Vinay's AI Patch
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FishBowlMan
Club Cricketer
AI Patch: Vinay's WCC Patch V 1
Reviewer: John / FishBowlMan
Date: 020406
Review Category: Test match batting
Rating: 5/10
Summary:
If you like powerful test match batting with plenty of boundaries then you will enjoy this patch. Runs are easy to score and shot timing is not very important. There are 4 difficulty levels provided, but to be honest, none of them are particularly demanding. Green pitches are tricky though. They seam and give up plenty of edges, but I think several records will be broken on the other tracks.
The patchmaker has stated in his thread that he has only concentrated on the batting. If you like to bowl, you will be facing a long, low-scoring struggle. However, the autoplay is excellent. The CPU will set competetive totals on all wickets - scoring at around 3 an over.
The highlight for me is the backfoot leg glance. All shot timings for this stroke hit safe, powerful shots, but by deliberately hitting early or late, you can control the placement superbly.
This patch contains an up to date roster with some player stats edited to reflect player abilities more accurately (although it appears that James Anderson has suddenly learnt how to bat
). (Note: only the international teams have been edited in this way). Also provided is a set of fields. These are by and large a good improvement on the default fields that come with the game.
I have a feeling this may be more suited to the 1-day game, so if you're after a real test match challenge, I would suggest trying another patch. If you want to fire up the game for a run-fest though, you will enjoy this one. And you've got to try out that leg glance...
Detailed Review:
Roster:
An updated roster has been provided with this patch. It seems a good representation of current international squads.
Stamina has been reduced to virtually nil, but only for the main bowlers. Fielder's throwing accuracy has also been reduced. Changes are only to international teams. Take care if you're playing a tour as e.g. Essex is rated higher than Australia! Why can't this be true in real life?
Bounce & Outfield settings:
There is an obvious difference between the bounce on the different pitch types, which is good. Possibly the dusty pitch is slightly too bouncy as bouncers consistently go above head height. Maybe the outfields for the hard and dusty pitches are slightly too fast. Everything, and I mean everything that beats the infield or finds any sort of gap races to the boundary.
Every pitch type has a kind of "glide feel" to it. There is no real feeling of the ball slowing on any outfields. It feels like the ball rockets off the bat, slows down to the appropriate field speed when it leaves the close infield, and then maintains that speed up to the fence. It feels just a tad unrealistic.
Autoplay:
I autoplayed 6 complete test matches using World Class Mode - the most difficult of the files. The findings are very good indeed. England vs Australia on a hard wicket produced 3 highscoring draws. Scores ranged from 234 all out (followed by 544 / 6 declared after the follow-on had been enforced), to 706 / 2 declared.
Eng vs Aus on a green wicket yielded an Australian win with scores in the region of 300 for both sides.
India / Pakistan on a dusty track was a draw. Scores were between 400 & 700.
SA vs USA was a comprehensive SA win. 470 / 6 was replied to with 145 all out and 284 all out with the follow on.
In all games, each side scored at between 2.5 and 3.3 runs per over, which is an excellent result for an autoplayed test match innings. There appears to be a weighting in favour of the higher ranked team. This is also good. As shown, closely matched teams (statistically) had close games, wheras SA would expect to thump USA.
Field settings:
There are some nice fields in this package. The aggressive fields are excellent - a big improvement over the default ones. The fields for the spinners are also good. The only let down for me is the lack of a square leg fielder on a couple of the fast attacking fields. There is a huge gap between mid on and fine leg making it very easy to hit singles and boundaries using the leg glance. These fields are the ones the CPU chose when I was batting. This may be deliberate as the patchmaker stated in his thread that this was meant as a fun, batting patch.
Strokes:
These were tested using World Class Mode - the most difficult of the files.
The first thing I noticed was there was very little "risk / reward" to all the normal drive strokes, with one exception. Play slightly early on the front foot on drive and the ball may spoon at catchable height to mid on. Mistime the other shots, and the ball stays on the ground with some varying direction and slightly different pace. Normal drives will generally not pierce the in-field. The "6 hit" back drive is another story. Unless you are unlucky enough to hit the other batsman, bowler, the other stumps, (these 3 happen on a regular basis), or pick out a fielder, we have a guarenteed 4 every time. All along the ground like a rocket. There is minimal random direction on the individual shots (note: there are 3 animations for normal front straight drive. Each follow 3 pretty distinct paths) but has the feeling of running down distinct lanes.
The 6 hit drives have a very low trajectory. The on-drive may loft to mid on if you hit it really early, but otherwise they barely reach 8 ft above the ground and bounce close to the rope for 4 runs (unless you hit directly at a fielder).
Advance drives are good - I hit my only 6 with an advance "6 hit" on drive. Nice height on these, but again, minimal variation in direction.
With no square leg fielder in place, the front foot leg glance is a favourite run scoring shot. There is a bit more direction range here, but again - very fast and along the ground no matter what the timing. My favourite stroke in this patch is the backfoot leg glance. Timing is not an issue in terms of power or risk of being caught, but timing late, early or "correctly" will send the ball in different directions allowing you to choose where you place the ball. If you want to hit it to fine leg, play it early. If you want square leg, play it late. Good fun!
Hooks, pulls, square drives and cuts are hard to play. This is mainly due to the cpu shot adjustment (or lack thereof) with respect to the height of the ball. If you're like me, you'll miss 80% of these. Bizarrely, the 6-hit versions of these are easier to hit than the normal shots. I have no answer to this as it happens on the majority of patches I've played as well as the default setup). Placement and power on these shots is very good, but again there is little risk of mis-timing.
The sweep is easy to play against the spinners - again, timing is not really an issue unless you really mess it up when there is a good looping "top edge".
Gameplay:
Vinay has mentioned in his thread that he has only concentrated on the batting side of the patch. Therefore, I have not reviewed the bowling as that would be unfair.
There are 4 levels of difficulty depending on which config file is loaded into the C2K5 root directory. Having studied the config files, the main differences are the level of batting difficulty, stroke difficulty, batsman adjustment, and quantity of edges. I am only reviewing the World Class mode here as the others are really just slightly easier versions of this one. As I mentioned in the shot descriptions, timing is not an issue with this patch on any of the difficulty levels.
Test Batting. World Class Mode. Hard pitch. Sunny conditions. Hot. England (me) vs Australia (CPU) at The Oval.
Its a test match! Therefore I generally bat accordingly - defend the good balls, try and punish the bad balls and leave the rest. The write up advises playing with caution, so I was disappointed to bring up my opening wicket 100 partnership after 15 overs. Leg glances raced to the boundary. Normal drives trickled to the infield so I experimented with the backfoot straight drive "6 hit". Not a single edge here no matter how badly (deliberately) I timed it. At no time did I feel threatened that I was going to lose a wicket. The closest I came was when I started experimenting with bizarre shots - trying to hit pull shots to pitched up balls - standing 3 feet outside leg stump to try and play cuts etc.
The CPU bowlers will bowl a good line virtually every ball - hence mucking about on the crease trying to hit different shots.
Essentially, playing "correctly" (with the leg glance exception) gets you nowhere, and attacking shots are easy to hit with very little risk. I did lose wickets, but only because I was trying advance slogs.
Test Batting. World Class Mode. Green pitch. Overcast conditions. Cool. England (me) vs Australia (CPU) at Lords.
Now this is a challenge. Plenty of edges flying around here. You really do need to play well to set a good score on the green wicket. Leg glances and byes are your best friends here. Again, a very quick outfield, so whatever you do lay bat on can get you runs, but you really have to pay attention to the ball movement if you want to play aggressively. Patience is the key here.
Test Batting. World Class Mode. Dusty pitch. Sunny conditions. Humid. India (me) vs Pakistan (CPU) at Faisalabad.
Pretty similar to the hard wicket this one, but with a slightly faster outfield. There is some vicious spin here. Again, nothing really threatening. I foundthat the shots I connected with, I hit cleanly (drives, glances, sweeps). I did miss a few, but the ball either spun way past the stumps, or back into my pads. Even playing against the spin caused no edges, and no mis-timed strokes.
I briefly tried normal mode, finding it to be very similar to hard but with fractionally less bounce. A wet pitch gave low bounce, but again the outfield speed was very high.
Suggestions:
A few lines of feedback for Vinay. Please note these are purely here to give you some ideas. Do not feel obliged to use anything if you do not want to include them in your next release.
1: Maybe the next release could contain different field settings to be used for each difficulty level.
2: More variety in the outfield pacings.
3: More edges on pitches other than green.
4: I would like to see more "randomness" in the stroke directions - I hit 3 advance cover drive 6 hits for 4 runs. All followed exactly the same path on the spider diagram.
5: I think there are 2 possible directions this patch can go in. EITHER: make the early and late timed shots have a bit less power and more elevation to have more chance of giving a catch to a mis-timed shot. OR: Apply what you have done with the backfoot leg glance shots to the other strokes. i.e. make the timing of the shot purely relate to the placement of the shot. You could make the "really early / really late" timings give chances to fielders, but have, essentially, 3 different shots you can play for each combination of keyboard / joystick presses. You could also perhaps incorporate different power in these as well. e.g. play it early pushes for a single. Play it on "correct" time is a boundary hit. Play it late and you play it squarer / finer. This second one could make for a very interesting patch indeed.
All comments and suggestions here are purely my views and the patch was reviewed without prejudice.
I wish you all the best for your next release and I am looking forward to a bowling patch in your next version.
John.
Download this patch here
View Vinay's patch thread here
Reviewer: John / FishBowlMan
Date: 020406
Review Category: Test match batting
Rating: 5/10
Summary:
If you like powerful test match batting with plenty of boundaries then you will enjoy this patch. Runs are easy to score and shot timing is not very important. There are 4 difficulty levels provided, but to be honest, none of them are particularly demanding. Green pitches are tricky though. They seam and give up plenty of edges, but I think several records will be broken on the other tracks.
The patchmaker has stated in his thread that he has only concentrated on the batting. If you like to bowl, you will be facing a long, low-scoring struggle. However, the autoplay is excellent. The CPU will set competetive totals on all wickets - scoring at around 3 an over.
The highlight for me is the backfoot leg glance. All shot timings for this stroke hit safe, powerful shots, but by deliberately hitting early or late, you can control the placement superbly.
This patch contains an up to date roster with some player stats edited to reflect player abilities more accurately (although it appears that James Anderson has suddenly learnt how to bat
). (Note: only the international teams have been edited in this way). Also provided is a set of fields. These are by and large a good improvement on the default fields that come with the game.I have a feeling this may be more suited to the 1-day game, so if you're after a real test match challenge, I would suggest trying another patch. If you want to fire up the game for a run-fest though, you will enjoy this one. And you've got to try out that leg glance...
Detailed Review:
Roster:
An updated roster has been provided with this patch. It seems a good representation of current international squads.
Stamina has been reduced to virtually nil, but only for the main bowlers. Fielder's throwing accuracy has also been reduced. Changes are only to international teams. Take care if you're playing a tour as e.g. Essex is rated higher than Australia! Why can't this be true in real life?
Bounce & Outfield settings:
There is an obvious difference between the bounce on the different pitch types, which is good. Possibly the dusty pitch is slightly too bouncy as bouncers consistently go above head height. Maybe the outfields for the hard and dusty pitches are slightly too fast. Everything, and I mean everything that beats the infield or finds any sort of gap races to the boundary.
Every pitch type has a kind of "glide feel" to it. There is no real feeling of the ball slowing on any outfields. It feels like the ball rockets off the bat, slows down to the appropriate field speed when it leaves the close infield, and then maintains that speed up to the fence. It feels just a tad unrealistic.
Autoplay:
I autoplayed 6 complete test matches using World Class Mode - the most difficult of the files. The findings are very good indeed. England vs Australia on a hard wicket produced 3 highscoring draws. Scores ranged from 234 all out (followed by 544 / 6 declared after the follow-on had been enforced), to 706 / 2 declared.
Eng vs Aus on a green wicket yielded an Australian win with scores in the region of 300 for both sides.
India / Pakistan on a dusty track was a draw. Scores were between 400 & 700.
SA vs USA was a comprehensive SA win. 470 / 6 was replied to with 145 all out and 284 all out with the follow on.
In all games, each side scored at between 2.5 and 3.3 runs per over, which is an excellent result for an autoplayed test match innings. There appears to be a weighting in favour of the higher ranked team. This is also good. As shown, closely matched teams (statistically) had close games, wheras SA would expect to thump USA.
Field settings:
There are some nice fields in this package. The aggressive fields are excellent - a big improvement over the default ones. The fields for the spinners are also good. The only let down for me is the lack of a square leg fielder on a couple of the fast attacking fields. There is a huge gap between mid on and fine leg making it very easy to hit singles and boundaries using the leg glance. These fields are the ones the CPU chose when I was batting. This may be deliberate as the patchmaker stated in his thread that this was meant as a fun, batting patch.
Strokes:
These were tested using World Class Mode - the most difficult of the files.
The first thing I noticed was there was very little "risk / reward" to all the normal drive strokes, with one exception. Play slightly early on the front foot on drive and the ball may spoon at catchable height to mid on. Mistime the other shots, and the ball stays on the ground with some varying direction and slightly different pace. Normal drives will generally not pierce the in-field. The "6 hit" back drive is another story. Unless you are unlucky enough to hit the other batsman, bowler, the other stumps, (these 3 happen on a regular basis), or pick out a fielder, we have a guarenteed 4 every time. All along the ground like a rocket. There is minimal random direction on the individual shots (note: there are 3 animations for normal front straight drive. Each follow 3 pretty distinct paths) but has the feeling of running down distinct lanes.
The 6 hit drives have a very low trajectory. The on-drive may loft to mid on if you hit it really early, but otherwise they barely reach 8 ft above the ground and bounce close to the rope for 4 runs (unless you hit directly at a fielder).
Advance drives are good - I hit my only 6 with an advance "6 hit" on drive. Nice height on these, but again, minimal variation in direction.
With no square leg fielder in place, the front foot leg glance is a favourite run scoring shot. There is a bit more direction range here, but again - very fast and along the ground no matter what the timing. My favourite stroke in this patch is the backfoot leg glance. Timing is not an issue in terms of power or risk of being caught, but timing late, early or "correctly" will send the ball in different directions allowing you to choose where you place the ball. If you want to hit it to fine leg, play it early. If you want square leg, play it late. Good fun!
Hooks, pulls, square drives and cuts are hard to play. This is mainly due to the cpu shot adjustment (or lack thereof) with respect to the height of the ball. If you're like me, you'll miss 80% of these. Bizarrely, the 6-hit versions of these are easier to hit than the normal shots. I have no answer to this as it happens on the majority of patches I've played as well as the default setup). Placement and power on these shots is very good, but again there is little risk of mis-timing.
The sweep is easy to play against the spinners - again, timing is not really an issue unless you really mess it up when there is a good looping "top edge".
Gameplay:
Vinay has mentioned in his thread that he has only concentrated on the batting side of the patch. Therefore, I have not reviewed the bowling as that would be unfair.
There are 4 levels of difficulty depending on which config file is loaded into the C2K5 root directory. Having studied the config files, the main differences are the level of batting difficulty, stroke difficulty, batsman adjustment, and quantity of edges. I am only reviewing the World Class mode here as the others are really just slightly easier versions of this one. As I mentioned in the shot descriptions, timing is not an issue with this patch on any of the difficulty levels.
Test Batting. World Class Mode. Hard pitch. Sunny conditions. Hot. England (me) vs Australia (CPU) at The Oval.
Its a test match! Therefore I generally bat accordingly - defend the good balls, try and punish the bad balls and leave the rest. The write up advises playing with caution, so I was disappointed to bring up my opening wicket 100 partnership after 15 overs. Leg glances raced to the boundary. Normal drives trickled to the infield so I experimented with the backfoot straight drive "6 hit". Not a single edge here no matter how badly (deliberately) I timed it. At no time did I feel threatened that I was going to lose a wicket. The closest I came was when I started experimenting with bizarre shots - trying to hit pull shots to pitched up balls - standing 3 feet outside leg stump to try and play cuts etc.
The CPU bowlers will bowl a good line virtually every ball - hence mucking about on the crease trying to hit different shots.
Essentially, playing "correctly" (with the leg glance exception) gets you nowhere, and attacking shots are easy to hit with very little risk. I did lose wickets, but only because I was trying advance slogs.
Test Batting. World Class Mode. Green pitch. Overcast conditions. Cool. England (me) vs Australia (CPU) at Lords.
Now this is a challenge. Plenty of edges flying around here. You really do need to play well to set a good score on the green wicket. Leg glances and byes are your best friends here. Again, a very quick outfield, so whatever you do lay bat on can get you runs, but you really have to pay attention to the ball movement if you want to play aggressively. Patience is the key here.
Test Batting. World Class Mode. Dusty pitch. Sunny conditions. Humid. India (me) vs Pakistan (CPU) at Faisalabad.
Pretty similar to the hard wicket this one, but with a slightly faster outfield. There is some vicious spin here. Again, nothing really threatening. I foundthat the shots I connected with, I hit cleanly (drives, glances, sweeps). I did miss a few, but the ball either spun way past the stumps, or back into my pads. Even playing against the spin caused no edges, and no mis-timed strokes.
I briefly tried normal mode, finding it to be very similar to hard but with fractionally less bounce. A wet pitch gave low bounce, but again the outfield speed was very high.
Suggestions:
A few lines of feedback for Vinay. Please note these are purely here to give you some ideas. Do not feel obliged to use anything if you do not want to include them in your next release.
1: Maybe the next release could contain different field settings to be used for each difficulty level.
2: More variety in the outfield pacings.
3: More edges on pitches other than green.
4: I would like to see more "randomness" in the stroke directions - I hit 3 advance cover drive 6 hits for 4 runs. All followed exactly the same path on the spider diagram.
5: I think there are 2 possible directions this patch can go in. EITHER: make the early and late timed shots have a bit less power and more elevation to have more chance of giving a catch to a mis-timed shot. OR: Apply what you have done with the backfoot leg glance shots to the other strokes. i.e. make the timing of the shot purely relate to the placement of the shot. You could make the "really early / really late" timings give chances to fielders, but have, essentially, 3 different shots you can play for each combination of keyboard / joystick presses. You could also perhaps incorporate different power in these as well. e.g. play it early pushes for a single. Play it on "correct" time is a boundary hit. Play it late and you play it squarer / finer. This second one could make for a very interesting patch indeed.
All comments and suggestions here are purely my views and the patch was reviewed without prejudice.
I wish you all the best for your next release and I am looking forward to a bowling patch in your next version.
John.
Download this patch here
View Vinay's patch thread here
Last edited:
sid_19840
International Coach
Vinays WCC V1 Patch
Review On: ODI Bowling + ODI Batting
Patch Rating 1: Decent
Patch Rating 2: 8.5/10
Main Patch Review
I think that this patch has succeeded on what it has been told to do by the patch maker. It has definatetly made batting a whole lot easier I found shots easy to time as it had been stated. Shots were definitely tweaked to perfection, timing for most shots is the same besides the pulls and hooks although I have found myself using them shots much more with this patch, before I would just duck and let it go but this patch has allowed me to use all the shots in the book. For a change it felt nice to be able to score freely and in style not just slogging. Also another good feature about this patch is the four game play setting they are pretty handy to use I have only tried Semi-Pro and Pro which I did notice a difference in. With Semi-Pro its not that difficult to time the shots in fact its pretty easy which is good according to the difficulty, with Pro its a touch harder to time the shots to perfection most of the time if you don?t time it correctly it makes the mistimed sound and will not go for four, but it is still a joy to bat with I am currently using it to lot. I will not make many comments on bowling side of the patch because it is not aimed at it so I will leave that for now although the cpu give u a hard time, very difficult to dismiss.
Suggestions
I think this patch has been fine tuned carefully but some shots need a touch more work done on them for example if your trying to play a BF On Drive to make it go for six it will not it will just go very fast along the ground for four almost each time you try, same happens with the BF Cover Drives. I think the straight drives need more power and bounce they should be like the ones in boss's patch. It is also a bit too easy to score runs seeing it?s a one dayer but that can be improved most of these are very minor flaws.
Conclusion
I recommend this patch to everyone it has worked wonders for me (I can finally play Bf cover drives which go for 4 lol) and I guarantee you guys will love it. This patch has done exactly what the patch maker has said and that was to make batting easier that?s why it is so good and I have got many complaints about it because it has done exactly what its meant to do, so guys I highly recommend this patch give it a try. Here is the link to Vinays own thread where u can locate this patch
Reviewer: Punk Sk8r
Review On: ODI Bowling + ODI Batting
Patch Rating 1: Decent
Patch Rating 2: 8.5/10
Main Patch Review
I think that this patch has succeeded on what it has been told to do by the patch maker. It has definatetly made batting a whole lot easier I found shots easy to time as it had been stated. Shots were definitely tweaked to perfection, timing for most shots is the same besides the pulls and hooks although I have found myself using them shots much more with this patch, before I would just duck and let it go but this patch has allowed me to use all the shots in the book. For a change it felt nice to be able to score freely and in style not just slogging. Also another good feature about this patch is the four game play setting they are pretty handy to use I have only tried Semi-Pro and Pro which I did notice a difference in. With Semi-Pro its not that difficult to time the shots in fact its pretty easy which is good according to the difficulty, with Pro its a touch harder to time the shots to perfection most of the time if you don?t time it correctly it makes the mistimed sound and will not go for four, but it is still a joy to bat with I am currently using it to lot. I will not make many comments on bowling side of the patch because it is not aimed at it so I will leave that for now although the cpu give u a hard time, very difficult to dismiss.
Suggestions
I think this patch has been fine tuned carefully but some shots need a touch more work done on them for example if your trying to play a BF On Drive to make it go for six it will not it will just go very fast along the ground for four almost each time you try, same happens with the BF Cover Drives. I think the straight drives need more power and bounce they should be like the ones in boss's patch. It is also a bit too easy to score runs seeing it?s a one dayer but that can be improved most of these are very minor flaws.
Conclusion
I recommend this patch to everyone it has worked wonders for me (I can finally play Bf cover drives which go for 4 lol) and I guarantee you guys will love it. This patch has done exactly what the patch maker has said and that was to make batting easier that?s why it is so good and I have got many complaints about it because it has done exactly what its meant to do, so guys I highly recommend this patch give it a try. Here is the link to Vinays own thread where u can locate this patch
Reviewer: Punk Sk8r
