I hate patches that gimp my games.

shortylickens

No Lifer
Jul 15, 2003
80,287
17,082
136
This is a serious problem with Dawn Of War 1 and its expansions. The patches re-balance everything and I dont care for it. For Space Marines you can only have one each of terminators and assault terminators. Same with powerful vehicles. They changed the population points each vehicle uses so now some weaker ones cant be built in mass numbers.

For Tau the kick ass broadside battle team has been reduced from 3 units to 1 unit. Thats not much of a team.

And my games are on Steam so theres no way to undo the patches. Not cool.

Anyone else had gameplay altered with a patch to the point they didnt like playing as much?
 

CP5670

Diamond Member
Jun 24, 2004
5,670
770
126
The last time I saw this was in C&C3 Kane's Wrath. The patches rebalanced a lot of stuff from the original game, mostly for the worse (and breaking the AI in the process), while still leaving most of the bugs in the original version unfixed.

I hardly ever use auto-patching in any program though, to avoid exactly these situations.
 

shortylickens

No Lifer
Jul 15, 2003
80,287
17,082
136
Which patch is that? I'll avoid it.

If you have the disc versions of each expansion, never patch them.
If you have the disc version of the original game, only do the first patch. In fact you will have to dig around to find just that one.

Downside: You can never play online, since that requires the latest versions. And if you use the Steam games, you are SOL, cuz it always gives you the latest version whether you like it or not. By the time they were made available to Steam they were already heavily patched.
 
Oct 25, 2006
11,036
11
91
If you have the disc versions of each expansion, never patch them.
If you have the disc version of the original game, only do the first patch. In fact you will have to dig around to find just that one.

Downside: You can never play online, since that requires the latest versions. And if you use the Steam games, you are SOL, cuz it always gives you the latest version whether you like it or not. By the time they were made available to Steam they were already heavily patched.

You can disable updating
 

shortylickens

No Lifer
Jul 15, 2003
80,287
17,082
136
You can disable updating

Like I said, by the time they were made available to Steam, they were already heavily updated.
If you got it off of Steam, you automatically have most of the latest patches.
There is no updating, or none that will take you over to the new balances. They are already there as soon as you have the game.
 

Arglebargle

Senior member
Dec 2, 2006
892
1
81
You can disable updating

My experiance, with the old Steam at least, is that every time Steam updates itself, it resets the disable updating flag to update automatically. If you didn't keep close watch it would do it whether you wanted it or not.
 

Zenoth

Diamond Member
Jan 29, 2005
5,202
216
106
This is a serious problem with Dawn Of War 1 and its expansions. The patches re-balance everything and I dont care for it. For Space Marines you can only have one each of terminators and assault terminators. Same with powerful vehicles. They changed the population points each vehicle uses so now some weaker ones cant be built in mass numbers.

For Tau the kick ass broadside battle team has been reduced from 3 units to 1 unit. Thats not much of a team.

And my games are on Steam so theres no way to undo the patches. Not cool.

Anyone else had gameplay altered with a patch to the point they didnt like playing as much?

Somewhat, indeed, it does change the status of the game. What I do remember the most is from Dark Crusade, because right now I play Soulstorm a lot with the unofficial patch (which applies after the official ones) and the Dawn of Skirmish A.I mod (for which I've been a tester since Winter Assault). In Dark Crusade, at first (if I recall correctly that was during its first few months after release) the medium/heavy vehicles/units cap limit was high enough that with the Space Marines one could build I believe either 4 or 5 Predators (and of course have them all at the same time on the battlefield), with the Tau we could get around 6 or 7 Krootox (and they were over-powered on top of that), and so on for all races.

Eventually they patched and re-balanced a good number of things, and the unit cap of two was imposed for specific unit types, such as Predators and the Krootox (can only have two of them at any given time). But on the other hand the Eldar's Wraithlord still isn't limited by that to this day, we can still build six of them, and if you control a Relic and train an Avatar your unit cap increases and allows you to build up to NINE Wraithlords (if of course no other vehicles than that are built), can you imagine not one but nine Warithlords moving towards your base. Instead they could have simply increased the efficiency and power of the Wraithlord for instance and then limit it to two or maybe four units at the very most.

There were a few inconsistencies over time with their patches, but overall I think it's still fun, I still prefer DoW1 over DoW2, I play it the most in skirmishes mostly, sometimes I go on-line with Dark Crusade because Soulstorm is pretty much dead (and so is DC as well to some extent but it's still a bit active especially during the week-ends). But your main question you've asked, about not playing a given game and not liking it as much because game-play was so much altered over time... I'm not sure, to be honest I've never really thought about it and I think it's usually fine, but if I do think about it right now there's a single title that comes in mind, and I can't recall any video game I've ever played in my life that was changed so much with updates after its release, and it's Team Fortress 2, although I still like it very much, it's certainly very, very, extremely different than what it was not only at release, but still much different than what it was even just a year ago.
 
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