Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

Hi, and welcome! 4 and 6 have been improved - routing mechanics were re-done, and AI now builds castles. It still won't fare against strategies that an average player with Dom2 experience doesn't stand a chance against, but it is more challenging, and builds castles (which alone improves late game a lot).
If by 5 you mean fliers and light cavalry, there still isn't a "harass enemy and stay out of reach" command.
1 and 3 aren't changed, but you can see damage numbers in combat with few different colors for very basic damage sources. As in Dom2, you can also right-click on any unit if you've paused the battle.
I don't know what you mean by 2. There are few battle inconsistencies, but they should be rare. Battle inconsistencies mean that the battle is replayed differently on different machines or differently during the hosting and the replay in-game. Have you patched Dom2 yet? Quite a many battle incosistency bugs were fixed with the various patches.

Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

Did you patch the gane? There were some combat inconsistencies in the early versions.

More detailed combat reports could be a good idea indeed.

The strategic AI has been improved in Dominions 3. It now builds castles and labs.

Oh, and welcome!

Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

Good to hear about 4 & 6.
By 5 I mainly meant spellcasters and multipurpose spellcasters/warriors, though I suppose it applies even better to high mobility units since it's harder (more like impossible) to "script" decent behavior out of those than casters or fighter/casters.
I suppose that's probably an improvement to battle playbacks, though I was actually complaining about the battle summary in the messages rather than the full playback.
For 2, I include a wide variety of... strange happenings... which I think are bugs, but I'm not entirely sure. Yeah, I patched to 2.16 as soon as I switched to the full game from the demo (ie before any of the observations that my current complaints are based upon). Here's the strangeness lumped under #2 that I saw happen in my most recent game, where I was Neifelheim on the Orania map against 16 "Difficult" AI players, playing on dom2 2.16 on win32.
2A. Around turn 50 or so, I couldn't find my prophet. My last recollection of him placed him underwater in Atlantis' capital (he was a Jotun Scout w/ a sea kings goblet). My temple conversion info screen said I had no prophet, but I didn't notice him die. I was never allowed to declare another prophet for the rest of the game (which ended on turn 162). Actually, I guess there's not necessarily any combat involved, so maybe this isn't properly under #2, but it's still under "bugs", most of which are vaguely combat related.
2B. A while later, I had a force of one Neifel Jarl SC and 400 Vine Ogres attacking a castle... I think it was a Man castle... after a while all of the VOs routed (actually dissolved) for a reason unknown to me. My impression is that mindless units are not supposed to route unless their commander dies. The SC continued attacking, but was killed. He appeared to have been killed by either a human militia man or a sea troll - they were the only units within range of him at the time of his death, but a fraction of a second before dieing he was at 70+ health, and by my understanding of the mechanics they should have had less than a 1 in a million chance of killing him (19 protection, 70+ hit points, 26 defense... vs the sea troll of 23 strength, -2 damage and 12 attack... the militia is even worse). I watched the battle several times watching the scrolling text for a spell that could be responsible for either the route or the SC death, but couldn't find anything. Save available.
2C. A while later, I attacked a province with 102 vampires and a few commanders. They were led by a VL w/ sea kings goblet & barrel of air. They attacked from the ocean. The vampires routed but the commanders won the battle anyway. It was within friendly dominion, and the battle summary said that they lived (well, that most lived, but I've found that the battle summary seems to often make up a few spurious deaths for no reason). The only adjacent friendly territory was the ocean province that I attacked from. So where did the routing vampires end up? Answer: nowhere, so far as I can tell. There were no vampires left in the province that I took, and none in adjacent territories. Some vampires were in my capital, but only 68, too few to account for my 100-odd missing vampires. Save available.
2D. A while later, I decided that I had enough spare resources to try to make an ultimate unbeatable combat squad. I figured that I'd build it around the principle of making SCs be communion slaves, and sharing powerful self-buffing spells with them via the communion-slaves-share-self-buffs principle. Unfortunately, I found that communion slaves behave somewhat oddly in battle. I had 4 pure slaves, 3 master/slaves, and 2 pure masters. That is, a pure slave had a slave matrix, a pure master had a crystal matrix, and a hybrid had both. All were mages. All were set to cast spells for the first round, and the 4 pure-slaves were set to attack for the rest of the battle while the pure-masters and hybrids cast self-buffs. However in combat, the 2 hybrids and 3 of the 4 pure-slaves did nothing. The 4 pure slaves each had identical orders, identical equipment, identical unit type etc, and yet one of them cast while the other 3 just stood there. Even the one that cast stopped following his script after the first round, even when it told him to attack at the same time he was bezerked. I end up with the impression that the combat AI has communion slaves stand still and disregard normal orders, but every once in a while a bug causes one to do what it's told for a turn instead. Save available.
2E. One of my Ivy Kings found a lychantropos amulet and stupidly put it on. Since the item description says something about turning the wearer into a "beast" eventually, I figured it wouldn't be too terribly suprising if he became a wolf for some portion of a battle. I didn't pay much attention to him for a while, and he went through a few battles. I was fairly suprised when I noticed him next and found that on the strategic me map he'd been transformed not into a wolf, but into a human! Okay, maybe it's not a bug, he was changed into a skinshifter, one of those vanheim national werewolves that are humans blessed w/ the ability to be wolves. Except he wasn't supposed to be human! Save available.

Other ones I've seen include immortals sometimes respawning but sometimes not respawning after dieing in a battle where the dominion was friendly when the attack order was issued but hostile after it completed, or mindless units dissolving when the last enemy killed was a mage who respawns with that pheonix respawning spell.
Hello.
Yep, patched long before starting that game, didn't fix any problems that I had noticed except the bizarre jotun fire theme that didn't match its description at all.
Will look forward to having more meaningul games against the AI.
Didn't see your post until after most of this one was written.

Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

Welcome on the forum cthulhu. The AI will be upgraded in Dominions 3. Large maps with 10+ AIs on the hardest setting will give you some challenge, trust me. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif
Also with modding its possible to make the AI uber strong in a total conversion mod. [Example: give them stronger units for the same resource cost, cheaper national spells etc.] Anyways maybe it won't be needed at all, since the AI will be much better.

Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

2E is actually working as designed...

Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

I answered your post in Dominions 2 bug thread.

Some of those were bugs, mostly known ones. This must be one of the most informative posts a new player has posted in these forums. Quite an introduction! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

Hm.... my problem isn't that AIs are too weak - in 16 AI Orania games vs "Difficult" my win rate is less than 50% so far - my problem is *when* the difficulty is. If I survive until late game, the AIs become a joke. They don't horde clams, vampire lords, or juggernoughts. They rarely do globals. They don't concentrate forces enough in late-game. Once I have 10 vampire lords or so, it doesn't matter if I have only one province left and a handful of AIs control everything else in the world, my victory is still inevitable. It would be even worse if I horded clams.
I suppose it might be fixable in that manner if I could give them things that were only useful when they reached late-game. Perhaps spells that need to be researched or units that are uberpowerful only in combination with spells that require lots of research.
I was afraid of that. Silly. I am not a human, I am a free Ivy King!
Glad I can be informative. I'll respond in that thread.

Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

It's true, there comes a point eventually, where no matter how much advantage the AI has, the human players has enough options they can out perform it. It can be improved of course (and I think dom3 has) but I don't see it going away.

Anyway, I hope you're planning to try some mp... your grasp of powerful strategies seems very good for someone who has only done sp.

Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

Yes, the late game AI had many problems. Hopefully in Doms 3. the late game AI will be better. Maybe the AI will summon and equip SCs also. Also keep in mind, the IW devs are always reading this forum, and we can make suggestions that what should the devs try to fix or upgrade in the AI.

Re: Introduce yourself!! :-)
 

Hullo again folks!

37, male, live in Northern Virginia with a wife and two daughters ages 4 and 8.

I was active around here a few years back, but now only pop in from time to time to read up on strategy. I have a group of eight buddies in the Eastern US that I got hooked onto Dom2, so I have never really gotten into the multiplayer scene here.

The nostalgia computer game thread is both amusing and deeply, deeply depressing as I can remember the days of playing games on a computer that used a cassette tape drive for ROM storage....