============================================================= ================== 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 can try it out for yourself, otherwise you'll be wondering what the hell is going on. You've probably guessed what I'm about to say anyway. So what happens when neither player can see a horse and one person happens to be STILL RIDING IT. That is of course basically combining both of the previously learned techniques. When this happens the game gets seriously confused and does some very odd things. When you unpause (don't do it yet) you're going to tap down on the direction pad of Jiang Wei's controller to turn him round 180 degrees, as soon as you tap L1 his view will also turn 180 degrees. Jiang Wei will be able to see no horses, Huang Gai will still be viewing the 5 Hex Marks, but oh dear. There is no way now that the game can get its vital information about the invisible horse Huang Gai is riding, it's full up with 5 Hex Mark horses due to that 5 horse limitation. The game will now do two things, you can still move around Huang Gai, his coordinates will be remembered in memory but the graphics rendering still thinks you're on the horse. Huang Gai will not move but strangely enough the camera angle will, you'll instead be moving the camera. Unpause now and have a go, turn around Jiang Wei as described. Make sure when you move around Huang Gai you keep L1 pressed, if you move the Hex Marks off screen you'll reappear again and the bug will discontinue. You can get some pretty mad views however during this bug. You can zoom well far out, just don't zoom out the horse. Also don't move too far, you are still moving around in memory, if you turn Jiang Wei around then Huang Gai will suddenly reappear to where you had last been moving him towards, this could be anywhere, it's usually miles away from where he was when you first turned Jiang Wei around. Pretty crazy stuff you have to admit. Repeat the process, but this time when you press L1 to turn Jiang Wei away, make sure you're moving Huang Gai, I found it best to just alternately tap left and right on the directional pad of Huang Gai as fast as possible, this way he turns around really quick but does not move from his spot. Then whack L1 on the other pad. If you were moving Huang Gai at the time he'll suddenly start having a spack attack as soon as you whacked L1. What's happening is that the computer is rapidly switching him between the next and previous frames in the player motion before the game lost its horse information. It won't know which frame to show so it'll just show both. It looks really funny as it flickers at the speed of light. You can get some really good mid air spasms to laugh at. Some of which are hilarious to watch :) I hope you've got this far, well done if you have, I hope you enjoyed the ride along the way. Ok, lets summarise what we've done so far. First we've had too many horses on screen, cheating by keeping a player to watch over them while we grab more, then we've had invisible horses and then finally mid air spazms. What a great bug eh? I hope you enjoyed it. However, I've saved the best till last, that's right, there's an even better final conclusion to this invisible horse madness. If you've been laughing so far at how funny some of these bugs look, then you're going to fall off your seat when you see this one ;) You may have already guessed the next bit anyway. What we're going to do next is get more horses. Normally when I do this trick I get around 8 or 9 Hex Mark horses and arrange them as below X X Horses--> X X Y <- Brown horse X X X X X Jiang Wei --> O I only suggested 5 earlier on as it would help clarify things in the explanation. The more horses the better, I'd certainly get as many as you need. 10 in total will be plenty. The beauty is that Liu Bei is right next to where you have been setting up the horses so it's easy to get many horses quickly. What you need to do is as before, get someone to be riding an invisible horse. To do this quickly, remember to get Huang Gai to face the Hex Mark horses. Make sure Jiang Wei can see the brown horse so that you can use Jiang Wei's screen to get on the horse. If Jiang Wei cannot see it then Huang Gai cannot mount. Make sure Huang Gai is always focusing on the Hex Mark Horses, once he mounts the invisible horse. Put the controller away somewhere safe for the time being. You won't be needing to use him again for a while. Right, you'll now be controlling Jiang Wei. This is where things are a bit more hit and miss. I know roughly how to get this bug working, there are two ways of achieving this but sometimes the bug happens when I haven't even finished setting. Firstly keep a close look on the screen of Huang Gai. Make sure Huang Gai is setup riding his invisible horse quite a distance from the other horses. The reason being, you don't want for the time Jiang Wei to be looking at Huang Gai at all. Try to set up like the diagram below. X X Horses--> X X Y <- Huang Gai riding Brown horse X X O <-- Jiang Wei X X X To recap, Huang Gai should have Jiang Wei in view and 5 Hex Mark horses and be riding an invisible horse. For now, I'm not 100% sure what triggers the next bit. What I generally do is move back and forth with Jiang Wei, focusing on a random set of 5 Hex Marks. You can strafe back and forth. Keep an eye on Huang Gai's screen, if nothing seems to be happening turn round and face Huang Gai and view his horse, and then repeat the process. You should also try and get both Huang Gai and some Hex Marks in view by moving back to where Jiang Wei used to be stood. What we're trying to do here is fool the PS2 into a communication error. Whilst you're moving Jiang Wei around changing his horse slots, the other screen containing Huang Gai will be noting this information and sending data back to the Jiang Wei window. For some unknown reason Huang Gai will suddenly jump from the invisible horse to one of the Hex Mark horses. I have no idea why this happens but it seems that Jiang Wei's window has temporarily given Huang Gai's window false information, this only happens because Huang Gai's window has all 5 of its slots full. No other reason. You may to persevere to get this working, you might get it straight away, often I do, but other times I don't. As soon as Huang Gai jumps then immediately STOP! Huang Gai will only make the horse jump on Huang Gai's screen, you WON'T be able to see his jump in Jiang Wei's window. You've now got the magic number of horses on Jiang Wei's window to send Huang Gai's window the false information, now slowly edge your way to the horse that Huang Gai is falsley riding. Remember that you cannot move Huang Gai using the other joypad. As soon as you move on Huang Gai's pad, it'll just move the camera around like before, so don't touch it. You won't be able to ride around on the falsley interpreted horse. You'll need to make sure that whilst moving to Huang Gai that you keep the same 5 horses on Jiang Wei's window. You'll need to use Huang Gai's window to check which horse to mount as it won't be shown on Jiang Wei's window. Remember, Huang Gai will only jump to a horse that both Huang Gai and Jiang Wei can see, I have a feeling it could be the 5th horse in both of the window's rendering slots. But that is only a guess. Once you've edged your way to the horse with Huang Gai on it you'll be able to mount it with Jiang Wei. Yes, that's right. YOU'VE JUST ACHIEVED GETTING 2 PLAYERS TO MOUNT AND RIDE ON THE EXACT SAME HORSE! :D If Huang Gai does not appear in Jiang Wei's window pick up his joypad and attack with Huang Gai by pressing square. He'll then appear. Well done, you've now successfully got 2 people on the same horse, a complex procedure, but as I'm sure you'll probably agree, time well spent. It's just too funny for words. As soon as either Jiang Wei or Huang Gai change any of their 5 horses in the horse rendering slots Huang Gai will appear back on his own horse again. Sadly it's not as useful though for anything gameplay related either. You won't be able to move the horse using Huang Gai, doing so still moves the camera angle. It's funny to watch Huang Gai on Jiang Wei's window lean from side to side as if he's still riding a horse of his own. However you can feel free to attack with Huang Gai using square, triangle and circle. Get them both to perform a Musuo at the same time or charge the Musuo up, it looks funny. If you're using a fat character like Meng Huo or Xu Zhu you might not even be able to see one character that well. As it stands, it looks like Huang Gai wearing Jiang Wei's hairstyle with 4 arms, legs and two weapons. I'm sure with certain character combinations you could have some right freak formations. Now onto Jiang Wei's pad, you can move the horse around with Jiang Wei and Huang Gai will automatically move with you. If you have a mate witnessing this event, give the Huang Gai pad to him/her, just make sure they only press the 3 buttons I just mentioned, they don't want to be touching the directions or other buttons. Although you're free of course to change the map, names on/off etc. Just don't press the other buttons. What I do is rest one pad over each leg and then press the buttons and directions as necessary. You've just got to make sure that whilst you're riding around with Jiang Wei that you do not disturb the 5 horse rendering order. You must keep those 5 horses on screen, else Huang Gai will go back to his original horse. You've also got to make sure the horse that Jiang Wei is riding does not vanish from Huang Gai's screen, otherwise a slot will be available for Huang Gai's invisible horse and thus he'll return back to his horse. I think you can dismount Jiang Wei and Huang Gai still remains on it, but I'm not sure. Just make sure you don't face in the direction of Huang Gai either, otherwise the window will get the information it needs to successfully put Huang Gai back on his own horse. Sadly you can't go any further than the boundaries I've just mentioned. You've got to keep the same 5 horses on both screens But you can still have lots of fun, riding around on the tandem horse. :) So to summarise the confusion between both windows. Except I've made it into a crude little story. ;) Imagine each person is a cameraman and once they have fixed upon 5 horses in their camera lens, they no longer have the intelligence to see any more. Both windows agree with each other that both players are riding a horse. But since Huang Gai's horse is invisible there are no more rendering slots, the game gets this information from the other window to fill in the missing gap, but struggles when the other window cannot provide this information. Then when Jiang Wei's window has no more remaining slots somehow (god knows exactly) both windows come to a disagreement. When a window has no more slots remaining it makes an assumption based on previous information and asks the other window if it agrees. However when both windows are full, neither can tell which argument is true. One says Huang Gai is actually on a horse that Jiang Wei's window can see, Jiang Wei's windows disagrees and quite rightly so say's you're talking nonsense, there is noone on this horse, I've been watching this horse all along and I didn't see Huang Gai go anywhere near it. However when Jiang Wei tries to mount the horse, Jiang Wei's window cannot see the information it needs to know for certain whether Huang Gai is on his own horse or not. Then when Huang Gai attacks Jiang Wei's window admits defeat as it cannot tell who is correct and wrongly accepts it has made a mistake and both windows gladly accept that both players are riding the same horse, even though two people on the same horse is obviously an illegal operation. However as soon as just one window has a free slot to check the horse layout, they both realise the error of their ways and immediately sort of the mess they've been making. That's roughly what is going on. **********************NEW********************** I've finally discovered exactly how to make the character do the horse jump. Once you've got one of the characters on the invisible horse and not shown on the other window. You need six horses to do this. So seven in total. One for the invisible horse. What you need to do is get Jiang Wei to view 5 horses and then move in such a way that one horse gets left off screen and then another appears. This is easily achieved since you already have a row of horses. Simply get the first 5 and then strafe. As soon as the first horse goes missing and a sixth horse appears (still five in total) this is the horse that Huang Gai appears on. The sixth one. This means you can choose which horse Huang Gai appears on, also you can turn around and do anything you like with Jiang Wei, even look at where Huang Gai is MEANT to be as long as you still have 5 horses on screen. But you can have LESS than 5 horses on Jiang Wei's. I have finally discovered it does not matter. The illusion is only broken if you do two of the following with Jiang Wei:- (Remember that Huang Gai don't move him) - The horse Jiang Wei is riding WILL be shown on Huang Gai's window. If it moves off Huang Gai's window then the bug will stop. - Looking at where Huang Gai is meant to be stood but with less than 5 other horses on screen already. If you're having trouble getting this work still, or it's too complex for you then I've done the work for you. I've uploaded a movie file to my website at:- http://enaysoft.co.uk/dw4bug.avi I'm sorry for the low quality but it's so the file is not large to download. However you can still see the double horse mounting bug in action. NOTE : This file could disappear at any time. If you can't find it any longer, then I have deleted it or moved it from my site. If it does disappear and you can't get the bug to work, e-mail me and I might be kind enough to put it back up for you. I still recommend you try getting it to work for yourself as it's very cool to experience it for real. Anyway, on the movie clip I've got Diao Chan instead of Jiang Wei on the bottom screen. As you can see on both screens I've left Huang Gai idle but at the very end of the clip I make him do his Musuo. Notice how the Musuo explosion appears nowhere near either of the characters. It is shown in the centre of Huang Gai's screen as this is where the game thinks Huang Gai is. You may need to pause the last frame to get a better look. Also note that the horse is invisible on Huang Gai's screen. The reason why I'm not on the same level as I've told you to start on is because I'm doing the invisible elephant bug at the same time. See how neatly I've arranged my elephants and horses ;) Although this method to achieve the bug is very complex, once you know what you're doing, you'll be able to pull this off with ease. Just experiment, that's what I always do. Amaze your friends with your invisible horse riding antics but don't give away the trick like I have. Who knows, you might find something out that I've missed. If you do, I'd be of course interested to know. You see, Koei probably knew about this problem, or a similar one, but the chances of anyone doing the above method as part of playing the game. It's not going to happen. As soon as both players move all these horses off range, they're gone. For starters what are the chances of being under attack from 5 generals on horses all at the same time and the player not moving from the spot in which they were put under attack? Exactly, it's virtually a non existent event. It's something you have to blatantly force, it'll never happen otherwise. So there you have it, hope you enjoyed doing that. Difficult to execute, but a very cool bug none the less. :) With elephants it is much easier. Just choose the defence of the nanman stage. It's the one at night time. Use the same method as before except this time you only need a 3 elephants. Only 3 elephants can be rendered at once but it is 5 horses. Interestingly the game still renders 3 elephants and 5 horses. Having one type of creature on screen does not affect the states of the other. Although I'm fairly convinced that this affects the Z ordering of the troops, as in less on screen. Sadly two people on an elephant isn't nearly as cool, for starters pressing any attack button moves the elephant and not the chartacter, this in turn moves the window of Huang Gai and this almost always moves the screen far too much, thus stopping the bug straight away. So it really is quite useless. Although it's funny seeing the player riding the invisible elephant as they're high up in the air and all you can see is their legs. You can even go underneath the character and have a look at their underside by using your bow and arrow. Thus proving that none of the characters (including the women) have nothing between their legs. It's funny if an enemy arrives on a horse or an elephant when there are too many already onscreen because the enemy will also be riding an invisible animal. Except for some unknown reason they'll be trailing along the floor instead of at the usual height. King Mulu arrived on his elephant but instead looked like he was skiing. :) _____________________________________________________________ 3.7 CLIPPING Remember how I explained about people disappearing in relation to Z order distance as explained in section 3.2? Well, it's pretty safe to assume that a character that has moved off screen is not drawn. Clipping is a term generally used for the drawing of gfx. Say for example you have a soldier that you can see but isn't fully on screen. Such as half of their head is behind a wall or off the edge of the screen. The unseen portion won't be drawn to screen as it's been clipped at the edges of the screen. Clipping is a good way of stopping illegal drawing operations. The screen that you view is represented in the computers memory made up of a series of square dots on screen and represented as slots in memory. So the game cannot draw outside the screen in the way you think it would do as it is an illegal operation and would be overwriting other parts of memory. This technique can also be useful for other purposes. For example as soon as you get out your bow and arrow a new factor is added to the graphics drawing algorithm for the game. A clipping range is added to the camera angle of your window. In relation to the troops Z ordering, there is now a small field around the player. For example get close to one of your bodyguards and immediately get out your bow and arrow, they'll be gone. The game has decided that you have moved too close to the bodyguard and therefore too close to the bodyguard. Because the camera view is now inside your head instead of positioned above you are now much closer to the action. Therefore this feature is added to stop people getting too close. Why does the game do this you're probably wondering? Well I'll explain why. You've probably noticed on Dynasty Warriors and also on many other games that when you get really close to something it can look really blocky or blurry. Such as using a sniper rifle on a shooting game. It's generally used to stop you from seeing things too close and seeing graphical problems, although it can be used to gameplay reasons as well. Almost all 3D graphics on any 3D game, including the Dynasty Warriors games, they're all made up of meshes. The character in Dynasty Warriors, the scenery, they're all meshes. A mesh in it's simplest abstract form is a hollow object. Remember when you were at school you created a cube by cutting out a cross made out of 6 squares and then when folded together it would make a hollow cube? Like this:- # ### # # Everything in 3D is made out of hollow paper-like structures too. Zhao Yun for example isn't a solid character at all. His face, legs and arms, his whole body, it's just hollow. Now think back to the cube again, remember how at school you'd colour each square of your cross before sticking the cube together? So when you finally stick the cube together it would have a nice pattern or picture all the way round? Well this is the general principle behind creating 3D structures. A flat picture is drawn and then wrapped around a 3D structure, but the flat picture is drawn in such a way that when the wrap has taken place, it creates the illusion that it is the object that it is meant to be. This is the general simplified theory. Now imagine if you had coloured the opposite side of the paper. The image or pattern would be contained inside the cube and not shown on the outside. In real life of course paper is always double sided. This is the same in the 3D world of computer games, however it is possible in games for only one side to be present. So if we went inside the cube we can see from the outside, it would disappear. The same goes for a cube that we can only see from the inside. Like a square room, as soon as you go outside the cube, it is no longer there, invisible. In Dynasty Warriors single and double sided meshes are used for various things. It doesn't matter if you don't exactly understand, but as long as you know everything in Dynasty Warriors is hollow. When you're playing Dynasty Warriors you are playing under the illusion that all the characters are full bodied people and for pretty much the entire game (and any other game) this is partly true. For example the scenery is only one sided, the side that you can see. If you were able to walk outside the map you would no longer be able to see the cliff as the other side is empty and transparent. Of course the game won't let you go outside as the collision detection prevents you from doing so. However this is a really simple example since the boundaries of the level are fairly straight and easy to check against. However these checks are fairly primitive as they do not take into account character size and style. You've only got to watch Guan Yu running very close to a wall directly on his right hand side and notice that the end of his spear is inside the wall. Another one is to choose Zhao Yun and then say Meng Huo as the other player, it's possible to position both characters next to each other so that as Zhao Yun jumps up and down he is repeatedly poking Meng Huo through the chest. Though it's pretty much impossible to check for things like this. Since this doesn't affect gameplay however it doesn't really matter. But you can still get some quite interesting gfx. The water and sky are the simplest parts of the level. They're completely flat surfaces with a picture of a sky or water on them. If you were to go above the sky, again there would be nothing on the other side. Another object type is that of a flat surface that always faces your view. Can often be known as sprites or quads. These are used to display things like the swaying grass and other information such as the names of generals. You probably might think that these are just printed directly on top of the gfx after everything else is drawn, but this is not entirely the case. You've only got to encounter a boss that is fighting right next a wall or mountain and see that some of their name and energy bar is obscured into the wall. This is because half of the sprite containing this information is also inside the wall. Now lets imagine a real life camera man in a film. You could move and point the camera anywhere you like but you are unable to move the camera through solid objects such as a wall, person or tree. However this is not the case with computer games, anything goes through anything. Collision detection does not come as standard, it must be programmed into the game. This is one of the main problems with 3D computer games that use a camera emulated systems. When you're playing Dynasty Warriors the view of the camera is set above the player, this is not only so you can see behind the player but also so people do not appear directly in the camera. If no checks were performed on objects too near the camera, objects could take up the entire view, if this were to happen in Dynasty Warriors not only would you not be able to see what you doing, but it'd probably scare you to death as well. Imagine if when you went into bow and arrow mode and when the camera went directly into your head you could see inside of it? That of course be an undesired effect, but WOULD happen if Koei did not prevent it. If you're stood right next to a cliff facing it then you can see it. But if you turn around and also change your view so it is now behind you then you can no longer see it. If the cliff was textured both sides then you would be able to see the cliff and would unfortunately no longer be able to see yourself or what you were doing, another undesired effect. The cliff would be a complete mirror image of the other side. As if you'd painted one side of the paper and the colour had stained through right to the other side. As far as I can tell everything in the entire game consists of one sided meshes, except for horses and elephants. I'll explain why in a moment. Double sided objects take up twice as processing power as single sided objects due to the fact both sides need to be drawn. Of course if you don't draw both sides you have the added bonus of being able to still see because once the camera is inside the object you can still see out of it. The benefit on one sided meshes is that they take less processing power and thus more objects can be put on screen. One of the main reasons why the elephant is transparent is because when it obscures your view you need to be able to see through it but not make it vanish during play. If it was not double sided then you would not be able to see the elephant at all and thus the elephant would be somewhere where you probably wouldn't think it would be. On Dynasty Warriors 4 the elephant is transparent all the time you are riding it when you are moving forwards so you can see where you are stamping and the enemies in front of you. I'm not sure if this addition was necessary to be honest since you can see people on the mini map. Ok, enough technical talk. Now lets see some action ;) This is for Dynasty Warriors 4 but this should also work for the other Dynasty Warriors, but since I haven't tested this, I am not totally sure. Firstly start a 2 player game and pick Zhao Yun and anyone else for the other player. As soon as you start get as close to Zhao Yun as you can with the other player and go into bow and arrow mode. Position yourself next to Zhao Yun's spear. Don't stand too close otherwise he'll disappear in the clipping range and won't be shown. If you get it right the tip of Zhao Yun's spear should disappear as it comes into range with the camera. It will be so close that it'll go through the view and you'll be able to see inside of it. Notice how it is hollow inside, once one edge is missing, you can't see the other half of the spear. You can do this with any character that leans their weapon in a direction away from them. Now get a horse and an elephant. Make sure you are not riding them and then get as close as you can near the head. Then go into bow and arrow mode and aim directly at the head. You should now be able to see directly inside. You shouldn't be alarmed by what you see. For example if you look up towards the top of the elephant you will be able to see the saddle, but from the underside of the elephant. Same with the horse, seeing as these animals are double sided you are able to see the other half of the mesh. What you see is what I explained earlier, the inside texturing of a hollow mesh. The clipping tries to prevent this by making sure other objects do not get close to the camera. This is true for troops, it makes people too close to the camera invisible, but it just doesn't work with animals or characters that have weapons that point outwards. You can get a better look at your objects by aiming at enemies that are at a distance. What you do is aim at the enemies and then when you are fully zoomed in move the player away from battle with the other player on a horse, gradually pushing the player away from battle. You'll need to keep L1 pressed though with the zoomed in player at all times. But you're be able to focus on things at a much greater zoom. The clipping area will still be the same but now you have more magnification. Simply put a character fairly close and then focus on that character. You'll be able to get REALLY close of views of the people, far closer than anything you'll have seen before. You can look up close at anything you like. Especially if the other player brings along a horse and an elephant for a close-up inside the bodies. Yet again, whilst none of this is useful in any way gameplay wise. You just may find it interesting. ============================================================= 4.0 USEFUL TACTICS I suppose not particularly useful tactics. But I couldn't think of a better name for this section. I shall be generally explaining a few good game playing tips to help you on your way. _____________________________________________________________ 4.1 CONTROLLER Always use the analogue stick for precise movement. The direction pad is useless, don't use it. Running through enemy territory and aiming yourself up for battle is just useless with the direction pad. I've actually worn out my left analogue stick in the upwards part of the pad whilst playing this game. So when I push up, the stick often gets stuck in that position, allowing me to run forward hands free :) _____________________________________________________________ 4.2 ITEMS Except for Dynasty Warriors 2 you can equip items for use in battle. For Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme I'd ALWAYS equip either:- FLAMING MUSUO HP UP ATTACK UP DEFENCE UP MUSUO CHARGE UP and on later levels FLAMING MUSUO HP UP BOW DEFENCE DEFENCE UP MUSUO CHARGE UP I'll explain, bow defence is important, but not until level 3 or after as they are too weak on earlier levels. The scroll that allows you to use your flaming Musuo. It's the most important one, your flaming Musuo is so damaging. Because the burning effect gradually inflicts damage, even the weakest of characters can do heavy damage to bosses. I'd certainly prefer Musuo charge over attack up. You want to be doing your Musuo as much as possible as it is very effective, far more damaging than just having extra attack. I always kill more people with Musuo charge instead of attack up in comparison to my mate on a 2 player game, even if he uses a more powered up character. Defence, HP and Flaming Musuo are the must have 3 items for any character anytime. Ignore Musuo up, you want to be able to do your Musuo as frequently as possible as it is a fail safe in almost any situation. Being able to do it for long periods of time is useless. I sometimes like to play and bow attack up when I have a character such as Yuan Shao that has +60 bow attack on his maximum secret weapon. A bow attack of +120 is VERY powerful. Combine with the charge arrow fire and it kills almost everyone in one hit. Gate Captains and Generals die in 5-10 arrows. You can even kill the end of level bosses in 15 or so arrows. Very good and very effective. Then you can finally put those 99 arrows to use that you can often have by the end of a stage. If playing on Dynasty Warriors 4 I'd equip these in order of importance as slots appear in your rank. DEFENCE UP HP UP ATTACK UP CHARGE ATTACK UP -- your own choices -- You might wonder why I recommend defence up before hp up. Think of it like this. If you could double your defence or double your hit points the results would be the same. Losing 5 hp out of a max of 50 would be the same as losing 10hp out of a max of 100, depending on which powerup you chose. Although the effects are the same on how many hits you take. It's a disadvantage when it comes to needing food as you will need to eat twice as much to get back to full health. So get that smaller bar but with higher defence. You also don't want to equip attack up too early in the game or at all in early stages as you'll kill bosses too quickly and not get much weapon experience whilst fighting them. During 2 player games, you will want to be as weak as possible because there will be roughly half of the experience going round from the bosses, so you'll want to be hitting them as much as possible, you could even let them hit you down so they use health items, thus allowing you to hit them for longer. If you have a third slot free early on, I'd recommend speed up so you can finish the levels quicker. I'd also equip break element as you can get weapon exp from bosses even that block, until your character has 5 or 6 hits in their weapon and then I'd change to flame element. Then you can perform the simple uppercut and then juggle burning people to great damaging effect. Lightning is also good for characters that have large swings or earthquake style stomps. I'd not recommend the other 3 to be honest. As you can inflict more damage using the others. But remember that flaming attacks are definitely not as strong as they are on the other games. _____________________________________________________________ 4.3 CHARACTERS AND CHARGING UP I don't particularly dislike any character that much. My favourite characters are:- Zhou Yu, Jiang Wei, Lu Meng, Zhou Tai, Xiahou Dun, Zhao Yun In that order. Because of how they look and fight. Not if they're actually any good or not. Zhou Yu I find has the best selection of moves. On Dynasty Warriors 2 his charge 3 attack made him one of the coolest characters to be, and his running attack on the other games is one of the best in the game, with its multiple hit potential. Of course Lu Bu is probably the most effective character. But he's not one of my favourites as he's so powerful that playing him if a bit dull. I still think he's the best character in Dynasty Warriors 2, his moves weren't THAT long range, he also has the best voice used ingame in Dynasty Warriors 2 also. Jiang Wei and Lu Meng are similar and in fact quite difficult characters to use, but I like to be challenged and like playing quirky characters, they also look cool too. Zhou Tai is generally really effective, I especially love his one sided horse attack, making him the best person to ever use on a horse. Xiahou Dun is a cool character too in that he steps forwards so quickly when he moves. And Zhao Yun, another cool looking character that can be fairly hard to use, but with some quality moves, like Jiang Wei and Lu Meng. I suppose Zhang Liao should get a mention since he's a lot like Lu Meng. Ma Chao and Jiang Wei, were in fact the exact same character in Dynasty Warriors 2, as were Lu Meng and Zhang Liao. I used to like Dian Wei on Dynasty Warriors 2 but they just keep making him weaker and weaker and his axe smaller and smaller as more DW games are created. I'm not a particularly a big fan of really slow characters like Meng Huo and Zhu Rong though, although these two have been made a lot better on Dynasty Warriors 4. For powering up characters, I try to find all the +10 life up powerups I can but IGNORING all the Musuo up ones. The trick is to have as much life as you can but as little Musuo as possible. This is so you can do your Musuo as much as possible. Think of it like this, equipped with flaming Musuo, when your Musuo bar runs out you have a guaranteed number of extra hits. This is very useful, lets take for example Liu Bei, his attack is great, an extra 6 hits in his Musuo. One long Musuo just isn't effective because you do these extra hits less often. Consider two smaller Musuo attacks which are better than one big long one. This concerns Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme Legends more than Dynasty Warriors 4. On Dynasty Warriors 2, the Musuo and health are the same thing, so it's always best to get the life up in any circumstances, you just have to cope with not being able to do your Musuo as often. Lets say you had a Musuo of 50 or a Musuo of 100. Lets imagine that a Musuo of 50 gives you 6 hits, so a Musuo of 100 would give you 12. With me so far? Now lets add a flaming Musuo powerup to Liu Bei and imagine a scenario where you had hit enough enemies to equal getting 100 units added to your Musuo bar and then immediately performing your Musuo once on full. So for example you'd need to do 2 Musuo attacks with the 50 length bar to equal 100. Below are the results:- 50 = 6 hits + 6 hits 50 = 6 hits + 6 hits ------- Total = 24 hits 100 = 12 hits + 6 hits ------- Total = 18 hits and now lets imagine another example. A Musuo of 25:- 25 = 3 hits + 6 hits 25 = 3 hits + 6 hits 25 = 3 hits + 6 hits 25 = 3 hits + 6 hits ------- Total = 36 hits and now for 10:- 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits 10 = 1 hits + 6 hits ------- Total = 70 hits As you can see for best results, make sure you have a small bar. So rather ironically, the smaller your Musuo bar, the LONGER you are in it, you can also perform it more often. So shorter is longer. And this is another reason why I also always equip Musuo Charge. This makes you very strong in battle, I pretty much always save my Musuo for boss battles, with a small bar I can wait till they attack, perform my flaming Musuo and then afterwards have it charged up again in only a couple of swings to nearby enemies. It really does help your character become 3 or 4 times stronger than they actually are, by having this invulnerable attack to blast everyone away, almost at anytime too. The burning status effect is also very damaging to any boss, even against Lu Bu with a very weak character. If you're hitting Lu Bu and barely even making a dent in his health, one Musuo can do 50-100 times more damage than this. The burning effect will gradually wear down the damage, and as long as you keep him in mid air, the burning will continue to remove his health. If you combine this with the infinite combo trick which I will describe later in section 4.5 you can have a boss in mid air indefinitely until they decide to jump out of it, you can deal some really serious damage doing this. With Lu Bu I keep doing this to him, normally you can't knock him down It's easiest with Xu Zhu on a low rank, you keep hitting Lu Bu but as soon as you finish you fall down to safety, then you can run away easily, charge up your bar by holding down circle from a safe distance and repeat the process until Lu Bu dies, and it doesn't take too long to kill him either. The burning effect is devastating, I always take on Lu Bu now regardless of how weak my character is. With tricks like this you can take out Lu Bu anytime, and often without taking a hit at all. Another great trick to do when you're on a low rank is equip the flaming arrow powerup. As Lu Bu approaches perform your charge arrow so it'll stun him. Wait till he gets close and then fire it, as soon as it hits, immediately start juggling him with the infinite combo as long as you can. You should aim to be able to put your bow away and immediately be in range to start hitting. Then you can juggle his burning body, without even needing to use your flaming Musuo. Or combine both techniques for a quick victory. Although this burning has been toned down a lot on Dynasty Warriors 4, the speed the health bar moves down is much slower. _____________________________________________________________ 4.4 INCREASE POWERUPS If you get big combos on bosses or gate captains you can increase the value of the item you will receive out of it. On Dynasty Warriors 2 it doubled every 8 hits. So with a 24 hit combo you could get a +8 defence or attack out of a +1. But you needed 16 to get a +2 to +4 So you couldn't just double it once. But it was very difficult to get 8 hits anyway, unless you had a 10 second full Musuo powerup handy. On Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme Legends you could only upgrade to a +2, and this required 8 hits or over. Unfortunately ignore all this if you're playing Dynasty Warriors 4 as some idiot decided to take this feature out. Also, gate captains give you food instead!?! _____________________________________________________________ 4.5 INFINTE COMBO It isn't a well known secret that large combos on normal troops gives you +50 food or +5 arrows. You need an 8 or more combo on Dynasty Warriors 2 and the for the other games 16 or more. I swear though the game is biased into giving you food when you're about to die and arrows when you have none and have already got full health. It seems to always give you what you don't need. With almost all the characters in Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme Legends. It's possible to keep using your charge 1 and charge 4 attacks over and over again. To keep juggling an enemy forever. I've had a 300 hit combo on one boss that I juggled him across half of the map before being hit by someone else. Useful for getting food out of regular enemies. Some enemies attack so fast that you can just attack 3 or 4 times with square, stop the combo and then start again. It's very difficult to do this on Dynasty Warriors 4 though. Especially because the charge 4 uppercut move seems to make the enemy come back down at fairly random positions, not to mention that the descend of the bodies coming down is much quicker. In fact it's so much faster that annoyingly some people drop them during their Musuo, Guan Yu springs to mind. ____________________________________________________________ 4.6 BONUS POINTS You get bonus points for surviving body guards and surviving allied generals. Although you do lose bonus this way too, even going into negative values. On Dynasty Warriors Extreme you could also get more points for doing combos. This is basically doing as many different moves as possible without there being much time taken between each move. This includes all 6 hits, all 6 charge attacks, jumping attack and Musuo. The more you do the higher your combo goes. Until you get a perfect score of 100, your highest combo score is remember until it is 100. So you can't keep getting 60's and then expect 300. The game only remembers the 100's and your next best game. So achieving 60, 80, 100 and then 35. Will only give you 135. You need to get as many 100's as you can. Easy once you get the hang of it, I've managed to do get scores of 3000, more than even killing 10 enemy generals or 400ish people. Getting a maximum of 100 requires you to use most of your moves at least once. Quite easy when you're against lots of people. I'd say the hardest moves to pull off are generally charge 2 and charge 3 moves. SST and SSST. Depending on the character. If you're Zhuge Liang, Sima Yi or Xu Zhu. I'd forget about even trying to attempt a combo. Xu Zhu is so slow and the fan boys can't juggle to save their lives. What I generally start off with is a charge 2 or 3 attack within a group of enemies. Then immediately go into a charge 1 attack and then juggle the same enemy into a charge 4 attack. Depending on the character I'd then either wait for them to come back down and perform a charge 5 attack or use all six hits. Or I'd chase after them by hitting T again and then dive and use the jumping attack hitting the same person and continue into a charge 5 attack or six hits this way. By now you should be on 70 or 80, which just leaves a charge 1 or charge 2 or flaming Musuo to get a 100. You can even carry on trying to get another 100 if you like. Sounds complex but it isn't with practice. You'll be doing it non stop with some quicker characters. What you need is lots of enemies around. If you get hit out of your combo, immediately Musuo to carry on the combo, always use the Musuo last in case you need to rely on it in this way. _____________________________________________________________ 4.7 9999 The maximum amount of points you can get from killing enemy troops. Killing 1000 exactly gives you 5000 points exactly. Any kill after this mark gives you a lot more points. For example 1200 kills will give you 7500 points. So 1000-1400 kills is proportional to points range of 5000-9999. 1400 kills is the magic number. Anything over 1400, you still get 9999. So once you get that amount finish the level. If you kill lots of generals too you can get in excess of 15000 rank points. A great way to rank up very quickly. The quickest way to charge up your rank is to start the easiest level and charge directly up to the final general of the level. You should get around 2000 points if you finish the level in under 5 minutes. Repeating this 4 more times gives you around 10,000 more points. Although this technique is far more boring and tedious than getting a high kill count, although it does have the advantage that both players get this high speed finish bonus, with the high kill count, only one player gets it. So you could argue you get around 4000. Also make sure you equip the strongest bodyguards you have, surviving bodyguards gives you a lot of points too, and the higher the rank they are, the more you get. _____________________________________________________________ 4.8 ARCHERS Archers are another good way to gain extra points. On Dynasty Warriors 4 make sure as soon as you start you press select twice so your bodyguards do not move. You'll then get the bonus for them being alive. In Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme Legends always turn them off. They die far too quickly and just eat into your bonus, thus making you rank up more slower. _____________________________________________________________ 4.9 MAXIMUM MORALE AND SUB GENERALS On Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme Legends any army that is 8 stars on your own team is practically invulnerable. This is especially good if you are in a team with many bosses. By killing 2 or 3 generals you give the entire team 2 or 3 stars extra. Any sub bosses will also have 8 stars. On many levels this means your sub bosses will go around as unstoppable killing machines. If you happen to be part of the main leader on your team. Then it means you'll never have to go back to HQ and help, no matter how badly you are doing in the battle. The slight disadvantage is that although it's rare for anyone to die on 8 stars. If they are on low health they will still die sooner or later. But because they are so high in morale they'll never cry for help and will die without warning. Just make sure this is not your leader, don't leave your main guy in battle for too long if you can help it. Although this will only happen if two armies both on 8 stars collide. _____________________________________________________________ 4.10 MOUNTING There is nothing more annoying than trying to mount a horse or an elephant and being repeatedly knocked off. You can make things easier for yourself by immediately going into your Musuo as soon you mount to avoid being knocked back down. Then you can move away to safety whilst in your Musuo attack. _____________________________________________________________ 4.11 REINFORCEMENTS Lets face it, unless we're talking about sub generals. The rest of the army is fairly useless. Am I right? However, that's no reason to dismiss them, although not as useful in actual fighting, they are very useful in other situations. If you're all alone every single archer will target you, you're wide in the open, but when you're with your army the archers will be firing at all your army, thus the chances of you getting hit are quite slim, and even if you are being targeted by every single archer, the chances of it hitting someone else before it getting to you are very high in a big crowd. You've probably found it hard yourself to fire at a general whilst they're fighting in a large crowd. The same problem can also work in your favour too. The other great point is that they are great fodder and decoys. If you didn't have an army everyone would come for you. Including every single boss, making life for yourself very hard. They're best for bosses, a wimp hitting a general in the back, even if they cause no damage is great as it makes them turn around to whack that person, or at least distract them long enough for you to hit them in the back. You've probably ran away from a boss before into your own army, screaming at your fellow generals and army to come and help you, and then they do. Lu Bu springs to mind. He can follow you forever unless he gets hit by someone else in your army. My favourite trick is to lure a boss into a load of allied archers. Then all you need to do is repeatedly attack, they won't be able to block forever as they'll keep getting hit by arrows. The arrows won't do much damage, but the boss will be at your mercy, and will die very easily from your whacks. _____________________________________________________________ 4.12 NEVER GIVE UP! Apart from very rare or very impossible circumstances, such as trying to complete the final stage on the hardest setting with someone you haven't used before, I think it's possible to complete every single level, no matter how badly you are doing. You can certainly going through the Musuo mode from start to finish without having to charge them up elsewhere. The toughest is that of Dynasty Warriors 2, starting from the first stage and completing all 5, all on hard. It's very hard, but still not impossible. Some of my most enjoyable Dynasty Warriors experiences have been from situations where only me and the general leader have been left, taking on the entire army by ourselves. During a 2 player, the 3 of you taking on the entire world is a highly exciting experience. This is where the brilliance of the double Musuo also come into play, ignore this sentence however if playing Dynasty Warriors 4 though, as the double Musuo is surprisingly very crap. It simply isn't necessary to restart the stage or powerup up your character in free mode if things aren't going your way. In fact I would consider that to be cheating. For me it's the hardest setting all the way, I want the hardest challenge. Here are some useful tips on how to survive when there are just you and your leader left. Firstly read sections 4.2 and 4.3 explained earlier, incase you haven't already. It is vital you have your character equipped as best as possible, this will help you a lot in the long run. Equipping meatbun recovery up will also help if you can spare a slot. True Musuo, Musuo charge up, meatbun recovery up, HP Up and Defence Up are the ones I'd always equip if I knew a tough level was coming up, although I'd definitely have Bow Defence instead of meatbun recovery if the level is known to have lots of annoying archers on it. Depending on the stage there may be some pots nearby. Save these in an absolute emergency, never open them just because you're not on full health, use them only when even one hit from the weakest person in the whole world would kill you. As you never know when the next food may suddenly arrive. Since you're basically making the last stand, you won't be moving anywhere, you'll be fighting on this very spot until the entire enemy army is destroyed, or all of them except for the main general. Since you're on your own and heavily outnumbered, it's almost guaranteed that your leader is on 0 stars of morale and almost everyone else on 8. So it's useless even thinking about morale boosting, any extra you do get will simply be stamped out almost immediately. Your main concern are archers, hopefully you'll have equipped the true Musuo powerup so you'll always be able to perform it. Getting low on health will be your biggest problem, not in the fact you are about to die, but because you have to stay in the heat of the battle. The very instant that the general you are standing with goes off range, they will be guaranteed dead within around 10 seconds. So running away isn't an option, unless you're on a 2 player game perhaps and at least one player can stay guarding the leader. Being near death can actually be quite useful as long as no archers are around, you can tell when you're near death because your energy bar will be red and your Musuo gauge will charge up constantly without even hitting anyone, your Musuo bar will charge up at the speed of light providing it is small and you have Musuo charge up equipped. Meaning that you can Musuo practically all the time, the main benefit of course is that during your Musuo you are completely invulnerable. If there are lot of bosses or archers around you can simply run around in circles and wait for your bar to fill up before attacking. Or jump in circles if archers are around. If you're near death it's always best to attack the huge army in hope that someone will drop food, ignore the bosses, but reverse when you're on full health, go straight for the bosses. Keep the army alive as long as possible and therefore preserve the food contained within it. On a 2 player game it's best for the person on the most health to go for the archers that often build up around the edges of the battle ground. On Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme Legends, getting these archers will be incredibly difficult. Finding them will be hard enough because there will be so many people at all times around you, use your mini map. Even when you do find the archers they'll almost immediately vanish due to the Z order problem and then even worse have run away without you seeing them. It's best to just dive in there, do your flaming Musuo attack and just hope for the best. You will kill them eventually, but it'll be far harder than normal. You will get shot a lot by the archers in the meantime. Usually the archers will aim for one player, often the player who is nearest where the army are arriving from. It can sometimes be better for the player who isn't been aimed upon to find the archers, not only will they not see you coming, but when they do, it'll reduce the number of arrows beign aimed at that player. Your health can go down very quickly by archers if you don't sort them out quick. You can't see them, but they can see you. The biggest problem is although the enemy arrows would normally just hit the army around you, because there are so many at this period, only the army behind you is drawn, you kind of get a half doughnut shape of enemies attacking you. As soon as you Musuo this doughnut, almost immediately the other half appear. Since the invisible people around you are invisible, they are also invisible to the enemy arrows shooting at you. In other words, the arrows being fired at you from the direction you are facing, they won't hit the army that is stood there. It should do, but won't because they are invisible. You can minimise the blow by facing away from where the archers are standing, if they're in range behind but not on screen they'll hit the foreground enemies trying to attack you instead. But the chances of you keeping the screen still whilst fighting are nigh on impossible. You're relatively safe during a 1 player when engulfed all around from enemies. If one player is about to die, save your game and come back. At least if you die you can try again. Double Musuo if your best friend in these circumstances, stick together. You should aim to have all 3 of you as close as possible. The enemy has a harder time of hitting you this way. As a general AI rule, an enemy will fight the nearest opponent who is nearest, or the person that hit them last. As you'll be so close together it's likely that one player will hit enemies going for the other player, and vice versa and this will happen constantly. With bosses this is ideal, as they will die much quicker. It's also means your leader will get hit less often. As soon as both of your Musuo bars are on full, get together, get in the middle of all the enemies and let rip. Your best friend in these hectic situations are the attack x2 powerups. Since you're likely to be hitting a minimum of 5 people every time you swing your weapon, attack x2 really helps you deal some serious damage, even on the hardest of stages. The best characters in Double Musuo are Pang Tong, Meng Huo, Zhen Ji and Da Qiao. There are two things that these characters have in common, they all have Musuo attacks where the character does not move (well at least not very much with Meng Huo and Pang Tong) and Musuo attacks where when a person is trapped within it, they are captured and constantly hit until the Musuo ends. They're also one of the few Musuo attacks where whoever you start hitting, will not suddenly disappear from view in heavy crowds like what normally happens during a 2 player game. So once hit, always hit. For the first three, their Musuos are almost the same. Except Pang Tong's has a better vertical range and has more hits during the flaming Musuo part, Meng Huo and Zhen Ji also have many hits during the flaming Musuo part, but because Meng Huo's attacks are from the floor and Zhen Ji's is a circular ring in the air, they don't have as much vertical coverage and as such can sometimes miss. With Pang Tong however you can have enemies blasting right off the top of the screen as his Musuo vertical range is so devastating. Da Qiao is less effective as she only has about 45-90 degrees range whereas the others have a full 360 degrees. Although her Musuo is still pretty effective for its juggle potential. You're probably wondering what's so good about these characters and their Musuo attacks. You may have written these characters off before as being rubbish if you didn't like the fact they couldn't move during their Musuo attacks. Well if you imagine you were Pang Tong and ran into a big crowd of enemies and used your flaming Musuo. You'd probably kill all the enemies in the crowd, each of which you'd deal 10 to 11 hits. Now imagine doing a double Musuo with Pang Tong, whilst the lightning of the double Musuo is nowhere near as effective as the flaming Musuo, the fact that bodies will be bouncing about all over the place will almost guarantee that at least 1 person will be hit 16 times. Thus allowing you get some more food or arrows. Put say Pang Tong and Zhen Ji together as you have probably the most devastating Musuo possible. Each character will be hit for a minimum of 20 times as both players will be hitting the same enemies. Once the Musuo has finished you will have between 10 and 20 sets of food and arrows lying around. And that's every single time you do the double Musuo. Of course with this food supply, you'll never die. You'll be spoilt for choice. Although you probably won't have these characters grouped together as all 4 are on different sides and Meng Huo cannot be selected on most of the regular levels anyway during the Musuo mode. But even with a combination such as Pang Tong and Zhang Fei. The person playing Zhang Fei can go around hitting all the enemies that Pang Tong has trapped in his explosion of destruction, you could spin round spin Pang Tong and get a few hits on almost all of them. You'll probably only get 1 or 2 lots of food during each Musuo but this will be fine. Especially considering in normal circumstances you wouldn't be getting any extra. I know I said before that you should always aim to have a very low Musuo bar so that you can do it often, well in the case of these 4 characters I'd say the opposite. The higher the Musuo bar the better, sure you won't do your Musuo as often as you would want too, but if you get it high enough to be able to do 16 hits with the flaming Musuo every time you do the Musuo, you'll become an arrow and food creating machine. You'll be able to get food every single time you do your Musuo by yourself, and during a Double Musuo, be able to produce as much food as if the other player were another Pang Tong/Zhen Ji or Meng Huo. Da Qiao of course should be kept in the same direction as when she starts her Musuo so at least for the people you start hitting, they get hit multiple times. Zhen Ji are Da Qiao are slightly better characters in general for fighting since Pang Tong and Meng Huo are fairly short range. Pang Tong is a little clumsy also, whilst Meng Huo is incredibly slow at attacking at all. I'd have to say the worse characters for Musuo are Zhu Rong and Xiao Qiao. Xiao Qiao's is just so difficult to steer, whilst Zhu Rongs is just so hard to aim with and the juggle potential is none existent. Most people say Xiao Qiao is better because she has a better Musuo, I disagree, and for the reasons I've just mentioned. Xiao Qiao's Musuo is just too hard to steer to be 100% effective. Sometimes it is great, other times it is not. Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi can also be more effective than you might think. They have no juggle potential either like Zhu Rong but can hit enemies far and wide due to the beams travelling off into the distance. What I tend to do is perform my Musuo in the direction my partner is. This is so the lazer beams inflict damage on my screen and then inflict damage to all the enemies on my mates screen too, pretty much doubling the effectiveness of the move. Since I can see the other player, the computer processes the beams as far as you can see, and as soon as it appears on the other player's screen the computer will process it there too. However had I not faced in the direction of my mate so I could see him and fired off screen in his general direction. It's likely they would have been lost, unless my mate happened to be facing me at the same time. As is the general rule in Dynasty Warriors' general processing, 'Once you've seen it go disappear, it's always gone' Fast characters also have the edge, especially ones that step forward, Xiahou Dun is probably the best of the lot as not only is he quick, he strides forward a lot with each swing. Often a boss will try to attack you in the back but you'll have walked away by simple attacking. Characters with big swings or ones that have big stomp attacks like Zhang Fei and Huang Gai are also very effective. This is what also makes Pang Tong and Zhen Ji so effective as their charge 6 attack is a wide range move like the stomp attacks, except with Zhen Ji it is even better as it doubles up as a stunning as well. If you hold out long enough you should eventually win and have defeated everyone on the map. Sadly, if the last general does not come to you, you'll have to give chase. And by yourself, it's still possible of course, but it'd be nice to have some support. The harder part is over though. If you managed to survive then well done to you, you've just passed the greatest Dynasty Warriors test, we've done this many times though now, and it's become second nature. Although in Dynasty Warriors 4, the game is generally so much eaiser that you rarely get to be in this situation anymore. ============================================================= 5.0 SOME PROBLEMS WITH DYNASTY WARRIORS 4 Before you even begin to read this section I must stress that I still really like Dynasty Warriors 4 and this isn't an attack against anybody. Up till Extreme Legends the game just got better and better, until 4 where some things did get better but with the result of some getting worse. Dynasty Warriors 4 is just slightly more less than perfect. It'd be nice if someone at Koei should find this FAQ and read the following and take note. I'd still recommend you to buy Dynasty Warriors 4 if you don't own it and only have the earlier versions. But don't expect much more. The DUEL!?! Probably the most annoying and useless feature ever. What on earth where Koei thinking adding this to the game. The idea sounds great in principle, having a one on one duel. But the fact you suddenly teleport to the middle of nowhere to have a duel in an arena, breaks up the continuity. And the duel music is just a 3 second looped track. On a 2 player the other player has to just sit and wait. When you finish the duel you suddenly appear back in the battlefield, as if it was all a dream. Ridiculous! You can't just simply refuse them as every army in your force loses a star of morale, as they do also if the duel goes to a draw. And you can't turn duels off either. If you die in a duel, then it's INSTANT GAME OVER! And the enemy can even CURE THEMSELVES in the duel, whereas you cannot. But these energy bars are nothing to do with your normal health either. And I've already discovered a way of beating the opponent everytime without being hit with most characters, almost a cheat in itself. All you do is do small jumping attacks at the enemy and once you've jumped behind them, turn and whack them in the back. But don't knock them down, just hit a few times then stop, and repeat. The enemy never fights back and therefore dies very quickly and easily, this can be done with almost every character in the game, even slow ones and can put any enemy to death without taking a hit I can't think of a single good reason for this feature at all. It just makes the game even easier, and since you can cheat and win everytime, it just makes a mockery of the overall game engine. In Dynasty Warriors 4 you gained weapon experience by fighting bosses to charge up your weapon, you can't appear to find weapons. The fun thing about finding weapons in the previous two Dynasty Warriors is that they had random statistics added to them. So you can almost customise your character slightly. Keep the weapon that had the parameters/skills you liked the most. You can't even equip old weapons, incase you wanted a challenge of only using 4 hits on a particular level. And you can't even get weapons or items for bodyguards anymore. Another step backwards in my opinion. It was possible to find better weapons for Ma Chao and Jiang Wei by finding new weapons. I also liked to choose low hit weapons when I am playing on a 2 player with a playing who is using a new character, never used before. Because otherwise one player is so strong that they end up getting all the experience and leaving the other player behind. Which makes the game kind of dull for both players. One getting too much action and the other winning battles with ease. The linear weapon experience provides the game with a very effective but unfortunately very dull experience. The fact that levelling up each character ALWAYS gives you the same stats makes there nothing to look forward to finding. There is pretty no much no reason to ever use a character again once they have full experience in weapon and rank. And only being able to find your best weapon when you are on full weapon exp, what is the point in that? It was better on DW3 being able to get any weapon anytime, therefore you could pick it up on your way to completing the character in the first place. The game isn't particularly that hard either, even on the hardest setting. And hard is the hardest setting, there is no very hard mode like on Extreme Legends. So you may find yourself not breaking into too much of a sweat. It's even possible to complete some of the tougher levels with a character you've never used before. Even the last level isn't too challenging. On some levels the colours looks better on Dynasty Warriors 3. Especially the Yellow Turban Rebellion levels. The colours often look really drab. And the menus, especially the map screen, they're really dark and black. They look terrible. Why have these graphics been made worse? Similar to the weapon problem, but why are the items in levels and not in numbers. How much health does a Level 7 HP UP give you for example? It doesn't even show you how much extra attack or health you get when you equip. Why? I also felt that the elements that were attached to your weapons should have been activated during Musuo and not charge moves. I mean, I barely use my Musuo anymore. I sometimes never use it because you can do more effective damage by using your normal attacks. It seems exciting at first, unlock 6 costumes in total for each character. WOW GREAT! Well first of all there are a maximum of 3. Just a different colour in each. The final two are just the original costumes in Dynasty Warriors 3 and with some characters 2 of them are so patronisingly similar. Thankfully the last two are there because I've found with that almost all the characters, their costumes on Dynasty Warriors 3 were better. So for some characters it feels like they just have one costume. Huang Gai for example, his 3rd and 4th look just like his 1st and 2nd. I had to stare closely to figure out what was different, a single shoulder pad. I'll really notice that in battle. Whilst others such as Lu Meng, Zhou Yu and Zhao Yun are exactly the same but with a slightly different hairstyle or hat. Most of the starting costumes look stupid. Dong Zhuo for example looks like a performing clown. Whilst Zhang Liao, Meng Huo and Zhu Rong are participating in the silly hat contest. There are a couple though like Cao Cao, Xiahou Dun and Zhuge Liang who look better. What I believe Koei should have done was to keep the Dynasty Warriors 3 costumes as the starting ones and then have the other 4 costumes as unlockable costumes. Because the since the second 2 are practically the same as the first 2 and the final two are just the original costumes, it doesn't really give you that much incentive to get all of the costumes with each character. The music on the whole is just as good as the previous versions, it's an all new line up of tunes. Some are just brilliant, some if new better than the previous versions. There are also some more oriental sounding tracks adding to the action. However some are just really really terrible and don't go well with the game at all. The duel music is the worst, it's just so repetitive and the music for the Nanman stages is just as bad, except of course you have it for the duration of the level, instead of just for a minute like you do with the duel music. Very repetitive and annoying. And then there is the Yellow Turban Rebellion, one of my favourite tunes on the other versions. However this time they have replaced it with an ambience style tune with a lady badly trying to sing in harmony. The Hu Lao Gate also suffers as well, not in the symphony itself, but in one instrument that sounds exactly like the instrument used in the Mars Attack film. I'm sure you know the one I mean. What was wrong with the original voice actors? Most of the new ones are not really that great. I still think the voices of Lu Bu, Zhao Yun and Zhou Yu were best on Dynasty Warriors 2. But why change them from Dynasty Warriors 3 and Extreme Legends. They were find as they were. With only 1 ending per army. And 4 extras. You don't need to finish with everyone anymore. Which is a bit of a shame. So combined with the weapon system, you may yourself not needing too or wanting to finish the game with everyone. And lastly, Double Musuo! Why is it so crap, not only in how it looks but also in its effectiveness? ============================================================= 6.0 IDEAS THAT I THINK SHOULD BE ADDED TO THE NEXT GAME The final section contains some stuff that I think would be great additions to the Dynasty Warriors series. It would be nice of someone at Koei would happen to come across this FAQ and maybe take some of these into consideration. _____________________________________________________________ 6.1 KINGDOM LEADERS CHOOSE SUB BOSSES I've noticed that on Dynasty Warriors 4 during the Yellow Turban Rebellion and Hu Lao gate sagas that the two sub generals in each of the 3 kingdoms are completely random. Depending on which characters you have unlocked. There are other levels though that are similar, such as the Nanman sub bosses. What I think would be a great idea is that when you are equipping all your items and changing bodyguards there should be an extra menu added. If you choose Liu Bei, Cao Cao or Sun Jian (Could be for any character really, or an unlockable feature maybe) you could choose which two sub generals you would like in your team. It'd be great for the players to be able to choose which characters they would like to accompany them on the level. I also feel that this would be an easy feature to implement as it would not affect the ingame processing, just the setup of the level before the stage starts. _____________________________________________________________ 6.2 PRESS SELECT TO INSTRUCT GENERALS Although the select button is used for changing the commands of bodyguards. I think it'd be great if you could press select next to a stationary allied officer to make them get off their horse for you to have. I've often wanted them to get off their horse so I could get somewhere quicker. What a cool feature it would be to be able to give instructions to bosses like this, you could also make it so Lu Bu refuses. I don't really want to have to blow them off their horses with Huang Gai's bombs all the time. And that's just a solution for one character only. _____________________________________________________________ 6.3 R3 MENU I don't think the R3 button used to announce yourself it isn't effective at all. I also confused it with being able to summon up a duel. Which of course is not the case. Instead I feel it should, when pressed and held down, display all the generals in the entire level in text format. How much health each general has and what their morale is. It should also remove all units from the large map except sub bosses so you know where all the bosses. This is so you don't have to keep pausing the game and going into all the menus to check out this info. If you had a simple drop down menu during a 2 player game this would stop having to keep pausing the game and checking things all the time. It can get a bit tedious when the other player keeps pausing the game to check out something, getting this information in real time would be great. This would improve the overall flow of the game and not make it into a stop and start affair. The menu could maybe even display what the health is of all the allied bosses and sub bosses and have ???? bars next to the enemy generals. I'd also like to see the number of total ko of each general too. If anything it'd at least give the player something to read whilst they were on those long tedious horse treks/walks up to the next battle. _____________________________________________________________ 6.4 TAKE OUT AUTO AIM Yes, auto aim. That feature where the game decides who you should be aiming for. It always messes up my combos. The number of times I've had 15 hits on a dead guy and then auto aim takes over. It starts to turn me around to fight some other person who is nowhere near me, thus ruining my combo. Or 7 hits on a gate captain when one of the gate captain's body guards try to attack me. Surely the fact I'm holding directly up on the analogue stick should be a clear indication to the game that I want to be moving up, not to start turning left, I'm pressing up, not left. It should be like during a Musuo, you're free to go wherever you want, or at least the feature to turn auto aim off would be nice. But as soon as you hit someone, that's it, you have to carry on hitting that person only. You can't change direction, which is a shame. It's maybe best for people using the direction pad as it substitutes for the lack of 360 motion like on the analogue stick since the direction pad only has 8 directions. But surely some sort of check could be made to see if the player is using the analogue stick or not. This is probably the biggest gameplay gripe I have, I feel like the game is playing for me when auto aim takes over. Or a feature to turn auto aim off. _____________________________________________________________ 6.5 A FEATURE TO DIABLE DUELS What else can I say? An on and off feature in the general options would be nice, next to turning the events on and off. I also think you should be able to press R3 to escape or surrender in a duel, instead of having to run in circles until the time runs out. Although I wouldn't be too upset if duels were taken out altogether to be honest. _____________________________________________________________ 6.6 MORE INFO I feel that a bit more info should be displayed at the end of the stage. For example I feel that the number of kills for every general in the battle should be shown. Just like on Dynasty Warriors 2, I'd find that an interesting static to read, also how many losses (total kills) were suffered on each side would be good as well. _____________________________________________________________ 6.7 A BETTER SURVIVAL CHALLENGE I think a better survival would be exactly that, survival. Not survival where you have to run around the map. Similar to the balancing act stage, instead of being on a platform you should be in a square room with 4 entrances and respawn points at each end that you cannot seal. That would be it, the highest number of kills in one energy bar and 90 minute time limit would be the top score. The troops/bosses/flame erupting carts should always be spawned in exactly the same order so a feeling of true progress can be achieved. I also feel like this should be a 2 player mode as well, a highscore for 2 player games and one for 1 player games. This would be an incredible feature in my opinion. No strategy, just pure action and survival skills, one for the true die hard fanatics. Maybe even a highscore internet ranking password too could be added? Classic :) _____________________________________________________________ 6.8 GENERAL BODYGUARD No, a general as a bodyguard, not a general bodyguard. I liked the feature of having a general as a bodyguard on Extreme Legends. But this feature was almost useless since you could only use it on a 1 player game and free mode. I've noticed the same behaviour is also present in Dynasty Warriors 4, such as in Lu Bu's revolt where if you are not Lu Bu, Lu Bu follows you around religiously like a bodyguard does, even on a 2 player game, so surely this feature could be added to the next game, and also allow it to work during Musuo modes and 2 player modes as well. There should also be more ways to customise your bodyguards than just choosing a colour. More faces, legs, arms, hairstyles for the create a general mode would be great as well. _____________________________________________________________ 6.9 SUB GENERAL SPEECH When you're playing and you kill a general or get 50/100 etc kills. You're often congratulated by other generals, the same when you encounter in person generals that are on your team. But why isn't this the case with sub generals? If all your generals die except for the main general then only he speaks to you. It's worse when you are the leader because there is no speech at all ever again. I feel that sub generals should also speak up and have their say at the relevant moment. Such as during the Yellow Turban Rebellion and Hu Lao Gate where there can in Dynasty Warriors 4 be a whole ton of other generals that could congratulate you, in each of the main three kingdoms. Although I have noticed in Dynasty Warriors 4 that character bosses in general say something to you as you walk past them. _____________________________________________________________ 6.10 4 PLAYER MODE USING TWO PS2 UNITS Split screen between two PS2 units. 2 playing on each, that'd be incredible...........well...........I can dream ;) ============================================================= ================== 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/ ============================================================= ============================STOP============================= =============================================================