Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

I recently purchased the game and was very excited to dive into it. I played through the tutorial and feel like I have a grasp of the basics.

The problem is I have no interest in playing because it just seems so... dry. Like I'm playing some sort of spreadsheet simulator.

At what point does this game get fun? I REALLY want to like it and am willing to scale the steep learning curve, but how much time (typically) does one need to invest before finding that wonderful "just one more turn" feeling?

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

There's something wrong with you, it's fun from the moment you open the manual! MP is definitely the real payoff though.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Approximately 5min into your first MP blitz game.

Check out the IRC channel (instructions are in the FAQs), which usually has a few people willing to play a quick game. It's always friendly, just say you're new and they'll set it up.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

It was fun for me before I even had the game. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

you must try MultiPlayer. words cannot capture why it is so good. When I first got the game I played SinglePlayer only for a couple of months. I got bored of it, and quit playing for several more months. Later, I picked the game back up and tried out the MP. I could suddenly feel the magic and got it; it's the best game.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

It's fun every time you discover an old strategy.

It's extremely fun when you start to realize that you're better than the general run of people at the game, that you know a lot of the ins and outs and can defend yourself even against long odds.

It's insanely exciting when you develop a new strategy that maybe nobody has ever heard of, and then pull it off in a multiplayer game.

It's indescribable when you're winning a multiplayer game against 10, 15 other players a couple of months into it, with people writing stories about their (and your) exploits; the game comes alive and you look forward to every turn with butterflies in your stomach.

It then really freaking sucks when Gandalf's servers go down and the game is cancelled.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

The first dozen turns of Dominions_3 is using basic methods for expanding your empire, which may feel boring to a new player. As game turns pass your nation becomes stronger and more strategic options become available. The fun is within the thousands of different strategic options which can be placed together for a powerful overall strategy. In MultiPlayer even more strategies must be considered and increases the challenge.

As time passes you have the options to make either your computer or human opponents stronger via mapedit commands and/or modding commands.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

It depends what you thought would be fun going into the game.

If you want to see lots of magic flying around and people exploding then we can make suggestions to get you that experience. If you want fantastic creatures rampaging that's something else we can direct you towards.

When I first started playing dominions the units and descriptions really drew me in and I had a lot of fun just using the national troops, but some people find spells and summons far more interesting.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

I tend to RPG, solo play, large maps. But I admit that its probably after 20 turns or so before I really get that feeling.

It did help alot when I had the nations narrowed down to the ones which best matched my playing style. Let us know if you are aggressive, defensive, researcher, stealth, tricky-tactics, barbarian horde, etc etc

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Hey now, to be fair only one of the servers went down. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif
The blitz games kept running.
But its nice to know its missed. Working on getting it back up. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

I recommend reading a strategy guide for a nation you find interesting. They tend to give an impression of the really huge range of options open to you. Baalz's ones are good.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Thank you all for the replies (except for the guy who took the trouble to post only that there was something wrong with me)<rolls eyes>.

Apparently, multiplayer is where it's at. However, I am a large map solo type of player. That being said, it seems that I need to do two things to achieve the fun factor:

Get past the initial expansion phase (first 20 turns or so) and figure out which nation suits my style. I tend to like to start slow and research. With that in mind, would any of you have any suggestions as to which nation and pretender god I should go with?

Again, thank you all for taking the time to get me going. If I didn't believe that the game was excellent, I wouldn't take the time to try to get my brain around it!

(edited for punctuation)

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

I generally point new players to Abysia because it has lots of pretty battlemagic, it's very straightforward and you can see how powerful magic can be. You also can't hurt your own troops with friendly fire and you get some neat sacreds and units to play with as well as lots of gems to experiment with fire spells.

As for the pretender, I suggest a rainbow (a pretender with relatively low levels of magic in lots of paths) so you can try out more spells should you wish and find more interesting magic sites by searching.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Abysia is very cool. If you are more of a fan of human nations with cavalry and archers, Marignon is another excellent option.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

llama makes a great point about guides by the way. They often inspire me to play nations I had only briefly tried before.

I also find if I see a TV show or film about romans or greeks or dragons or demons, I want to play a related nation in dom3. Reading the book Rubicon had me playing EA Ermor for quite a while.

Btw llama I'm moving to oxford next month for a job at OUP. Little studio flat on Woodstock road.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Generally for hold-back researchers I recommend Arcoscephale.

Also if you set the independent strength higher you will keep the AIs off your back for longer. They dont tend to be as smart as you in choosing who to attack and when to attack them. Strong dependents give the AI setbacks early in the game. Dont give in to the temptation to set the game parameters to easy magic research. The AI will be blasting you before you get it figured out.

If you use the games map-generator to make maps then two things can help you in the early learning curve.

A) Turn up the mountains. Setting it about 50 will give you lots of chokepoints. Basically a maze. You will be able to use those better than the AI.

B) Make the maps skinny. A really large map (1000-1500 provinces if your machine can handle it) that is only wide enough to handle one nation at a time can keep you from getting swarmed. I have two versions. Tower (really tall but so thin that its only about 10 provinces wide). And Pipleline (really long but only tall enough for about 10 provinces). That way I have two enemies, one on each side, to worry about. At least until the magic research hits a fun level.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Again, thank you. I will check out those nations and their respective guides.

That last post was particularly helpful. Much appreciated, Sir.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

With respect - if you are finding the game to be dry, you should aim for a fast start with fast research. This will get you out of the "mundane" portion of the early game and into the parts where you are can really play with battle spells/tactics and blow up whole armies with rituals and whatnot.

Go with Aby or Mari as people have suggested since they are straightforward. You might also consider an SC pretender as they give you quite a range of tactics pretty early on, depending on how you choose to equip them.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

It also helps if you have everyone start with 9 provinces. Honestly what we really need for this situation are some more scenarios, but I'm not aware of too many and I haven't gotten around to making any myself. Real Soon Now. After I finish my T'lan Imass mod, and implement a rule-based AI for Ms. Pac-Man.

-Max

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Hey ummm, for starting nation choice I would really suggest T'ien Chi, either Early or Mid (they lose something in Late http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif). Both nations get incredible magic diversity in their national mages, and both get excellent national troops with solid PD.

They are not a nation that you can so easily get a real "handle" on, but they have some of the best cheap troops to deal with the AI stepping up the fight, as well as huge magical diversity so that you can really explore different spells and different tactics within one game.

Using Fast research is one way to get into the more "exciting" parts of the game, I would also suggest boosting Magic Sites to at least 70. A large gem income will give you the chance to empower your pretender in all paths, and try out all of the summons and global spells that you are curious about.

Also bear in mind, the interactions of the stats are far less "spreadsheet-like" than you might imagine. First, paying close attention to the combat mechanics in the manual will show you how things like Shield Parry, Repel, multiple attack Defense reduction, encumbrance, and so many other factors start to open up so many potential interactions even just with the basic troops. But it's when magic becomes more prevalent, and you start adding in interesting buffs and summons (and a little fire and brimstone, too) that the battles really start to come alive.

Ultimately, what makes Dom3 sparkle is not so much the gameplay itself, as it is the content. And there is so much cool and interesting content, it's nearly impossible to become deeply familiar with all of it (very few succeed in that quest, most dehydrate first).

Also if you think the action is just a tad too slow - try a game where you take a pretender who has Fear +? and give a starting Dominion of 10. Don't bother boosting his magic, and keep him awake. On the first turn, attack blindly, and laugh as he massacres the independents. Continue fiddling with that game until he dies or gets a horrible affliction. Now go back, do it again but pay attention to the magic, make sure he has 1 Astral (Ethereal and Luck), or 2 Nature (Regen), or 2 Water (Quickness) or something that gives some solid buffing that doesn't take forever to research (like Soul Vortex is neat, but you won't get it in the first year), and then go straight for those buffs, and see how long he lasts. Almost everyone has immense fun with supremely powerful critters, it's just too hilarious to watch them eat things. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif It's by no means the only path to victory, but it's a fun way to open up your eyes to the vast potential that the game has to offer.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Another opinion for you. I played only SP for a few years (Dom I, II and III) before stepping into MP. Single player can be a lot of fun, a huge amount of fun, but it is very different than MP. I would argue that MP is more fun, but it has drawbacks. So don’t feel you must play MP. Also, unless you don’t mind getting your butt handed to you on a platter, don’t enter MP until you have a solid understanding of the game. Others will disagree, but I don’t find sink or swim the best learning technique when you don’t know the basics.

Another thought. Despite your preference for large maps, your learning curve will peak faster in some smaller maps. If you are determined to enjoy (which many of us clearly encourage) run a series of two or three fast small maps with different nations. Devote 45 minutes to each. Play and try out new things. Then, when you move on to one of the big maps, you will have a stronger conceptual grasp of what is possible and will get more out of your game. Some folks might blanch at the idea of putting in two hours of “training” but if you really are into big maps, two hours of gaming is nothing to you. The big maps will consume hours…

Finally, I second the advice to boost magic sites to 70 and choose fast research.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Another option to get into the game and start enjoying it (SP), is to take a nation that is suited for SCs. I remember finding the game somewhat dry in the very beginning, until I tried Shinuyama which has recruitable SCs. Then try out forging different items. Then have a blast just taking out Bandar Log's armies of 10000 monkeys with just a handful of your SCs. They'll quickly become experienced heroes and add some role playing to the game.

Another good suggestion made above is to try Abyssia and play around with fire magic. That's when I got into magic.

Once you get to know the game a bit more, the starting turns won't be boring anymore either. You will have your long-term strategies set out, and every turn counts (in MP more so) in order to maximize your goals. I now actually feel that the starting turns are some of the most exciting, especially in MP.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Hello Clownhammer, and welcome aboard.

Almost everything has been said.

I can garantee you that this game IS fun! I almost exclusively play at it since now 2 years, and exclusively in SP, and I had, have a LOT of fun!

All advices are good: try small games with victory points to handle basic game mechanisms.
Then, try some nations which you think fit you gamestyle.
Read A LOT on this forum! Especially the strategy index, and try that is explained.
Try every spells that inspire you and see what happen.
Whatch the battles, and you will learn a lot. Adjust your army placement and your commanders scripts and look at the results.
If you want to really go deep, you have to learn handling magic, and for that play some games in EA with magic site frequency set at the max to experiment a lot.

For nations, EA Abysia is one of my starting ones, along with EA T'ien Ch'i and EA Vanheim a bit, but I don't recommend the last for beginners. Arcocephale is also a good choice.
MA Machaka is versatile in magic, but a bit tricky to handle at first.

I would not advice trying SC or thugs in the beginning, because I think that it requires some game comprehension and some magic items experiment first, but it's your choice, and as parcelt said, it may fit you. Try it.

Well, that's a lot to try!
But as JimMorrison said, the real treasury is the content of the game, and I must admit that, after two years of playing, I only discovered probably less than 10 or 15 % at most.
So, you have many long years before you http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

I can say anything about MP, but I must correct you: it is NOT all about MP with Dom3! Believe me!

See you around on the forum.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

I agree, there are many methods for providing a challenging SP game. As time passes the SP gamer can even provide one AI opponent with 20+ SuperCombatants at the start of a game, which works fine on large maps.

Large maps should also use victory points otherwise it can take months to finish a game.

The patches seem to lean towards being all about MP. From what I've seen the computer AI opponents haven't been improved in any patches despite having multiple problems. Some of these are probably difficult to fix yet I'm sure others are not so complex.

1) EASY FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents sending pretenders into the arena death match. Pretender tag should make it easy to stop this unit from participating. It's so sad to see 10+ AI pretenders getting killed because the AI doesn't know better.

2) HARD FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents starving its own troops. This causes the AI opponents to lose battles, even important battles. This would probably be more difficult to fix, yet at least the human player can set supplies to 300 as a semi-workaround.

3) HARD FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents blindly drop items on mages/commanders. This causes AI opponents to severly hurt its own mages as it places full steel plate on a low hitpoint caster. It's rarely able to use important magic item boosters as well. This is another task which would probably be difficult to fix.

4) EASY FIX DIFFICULTY: Computer opponents lack knowledge of which globals it should NOT be casting. Globals such as Utterdark and Perpetual Storm will do more damage to the AI opponents 99% of the time. If given a high astral and blood pretender I worry whether it may even cast Astral Corruption which would totally devaste any AI opponent. It should be very easy to prevent AI opponents from casting specific spells since it's already done for spells such as Wish.

5) AVERAGE FIX DIFFICULTY: AI opponents choose wrong scales causing even an Impossible AI setting to choke and wither away. The higher difficult settings should include wiser scale/pretender builds. Poor scales and dominion has been known to cause AI opponents to die very very early... such as Mictlan. Some nations already have programmed scales such as Abysia for its heat so the difficulty is probably average.



The last patch I recall which improved the computer opponents was the Burden of Time fix during Dominions_2.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

I don't think this is really the place for a complaint about lack of changes in the AI NT Jedi. Clownhammer is unlikely to be worried about these things for quite a long time.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

As much as I love solo play thats not at all what I see. Im not sure what MP things you feel are in the patches. It doesnt take much scrolling thru the fix-list to see a number of AI spell-casting improvments.

Most of the patches lately seem to be mod commands (Johan) and new nations/units (Kristoffer)

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

These are battlefield spell-casting improvements not AI opponent improvements. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

This doesn't help AI opponents, but it's appreciated.


I was responding to QXel and leaned into a different important issue, thus created a new thread.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Not with a good Water bless http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif

Hey Clownhammer, welcome here.
I'm a quite new player just like you, so I can't be of much help. I am like you, I love to play SP in large maps, I have yet to try a MP game 4 newbs but soon I'll try.
The more expert guys here gave you excellent advices IMHO.

If I can bring my experience, as you asked nations-pretenders combos, the first game being very funny to me was:

Large Random Map, 3 Human Player, 3 Normal AIs, Early Age
Very Fast Research, Indies at 6, 2 initial provinces, Sites at 55

My 3 nations were

- Abysia with an Asleep Moloch: The expert ones are right, Abysia is funny, the national troops are quite good at the beginning for their good armors and heat auras and not many indies are a problem for them. For the time the Moloch awakened, I had forged some items for him and sent him fighting with my main army, while the powerful fire mages were wreaking havoc on my enemies and my (immune http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif) armies in form of falling fires, fire pillars, firebolts, fireclouds, fire-everything.

-A Marverni with an Awaken Wyrm with no magic, Dominion 10 and decent scales. A strange choice probably, but it was funny to have a good awaken SC helping my early expansion and I didn't have to worry a lot about (regen, no magic points to lose if it died). Not having blesses, I didn't have to focus too much on sacred units and made huge armies with a mix of every unit avaible. It was funny, yet not terribly effective on the long game http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

-Agartha with an Imprisoned rainbow Master Lich. The blesses helped the not terrible sacreds of Agartha while hordes of troglodytes and the nice national summons were flanking and squishing the enemies, with mages casting one of the most exciting spells of the game: Blade Wind. Let me say - plain fun http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/smile.gif

The enemy AIs were IIRC Ermor Arcoscephale and Tien Chi (I avoided water nations as I suspected it would have been difficult for a beginner getting to attack them).

Ok, now prolly the gurus will skin me alive http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/stupid.gif as surely those weren't perfect, minmaxed, totally effective builds - but I had a lot of fun with them, they were fine to play with and gave me a nice idea of how the things work in Dominions 3; playing 3 nations at a time allowed me to gang against the AI if I was in trouble, then to backstab myself and see how my favourite armies worked one against another.

Surely every experience in game as in life are different for different people, but I hope I gave you at least some ideas on how you can have fun with this huge game http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif


P.S. If someone is asking, Agartha won as soon as I put my hand on Tartarians [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Envy.gif[/img] http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/evil.gif - even if I didn't know yet that with Gift of Health or The Chalice they would have been far better [img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Dagger.gif[/img]

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Improvements don't all come in patches. The AI has been vastly improved since Dom2.

-Max

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

My point was none of the DOM_3 patches include improvements for AI opponents.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

The AIs can be found in here, they're named IronHawk or Baalz or quantum_mechani, for example, and they're even developed so good that they can give replies on the forum and over IRC and email. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

I like the sound of that.
Baalzbot... That would have made a hell of a screen name. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

If nothing else works, try drinking two martinis http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Two martinis for dom3, three martinis for dom2. Simple maths.

Re: Help! It\'s not fun!!
 

Only one martini down tonight, so no skill penalty here :-). One my first game this evening (3 player, SP, Cradle of Dominions). Started a new game, same map, 10 players. Wish me luck! So far Ermor and Hinnom are double teaming me :-(