Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Hey Folks,

I recently tried to recruit some new players. Once I get them to download and play the demo they soon come back - totally lost. I give tips and point them to this message board since it's even more useful than the manual. I hint at the stickied threads for easy information gathering.

Well, that doesn't quite work out.

The first question I get from every single on of them is that the message board is broken. I explain that you have to start reading on the Last page of a thread and then from bottom to top. I understand that this is being worked on but probably 50% of newbies is already confused enough to go away. Maybe make a sticky topic about that?

Especially the confused Newbie thread is a confusion for my confused friends. Try it for yourself. Imagine you are here for the first time. Your are a newbie and are confused. You read the stickied newbie thread. You click on page 1 and find some Posts that seem to be out of context. You scroll down since you have to read from bottom to top. Still doesn't make sense. Ah, go to Last page of the thread. Scroll down. Hmm, the content moved to newest post? Huh? To be honest I couldn't find the content of that thread myself.

As of now I couldn't convert a single friend to buy the game. They are the perfect audience though. We played and loved MoM, MoO(2) and a really long time ago even similar PbM snail mail games. They are just lacking the endurance to get over the steep initial learning curve. For now I reverted to try it again once I meet them in person and can actually show and explain the game.

I guess what I'm saying is that we probably should clean up the newbie thread. Maybe Gandalf or Zen can edit that. Also please, Shrapnel Games Staff, keep on working on the forum upgrade....

I also would appreciate your tips on recruiting new players. Is this really Mission Impossible?

[ May 08, 2004, 09:09: Message edited by: BugRoger ]

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Hm, I have advertised dominions 2 to some of my friends, and two of them have bought it. Indeed, this game needs to be played by some open minded people who don't care whether the messaging board goes the one way or the other. Maybe this is to much of a challenge for the common Counter-Strike player, but honestly, is this so bad?

--Edit--

Please don't misunderstand me. I do not generally dislike counter strike players http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif . However, if you look at this fine community we have here, without flaming wars but with honest discussion, I dont mind Dominion 2 being a game for excentrics. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif
As long as Illwinter prospers of course http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif

[ May 08, 2004, 10:16: Message edited by: PrinzMegaherz ]

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

This board has grown beyond its original use. We are working on loading a new software for the board so that Users can choose the sequence. The only holdup at the moment is concern for the Messages that have already been posted. Importing them into a new software.

As for newbie help; the Jotunheim walkthru made a big spash when it was first done. Its linked now on Illwinter, Shrapnel, just about every Dom2 board. There is a Dom2 quick reference, FAQ files, all kinds of things that are excellently done by players. (because its hard for Devs and expert players to think like a newbie to write such things)

I tried to get some people interested in a newbie package to be downloaded. Suggested files such as the Quick Ref, spells list, items list. And the Jotun WalkThru of course. A started game so that if they skip the first two steps they can still poke their nose into things. A set of pre-made gods for each nation. Something like this....
http://web.archive.org/web/200306031...com/stuff.html
which dont even have to be good gods. In fact they can be obviously flawed. It just allows the people who tend to rush to "make a new game" to be able to do that without being confused. If they find the god that was made for them to be something "gee I could have done better than that" it would be great. The whole package could install all of these into the proper directorys. Things that would work with the demo, even better.

The problems are that (A) experts cant stop being experts long enough to do it. The discussions fell into "best" gods instead of just starter gods. and (B) people wanted the devs to do it but the devs do docs just like the devs do docs. We have examples of that in the docs directory already. Waiting for that is not a good idea.

The best bet for newbie docs is for a newbie who still knows the newbie questions, and can write, to do us some. To ask for the answers and write down the ones that make sense (throw out the ones that are probably more correct but too confusing). If they wait until they are an expert then it wont work.

[ May 08, 2004, 13:47: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

All the information I've found (and I've found a ton) falls into three catagories.

1) Bone basic, bog standard newbie stuff (How do I start a game? How does stealth work?)

2) Experts talking to experts using abreviations I don't understand VQ? PD? references to spells I'm not familiar with or discussions where it is assumed one knows the armor, damage, attack, moral of every unit, the details of every magic item and every spell.

3) Tables upon tables of data (I'm pouring over it but haven't internalized it yet).

With those as tools it's tough to get someone excited. However, without knowing the game all that well myself I've managed to recruit 9 new players. Here's how.

Two times/year my 8+ friends and I get together to play games. We started doing this in about '87. It started off mostly board games but the Last 13 years has been mostly computers. Everyone brings up there computer.

The Last time we got together was in March. There were 14 of us. I burned the demo onto a CD and set aside 2 hours for a walk through. All of us had tried it for 30 minutes or more but all but 2 found it too opaque.

We had everyone start a single player game, select Ulm and walked through diety creation and then basic play. By turn 3 or 4 people started moving ahead on their own and when they had questions the two of who'd played it a bit more tried to answer them. Of the 10 who participated in the walk-through tutorail 8 bought the game.

If you can't get a bunch of people together to play like that you can do the same thing over the Internet using a voice program like Roger Wilco, Battlefield Communicator, Team Speak, Sidewider Game Voice. Get your friends in the demo and walk them through a few turns explaining research, the economy, units.

It's a great game, truly. But I think it does take some hand-holding to get people into it.


Ice

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

hopefully one of the features of Dom 3 will be a built in tutorial al'a Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

I got exactly your same problem so I start this thread

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/cgi-bin...;f=74;t=002620

hoping expert player could help to just make a step by step newbie introduction to the game. But my idea seems to fall in the void ... ayway try to give your friends the suggest in my thread ... seems to work!

good luck
Liga

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Thanks for the tips. I will continue my mission and show the game to my friends in person. This seems to be the most promising strategy. I already tried to show off the game on a LAN party Last year. This ended in a disaster because I hardly played the game before and we didn't get much further than setting up a game.

But I'm member of a board gaming club and we're holding a bianual board gaming con in a few days. I propably take my laptops with me and try to convert some fellows.

I also compiled the Newby Guide thread into an proper webpage. This is much more readable than the big post in the confused newby thread.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

The game can go slow at first. If you want to get them interested then have a major game-save available. Preferably something with all the nations and far enough into the game to start seeing minor summonings in the armies.

That way you can let them open the game with any nation they are interested in and scroll around a big game, watch some major battles, get a taste for trying to decide what to use gold and gems on whan you have many items, spells, and provinces you can build troops in.

In fact, I think such a game, downloadable, would be very useful for us all to have access to.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

To me, the problem isn't about complexity, it's about the lack on action. Your average gaming dolt needs an action packed game to keep them interested, but Dominions doesn't give them that. The computer controls your battles, and all the orders you give happen next turn. Most people aren't made of a tough enough stuff to endure this, and quickly get bored and go play some corny game like Diablo.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Your average gaming dolt also has an incredibly short attention span. Hell, even the people who have managed to become interested in Dominions II have short attention spans. In *MY* day, the ability to concentrate on something for more than 20 hours at a time was NORMAL. If you couldn't, you'd be beaten until you could.

Nowadays, people have problems concentrating for more than half an hour. That's the real obstacle to interest in Dominions II: It requires an attention span better than that of an epileptic lemming. I place the blame firmly on the fact that children aren't beaten enough nowadays.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">If you want to try to trasform in a web readable I'm keeping a .rtf file including all the interesting informations about the rules that comes up on the threda.

You can download it at

http://arrakis.unimo.it/~ligabue/dom2/docs/

it is the guida.rtf file

I'm used to update the files 1/2 times a week

good luck
Liga

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Hmmm...I showed the demo to a few of my friends. To one of them I gave the advice "Try Ulm to start, they are less complicated" The others I just said "download the demo - this game is cool"

At least three of them got the full Version before I did :-p

Don't know what this says about me and my friends.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Dom is a deep game but for the reasons you’ve mentioned I’m having a hard time getting into it. Part of the reason, I know, is that fantasy only barley fires my imagination. Slowly Dom is moving into the same Category as Warcraft III for me. Both are very good games and I can see why people like them, just maybe not my cup of tea. I’ll keep Dom on my hard drive and visit it occasionally—who knows? Maybe it will grab me at some point.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Yeah, Norfleet, but in your day, people ate rocks and fire was new and exciting.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

I have introduced Dom II for my real friends and even invited some of them to bring their comp to LANs and test the game. My real-life friends played one game and then they said that they will never play Dom again. Nothing against that, they just don't find the game interesting enough.

Then I introduced Dom II to few of my IRC friends and they played many demo games and said that it's a good game. They were hell confused of everything and asked thousands of questions, i pointed out that they should read FAQs and manuals. Then they went quiet continued playing their counter-strikes etc.

Dom is hard game to catch on, game itself doesn't contain any help information, except turn tips. FAQs and manuals are hard to find and forum is very strange. I remember when i first time came on the forum i read maybe 20 postings and didn't understand anything. I read all threads from up to down and I was very confused.

I would really appreciate that there would be some info that the forum is "upside-down"

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Let me ask a question: are you an hour-a-day gamer, or a ten-hour-sesh gamer? See, my theory is that Dom2 suits the former type. Games are loooong and involved (don't get me wrong, this is great). I'm the latter type of gamer and I can't win in a single session (I can lose easily!). Even with no kids and a nice easy job I can only manage about one session every two weeks. So by the time of my next session I can't be bothered to resume an old game, so I start something else. I got really into Dom2 when I first got it, but I didn't come back to it. I think if I was an hour-a-day type, I would do, but that really doesn't suit me.

Of course, YMMV.

CC

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Dominions problem is somewhat like the "wargame problem". On the one hand you have a beautiful board with nice (albeit very limited) pLastic pieces like, for example, Axis and Allies, on the other hand you have an "ugly" 2000 cardboard counter game like .... lets say Third Reich. Both are great games, but if the average gamer came up to a table where both games would be in starting set-up, most would probably choose A&A. This is a rather lame comparison, I know, but it resembles what I've come across with dom2. I showed a friend of mine Dom2 and Medieval :Total War. He definately liked both games, but guess which wanted to play more... .
(On a happy sidenote, now that 5000 miles are between us, he gives dom2 serious consideration because of its good pbem ability.)

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

Two parts to my comments.

Smeone named ceremony was writing a brilliant guide to the game. I am delighted to provide this link to what I have seen.

http://www.maladjustite.com/dominion.pdf

I can not praise this document enough. I got the link after posting a question in January regarding dominion.

I do not know what happened to the author, but I do hope that they could finish the guide or release what they have done. Like an unfinished story, it can still be very valuable to others.

On the other side, I feel that Dominions is a niche game with great depth, so it will struggle to bring in new players. Let me put it this way, my girlfriend is very new to computers. As in, only started using them in the Last year for anything other than word processing. She worked as a journalist for three years and is good at Word, but games are new to her, she is a raw beginner. We play Diablo on the network but Counter Strike with all those different guns is too complicated. Put yourself in her shoes and imagine playing Dom II… This game is for those who have played other turn based strategy games before and even they will have to work at it. Think of it as a violin. You have to work at it before it produces beautiful music.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

*Unbearable Smugness*

My girlfriend is currently building far too many salamanders for my own good. Damn things are size 3 and my war minotaurs can't trample them.

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

As a newbie I can tell you about my own problems with DomII.

A little background info: I discoveded DomII while looking for a substitute for Stars! The game had to be PBEM ready, run simultaneous turns (real WEGO) and support 8+ players - and frankly besides Stars!, VGAPlanets and a few other older games, DomII was the only game offering these features (very odd indeed - WEGO is by far the best turn-based model!)

I downloaded the demo when the game was released Last year, but quickly lost my way in the interface. Like I said I'm a former Stars! player and not really concerned with flashy GUI, but DomII is much harder to get into!

The demo lay dormant on my harddrive for half a year until i "rediscovered" it recently. I found this forum (and yes, the latest postings should be at the end, not at the beginning - it's confusing http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif ), and thus found my way to the "walkthru".

The walkthru did it for me. It's brilliant, and while it doesn't explain everything, it's enough to get you started. I bought the game Last week, as did a friend of mine.

Now the interresting stuff: Why is DomII so hard to get into?

IMO, it's the lack of clear text info on the main screens. This makes you loose overview and makes you think "where do I begin?" The overview would be much better if all the symbols,units and such were labeled. Like:

Hire troops: Write the name and vital stats of the troop underneath the units. That'd make it 50x faster to compare units. A picture tells me very little in itself. Oh yea, and separate the Commanders clearly from the regular troops - the current view is confusing.

Troop status: Write stats, afflictions and such under each unit.

Main map army size: Write a number inside the square.

And while we're at it, improve/expand the main map filters! Filters in Stars! made it easy to get a good overview of all fleet opreations. In DomII these filters would be a great help:
Show/hide:
- Scouts/Spies
- Commanders
- Priests
- Garrisoned troops (troops w/o commander)

The way Build God/Start New Game works is terrible. Let players build a God and save it under whatever filename they want. Make it so I can reload, change and save any God I choose. And put some default Gods in the game as suggested (to help getting started).

All this said I really like DomII. It may not be perfect (yet) but it's the best we got http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif

Re: Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?
 

I became interested in Dominions when I've heard about it all over Age of Wonders forums.

I really got into it solely because of its complexity. I love stats and features, which Dom is bloated with. It's fun analyzing stats and deciding which units are the best to field in any given situation. The strategy involved in army movement and battlefield tactics were also amazing. For quite a while, I played a "simplified" Version of Dom, where I just left all of my units clumped in the middle without orders and didn't know how to set taxes or province defense. Hell, I couldn't even search for sites or research the right magic schools back then. It's much easier to start your Dom experience by ignoring certain features and learning and discovering them as you go.