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Oh boy alot of questions
Ok I just recieved my full Version the other day. I have read through the walkthrough and the manual, played a few times, and still have tons of questions! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
1) One of my main questions is about animate dead. I have mainly been playing C'Tis. The manual does a good job exaplining that ghouls come from your population points in a province and souless come from the number of corpses. What about Longdead and Tomb wyrms? What exactly is that taking from to build? 2) The whole "no diplomacy" thing is kinda taking me for a loop. Mainly once I meet up with another dominion at the start of the game it seems to go like this, grab all the land you can and establish a border. As long as you don't move into the same territory as your opponent you can usually establish a line and not get into an early conflict. Basically i like searching my provinces for sites, getting a little research and maybe making a few magic items before fighting another major power. Does this seem to basically jive with how people see "peace" with other dominions? 3) The whole simultaneous movement thing is throwing me a little. It basically seems that the defender can NEVER get the advantage since a) you dont' know where an enemy army is moving AND b) enemy armies seem to almost never sit still. This is probably the worst part of the entire design system if x is my opponent 0 is me 0 0x0 0 if the 4 provinces 0 is in all move into x's province and he moves into anyone of 0's, he completly bypasses them all, this just doesn't make sense. Maybe if spies/scouts etcs gave you a report that told you the armies intentions like "40 units, they plan to occupy this province" or "50 units they are marching on X province". Does anyone understand this better so you can actually stop a rampaging army? If not then its really just about playing a luck game in trying to determine which province the army is moving into next. 4) Magic - just a quick one but I assume that the individual magic school levels of commanders is just as important to research for as your pretenders schools? |
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1. Nothing. They are sort of summoned. Come to think of it... I'm not sure any of the animated dead spells will fail to function if there are no corpses. You just get less zombie for the voodoo.
2. There's no peace in this game. Just preparations for war. Since there's no "allied victory" condition the only reason for diplomacy is to strengthen the enemy of your enemy. I tend to make a beeline towards my closest opponent with scouts and then strike at his capital as soon as I get enough troops. 3. It works the other way as well. The attacker don't know where the defender will be. It can be a pain at times to get attacked by swift but strong armies. But since they are continually advancing you can just recruit a small force that walks in behind them and reclaims the provinces. Defend your important sites with strong armies while breaking his supplyline and you'll beat any rushing invader. Blitzkrieg manouvers don't work that well in Dominions since it's hard to get a good "infrastructure" up fast. At most I managed to pull three waves of attack before having to pause and rebuild my forces. 4. I'm not sure I understand your question. Schools just represent the kind of magic you want to be good at. Depending on what magic your faction is good at this will vary a lot. The pretender is actually less of a concern, if you're not running nines and want to rush to a highend enchantment. It's the commanders that will be out in the thick of it so the spells they use are the most important. [ January 20, 2004, 19:55: Message edited by: Wauthan ] |
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This also makes building up multiple large armies and lines of heavily defended provinces important, as well as milking chokepoints (if you have them) for all they're worth. |
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in number 4 what i meant was that the individual commander types you can recruit have specific schoolt abilities. Like a Shaman has Nature 1. I just meant that when your reseraching its important to keep in mind that you have a shaman in play and that you want to research for him (as well as your other commanders) as well as your pretender.
Or am I just totally off on this? Number 3 is still a little frustrating I mean two armies don't just pass in the night. If X is moving into 0's province and 0 is moving into X's province on the same turn then there should be some chance that they meet and fight. Also scouts, spies, etc should be able to give you some idea of the movement of the enemy force, some how, some way within the turn/movement model of the game. |
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While I haven't explicitly tested it in Dom II, at least in Dom I two armies looking to exchange provinces had a chance to meet in one of them, with a greater chance for larger armies.
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As far as magic schools go, what you research, especially early on, should primarily be stuff for your national mages. Those big (5+ sphere) requirement spells are all quite high in the research tree and don't become useful until mid/late game when you're generating enough research to blow through the lower levels of any school anyway.
~Aldin |
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There are ways interception could be implemented with the current movement system. Suppose you have a spy in a province currently occupied by enemy forces, and you have an army ready to intercept. If the spy had a 'Track army' command, whereupon it would *attempt* to track the largest portion of forces that move, and you could give the friendly army an 'intercept' command that with some probability would be able to intercept (base it on, say, overall strategic move of the interceptors versus the interceptees, the experience of the spy, stealthiness of troops, the number of parts into which the interceptees split)...
It'd affect balance, as not all nations get spies or very mobile troops, and figuring out a sane formula would not be easy. |
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Play the guessing game. It's not very tough against the AI. You eventually find you can guess where AI armies are going 90% of the time (richness and defense level being the big triggers). Against humans, they have to play the same game you do. ~Aldin |
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For 2. and 3., try cranking up the indie strength to 8 or so. This will slow you down, and create a different game, but it will also create a buffer between you and the AIs so you have more time to get the things you want. Many times I just want to try out some things high on the requirement lists, such as high level spells and items, but the current game setup just doesn't allow for that, unless you hamper the advance altogether, since there is no way you can secure your borders and make peace. The high indie strength will also positively affect the porousness of borders that you're talking about in 3., creating indie armies strong enough to fend off smaller raiding armies and hence giving you the opportunity to make chokepoints and normalize situation. Otherwise, playing with indies at 3 or so is just too chaotic if you want a slow-paced relaxing SP game, as everything is simply too open and forces you to bog yourself into conflicts on all sides usually.
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It seems like its always an independant developer that goes and makes a great game like this and then completly deviates from the norm on core design in some way.
Chess, checkers, tic tac toe, etc etc etc all have the guess where I am going to move next style of game play BUT order is serialized!! (to account for iterative order with more than two players you can either create random order or an order of precedence for every nation) If they would have simply gotten rid of "simultaneuos" turns or made it serial, then alot of the movement would have made more sense. Heck I bet they could have even made it an option to have simultaneous or serial moves. I wouldn't want to get into a realism debate about all this either after all its a strategic game and realism is best left to more tactically oriented games. Why do i think serial would have been better? Because "corralling AI" so that we both move into the same province on the same turn is not my idea of strategy. Gimme chess type strategy any day, u move i respond, i move, u respond.... |
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HJ thats a good idea ill try it thanks!
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Cheers, |
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First, "realism" in no way is limited to just "tactically-oriented" games. It's just easier to do the smaller the unit scale you go. The problem with "realism" in operational/strategic games is that it's much harder to model such things as economies and politics and other social structures than it is to model combat. Dom 2 has an economic and political (aka religious) system that works well enough for what it's trying to do. It doesn't pretend to be "realistic", nor should it, nor does it need to. As for simultaneous execution of moves, that's the most realistic system for modelling conflict. After all, it's the very rare (and stupid) opponent that will give his enemies a clue as to what he's going to do so they can react to it. The idea is to keep the other fellow guessing. Simultaneous movement accurately models things such as Rommel's desert "adventures". He kept moving so that every time the Brits pounced he wasn't where they expected. If real life were "I Go, You Go", then the Brits would have said "Oh, that's where he's gone, now we get to smash him before he can run away". The strategy is to out-guess your opponent. If you are not very good at trying to predict what your opponent might do, then you won't do well at this type of game. You also won't do well at chess, either, despite chess being non-simultaneous. |
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Don't get me wrong I really like this game ALOT.
Though i think it would have been better from a pure gameplay standpoint to at least make the OPTION of choosing serial turn movement as opposed to simultaneous moves. The simultaneuos move system, from what I understand, is mainly to accomadate faster gameplay in multiplayer. Every player can take their turn simultaneously as opposed to waiting for previous players to end their turn. Insofar as realism is concerned I would think that armies perform recon and determine enemy movements and plan theirs accordingly. I disagree that armies somehow maintain a posistion, choose a destination, with no information except a "best guess" then march out, possibly missing opposing forces entirely. Actually from a "realism" point of view, in a fantasy world, one would think divining spells would be specifically crafted to recon and spy on ones enemy, especially an offensive army in ones own territory. This type of simultaneous move system requires the more tactical level of recon in order to be "realistically" modelled. That is why I would prefer serial turns as it is more accomadating in single player from a pure gameplay point of view. |
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Okay. Now I better understand where you're coming from. I don't agree, but that's my own opinion. What you need to accept though is that Dom was designed first and foremost as a multiplayer game, and from what I can tell (again, IMO), single-player is more or less an afterthought. FWIW. Most of us think the game is fine as is (insofar as simultaneity). However, also bear in mind that to rewrite the code to accomodate sequential turns would not be a simple task at all. Trust me. I've been writing code for nearly 30 years. And IW has far better things to do with their time, IMO.
And now we return to our regularly-scheduled obliviousness ... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif |
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[ January 21, 2004, 06:50: Message edited by: HJ ] |
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(Sorry, couldn't resist. This thread needs a wee bit of levity, don't you agree?) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif |
Re: Oh boy alot of questions
Just to be clear, there is a chance that armies will meet if they cross each other’s path. I was having a tough time with one game, as we kept going for each other’s province on the same turn. I do not know how the location was chosen, but when I ended up defending, my army did not move, even though I had told it to.
I knew I could win and did so, three times in a row. The problem was, I was defending each time! You will notice it when you win the battle and then look at the map expecting to be holding the province you attacked. Instead, you are where you started. When you read carefully, you will see what happened. As for realism, I throw my chips in the corner which holds real movement takes place at the same time and it is hard to tell where someone else is going. Holding on to what you take is hard, so while stopping the rampaging army is hard, it is also tough for them to hold on to what they take. Sure, I hate it when someone gets through my front lines, but that is as it should be. |
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There are 2 distinct movement phases. The Friendly Movement phase and the Moving into Enemy Territory Phase. The Friendly phase is before the Enemy phase, so if you guess right, you can move an army into a previously undefended position where you opponent thinks you are weak and end up defending it.
The main issue is the fact that the magic phase is before both phases, so you can lay on the magical pain with the full knowledge of where armies are if you have proper scouts/intel. |
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Of course, in a fantasy world, spells take care of some of the problems... as they do in Dom2 Did you know that "magical" attacks in Dominions take place before armies move ? You can use a magic to teleport your army on top of theirs, or to try to kill the commander, trapping the men, or summon a magical army. The only thing you can't do is guess where he is going... probably because the other side has its own diviners doing counter spells and looking at your army, to see where you're going so they can alter course accordingly. Think about it : your diviners tells you he's moving north. You start moving to intercept. His diviners tell the ennemy commander you are moving north. He alters course to ambush you. You alter course to avoid the ambush. He alters course back to his original target... and nobody is going anywhere fast http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif [ January 21, 2004, 09:49: Message edited by: General Tacticus ] |
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Of course, in a fantasy world, spells take care of some of the problems... as they do in Dom2 Did you know that "magical" attacks in Dominions take place before armies move ? You can use a magic to teleport your army on top of theirs, or to try to kill the commander, trapping the men, or summon a magical army. The only thing you can't do is guess where he is going... probably because the other side has its own diviners doing counter spells and looking at your army, to see where you're going so they can alter course accordingly. Think about it : your diviners tells you he's moving north. You start moving to intercept. His diviners tell the ennemy commander you are moving north. He alters course to ambush you. You alter course to avoid the ambush. He alters course back to his original target... and nobody is going anywhere fast http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I find it really hard to believe that people really think that somehow medieval armies did not employ scouts, use spies, simply talk to people in the region they are in, and as the defender of an invaded land try to use ground that would be advantageous. Also the province partitioned map does not lend itself to the movements of these armies; geography, roads, towns, ports, etc were what really determined how movement worked, not some arbitrary turn based system (whether simultaneous or serial). And since you can't model this type of reality you should model it on pure gameplay alone. For single player this means, corraling the AI in simultaneous turns, or have a more classic style chess type serialized movement. I obviously like the chess type of gameplay. History is full of examples showing how much good recon impacted the ensuing battles. By the way I have read alot of military oriented books, but I have started to find several shows on TV, namely the history channel, that have much more credible and current information. Namely there is a series called "battlefield detectives" that is absolutly outstanding. I hate to speak with some air of authority on the european medival period(appx 1080a.d.-1415a.d.) as it is not my forte, I am more of a roman era person. But I know enough about the period to know that most assertions about the period about how stupid they were, how heavy there armor was, etc etc is nothing more than current day myth. I know that for any serious discussion about the period you have to understand heraldry, diplomacy of the royals, and ransom. Also i think this type of comparison is fairly limited in its application of "realism" to FANTASY strategic games. I do agree than it does add alot to the general context, feel, and flavor of games like this. If the medieval period were at all applicable to any point of realism in this type of game you would have Knights that would roam the battlefield looking for someone of his own status to engage. What simultaneous turn boils down to in its most absolute form for single player is "corraling the AI". By learning the behavior of the AI you simply count out turns and match up a movement phase into an intended target square, predictable and boring. All your doing with serial turns is eliminating this frivolity and getting down to a game of engagement and defense, something AI's are pretty good at, its like chess. Alot of this has to do with maturity of AI as a whole. Now as far as multiplayer is concerned I think simulataneous is definetly the way to go. Not only does it speed the game up, human players are notoriously unpredictable making the "corralling" a mini game in and of itself. |
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