difficult to defeat everyone by yourself. Unless you're really powered up. _____________________________________________________________ 2.2 ENEMIES Enemies are programmed similar to Allies except you will rarely see them stood around waiting for battle because once approached they will engage you in combat. Except on Dynasty Warriors 4 where you need to get fairly close. Regular enemies will generally engage with the first person they meet or by the last person who hit them. Enemy generals have a special bias towards you, each time they finish a combo a check is made to see whether you are in close range. If this is true they will give chase and come after you. Keep an eye out on them on the mini map. This is less true on Dynasty Warriors 2 where generals can sometimes be fighting right next to you fighting someone else. _____________________________________________________________ 2.3 BODYGUARDS As everyone should know bodyguards fight alongside you. If there are no enemies on screen they will just stand idle. When enemies are on screen they will attack or defend depending on the orders you give them. Personally I think defend is pointless. What good are they if all they do is just stand there not attacking? The answer is simple, they're worthless. Better in my opinion to fight back and have no one to defend against. The bodyguards will fight within a certain range, if you move too far away from them then they will abandon the fights they were having and then follow you. You can see this is action if you face them, defend and then walk backwards. The bodyguards of enemy generals also do this, as can often be seen when you are fighting one of them, then they'll just suddenly run off. When they do this they are not programmed to retaliate but just run straight towards their general. If you can prevent them from returning to their master then you're pretty much guaranteed a safe. Enemy bodyguards gave you food in Dynasty Warriors 2 but sadly do not in the other versions of the game. In Dynasty Warriors 4 you can press select to give your body guards orders, the most useful of which was to make them stand where they were. On any version before Dynasty Warriors 4, if bodyguards died, they didn't rank up. Except with the exception of Dynasty Warriors 2. _____________________________________________________________ 2.4 PATHFINDING All the characters in the game move through pretty simple path finding. It's largely unchanged in all the versions. Because each battle is pre-determined and all levels mapped out before hand I very much doubt there are any complex heuristic or A* path finding algorithms used in the game. That is in simple terms, processes which the PS2 will use to calculate the nearest path towards another unit whilst avoiding the scenery. Especially since they often get stuck if you follow their every move from one place to another. When enemies follow you or are moving to another location they move towards a particular location in a straight zig zagged fashion. This is rather clumsy, often stopping and starting, and even moving backwards and forwards in the same area before moving onwards. This is because if they get side-tracked into a fight they need to get back to a previous way point before they can carry on moving, even if it means going back through old ground. If you look at the direction they are moving they will almost always move in diagonals. As in NW NE SW SE. I believe this is so they don't get stuck on scenery like fences or other straight obstacles. However, when generals are not with you they move to their destinations perfectly. This is due to the off range processing, of which I will describe later. It is therefore faked off screen. For this reason generals move towards their locations quicker and more efficiently when you are not hanging alongside them. There are some levels like the battle of Chi Bi on the 3rd and Extreme where generals can get stuck. I've had Sun Jian get stuck on two boats and repeatedly move between the two for eternity, leaving myself to do the rest of the level unaided. Even when I'm moved away from him he still wouldn't budge. I've even had Xiahou Yuan stood in the ocean instead of on a boat. Definitely a bug. When running through enemy territory all enemies will execute the age old 'run directly to your position tactics'. Similar to how bullets approach your ship on shooting games. A calculation is made to find the shortest distance between you and the enemy and this is the route they will take. They will never try to cut you off or guess where you about to move so the trick is move in a slightly curved and also zig zag style fashion between enemies. This way you can avoid getting into contact with them at all when running through enemy territory. The enemies rarely crowd you on Dynasty Warriors 4 so running through enemy territory is much easier. I will explain more about why this is true later on. With archers it is recommended to jump in a zig zag fashion, even when approaching them. This way they will never be able to get a lock on you. Watching the demonstration will give you an idea of how obscure the path finding can sometimes be. You should also note how strange it is that the computers are also able to perform the pointless 'circling around' technique during the demo. You'll have seen many times enemies do this in battle but strange how it is impossible for you to perform, yet the demo makes you think it is a legal move. I hope that last bit makes sense. _____________________________________________________________ 2.5 BATTLE ORDER Each battle consists of various units set out in strategically set locations as defined in the battle layout of each level. Generally speaking the order of this each unit is set is the same and only varies depending on which side you're on. For instance at the battle of He Fei castle on the 3rd game, if you choose Wu you start on the outside ready for the attack but if you choose Wei then Wu is already in the castle. This I believe only applies to Hard, but I could be wrong. You can often get some rather odd layouts on screen when generals are programmed to chase other generals and one has moved out of position. Especially if you are playing the stage leader. The best example is that on many levels, your main leader will stay in the same position until all the army in the other team except for the leader has been killed. The battle order in which the characters move is always the same, however what makes the battles often seem different is the order in which generals die. If two armies are in battle and one dies then the next army moves on. However is there are a lot of troops left in a particular army on the way to its location, the troops will queue up and wait their turn when they are needed. This is most apparent when you have killed everyone except the leading general of the level. A set number of allies will attack and any that die will be replaced. I swear sometimes generals on your team get stuck when they should be advancing forward. Thus leaving you to finish the level all by yourself. Very annoying. If no generals die then no armies with move anywhere, unless due to a cut scene that triggers an event. The generals follow a pre-determined route, regardless of what happens, they do not move to the nearest army. Only a set route. Unless they are programmed to do so, which is often rather stupid as there are many times when you could be losing and reinforcements appear in the enemy camp and are already on lower morale and thus die very quickly, it's a pity they don't retreat. This is confirmed when you are the leader of level, if you let all your armies die but move yourself out of your starting position, the enemies will move to where you started and just wait and not attempt to find you. However they will give chase if there is nowhere left for them to go once they arrive. Sub generals are a little more complex. They do seem to move towards the nearest enemy. They often split up from the main general and be miles away at the other end of the map. This is most obvious on the Yellow Turban Rebellion and the Hu Lao Gate. Cao Cao and Liu Bei are usually still at the top of the map whilst their sub generals Xiahou Dun, Cao Ren, Guan Yu and Zhang Fei are miles ahead, Xiahou Dun is often the first general to reach Dong Zhuo which to me is surprising since the route he takes is the longest in the level. I am of course taking about the 3rd and Extreme games. There are far less directions to take on the Hu Lao gate of Dynasty Warriors 4. It is often difficult to see where sub generals are on the map because they have no symbols. Finding enemy sub generals is basically just a case of looking anywhere nearby. Unless of course you happen to know which path this general should take, otherwise the only clue is to look for places where there are few blue or red dots on the map. This is not so on Dynasty Warriors 4 as you can check this on the map when you pause the game. On the Hu Lao gate Lu Bu moves around a lot and at times seems like he has no movement order at all. Therefore it is recommended to keep away from him if you're a weak character. Because he will give chase for a lot longer than any other general and he may even come looking for you. I would class Lu Bu as a special character as even morale affects him differently too. _____________________________________________________________ 2.6 ATTACK ZONE Similar to bodyguards, generals will fight in a specified zone. However, for generals this area is much larger. And you won't notice that until they give chase when you are running away. They will only chase for a certain distance before eventually turning back and heading back towards the centre of their zone. With the possible exception of Lu Bu of course, which I mentioned earlier. The most ridiculous factor of the attack zone is that they only follow you when you get within a certain distance. A distance that is shorter than the possible firing zone. Put simply, you can arrow them from long range without them coming towards you to retaliate, an AI problem from the 2nd and 3rd games which appears to have been fixed on the 4th. Also a general that is knocked off a horse will constantly keep trying to run towards where his horse stands and just ignore the fact that you are firing at him. Making the AI look even more stupid. Again, this appears to have been fixed in Dynasty Warriors 4. With enough arrows it is possible to kill entire generals in this way but in my opinion, this a good way to exploit the AI to your gain. It may seem like cheating, but it's not actually a guaranteed technique. For instance, if the general is already in battle with another army then the general will be moving around as normal instead of being a sitting target. And at other times there can be other archers shooting back at you preventing you from sniping successfully. The bodyguard technique can also be applied to generals. The technique as in repeatedly hitting them when out of their legal fighting zone. Get a general to give chase, walk backwards whilst guarding and watch them follow you. When he/she starts to run back you know you've found where their attack zone ends. Quickly move back into the zone and when they give chase again unleash a stun arrow. Now that they're dazed run behind them and combo them out of their zone. Now every time they get up their first priority will be to return to their zone without even attempting to fight back. You will now be able to fight them without fighting back or even using their Musuo when almost dead. It will be only the bodyguards now that will be of any trouble now. Gate Captains also have an attack zone. And they too can be arrowed to death from a distance using the arrow technique. The attack zone of generals on Dynasty Warriors 4 is very large and for the main troops it is much smaller. So you rarely get crowded as you do on the previous versions. One boundary I do find a tad unfair is that of the gates. It seems everyone in the entire universe can go there but you. Horses, elephants, troops. Even your body guards! Put your hand up if you've ever knocked a defence up outside of the gate captains area? And how annoying it is too, you can see it, but you can't touch it. _____________________________________________________________ 2.7 STATIONARY Any armies that are queuing up for battle or are standing idle will not be moved. It is possible to nudge people by walking into them but they will move back towards to their standing point if nudged too far. And of course this only happens when you are stood next to allies. _____________________________________________________________ 2.8 COMBAT LOGIC Surprisingly, combat logic is very simple, and is only slightly varied between each version. For regular enemies they will circle round (a strange yet unexecutable technique) the enemy that they've targeted and occasionally attack. Often though they will not attack for ages and it looks more like they're dancing than fighting. Regular enemies will only ever attack you if you hit them, that is turn their attention towards you if they're already fighting someone else. If you're fighting alone then every enemy that comes onscreen will instantly target you. Not good when archers come onto the scene. If this happens and allies arrive on the scene run away and then when all enemies have disappeared run back. Now all the archers will have set themselves to the allies that just arrived. Allowing you to take out all the archers whilst they're not looking, except on Dynasty Warriors 4 where they actually turn to face you, otherwise you can pick them off one by one. It's best to stand with your army when there are archers about so there is less chance of being hit by an arrow. Enemy generals will chase after you and then when in range will attack. The attack they perform will be random. But as long as you just stand there guarding and watch. You can instantly counter attack with an attack of your own once they have finished. This simple defend and then attack back will work against everyone. Whilst they're falling run behind them if you can, then attack as soon as they get up and they will be unable to defend. When a general knocks you down they will either charge up and use a power up or give chase. For this reason try not to let you knock them down. Or if they do, repeatedly press the L1 Button, attack button and direction they are in so you can quickly leap up and knock them off their feet before they life up. On Dynasty Warriors 2 you should aim to never knock down a general as they never use their powerups unless you do, and they don't charge, they instantly use an item, no way of stopping them. Not possible however when you are fighting with your own army, as they will often knock the bos to the floor. And never use your Musuo on a general on Dynasty Warriors 2 either, especially when you are on low health, unless you're juggling them. Because it's impossible to get into a Musuo deadlock, meaning that if they choose to do their Musuo into yours, you will take all the hits. The circling around technique is a weak point for all enemies. That move where they stand move clockwise around you, the move you cannot do yourself. Whilst they are doing this they are guaranteed to be not blocking, unless you are playing Dynasty Warriors 2 that is, in which they are likely to be already blocking. When generals knock you down and give chase they always do this, when they catch up and find you on the floor, on Dynasty Warriors 4 they often do this when someone else has started hitting you. Simply wait on the floor until they catch up and then when they start circling around you hammer attack and you'll get up quickly and hit them. This technique is a guaranteed free hit every time. This is especially useful on the Dynasty Warriors 4 duels. Another point is that generals for some unknown reason never use their jumping attack unless you're playing Dynasty Warriors 4. Neither do bodyguards that have bow or crossbow as their weapon, as they of course don't have one. ============================================================= 3.0 BATTLE CPU PROCESSING This section explains exactly how the battles are processed. It is more complex and less obvious than the AI, I will try and be as clear as possible but you might not understand everything. Not to worry, as long as you find something in this FAQ informative or useful. There are also some slight difference in Dynasty Warriors 4, but I will explain those. _____________________________________________________________ 3.1 REGIONS Not be confused with the zones each enemy has to fight within before they must go back to their local area. But each player (as in player 1 and 2) that has a region, a circular region that you can see this region by hitting R2 and changing the large map to mini map. I will be referring to this often later on in and out of range. As of course, any enemy that isn't shown on your map, is out of range of your map. _____________________________________________________________ 3.1.1 STATES The in range region is what you can see on the mini map. To recap:- The green arrow is you, blue dots are troop allies, red dots are enemy allies, light blue dots are army general allies, the other player and the other players bodyguards. And finally red dots are enemy generals. The other colours define the landscape but this is not important to us. There are a set number of people that can be processed on the mini map in range. I'd estimate about 80ish max. With about 40 to 50 in range for fighting, except on Dynasty Warriors 4 where enemies don't bunch together as much. The in range region is also split into two areas. What you can see and what you can't see. Basically Or as I will be referring to these as :- On and Off screen. On screen is obvious, anything you can see fighting. Off screen is basically any units that are not on screen but this also means any units that are not in range either, as in any units that are not shown in the mini map window. Each level starts with thousands of people, because you'll only be seeing a select few at a time I'd guess that 99.9% of the level is off screen. Remember the difference between the off screen, on screen and in range as I will be referring to these a lot more from now on. So to recap, there are 4 states any unit can be in. Off screen, on screen, in range and out of range. For example:- - A person that is outside your mini map is out of range. - A person that is inside your mini map is in range. - A person that is in range that you can also see on your main window is on screen. - A person that is in range that you can't see on your main window is on screen. This can be either someone that is behind or to the side of the you. Or someone that cannot be drawn to the screen even though they are close enough for you to see them. (See the next section) _____________________________________________________________ 3.2 Z ORDER This is where I start getting more technical. I hope the previous section makes sense to you. Ok, everyone should know from Maths that X defines left and right and Y is up and down. The Z Axis is depth, you couldn't define the Z axis on a piece of paper but you can explain it with your hands. Imagine this scenario:- Think of being in a queue at the bus stop and you're at the very back. You can count 20 people in front of you and the 20th person is about to board the bus. Now lets imagine that each person is one metre away in length. If where you are stood is 0 metres in the Z direction then the 20th person is 20 metres away in the Z direction. Also image that this static image we have in our head is flat. So that Y direction is up and down and the X direction is left and right. Still follow me? Anyway, in Dynasty Warriors a special Z ordering technique is used as it is simply impossible to draw all the enemies on screen at once, but it is does in a way that you're meant to not notice. (as much) Not lets go back to our bus scenario and imagine it as a game. A very boring game "Bus Queue Simulator" on the PS2. It just happens to have a map just like the one on Dynasty Warriors, so you can see all 10 people on the mini map. But this bus simulator game only has the processor power to display 10 people on screen. (including yourself) So the game has to think how to get around this, the game programmers could choose any technique for choosing which 10 people to draw. So if we adopt the Dynasty Warriors technique we'd draw the 10 nearest people, this is what Dynasty Warriors will do, standing from nearest person and gradually moving outwards. So the 10 people nearest the bus are not seen. This would be very crude of course because we can clearly see on the map that there are 20 people in front, not 10. Still following me? Now lets imagine you move 10 places up the queue. Lets say you happen to get there first before those 10 people even arrived at the bus stop. Now our 10 person problem doesn't seem as bad, or even exist at all, we can see all 10 people in front us. The 10 behind need not to be drawn, and if you were to turn round, the other 10 would be drawn and the other 10 would not. Get the idea, you can only ever see 10 people at once. This would be ideal only in this example. We could however cheat and pretend this make believe game could only ever have a maximum of 10 people at once, then we could stand anywhere and always see 10 people. But this is also bad. For example imagine if Dynasty Warriors had a maximum of 10? It'd be a pretty sparse war now wouldn't it? This is as simple as I can possibly put it and of course only happens with the people, this is not the same way the scenery for example is drawn. And there are also other factors to take into consideration, whether or not the characters all look the same for example. And I was only explaining people in a straight line and not in 360 degrees of movement. I won't bore you with the multiple other reasons, just make sure you understand this Z ordering issue, as it plays a very important role in Dynasty Warriors. The main thing is, there is meant to be so much going on at once you aren't meant to notice this drawing flaw. So to summarise, not everything can be drawn to the screen at once because the game would slow down far too much. The game can't cope with everything at once is there is far too much going on. Therefore many things are faked or simulated. "Why tell me all that?" I hear you cry. Well, tactical wise it plays an important role in how the game is played, especially during 2 player mode. And that's not all to the Z ordering in this game. Read on and all will be explained. Also remember the 4 states of player mentioned in the earlier section. _____________________________________________________________ 3.2.1 1 PLAYER MODE Ok. So I'm hoping you understand why this Z order is used, it determines depth of the people in view and who is to be drawn on screen. This is only a guess but I'd say that Dynasty Warriors is able to render about 30 enemies on screen at once before it runs out of time. It even says so on the back of the box on Dynasty Warriors 2 I believe. You've probably noticed that when there are few enemies on screen you can see many from a distance but when many are close you can't appear to see those people you saw stood in the background anymore. This is because when more than 30 are on screen at once only the 30 characters that are closest to the screen will be drawn. Dynasty Warriors runs at a cool and smooth 60 frames per second. So you see 60 pictures a second, giving the game that smooth animated feeling. Or 50 depending on your region in the world. That's what 60 frames per second means incase you didn't know. The PS2 has some seriously good hardware. If you imagine that the last scrolling beat-em-up I can remember of this type "Zombie Revenge" made a few years was able to draw about 5 to 7 zombies on screen at once. Dynasty Warriors has 30, and has better graphics. You have to be really impressed with how this game copes with so many. But it's also about detail too, this is why you can only have 30 people on screen, but can have thousands of small sprites say in an explosion, because the sprites are not complicated and small, but the people are. There have been sacrifices made though, just take a look at the general scenery, it's pretty simple. But the game is all about fighting, not sight seeing. It's much nicer in general however in Dynasty Warriors 4. Anyway, it remains a fact. Using Z ordering all the characters on screen are assessed. The nearest 30 are chosen and then drawn from the character that is the furthest away from the screen up till the closest character. One thing that happens that you probably don't notice is that units only battle in about 30. If you're fighting alone you will fight about 30. But say 10 allies appear. Only 20 enemies will attack. This is to ensure disappearing enemies are less common. There are times however when all 30 are so close together that you can only see a doughnut of enemies circling you. Or in other extreme circumstances where there are so many bosses attacking you and they bring all their bodyguards with them. Usually 8 or so each. This number seems to vary, it can sometimes be 40 or 50. I think it depends on the level and game in question. You remember earlier, I explained there were two types of in range processing? Enemies on your mini map you could see and others on your mini map that you couldn't? Well, just as you can only see 30 at a time. You can only hit that 30. Collision detection (the ability to hit your foe) is only true against enemies that you can see. You can't collide (hit) anything you can't see. Not a problem really until you use characters that have a fireball attack. Or characters like Sima Yi and Zhuge Liang that have multiple projectile in many different attacks. If you are attacking into the screen, you will only hit what you see. So any projectiles flying into the screen will only hit the people standing near the screen. So a Musuo with the Sima Yi and Zhuge Liang into the screen is useless. Make sure you face your enemies first and that they are in front of you and not behind the screen. And don't Musuo next to a cliff or other object. Otherwise the 360 spin when doing your flaming Musuo will not fully turn and you'll find yourself not facing where you started. Unless the other play can seen the projectiles on their screen any projectiles fired into your own screen will go no further than that. Other objects like food, powerups, items, horses and elephants also use a similar Z order, but as such these are always drawn and not selectively rendered and disappeared like the soldiers are. The simple way to limit too many horses and elephants coming on screen is to just not let a general on the screen to happens to have a horse have one when they arrive in range, it's that simple. Although it seems to be slightly different with horses in certain occasions. See section 3.5.4 for more about the horse phenominen. On Dynasty Warriors 2 the food and powerups were actually included in the same Z order loop along with the soldiers. This was incredibly annoying as you could only see food that was near you, and not at any distance. This meant that if you were really packed together tight, you wouldn't see any food glowing in the distance. Luckily this was fixed after Dynasty Warriors 2, the programmers at Koei probably didn't realise anyone would notice subtle changes like that. This I believe is why they also made the powerups glow and let off steam, just so you can see where they are more easily. They didn't glow on Dynasty Warriors 2 much, if at all. And finding that attack up in a huge crowd of enemies was a difficult task in itself. _____________________________________________________________ 3.2.2 2 PLAYER MODE The two player mode although revolutionary in my opinion, sadly has many faults with it. Despite them though, I'm very thankful this mode was implemented at all. One of the games best features in my opinion. You soon live with it. Firstly I will explain the 2 player mode on Dynasty Warriors 3, Extreme Legends and Dynasty Warriors 4 are slightly different. In the case of Dynasty Warriors 4 you can almost ignore some of the problems I am about to explain. Extreme Legends is almost the same as Dynasty Warriors 3 but with a few tweaks to improve things, not a gaming engine rewrite. I will now explain the problems of the 2 player mode and why they happen and how to get around them the best way you can. You remember before I mentioned that in 1 player mode there are roughly 30 characters rendered to the screen and you'll only ever be battling around 30 at once in range? Well in 2 player mode it is different. The rendering system is split between the two screens but the battle processing stays the same. So basically, each player has 15-20 people rendered on screen at once but still battling 30 people in range. Sometimes less people depending on the level in question. The graphics rendering is split in half. I'm sure they've made some speed critical hacks in their somewhere. Such as rendering a few more people on one screen one when one player has no one on their screen at all. "Why not put a limit of 15 people in range and 15 on screen then?" you may ask. Well if they'd have done that the flow of the game would be very different from the one player mode. You'd basically be having half a fight and the game would be much easier. Bus as you'll probably see, how can 30 units be in range but only display 15? This is of course where the problems start. I explain a bigger problem with this later in this FAQ. Hopefully you've understood the Z order system I've explained so far. I'd actually simplified it for the one player mode to make it more understandable for you to read by omitting a lot of technical information. I'm now about to add some more factors into the equation, what I'm about to explain applies to one player mode as well, but it's unlikely you'll notice the difference though. Which is why I'm not mentioned it till now and as not to overload you with too much information at once in one section. To cope with this split the Z order uses a selective mode of display based on character type. When there are more than 15 people on screen (30 for one player) not only are the people calculated in order of distance from screen but also in type. The order of priority is below. 1. Other player (2 player only) 2. Enemy troops 3. Enemy generals 4. Gate Captains 5. Allied troops 6. Own Bodyguards 7. Other players bodyguards 8. Allied generals 9. Allied Gate Captain Lets imagine a snapshot in time. As if the game were paused. How would an example scenario look on the screen of player 1? In this example scenario I will tell you how it's done. Remember this is a purely emulated hardware rendering guess. I haven't reverse engineered the program. Here are the units being processed in range that will need to be displayed on screen in our example:- Guan Yu (Player 1) Zhang Fei (Player 2) Cao Cao Cao Ren Cao Hong 14 enemy troops 7 allied troops Pang Tong 4 bodyguards belonging to Guan Yu (Player 1) Total 30 people to render. In a one player game (excluding Player 2) there would be 29. No player 2 and since there are a max of 30 people to show all sprites would be drawn to the screen. Simple. But in a two player game, here is roughly what would happen. Lets say 20 will be shown on screen. Firstly the rendering system looks down the list. (Shown above) Starts from the top of the priority list. Player 2 is present. Player 2 is added to the list to be rendered. 18 left. You might probable think that 19 should be left. But Player 1 is always rendered to the screen, so Player 1 takes a slot too. Secondly enemy troops are rendered. It is the second type in the list. There are 14 in total and as there are 18 available rendering slots left all 14 are added and ordered against Zhang Fei who is already in the list. Zhang Fei is in the middle of the enemy troops so he is ordered accordingly to fit in the centre. There are now 4 possible units left to render. Next is enemy generals. There are 3 and so all 3 are added to the list and ordered accordingly. Next is Gate Captains, none in sight. So we skip gate Captains. Next is allied troops. There are 7, but too many to add to the list, so the nearest one to the screen is chosen. Then we have to stop, there can be no more rendered. For player1 the rendering order for this frame looks like this:- (Remembering that 20 if furthest away) 1 Enemy troop 2 Enemy troop 3 Enemy troop 4 Zhang Fei 5 Enemy troop 6 Enemy troop 7 Enemy troop 8 Cao Ren 9 Enemy troop 10 Enemy troop 11 Enemy troop 12 Enemy troop 13 Allied Troop 14 Cao Hong 15 Enemy troop 16 Cao Cao 17 Enemy troop 18 Guan Yu 19 Enemy troop 20 Enemy troop Then Player 2's is done, I won't list Player 2 though as for the example in question it's not needed. This makes a total of 40. Both are drawn to the screen, we can then view it. Since this example is imaginary we'll have to imagine what it would be look. So a description of what the screen would look like for Player 1:- Guan Yu is fighting Cao Cao surrounded by some enemy troops. Two are behind Guan Yu but the rest in front. In the distance there is Zhang Fei fighting with Cao Ren with multiple enemy troops surrounding him. Only one allied troop can be seen between these two battles. However what you don't see is the problem, Pang Tong fighting alongside Zhang Fei is missing, he's just behind Zhange Fei and along with the remaining allied troops. Nor can Guan Yu see his own 4 bodyguards fighting alongside him. Even though they're right next to him at the front of the screen. But because they're at such a low rendering priority they're not visible. I haven't explained the order of Zhang Fei (player 2) but he is not facing Cao Cao (player 2) and can see Pang Tong because he isn't facing Cao Cao and his generals. Therefore Pang Tong is drawn in favour of enemy generals because no generals are on screen taking up the rendering slots, but player 1 cannot Pang Tong but can see Zhang Fei. What a complex mouthful. So as you can see from this one frame example how misleading some battles may be. If there was 30 enemy soldiers on screen at time, you'd never see any allies. Most of the time in heavy battle situations all you'll see are enmy soldiers and no bosses, it'll be difficult to fight them even though they are right next to you. Even if you are stood with lots of your allied troops, you'll rarely see them as all the enemies have drawing to the screen priority. Because of this order there are times when things don't seem to make sense. For instance there can be times when you can see the other player fighting what appears to be by themselves in the distance because there are enemies that are being drawn nearer to the screen on your window. During a 2 player game the mini map is your best friend. It reveals *ALL* units in whereas the main window shows only most of it. Watch it wisely. And also because this sequence happens 60 times a second during furious bouts of combat with many units people will be constantly disappearing all the time. However, it gets worse gameplay wise. Not only do they disappear, they're also impossible to hit. Not a problem most of the time but if you're happily hitting away at an army general and a large group of enemies appear from behind. The general will disappear and any consecutive hits will not hit. This means that during busy battles, it is very difficult to aim for the enemy generals as they keep vanishing, there is more emphasis on fighting regular enemies first during a 2 player game. The worst thing though in my opinion is running past units to get to archers. You start hitting the archers and as soon as the trailing army catches up, the archers disappear. Very annoying, however it can also work in your favour too, in the middle of being hit by a general they can often vanish leaving you to recover and fight back. Also when you're surrounding constantly, enemies will only be drawn at the front of the screen, meaning that you only need to be aware of enemies from one direction. Basically meaning that you can't be surrounded, so you can just keep swinging into the screen. To be fair, Koei have tried to make this problem as fair as possible, for instance, it's a blessing that enemies are drawn first over allies. Imagine if you were always with 20 allies and enemies never got drawn? That would be stupid, so Koei have done a lot of testing, the 2 player mode is fraught with problems but I think that this is probably the best they could do at the time. Although I do feel that enemy generals should have been given a higher drawing priority than enemies. But Dynasty Warriors 4 was a lot better in this respect. It is really difficult to know if you're fighting alongside allied generals since they come practically bottom of the list. The only way to know whether you're still near is to look at the mini map. It should be noted that they are still fighting, you just can't see them in action. Saving Pang Tong on the Cheng Du is very difficult as you often never see him, only the mini map can you know that he is there. So that's roughly what happens on a 2 player, I say roughly because there are a few other factors affecting this rendering. I know I said before that enemy generals should be rendered before normal enemies but the reason they're not is because enemy troops are faster to render because they have fewer moves, details and polygons. So it's likely you could render two normal troops over 1 general. Meaning that rendering for each screen could be as low as 10. Even generic type generals are rendered in favour of character generals because they have fewer moves are graphics. Don't worry too much about the in-depth complexities. You can pretty much ignore all of this if you're playing Dynasty Warriors 4 on a 2 player mode. But of course I didn't program the game so I can only speculate on to exactly what happens in the rendering department But I believe 99% of this to be to be true because I've played the game a hell of a lot and studied how everything works. I just hope noone thinks I'm trying to reverse engineer the game. :) The rendering order explained earlier is tweaked slightly on Extreme Legends to make a much fairer game. However it's still impossible to try and find archers in large groups of people as the people behind you chasing you make them disappear. But bosses disappear less often, as do gate captains. There's nothing more annoying than trying to kill a gate captain but he keeps disappearing but as soon as you kill more enemies more appear. Making it become a 'gate captain in a respawn needle haystack' hunt. There was nothing more annoying that getting a 7 hit combo on a dead gate captain and then him suddenly disappearing so you only got a +1 defence out of it. But luckily in Extreme Legends anyone you are hitting does not disappear until they have fallen to the floor. And Gate captains don't disappear half as often. Dynasty Warriors 4 uses an intelligent selective process on which units to render. This is where similar clusters of enemies are rendered in fewer numbers, meaning that a few people disappear everywhere, but not entire groups. On the whole this makes 2 player game just like playing the 1 player mode and is a much fairer system. You can often have 4 or 5 bosses rendered at the same time on both screens! Brilliant. Although this new system isn't without its drawbacks. Double Musuo is appalling bad on Dynasty Warriors 4 anyway, not only does it look so bad but because many people right next to you will vanish, you'll barely hit more than 5 enemies at all. Whereas before you could hit up to 50 in one go. Because in the old system although it drew all the closest people, at least it was people you could always hit. As soon as you run close to a crowd to do it, most vanish. And that for me one of the best things about Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme and a very very bad thing about 4. You get better performance out of doing it by yourself. And its made even worse by the fact enemies don't charge you in large numbers. You'll often see lots of enemies standing around right near you. This is definitely been added to improve the general visual aspect of the game and stop people disappearing more often. But unfortunately doing so in my opinion really make the game less difficult and less exciting from a gameplay point of view. _____________________________________________________________ 3.3 MORALE Morale plays the most important part in the game. Morale is everything, and having a lot of it greatly determines the battle outcome. These are 5 things that affect morale. - Events triggered that harm you or the enemy. These are different on each level. The fire attack on Chi Bi is a good example. These can either affect your army, both armies, or just one army. - Killing enemy generals (Not with Dynasty Warriors 4) - Killing enemy troops. - Getting kills in multiples of 50 (Not Dynasty Warriors 3 or Extreme Legends) - Getting 1000 kills (Not on Dynasty Warriors 3 or Extreme Legends on the very hard setting) Morale is most important for out of range processing. See section 3.5 _____________________________________________________________ 3.3.1 EVENTS Except for Dynasty Warriors 4, killing a general gives your army an extra star of morale, and sometimes sub generals do the same. This isn't the same on Dynasty Warriors 4, so it's not possible any longer to go around the map taking out the bosses only to get to 8 stars quickly. Dynasty Warriors 4 is also the first version to actually tell you when your own morale is going down. There is also an event on every single level, whereas in the other versions, often there were none at all, or at least non that would greatly affect morale. It's recommend that you try to get all the events to happen that work in your favour and prevent the ones you don't. It will help you out later on in the battle, and on some of them and also certain Dynasty Warriors, you will gain a special item. _____________________________________________________________ 3.3.2 KILLING ENEMY GENERALS Probably the most obvious of all. As this doesn't work on Dynasty Warriors 4 you have to think a bit more strategically. This I believe to be a good move for the game. This also happens when a general is killed by someone else, that army then goes up by 1 star. Of course if you lose a general you lose 1 star if it was a sub general, it'll be zero stars of course if it's the main leader you killed. There maybe other times when other generals may get some more morale too when you kill a general. Generally if that army happened to be fighting against the same enemy as you. It's slightly more biased though when your own bosses are killed. The enemy frequently get more morale. On some levels you can lose all your generals very quickly due to one general dying and everyone in your army losing morale and the enemies gaining it. _____________________________________________________________ 3.3.3 KILLING ENEMY TROOPS *** IMPORTANT *** This for me is the most important factor in the game. I've added an 'IMPORTANT' sign to it as I feel this can be a very neglected part of the game but also very rewarding if you get to know what's meant to be going on Which also goes along with the next two sections after this section. Depending on the difficulty setting the morale of each army is different. The harder the setting the more the enemy starts with and the less you have. If you play the game on Very Easy on Extreme Legends the game plays itself as you will always start with more morale. You can win without even moving, except for the last general. Ever wondered why your army slowly begins to lose morale? It's because they are losing enemy troops, this is the key point to the morale. If you spend your time fighting an army, the enemy will lose morale as well, if you manage to kill enough troops they will be on low morale and your own army will be able to kill them. They generally lose a star for every 20-50 kills. It depends on what morale they are on to how quick they go down. But that's mainly because your troops are helping to rack up the kills. As soon as you start, your armies are almost always on lower morale. When armies of different morals fight each other, the army with the highest morale wins. It's that simple. Armies that have the same morale will battle it out indefinitely. Of course the chances of that are slim due to their being other factors which influence the battle. For example one army might be against two armies at once. The size of an army matters, also the lower the morale, the faster you will die. And the higher it is, the more aggressive the army is. If anything, the best army is an army on a fairly high morale and no army at all. Just generals and sub generals. This way there is no army they can lose and thus not really much of a way to lose morale. In Dynasty Warriors 4 two armies with the same morale rarely fight for too long as armies now have strategies attached to them. Which basically means that when two armies are of similar morale the tactics that they have determine the outcome of their battle. Personally I've not noticed this to make much or any difference at all. Fighting armies and not just bosses is crucial to maintaining your army. Although diving in there and killing the bosses is always the fastest way to succeed, it's not always possible. This is especially true when your character is too weak to just dive straight into the enemy as they would die fast. But by helping your army defeat the regular soldiers you can lower the morale and possibly increase your own, and then fight the boss with assistance. Don't just stand with the boss on your team or dive straight into the enemy either, hang around with the regular troops as well. This is for me another thing I don't like about the duels about Dynasty Warriors 4 because they makes the killing the troops even more of a secondary task since it takes away all the fun of actually needing to destroy an army since they're all removed from the battle field. Or what actually happens if that you and the other general get removed from the battle field. It's pick off the few troops engulfed in your entire army. Even these few can take out all your troops if they're on high morale and you are not. This is mainly to the harshness of the off range processing. And when they die the morale of that army will be even lower and then even worse. There's no point in saving an army who exists on 0 to 1 stars as they'll be in trouble again when they move to the next army. This will be covered more indepth later in section 3.5 _____________________________________________________________ 3.3.4 KILLS IN MULTIPLES OF 50 In Dynasty Warriors 2 and 4 it is possible to gain extra morale by getting kills in multiples of 50. 50/100/150 etc Whenever someone congratulates you it's possible to gain more morale. This affects all your armies, so it's well worth getting a high score. And of course it also lowers the morale of the enemy, the army in which you are fighting. It appears to be completely random whether you get the extra morale or not, this also applies to other bosses in your team and also for the enemy. So helping your allies to get high kill counts is a good way of getting even more morale. _____________________________________________________________ 3.3.5 1000 KILLS It's simply the lucky number. Not only do you become the legend of the Three Kingdoms but everyone in your army goes onto maximum morale, PERMANENTELY! It's not easy to do, especially on a 2 player and on more difficult levels. But I believe you can do it on every level except ones that have limited time. My personal best is in Dynasty Warriors 3 with Xiao Qiao stood next to one of Lu Bu's gates where I achieved a score of over 7000 kills. I probably could have got to 10,000 had I gone to that respawn point at the start. So it's certainly not impossible to get 1000 if you've never done it. The trick is to find a big army and kill as many troops as you can whilst moving towards the gate, that way troops come out constantly. And I mean constantly. Once you get to 1000 your army is practically unstoppable. _____________________________________________________________ 3.4 ON AND OFF RANGE PROCESSING Off range processing is a very important issue, as it accounts for 99% of the map and battle. So it's important you understand what is happening outside your little world. This is where morale comes into play. This section is long and very important, first I'll describe the impacts with off range processing with morale, the simple stuff first. Then I'll explain the problems with the transition between off range and on range and other off range problems. On range is far simpler, it's anything you can see on screen and on your mini map, the fact that you can see this on screen is a nice confirmation and reassurance on how it all works. On range is a concept easy to accept. However, haven't you ever wondered why you'll be fighting alongside a boss on your team who is in trouble, who'll have full health and then suddenly die for no apparent reason? Also, I guarantee that if you stay with your boss leader for the entire duration of the level, he will not die. Almost any boss can be hit many times, they have tons of health, and even when they are about do die, they have tons of health potions and defence/attack up to help them. So you could argue why on earth when they are left on their own do they sometimes die so quickly. Ok, to explain why these and other mysteries happen I'm going to unfortunately spoil the illusion of the game a little bit. When enemies are off range (not on your small map) they are processed very differently to how they are fighting off screen. Remember before I mentioned about on and off the range of your mini map? If not, remind yourself in section 3.1.1. It's all because they fight differently on screen as to when you cannot see them on your map. Enemies that are on your map are moving around fighting each other, just like you are, just like the enemies that you can see are. So basically the only real battle is people you can see on your screen. Morale barely affects anything that is in range of your map. With possibly the exception that the higher morale you have you great chance your army will have of fighting instead of doing that pointless side step move. But it's still not that different, an army of 0 stars and an army of 8 stars fighting on your screen, you won't tell any difference. Which is why when you go to help an army in danger. You may often feel that when you arrive the army isn't in trouble at all. Or at least not THAT much. Remember when I mentioned about in range processing and how many people can be displayed at once on screen? Where I mentioned that many people can be stood next to you but only a certain number be displayed through the Z ordering? Well this also affects how they fight too. Lets imagine we have 40 people in front of you and say only 20 can be seen. All 40 will still move around as if they were about to battle with you, but only the 20 that CAN BE SEEN will be trying to attack you. The rest will not. These invisible people can be annoying for one very good reason, you can't attack them either. And one of them could be something important you want to kill first like a boss, gate captain or an archer. These people are in range but off screen. Which is a problem as they are only invisible like this when you are looking at them on your screen. Now lets imagine an even worse scenario. The 20 people you can see are stood right next to you in a doughnut shape. They're close enough to you so that no matter which way you face all 20 are shown. Now lets imagine the other 20 are archers, there are 5 in every direction. Positioned North, East, South and West. You cannot see any of them as they are too far away, the doughnut people are all you can see, however you can see all the archers on the mini map, they're all in range. This is where the gameplay mechanics are seriously unfair. Whichever direction you face you will have 15 archers off screen, behind, and to your left and right. So any archers not trying to be displayed in your field of vision (15 of them) can FIRE AT YOU. But of course as soon as you turn to see where they are, you can't see them and then they stop firing and the others you chose not to face start to fire. Then when you go to attack and break away from the doughnut army they appear. You start laying into one of them and then vanish again as soon as the doughnut army give chase and catch up the archers vanish again as they are programmed to run away when you get too close to them. Picking off archers in this manner get be very frustrating, especially when you're trying to run away and find food. This was a very big problem with the 2 player mode in Dynasty Warriors 3, but a bit less with Extreme Legends. Thankfully this is not as much of an issue with 4. But it still remains, but is more cleverly disguised as the people you do want to see the most are displayed first using the more intelligent display system. But since archers are so very weak in Dynasty Warriors 4, this doesn't even become an issue. Even on the final stage you don't need to equip the bow defence item. They've now made the archers too easy. Another reason I feel Dynasty Warriors 4 isn't hard. _____________________________________________________________ 3.4.1 MORALE I explained earlier that Morale doesn't have much to do with fights that you can see on your map. Morale is used to calculate and emulate battles that are going on that you can't see. It is not viably possible for the game to process 1000's of people per stage 60 times a second in the same way it is when you can fighting with people near to you. So it is processed off range in a far simpler process and morale is the key factor to this. Unfortunately off range processing although fairly similar just isn't the same, it works well enough for when troops are on medium ranges of morale. But in general I feel the fighting off range is sometimes too slow. People can often be fighting in the same place for 5 to 15 minutes. You've often cleared up half of the map by then. It's at its worst I feel when an army is on 8 stars or 0, extreme morale is when things go a bit out of control. You could for example do something like leave your main general with one weedy person and he be surrounded by 20 of your own army. Run off screen and then very quickly your main general be killed. Just from one guy because he happened to be on 8 stars and your army on 0. It's of course a theoretically impossibility that bosses on your own team could die this quickly, but it still happens. No matter how confident you are, you could never win against 20 people. This is where the off range processing emulation of a real fight is just too inaccurate. If you'd have stood there for about 30 seconds. Your army would have killed him very easily. Just look at Pang Tong on Cheng Du on Dynasty Warriors 3. He dies far too quickly when he's in trouble. On a 2 player mode you can often barely see him and if he happens to shoot ahead quickly without you knowing, he's dead within 5 seconds. Same when he gets trapped in Dynasty Warriors 4, and when you arrive to help, he's barely in battle with anyone. It's great however when your entire army has more morale than the enemy. Having low morale is bad enough, but a low morale with a very large army is even worse. As the opposite team will plough through a lot of people very quickly. Getting 50 and 100 kills in the process and gaining even more morale. The ideal army actually is one with no people at all, just bosses. This way there is no way of losing morale from losing troops. If you're fighting alongside an ally that has 7 or 8 stars they fight better when they are out of range. If they're on 8 stars and fighting an army on zero. They're unstoppable killing machines. They fight even better than YOU DO! They also appear to lose no health at all, they can fight for hours without losing a single bit. A good tactic is to stay with one army for as long as possible. The quicker this army advances, and the faster you can get an army on 6 or more stars, the more likely it is to survive the entire level in non stop combat. I'd say basically that any army you have on 7 or 8 stars is guaranteed never to die. Put simply, out of any two battling armies, the one with the highest morale will win, ALWAYS win. The difference in stars determines how quickly they will lose. The battle will be over quicker if the armies are 5 and 6 instead of 1 and 2 since higher morale also means higher aggression. An army of 5 against 6 will rarely win when the morale is that similar. What generally happens is that the weaker army slower gets weaker. Most levels start off with the enemy on 5 or 6 and you on 3 or 4. The difference in morale is generally proportional to the life expectancy of the army. When you're playing the Wu Zhang Plains with Shu on Dynasty Warriors 3 on Hard the morale is far too harsh. One of your armies is at deaths door as soon as you start, and when it dies in 60-120 seconds, your army loses morale and all the enemy gain it. Within 5 minutes your entire army is gone. It's like domino effect. Stopping the fire attack on hard is pointless because by the time it happens, practically your entire army is already dead. And it has the double negative in that Liu Bei doesn't run away to safety, he remains in the centre of the map, the worst possible place under the overwhelming circumstances when every single enemy army comes in for the kill. What I tend to do on most levels attack the enemy troops of the army I start near so it is the same morale as the army attacking or my army one star of morale higher. Then I go away and leave my army to win, this often takes 15-20 minutes. I may end up even coming back later and killing this general myself. But it means that army is delayed as long as possible. And therefore doesn't lose even more morale when it wins too quickly on the starting army. If you start on easy you can move your character somewhere safe and watch how the level will complete itself up until the last boss. This is because you start with more morale than the enemy. The enemies morale will start to descend as your army start killing all their troops. Just in the same way your own do when you start on hard. Morale doesn't how you yourself fight, you can take on an army of 8 stars by yourself with 0 stars and it won't make a difference. So it's up to you to take the morale down on the enemy, your army will not be able to do this until they get more morale over the enemy. Of course you can't save everyone, but you can at least give some of your armies the winning edge. Progressing too quickly can sometimes be a bad idea, especially on Dynasty Warriors 4 where doing so can trigger a cut scene too early which can almost instantly put a finishing touch on your army. If you take the time to stabilise your overall morale and not let the enemy run away with the stage you can have every general in your entire army survive the stage. This can be exceptionally easy during a 2 player mode also. This can really really help you, especially on the Nanman stage on Dynasty Warriors 4. This level is annoying as it is because your troops lose morale a lot just from general fatigue. If you're not careful you can lose all your morale in your entire army very quickly. Then the level can be almost impossible, you need to defend your main guy who is on zero stars, but you can't afford to leave to attack Meng Huo. Which basically means you're stuck for a very long time at the start of the level as enemies respawn on this level very quickly. Here's how I do the level, if you follow my tips, you'll find the level an absolute breeze. For starters for some unknown reason Meng Huo accounts for almost all of the gate captains in the level, and whenever you defeat him, he comes back and also reopens all of his gate posts that may have been closed. So it's pointless trying to close any, but I recommend you leave them all open. As they work to your advantage in the end. Ok, so the level starts, I'm presuming you're playing the game on hard. As soon as you start you have an army attacking you with two sub generals. It't best to kill them and also Meng Huo. I then go around the windy path killing everyone but missing out on Meng Huo this time. Once you get out in the open you will fight against lots of Meng Huo's troops. Kill them all along with Meng You and Jinhuan Sanjie, this will probably take off two stars. Then go back up to the top and kill Meng Huo and the reinforcements that appear at the main camp. Use an elephant and burst through all the trees in the middle if you can. Meng Huo should by now be on zero stars of morale. By now Meng Huo's troops will be getting killed quickly by your army as they are on zero stars. And because your generals are constantly getting high amounts of kills, 50/100 etc. Combine this with Meng Huo's troops that are spawned quickly and your morale will grow very quickly. You'll almost be able to let them complete the level on their own, except for that all the other armies of Meng Huo will be on 8 stars. Go and kill these other bosses and remember that Meng Huo will get 1 or 2 stars back each time he appears. But he won't for long, if your army is still fair low on morale, you still may have to go back and help them when Meng Huo gets any more than one star, just to speed them up a little. Very quickly each of your armies will be on 8 stars, despite occasionally losing a star to fatigue. Eventually the number of kills will spiral out of control. I've even had bosses reach 1000. Xu Sheng reached 1150 kills before I had completed the level, with his sub bosses Zhuge Jin and Sun Shao on around 800 each. In fact most of my bosses had at least 300. Xu Sheng almost had more than me. So if you can ever get your troops on 8 stars, you should try and keep it that way, because when they're fighting armies of 0 stars, they're even better and quicker at fighting than you are. Whenever Meng Huo got his extra 1 or 2 stars of morale, it would within about 5 seconds go back to zero. Troops were being killed that quickly. And of course normally it's rare to see any bosses get more than 50 kills. _____________________________________________________________ 3.4.2 OFF RANGE<->ON RANGE I could talk all day about morale, but I think I've covered the more important factors. Now I'll move straight onto off range processing. The main thing to note is that lots of odd things happen when objects change between in and out range. Such as bosses that ride horses, if they move out of range after falling off one, they are back on another horse when they come back in range. I can remember arrowing Lu Xun off his horse and then watching him run off, to then come back with another horse 3 more times until he eventually just came back on running. I've managed to get around 15 horses on screen on Chang Ban on Dynasty Warriors 3 where multiple bosses kept doing the same. This still happens on Dynasty Warriors 4. You'd have thought Koei would have fixed that by now. Especially considering Lu Bu can keep coming back with another Red Hare or Liu Bei with another Hex Mark. These rare famous horses that there are only supposed to be one of. Although it is useful to be able to get two Red Hare's to get to a destination quickly of course. But from a programmers point of view, I don't think it'd have been too hard for them to make a check to see if Red Hare or Hex Mark were already in range before spawning another. This also includes Guan Yu who becomes the new leader of Red Hare when Lu Bu is supposedly no more. I think he dies and Guan Yu steals it or something. It's something that must be explained in the book and not in the games. Normally when you leave a regular brown, dark brown or white horse, as soon as it goes to off range it disappears. Although I have noticed it seems to get remembered in certain circumstances, such as on the far east of Dynasty Warriors 3. The Yellow Turban Rebellion where you must defeat Zhang Bao from his rolling boulders, once you leave your horse it's always there when you come back down. But rarely in any other situation. We could safely presume, or even pretend that as soon as Red Hare is off range for both players that Lu Bu and Red Hare have become united again. Although then you could argue that since Lu Bu might have run all the way to the other end of the map and therefore never travelled to fetch Red Hare, so if you meet him again, he'd have Red Hare again. But at least if a check to see where Red Hare was first, would at least make the horse respawning a little more realistic. Just one horse per general, at least for generals that do ride horses. Because as realistic as the game can sometimes be. How many times must we travel to help a general in trouble, to always find him (or her) stuck directly in the middle of many troops, who are arranged in a perfect circle around him (or her) and are on full health. You'd have also presumed that a general in trouble would not be still on their horse, and true to form as soon as they are respawned they fall off their horse almost immediately, something that would never happen if you were actually there with a general, witnessing them in trouble. And since generals never ever remount their horses once they have fallen off, it's an ever bigger glaring fact. Especially if you stay with Liu Bei for the entire duration of a level, as soon as he falls and therefore never goes off range, he'll never ride his horse ever again. A little random layout from Koei wouldn't have gone a miss. Just imagine the time when you go and help your mate somewhere on the map, when you arrive, it's never the same layout as when you arrive to help the computer. The spawning in general is far too static and inconsistent as it stands. I mean the respawning in general and not just the spawning of generals. My favourite continuity error which appears to have been fixed on Dynasty Warriors 4 is one that always seems to happen with Liu Bei. Although it can happen to any general it more often happens with Liu Bei because he tends to move around the map a lot more. What happens is that whenever Liu Bei is changed from off range processing to on range processing, he's always respawned on Hex Mark his horse, and that includes areas where you are not meant to be able to take your horse. With the possible exception of the battle at Chi Bi where on Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme Legends at least, no horses are ever spawned. This is all explained in section 3.5.4 I can't remember off the top of my head but I'm fairly sure I've seen him charge up mountain areas with his horse. And as soon as you try to follow suit, you're not allowed. You'd perhaps think whilst Red Hare is strong in battle and fast in speed that Hex Mark has some sort of a special ability. Being able to run up mountains perhaps? But this is not true since as soon as you mount Hex Mark you cannot do the same as Liu Bei. Infact no, now that I think of it, I think as soon as Liu Bei gets a point he cannot get up, he just waits. Although I'm not 100% sure. But I know as soon as he's off range, the game just cheats and allows him to go where he likes. In fact this a general problem with all off range processing. When objects such as the scenery are spawned on range they are also checked for collisions, such as for a wall or set of spikes. Noone can walk through them as long as they are on range. But as soon as they are off range thay are ignored, it is faked to a close approximation. The best example I can think of is your bodyguards. Since on Dynasty Warriors 4 they are remembered and shown as green dots on the large map, they must be moved around like everyone else. But on the previous games they cheat. As soon as bodyguards are off range, they walk through everything except with the possible exception of water. In fact no, they might even do this as well with small lakes. I bet you've often left your bodyguards behind, walked through Zhuge Liang's maze, or jumped over the wall gates in scenarios such as the Hu Lao Gate, to then find your bodyguards running up to meet with you, often in the direction you are running towards as well. They impossibility beat you to it, reach the destination before you. This of course is not true if the other player can see them, but as soon as they are off range on both screens they cheat. Still not convinced? Well here is a test for you, find a wall on a level, a nice long wall, such as the wall to a castle. Run along it as quick as you can, try to leave your bodyguards behind but not so run so fast that they go out of range. Then as soon as you find an entrance run outside and run along side the other end of the wall. So you have something like this on your map:- WARNING:- CRAPPY DIAGRAM ALERT O O O O <-------Body guards -- --------------------- O <-------You Lets imagine we're on the Yellow Turban Rebellion Level as your bodyguards are stuck inside that big castle and you're outside. If you move back away from the wall the bodyguards will move back and forth trying to get to you. The artificial intelligence however follows a simple 'run directly to your position tactics'. I mentioned this very early into this FAQ. But now I'm going to digress into more detail. The 'run directly to your position tactics' is my crude term for the actual mathematical algorithm of finding the shortest distance to an object. The bodyguards won't think of going through the entrance you just came out of because that is a longer distance than moving directly down to where you are stood. You might just laugh and think the game has a bug in it. But this is not the case, this can be a problem with many other games. Believe me, describing the concepts of a wall or object to a computer requires a lot more processing power. More than the game probably needs. You'd probably use a path finding technique that would take into consideration objects that you cannot pass through. The whole point of games programming is to make as realistic as possible gfx and gameplay with using the cheapest tricks. So anyway, back to the game example, it's a problem with the AI of the game, but as soon as the wall is off range. It is no longer taken into consideration because the bodyguards will be off range as well. Remembering that anything off range is not checked for collision. It'll then resort to the simplified algorithm for moving around the map. You could even sidestep slowly so the entrance is far far away. No entrance for a great distance, to make the experiment even more obvious, of course making sure the body guards are still at the other side of the wall. Ok, so you're still stood there like the diagram described earlier. Now slowly step backwards, move slowly until the wall and bodyguards disappear from the top of your map. As soon as they vanish, stand perfectly still. Within a couple of seconds your bodyguards will move into range and will be running at you. If you'd have moved miles away from the entrance, you'd know that unless they had suddenly become the faster sprinter in the universe and had managed to run all the way the nearest entrance and back again, they'd have never arrived have arrived that quickly. It's a cheap trick, and because the bodyguards appear from the top of the screen and not from the left, where they should appear if they had run to the entrance, you definitely know the game has fooled you :) You're not meant to notice this of course, you're meant to be so engrossed in the game that you missed this little detail, whenever it happens. Of course on Dynasty Warriors 4 this does not happen. Well done Koei again. Actually, after a little bit of extra testing, I've discovered a few extra things, the AI isn't as stupid as I first thought, and it doesn't seem as obvious on Dynasty Warriors 3 or Extreme Legends. However, it definitely works on Dynasty Warriors 2. It's actually quite a lot harder to lose your bodyguards too, the best way to see this in action is on Dynasty Warriors 2. Choose the Yellow Turban Rebellion stage and get your bodyguards stuck behind a wall just like the diagram above, except go up on one of those platforms and jump across to the other side (by the entrance of course as it won't let you jump in the water) then quickly run across so the entrance isn't anywhere in sight. As in run the entrance so it is off range, your bodyguards will not stand still either as I first thought, they will keep trying to find you by running back and forth. Hopefully you should have a couple, if not all of your bodyguards on the other side of the wall. Face them and then gradually step backwards by holding down L1. Pretty much as soon as the wall and moat vanish, the bodyguards will suddenly appear, this definitely works on Dynasty Warriors 2, whereas on the next two sequels, you may need to fiddle about a bit some more. _____________________________________________________________ 3.4.3 PROCESSING TRICKS Remember when I said the off range is faked to a close approximation. Well this is true, and it's a very good way of moving things around the map. That is until you happen to interrupt the process in the middle of one of its hacks (cheat tricks to save on processing) What happens is when things are moved from off range to on range, many things are not checked. For starters they are not checked for illegal boundaries first, this is why enemies can be spawned in the oceans at Chi Bi also, but very very rarely does this happen. You've probably noticed the leader of a level in the corner of your eye suddenly snap 5 or 6 pixels somewhere when viewing on the large map, Cao Cao often does when moving around on his boats at Chi Bi. You may also have seen on your mini map a general on a horse suddenly get a sudden turbo boost out of nowhere. Many of these are odd tricks. When you see them happening it can keep on doing crazy things. It's because you interrupted the computer at the most inconvenient moment halfway through what it was doing. On the Wu Zhang Plains whilst playing Diao Chan once, a boss riding a horse was spawned on the very edge of the boundary in exactly the same position as a set of spikes were supposed to be. The boss was actually moving at the time I made it move into range, but it just happened to be directly over the spikes at the time when I moved it into view. So how did the computer handle this rare processing phenomenon? It does what is always does, places the object there anyway because the collision for object checking is not done until after spawning. The amusing thing was though, is what always happens when bosses in trouble come into view, they fall of their horses straight away. The general never even got to move and as such fell off his horse which was still on the spikes. I took a few screen shots of this rare incident and put it onto my crappy website. It's still there if you are interested in seeing it in action. I won't post the exact link to the pictures as I may change the url at a later date. But the main url to my website is at the top or bottom of this FAQ. It was also impossible from then on to mount the horse as you had to be jumping to actually get anywhere near it. Of course as soon as I moved it in and out of range it had disappeared. This is also a similar incident that happens with Liu Bei and his horse, which I was meant to be explaining before I got a bit side tracked. Another good trick by Koei is that pretty much every character in the game uses the same moves. I'm talking about the non special characters of course. The army troops and the generals that have no exclusive character type, such as Cao Pi, Cheng Pu etc. Although in the future they may be expanded into characters in their own right. In Dynasty Warriors 2 for example Huang Hai, Zhange He and Xu Huang were just regular sub generals. The same goes for Zhou Tai and Cao Ren in Dynasty Warriors 3. In each game Koei just keep changing these sub bosses into real characters. They don't even have to make up any names as they already have plenty to choose from. Except for the women of course, none of them actually fought in battle in the real story. Although that's because it would seem odd, maybe even classed as sexist to not have any women at all. I still believe Yue Ying was added only because the Shu army didn't have a woman in it. Anyway, I'm getting off topic again. These regular people are only ever equipped with swords and spears/pikes. Just look at any sub general with a spear, when they attack they are always almost using Jiang Wei's moves. I would consider Jiang Wei and Lu Meng to be not that effective characters. Which kind of proves the reason why Koei have chosen those moves for everyone else. Otherwise they'd be a bit too difficult. Imagine everyone coming at you with Lu Bu's/Guan Yu's big swings? The Musuo attacks are also Jiang Wei's and Lu Meng's. In fact it's probably like that with anyone that has a pike or a spear, they're the same as Jiang Wei or Lu Meng. Sword wielding bosses are the same as Huang Zhong, Xiahou Yuan and Gan Ning. As is the Musuo, that one where they repeatedly spin round with overhead swings. Even Gan Ning had that move on Dynasty Warriors 2 before it was replaced by that running slash. Koei have even changed Xiahou Yuan a lot more now so that he is less like Huang Zhong. Strong regular the troops, the ones with lots of armour, and gate captains, they usually fight like Jiang Wei and Huang Zhong. Anyone else usually has that generic left and right swing, then stab and overhead swing. You can probably imagine that one in your head since it is used often. Since there are generally so few moves it is therefore a great memory save for the motion capture of all the characters. This is one of the reasons why Dynasty Warriors 3 will choose sub bosses and regular people as opposed to character as there are less moves needed to be shown on screen. Not 100% sure on this one, I think it's true. _____________________________________________________________ 3.4.4 SPECIAL HORSE CHARACTERS I'd like to explain that Liu Bei, Lu Bu and Guan Yu are fairly special characters when you are playing as them. This is of course because they ride special horses, although Guan Yu only becomes special later when Lu Bu no longer rides Red Hare. But we'll dismiss Lu Bu and Gun Yu for now since Lu Bu isn't on many levels, and Guan Yu isn't on as many as Liu Bei. All these characters have unique horses to anyone else. What special skill Liu Bei has is the fact in 99% of levels, he is always on his horse, and his horse Hex Mark. Cao Cao, Sun Jian, Sun Quan and Sun Ce do sometimes ride a horse, but not on every level. So if you ever need a fast horse you can always guarantee Liu Bei has one. The reason for this, combined with the fact that since he is the leader of Shu, means he is pretty much in any level where Shu is fighting. So he's a very commonly seen character. Whether you are with Shu or against Shu, Liu Bei is everywhere. The main point of this section is not about the horse themselves but of Liu Bei in general. Since he is almost always on his horse and also a leader, he can found almost anywhere. For this reason, this is where the problems in continuity start. Liu Bei is often spawned where horses are unable to go, but because Liu Bei is a special character he often MUST go through these areas. The first and probably best example I can give is on the very first level on the Yellow Turban Rebellion. He starts at the east of the map going up that hill to fight Zhang Bao (I think) to stop him from shoving boulders down the hill. It's not possible to go up that hill with a horse, but it is with Liu Bei. Instead of killing the general or running up to the top, just go as far as stopping the boulders and then killing all the people on the hill and the gate captain. Eventually Liu Bei will start to follow up the hill, and low and behold, he's on his horse. As I may have mentioned before when objects are respawned into off range, it doesn't take into account where that object is. So Liu Bei gets his horse and if he gets knocked off you can then proceed to use his horse in the area that you can't normally have it. The funny thing about these boundary checks is that they only work in one direction. Basically if you're below the hill then you won't be able to get up on the horse, but if you're already up there then it won't. That's the key to these boundaries. You can for example go all the way down the hill after stealing Liu Bei's horse when he's past the boundary, but as soon as you do you cannot go back up there. I've had Liu Bei in lots of other crazy places too. Such as half way up some steps on stages such as the Hu Lao Gate. What's funny about that is the horses back legs are half inside the steps themselves whilst the front feet are hovering in mid air. On a 2 player game you can quite easily get a whole ton of Red Hare and Hex Mark horses. I have no idea what the maximum number of horses that can be displayed on screen are. All you do is get one player to stay away from the general in question, it's easiest to do this technique if you're with Liu Bei on the same team and choose a level where he starts fighting almost immediately. Wait till he is in heavy combat, then when he gets knocked off Hex Mark, steal it and take it to the other player and leave it there. Go back to Liu Bei and he'll be on Hex Mark again. Do this as many times as you wish and then you'll have an entire stable worth of Hex Mark horses. Pointless I know. But something that you don't normally see in the game. I've tried a few times on the battle of Chang Ban stage on Dynasty Warriors 3 to see how many horses you can get on screen at once. My record is 7 Hex Mark horses, 1 Red Hare, 3 brown and 1 white. 12 in total. And that was with being on the side of Cao Cao. Originally it was just a test to see how many Hex Mark horses we could get. We parked the first horse near where Liu Bei starts where that bridge where Zhang Fei stands on and defends. Liu Bei of course runs away on this stage and getting horses became more and more difficult as the stage went on. We also started on a Hex Mark each to make the task easier. So we had 3 before we even had to give chase. The other 5 horses happened to appear as Guan Yu and other enemy bosses came past. So we thought we may as well add them into the total too. I've also noticed that for in order for Liu Bei, Guan Yu and Lu Bu to get another horse, they must be spawned on range when Hex Mark or Red Hare are not. So if you ran Liu Bei on and off range quickly whilst Hex Mark is standing around then Liu Bei will not be on Hex Mark. However, what is most unusual is that Liu Bei will be riding another Hex Mark if you happen to be riding the other Hex Mark he left behind. Generals that are riding non special horses however appear to be able to go on screen with the same horse many times. It seems that a few extra checks are performed on the two special horses just to make sure that not too many of the horse are spawned. Again, this seems to level or game specific, there could quite easily be other factors involved in the processing that determines whether or not the horses will be spawned. Such as during the Nanman stage for example, it's likely that elephants and horses are entered into the same rendering process, you certainly can't get any more than 3 or 4 elephants on screen, except of course Dynasty Warriors 2 where there are no elephants at all. As soon as any of them go off range, in the case of the scenario above. I rode Red Hare around the corner and back again and every single one of them had gone, all 11. It's unlikely that you'll ever get this many horses on screen during a 1 player game. You could theoretically, get some horses and keep riding each to the edge of your range and going back and getting another until they're all at the front and repeating the process until you get to the destination where you are going too, but this would be far too time consuming, probably best to just leave a second unused player somewhere safe. Remember when I mentioned about the selective Z ordering of the people? Well this doesn't happen with horses or elephants on any of the versions. If you have 10 horses on screen, you will always see 10 of them, the only time horses will disappear is when a general if still riding the horse. However in close range during a 2 player this can often cause amusing occurrences when generals move onto the screen quickly. The horse will appear first and with noone riding it. I'm sure everyone who owns Dynasty Warriors 3 has seen that and thought that noone was riding that horse for a moment. This has been fixed a bit on Dynasty Warriors 4 though. Generals on horses for example are rarely on horses in places where they cannot normally be, like at the top of castles for example. No longer is Liu Bei the super hero mountain climbing horse general. Although the horse respawning in great numbers problem still remains, it's not to the same extent as Dynasty Warriors 3, instead it's far far worse, but ultimately hilarious :) I will get onto that more in section 3.6 later. ___________________________________________________________ 3.4.5 BEHIND THE SCENES PROCESSING Anything out of range isn't fighting at all. Infact they're doing a very simple process that basically just processes numbers, energy bars are just reduced accordingly depending on how much morale everyone has, and is calculated at certain time periods, again depending on morale. It's more along the lines of the Championship Manager football simulation games. Numbers being crunched in the background with no gfx at all on screen. Remember when I said that troops come in sets of 5? One leader and 4 other troopers? Well when these guys (or girls) go off screen they are no longer processed as 5, they become 1 Each small red or blue dot on your big map represents a cluster of 5 people already. What the game does remember is how many troops there were remaining in that cluster when you left. So that when they become on screen again, the required amount of people can be respawned again from the one main leader. And I do mean when you left them, any dots you haven't encountered are treated slightly differently. But it's possible to leave a set of 3 or 4 troops for them to either vanish from the entire level or go back up to 5 again. The reason for this compression is simple, 100 units off screen become 20 dots instead of 100. Less numbers to process. This also means that units die in fives instead of individual units. Unfortunately there are many continuity errors and battle processes that I've noticed which you and maybe even the programmers of the game have failed to notice or take into consideration. Next time you dive into a battle somewhere you haven't been quickly note the following things, all the enemies fighting your boss/army. They're all on full health, which of course would not be possible had all these people been fighting for real, they'd all have random amounts of health, or at least some would have lost some to indicate that fighting had been taken place. This is less noticeable on Dynasty Warriors 4. Except for boss characters, each troop is basically respawned again, a whole set of troops based on an approximation of where the units used in the off range processing were. I'd bet you that your own troops are all on full health as well, but of course you can't see those. The only energy bars that will have changed are the boss energy bars. The game sometimes tried to hide this by making some enemy troops have a very very small amount of health. But this simply doesn't work well enough to convince. There are also other special occasions with health miscalculations when concerned with the main leader of the enemy. Did you know that it is IMPOSSIBLE for your own troops to kill the final boss? Try it yourself, for example fight until you have killed everyone on the Yellow Turban Rebellion. Then injure Zhang Jiao until he's almost dead, then watch as your troops knock him about all day. He'll never die, EVER. There's also an even odder trick, do the same as before, kill everyone but Zhang Jiao but don't go and see him. Stand somewhere in the middle of nowhere and let your troops attack Zhang Jiao, leave the game for about 10 minutes. Then go to attack Zhang Jiao, he won't have lost a single bit of health in 10 minutes. Not one, as soon as you arrive though anyone hitting him WILL inflict damage. So be aware that the final enemy boss is invincible against your army when you are not around, and they cannot kill him completely when you are. The leader to each troop of 5 is vital. If you kill the leader and run away so they're out of range, the remaining 4 often vanish from sight. The same happens with sub generals when you kill the main general of that army. Sub generals run directly to the nearest outpost. If they run out of range they're gone forever. So you couldn't get onto a horse and ride after them. They're gone. Sub generals are represented by a single blue dot on the main map. If you happen to be chasing a lone sub general alone in the middle of nowhere change to the big map and let the general run away and watch the blue dot disappear from sight once the boss moves out of range, teleported from the map. Another cheap trick against the player by Koei. Unusually this isn't the case with Pang Tong on Dynasty Warriors 4 on Chi Bi. When he chains up the boats he retreats and goes all the way down to Zhuge Liang manually without teleporting off the face of the world like a sub general would. Back to the point I was making before where I mentioned that when people come in range that are respawned again. On the main map, leaders of 5 troops, all bosses and gate captains are represented by those single dots. Since these dots are compressed army types they have to be re-displayed when they come back on screen. If you leave an army and instantly come back, the exact positions of each unit will not have been remembered only the main units. Bodyguards are spawned directly from where the general is standing, as do the 4 sub warriors to every troop leader. In battle this is not so noticeable, or bad in any way. But there are some unusual side effects for the split second of when they are respawned in other scenarios. Get Red Hare for example and then ride through your stationary troops waiting to fight, riding around your main camp is the best place. Notice how troops twitch slightly or are moving to arrange themselves. You can see this best on the mini map when people are put in range, but the effects are often seen in the main viewing screen. Watch how a single blue dot suddenly gives birth to 5. This is because the conversion from 1 troop to 5 is being performed. The other 4 troops have to be spawned from the standing position of the main leader. There are also other times when a general on a horse suddenly snaps to the direction that he/she should be facing. The same happens to the 2 to 8 bodyguards that most generals have in their protection. Next we come to another mildly devastating gameplay element. Which you've probably already experienced on a 2 player already if you've played it enough. People appearing out of nowhere. I will explain how this happens, it still happens on Dynasty Warriors 4 too, but the occurrence is far rarer than on Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme Legends. It's not really a bug as such, but in my opinion, an on range gameplay programming quirk. The AI rules for any pre Dynasty Warriors 4 game was that as soon as a troop was in your range, they'd go and fight someone. Whether it to be you or someone else nearer to them in the area. Remember when I said only 40 to 50 could in range? That's an estimate. But generally in busy crowds, when the number gets too low, another 5 move into range, so that it remains to be roughly around 50 in the area at any one time. For example if there are 50 enemy troops on screen then no allies would come to your aid, likewise if 45 allies were on your map then you'd only fight a group of 5 enemies. Ok then, this concept is all well and good. No problems there, the game works well in this mode, and despite this limitation you'd probably never notice this limit exists. It's a good way of not having the area too clustered and reducing the problem of 'too many people' to display on the screen a little bit. Then comes the odd part, this baffles me a hell of a lot actually. Remember how the number of people displayed on screen is split roughly in half during a two player game between both halves of the screen? Well it appears Koei couldn't seem to find a solution to the in range processing problem. As I explained in an earlier section. You couldn't limit each player's in range area to 25 units each as this would severely change the flow of gameplay. But Koei have left the limit to 50, for BOTH players. I'm not sure why this is the case though as gfx tend to the biggest hit on a CPU, not behind the scenes processing. I guess it must have been impossible at the time to make the limit to 100. Ok, so it's a problem with the game mechanics itself. That's what we'll put it down too. What happens is that there are a number of slots available in memory that people coming into range are set into. This contain the information about the type of character and what they'll be doing etc. This is shared in a first come first served basis between both players. So if all 50 slots are filled then noone else can come in range until there are slots free, such as people getting killed or people in range running out of range. Similarly if 46 slots are filled then only bosses can come on as 5 slots are needed to add a typical group of troops onto the screen. This a guess, it may be more than 50, I don't know. So now I'll put the main problem into context, if one player is using all the slots, a busy in range moment such as lots of allied and enemy troops on the mini map. None are available to the other player. This will happen when one player decides to leave a battle to go to another area of the map, thus freeing up all the slots that player was using. But once the player arrives at the destination ready for battle, no troops will be found. Until people are killed or left off range in the other players range. This is the main problem though, remember how there are single dots in the big map making up small clusters of people? The general rule is that whenever one of these dots approaches your field of range, they are converted into that particular as soon as they move into your boundary. But when they cannot be generated into range, THEY CARRY ON GOING! Which basically means they're actually in your field of vision already moving around trying to get into a fight with you, a 5th state if you like, invisible and not yet spawned. Except this time you cannot see them on your mini map either. The co-ordinates of the unit will be present in memory. But there is no way of knowing that they're actually there unless you go to your big map and think to yourself that you should surely be in battle now. Then of course the inevitable happens, PING!, out pops a load of troops seemingly out of nowhere once enough slots are available. These invisible troops may be in your range but because they haven't been spawned yet they are still processed as being off screen. I hope that makes sense. There was a time when I needed to help Liu Bei really badly. He disappeared off screen and I couldn't find him again. I kept checking on the map by pressing start and I was stood right on top of him. But he died soon after as he was on zero morale and the enemies morale was high. I've also once had Lu Bu suddenly appear and Musuo me on his horse, almost killing me. That gave me a fright and a half. On Dynasty Warriors 4 this limit appears to remain. Except since regular enemies rarely attack you in large numbers, it happens less often. But if you're standing right in the middle of a huge army of your own and become heavily under attack, even then the problem still reoccurs. _____________________________________________________________ 3.4.6 BOULDERS Yes boulders, I feel boulders are special. Not the ones that simply fall on your head like on Dynasty Warriors 2, but the ones that roll. Zhang Bao and also Zhang Jiao on Dynasty Warriors 4 have the ability to create boulders. On Dynasty Warriors 3 it is just him who can create these boulders but on Dynasty Warriors 4 other generals can as well. If you stop both Zhang Bao and Zhang Lang running away during the two sub section levels of the Yellow Turban Rebellion, Zhang Jiao will retaliate with boulders, there is also a general on the extra Yellow Turban Rebellion who can do this boulder trick. I can't remember whether or not it is Zhang Bao or not. Of course to get the extra level on Dynasty Warriors 4, you simple skip the first two levels and start on the third, incase you didn't know how to get it. Anyway, you're probably wondering why on earth boulders are special. Firstly they're the only objects in the game that can do damage to both armies. Except of course with the possibility exception of the flame geysers from Dynasty Warriors 4, but they are part of the scenery and don't move. Boulders are spawned from certain places, they just appear out of nowhere basically onto the screen. If Zhang Bao rolls them on the final Yellow Turban Rebellion stage, they don't just roll down a hill, they roll everywhere and come from all directions and even have their own physics, they can turn corners and even get stuck in holes and stop moving. You still get hurt even if you touch these static boulders. You can't see a boulder being processed out of range such as on the dots of the mini map, but they are there of course. Although boulders are spawned off screen from generally static locations, they don't actually hurt anyone until they come in range. They only hurt people you can see, otherwise they don't do any damage at all. Which is kind of surprising and makes a lot of sense in the fact that armies can often stand and queue up on those hills and not get hit at all if you're not with them. So again, another example of no collision detection out of your range. The fun that can be had is watching where they go. On Dynasty Warriors 3 you can stand right up against the castle wall, simply ride in a straight line from the entrance up the hill towards the wall. Eventually boulders will come rolling and crash into the wall. Because you're not stood on the slope, the boulder will miss everybody. It's certainly not what you're expecting to see if you happen to be just stood there minding your own business. Although sometimes they don't seem to come that far, it might be down to how many enemy troops there are on the hill, although I do not know exactly myself. The easiest way to get a boulder to hit the wall is to wait on a horse near the entrance of a hill, but face the opposite way otherwise you'll witness people getting hit by the boulder. You should feel the pad rumble when a boulder is about to go fast. Once you see it rolling past, simply ride after it without hitting it. Another inconsistency is that if you're in the 90 degree turn to the left to go up the hill, the boulders just go crashing into the wall. They are after all going in a straight line, but if you're stood further downhill, they just seem to magically turn the corner all on their own. Although oddly some boulders do seem to crash all the way round the wall without breaking, this is rare. You might think this probably contradicts what I have just said but when you're far enough away from the corner, all boulders make it round the bend, not just a select few. You could argue that boulders were being created after the turn itself, but you know this isn't the case because if you're stood near the top, this is the only place you can see them being created. _____________________________________________________________ 3.5 PERSONAL TROOPS AND RESPAWN POINTS "Don't Pursue. Wait for Reinforcements" Probably one of the most pointless things that the generals say. However, there is some truth in it. Although it isn't entirely obvious. Each army on every level has a certain number of troops. They come in two categories, ones that respawn, and ones that don't. Over half don't respawn at all. But ones that do, are respawned immediately from a gate captain. It's hard to tell on your own team which gate belongs to which of your generals. The only way to know is guess in relation to where each army started, or have a good memory and remember which it was when you were on the opposite side. It's a well known fact that you have bodyguards, but did you also realise you have your own army as well? It's not as big as everyone else's though unless you're the head of the level. And unless you're a main general you won't have your own respawn point. You can tell if you are or not by checking to see if you have your own name in the army list. If you're a sub general in anyone else's team then you won't have a respawn point or an army of your own. You can tell which is your own as people will follow you and then stop and arrange themselves in an orderly fashion behind your advances. In fact better still, choose Zhu Rong. Her army consists mainly of scantily dressed tribe women so you can spot her army a mile off. Now run somewhere where there is absolutely noone for miles. Wait around and then your army will eventually arrive. If you walk backwards by holding down the L1 button you can watch your army start to chase after you when you get too far away. It's interesting to stand near walls and water and watch your army adopt a new position in accordance with the landscape. If I recall Zhu Rong on Dynasty Warriors 3 has 10 women and 5 guys. Of which when these die they are respawned. Remember of course that all 5 troops of a particular unit need to die. This is why there are either so many people near a respawn point or none at all. If none come out and the leader general is still alive it is because the respawnable part of his/her army is still alive somewhere. You can only respawn of which that has been lost. Even wondered what all those sparse few dots were coming moving about? Well it's the reinforcements arriving, this is what your generals are talking about. But because they have to walk the entire length of the map sometimes, this is why you'll be fighting alone and then suddenly a fair few people come out of nowhere. Reinforcements have finally arrived. The number of people to respawn differs from every level, every person and maybe even each difficulty level. But if you can manage to hang around a respawn point where all the troops need respawning, you'll get a high amount of kills very quickly. Lu Bu's respawn point on Dynasty Warriors 3 has about 50 coming out of it! It's a pity you can't press R3 to see the health of your allied troops, or better still, be able to see the morale any troop. So you don't need to keep pausing the game to check the map over and over again. _____________________________________________________________ 3.6 THE LEGENDARY INVISIBLE HORSE AND INVISIBLE ELEPHANT Probably one of the coolest bugs in Dynasty Warriors 4. I suggest you read the all of section 3.0 up to this point or at least the whole of section 3.5 before reading this part if you haven't already. If you've skipped here directly from the contents you may not understand what I'm taking about, as I will be explaining in great depth why this bug happens as well, so you'll need a bit more knowledge in order to get this working, this is so simple to get working bug. But believe me, once you've got it and seen it in action, it'll be worth the effort. Ok, this section expands on the concepts and what we have learned from the horse trick described in section 3.4.4 Getting ridiculous amounts of horses on screen at once. I will mention Elephants later. The easiest stage to perform this on is the very first stage, the Yellow Turban Rebellion section 1. The one with Huangfu Song as your leader. Remember, this is for Dynasty Warriors 4 only. I suppose you could do the first bit anyway you like and on almost any level. But I've chosen this one as it is the one I found the easiest, and it's something you can follow step by step. Ok, start the stage, and join in both players, don't worry if you're playing alone, you won't be using the other player, but you will need 2 joypads plugged in so you can move the other one a little bit. You'll probably want to read this FAQ alongside the game, print this part out or if you can play the PS2 next to your PC. With player 1 choose Huang Gai, it can be with anyone but I feel it's best with Huang Gai as you use his bombs to get allies from their horses, rather than always having to wait for them to be knocked off. Choose someone who is in the Shu army for player 2. I usually choose Jiang Wei, but it's best to choose someone who you've completed the game with if you haven't used Huang Gai at all. This is so the Shu player starts in the bottom left and you don't have much walking to do. Do not choose Liu Bei. You need at least one powered player in order to do some killing. Ok, I'll imagine you've chosen Jiang Wei. But follow you guide anyway and pretend you have, even if you haven't. As soon as the stage starts move Jiang Wei to the far bottom left of the map, he'll be practically stood there already. So you won't have that far to go, just move him far enough out of combat. Now with Huang Gai kill a load of troops that he's stood next too, keep attacking until you have knocked the general's morale down to 4 stars. Then move towards Liu Bei and his army and do the same, and then the same with the army Cao Cao is battling. 4 stars with each, if Huang Gai is powered up this should take no time at all. If he's not powered up, move him towards Jiang Wei and then use use Jiang Wei or the character you have chosen to take out the morale in these armies. Now you've stabled the level so that Cao Cao, Sun Jian and Liu Bei won't lose their battles. They'll win but not quickly. The only other thing you'll have to worry about is when soldiers from the mist arrive to attack HuangFu Song, for some reason his morale plummets and he will die unless you help him, kill the general he is fighting. You should hopefully by then have about 150-200 kills and everyone else in your army should be able to complete the entire rest of the level themselves. They won't ever kill Zhang Liao, they'll wait for you to do that. Which should give you about 45 minutes of time to mess around with this bug. Free from having to save anyone, this is mainly so no enemies arrive to spoil what you're doing. You want peace and quiet, you're not here to finish the level anyway. But to have some and mess around. Don't of course help Huangfu Song yet, only when he needs it. Which should as soon as the first army gets killed by someone else. Ok, with Jiang Wei find somewhere fairly spacious, don't go right into the gate captain area, find a space where you are next to the tents and trees but with a wide open space in front of you. Leave Jiang Wei and with Huang Gai go and find Liu Bei, who will be right next to you, not far at all to walk. He should be in battle and should fall off his horse quite quickly, if not you could get some enemies to come after you, don't kill them, jump up and down near Liu Bei and they'll accidentally knock him off. If he's alone then just lay a bomb under his horse and when he flies off it, steal it and take it to Jiang Wei. You should avoid if you can bombing Liu Bei as it is very damaging to his health. You should only bomb him 5 or 6 times at the most. Each time you go back and forth bringing a horse to Jiang Wei make sure you get the first 5 in a line, as if they were in some imaginary stables, line them up as close together as you can, use the L1 button to help you. Once you bring the 6th Hex Mark back to Jiang Wei very odd things will start to happen. Before I explain what to do next or what happens, it's time for me to get technical. To explain what is about to happen and why. Remember back in this guide I explained to you about Z ordering? Yes? Good stuff. If not go back to section 3.2 and refresh your memory. To summarise, all the people in the game are rendered using a Z ordering technique, nearest to player gets rendering priority over people further away. Although this is slightly different for people in Dynasty Warriors 4 and is a bit more optimised, we don't need to concern ourselves with these details. Then I proved to you that you could get many many horses on screen at once on Dynasty Warriors 3, of which didn't seem to affect the rest of the game in anyway. Well it seems they didn't have the processing power to spare in the likelyhood of this scenario in Dynasty Warriors 4, infact the programmers have instead this time opted for the 'pray this situation never arises' instead of coming up with a solution. I still think the programmers were correct to do this. As grouping horses together in this manner is probably something that noone would ever think of doing. Except sad old me of course though, exploring all the possible avenues for bugs ;) In Dynasty Warriors 4 the horses are rendered using a different approach. Gone are the days of a seemingly infinite amount of horses to be rendered like on Dynasty Warriors 3. The programmers haven't even attempted to do a thing with this problem. No clever Z ordering algorithm at all, nowt, nothing. The general rule and processing concept is simple. There can only be a maximum of 5 horses rendered to a screen at once. Imagine there being 5 empty slots to store the horses, they're also treated in a first come, first served, basis. Remember that, as it is important, remember back to our little stable of 5 Hex Mark horses arranged neatly in a row? Well if you imagine running up to Jiang Wei, the first horse to be transferred from off range to on range is filled in slot one. And then the fifth horse goes into the final slot. REMEMBER that as long as these five horses remain on screen, this order cannot be changed. As soon as one goes the horses are bunched together accordingly and another slot is spared. And also remember that each screen has 5 slots. Ok, hope you're following so far, I'm starting off easy at the moment. Now back to the game, once you've got your fifth horse lined up. Make sure Jiang Wei can see them all on his screen. Then line him up as shown below, this is what Jiang Wei's minimap should look like:- Horses--> X X X Tail end-> X <-Head end X Jiang Wei --> O Remembering of course that horses are not shown on the mini map, you've just to use your imagination a bit and imagine that if they were shown on the mini map then the above is how it would all look. Ok? Good! Make sure Jiang Wei is fairly close and that all 5 horses are sideways as shown above. Use Huang Gai to move the horses around if necessary. I'm probably going into far too much detail already, but I want this guide to be fool proof, idiot proof even. WARNING : Before I go any further I must stress, DO NOT SAVE, when you save it does not remember where you put the horses, it remember one at the very most. So you have to do all of this every time you wish to execute this bug. Although once you've got the hang of it, it'll only take you 5 minutes to do everything at the most when you're ready to wow your mates. If you have any horse saddle powerups available then you can make your life a bit easier by starting your characters on horses or elephants. Thus giving you 2 already. Ok, so now you should have Jiang Wei sorted. Go off with Huang Gai again, this time for the sake of clarity you should get a different colour horse, go and find Cao Cao and Sun Jian is they're nearby. So what happens when there are 6 horses on screen then? You're surely asking this by now. Well it's quite simple, nothing at all. The 6th horse is simply ignored, yep, it's that easy. So when Huang Gai comes back with a 6th horse Jiang Wei won't be able to see it. Huang Gai will be riding around on mid air. HOORAY! Applaude at the legendary invisible horse, attack, musuo get on, get off, all whilst floating in mid air. Of course you can see the horse on Huang Gai's screen, but just not on Jiang Wei's screen. There is no room for it to be rendered as all 5 slots have been taken. And there's no clever Z ordering routine or nothing. You can have Huang Gai positioned right into the foreground of Jiang Wei's screen, a big closeup of Huang Gai in mid air. WARNING : If a cut scene comes up then the a check *IS* performed on the Z ordering of the horses, of course there are only two cut scenes in the entire level. So it's unlikely to happen during a critical moment. The effects are minimal, the horse order will be changed though. Just be aware then when you skip the cut scene you'll need to do some minor re-adjusting. You can safely pause the game however. That's fine. Basically if Huang Gai is up close when the cut scene appears. The horse at the back of the line will not be seen. This is easily fixed though, simply move Huang Gai away so he cannot be seen on Jiang Wei's window, instantly the horse at the back will reappear. And then when Huang Gai comes back on again, BAM! Invisible horse riding again. But it doesn't stop there I tell you, nope, this is just the tip of the iceberg. :D Ok, next up I want you to leave that brown horse near Jiang Wei but don't put it into the row, dump it anywhere in the right hand side of Jiang Wei's screen. Similar to the diagram below:- Horses--> X X Y <- Brown horse X X X Jiang Wei --> O Jiang Wei if you haven't moved him should not you see the other horse, just the five on the left. Ok, a few tips here with Jiang Wei, if you ever want to reset Jiang Wei's horse slot rendering priority, simply hold down L1 and strafe to the left until all horses are gone and then move right again. Move in a straight line so you can return to where you were stood. Your goal of course to make sure you can only see the five Hex Mark horses, not the ones on the right. I'd use the direction pad in this case to ensure you get a dead straight line. Just to help you. A few more technical details now. Any horse you can see is in range, you can't see it on your minimap but it's definitely in range. You should remember all this stuff for people roaming your map from before. However there is a slight difference with these horses. For starters you cannot see them on your minimap, but they are still in range and processed just like people are. You can turn around and although you cant see them on your mini map, they won't have vanished when you turn back round. Anyway, you remember how when troops vanished from the Z ordering problem you were no longer able to hit them? This is partly true to horses, except instead the game also requests information from the opposite window. For example, although Jiang Wei cannot see the horse of Huang Gai, because Huang Gai can see it then the game runs as normal. Obviously you cannot see the horse with Jiang Wei but both screens are able to plot your X, Y and Z coordinates in relation to where both players are standing. Because Huang Gai can see the horse it is considered real. So far so good. :) Now take Jiang Wei and move him way off screen to the right using L1 to side step. Hopefully you've left the horse in the position shown above, if not put it there. Make sure Huang Gai is facing away from this lone horse. Now move Jiang Wei back on screen, this time you want him to be able to see the other horse, and 4 of the other horses. Now with Huang Gai, this is a little more complex. Look at the 5 Hex Marks, once they're all on screen start strafing towards the other horse but making sure all 5 Hex Marks are on screen at once, you may or may not find this task hard. Use Jiang Wei's screen to help you navigate, once you are alongside the horse release L1 and press X to mount. You've now just mounted your first invisible horse. DO NOT MOVE YET! Pause the game and I'll explain, there are some rules you should know about riding invisible horses. It will only stay invisible as long as the rendering slot queue stays the same, therefore you can only move around whilst keeping those 5 horses on screen. The tables have turned this time, now Jiang Wei is the information giver to the other screen, because Jiang Wei can see the horse the game gets all the information it needs on to where the horse is in relation to both players. If Huang Gai drops a horse off screen then the invisible horse reappears. You must get off the horse and repeat the process for making that horse invisible again. Ok so now you've seen a horse go invisible on both screens. One for the rider and one for the observer. You're probably wondering why I keep going on about this communication between both screen? Well it's important because as one screen sees the horse, the logic for it remains, for example you can mount it and you cannot walk straight through it. If both players cannot see it because of looking at the other 5 horses it vanishes , it is still there, it hasn't vanished totally but it's now impossible to mount it or use it. You can try to mount it but you'll just walk straight through where it should be. And of course you won't be able to find it in the mini map. It's just removed from view and processing, just like when there are too many enemies on screen. It will be there again as soon as you turn to face it without looking at the Hex Mark horses. So don't panic, it hasn't been deleted from memory. WARNING : Never get off an invisible horse that the other player cannot see. If you dismount an invisible horse it WILL be deleted from memory forever and ever. But this isn't true for an invisible horse that you haven't mounted. The general warning is, if you're mounting an invisible horse DO NOT GET OFF IT! That's why I mentioned putting the five Hex Mark horses in a strict order, you don't want to risk losing them if can help it. You can still run the horses off range whilst they're in this state. But as long as you keep Jiang Wei where he is, you'll always know where they are. It's also much easier to focus on the 5 horses instead of having them arranged in an unorderly fashion. I didn't arrange them and lost a few horses, well I hadn't lost them altogether, it as just a pain trying to view 5 horses quickly. Ok, onto the next bug. I hope you're still paused, I'm going to explain this bug before you