I had a free evening and wanted to look into a new patch so I decided to install it. In this post I'll try to give my expressions about cRPG after a break, I hope they'll be used to improve the mod. This post will contain positive and negative conclusions I made after playing it.
1. I didn't have either warband or cRPG files on my PC so I had to download it. I downloaded Warband through TW website (shitty downloading speed from there, took 20 minutes to download ~600 mb file) and then downloaded launcher. And here comes the trouble. If I were a new player I would just give up. Launcher tried to download files and it got stopped several times because of downloading mirrors with several errors. Basically it was downloading to a some certain percentage stopping at some files and refusing to download further. Sometimes these files just required 10 minutes to find a mirror again but some just refused to finish the download even after an hour ending up in failed download. What was more frustrating is that launcher didn't actually download files to a folder of mod so you couldn't continue after a failed attempt. I took numerous attempts to download it during more than 6 hours. I also failed to find any links where I could download the mod without a launcher. So I ended up in asking Tyr to upload his mod folder so I can download it and put manually. After I did it - it started to work properly. Maybe it's fixed already and this problem was just temporary but it pissed me off hard.
2. Class balance seems to be changed a lot. I saw that xbowmen population got reduced (maybe 2-3 per 30 man team), there were actually more horse xbomen than foot. I guess it's somehow connected to the str requirements being changed. The amount of archers is the same. The amount of throwers just went to double or even tripple (equal to the amount of archers), the amount of horse ranged got reduced a little bit, longspear/pike users simply disappeared.
3. Throwers. It looked to me that throwers became an uber class that has no counters on the battle server. Buff of melee mode of throwing weapons was a completely wrong idea in my opinion. Also they seem to be very accurate (much more than they should be). The one who suggested such changes made a mistake, thumbs down for that.
4. All polearms stopping horses. I've read somewhere that you can't rear a horse with a glance anymore but all polearms now can rear with a thrust. To sum up: I didn't like it, even a peasant can rear an armored horse now. The idea might have been good but the realisation is horrible. Very creepy with bardich kind weapons. Also bump damage is kinda strange.
5. Onehanded animation. Seems like thrust didn't get fixed and it is still very easy to land pointblank lolstabs. In addition to the new right swing animation I would say that it was better than it is now. If it was tweaked it would be much better than before though, but nobody did it with thrust at least.
6. Flags with 5 people left. Overall a terrific idea. Especially annoying when you only have 10 players in your team and flags appear almost instantly. Also they spawn in bad places. Also sometimes they spawn right after the round start. Sometimes they don't finish the round at all. Sometimes you can see indicators of flags under the ground so you know where they will spawn. Very glitchy mechanic that kills diversity. When in the past I could win a round alone versus multiple enemies now it doesn't seem to be possible because they will just cap the flag that is in the other part of the map and that's it. Also a lot of people just ignore these flags and so on. I don't even understand why this mechanic got added (horse ranged?). Very bad idea, horrible realisation. Thumbs down.
7. A lot of new armours and new weapons. And also they look cool. Thumbs up! 8-)
8. Bad map rotation, newly added maps are mostly bad. It would be much better if maps were set according to server population.
9. Weather and day/night time still didn't get fix. Played 3 maps with rain in a row.
10. Population got dropped to ~50%. Good indicator that things don't go well. cRPG has no rivals so it only indicates that people quit the game, not just move to a better mod/game.
I didn't try xbows/archery, because I think they're all the same. Overall I can't say that mod became better. One frustrating thing got replaced by another. Game balancing team seems to do strange decisions. I don't want to sound negative but I didn't like the game that I played. There are still a lot of weapons that are just obviously OP and people tend to abuse them. I uninstalled the game in the same night as servers simply became empty.