Best way to lose a battle...
 

F6D6N6 Lord of the Summer Plague vs Oceania chaff army sieging friendly fortress of 200+ chaff. Pretender equipped with Unquenched Sword, Vine Shielf, Bone Armor, Boots of Caius the Druid, Wraith Crown, Ring of Regeneration and Elixir of Life, 540HP with GoH, Awe +2.

Pretender attacks and annihilates Oceania army. Oceania routs, but 50+ units stay on battlefield due to fatigue. Pretender runs around bashing heads of unconscious chaff.

Battle reaches turn 50. I lose battle.

And that was not the best part of it. Because the pretender had gone berserk, he didn't rout, and at the end of the battle died. Elixir of Life never kicks in, of course.

I think I'll reach for the "Create New Game" button.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

Ouch. Berserk + Unquenched sword + hordes of chaffy enemies is a nasty combination. My condolences.

-Max

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

That's a sad story indeed. There are a number of threads on increasing the 50 turn limit for similar reasons.
-ssj

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

For the extra poignant feel, I would add that he also had *four* globals up.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

Seems taking your pretender to the frontlines was a risk you shouldn't have taken ;)

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

The thing is, I never considered him at risk for this battle, and in fact he wasn't - at the end of the battle he had zero fatigue and some 60HP higher than the 540 he started with, having wiped out almost the entire Oceania army, and any remaining stragglers already dying from fatigue. Frankly, I could not think of a way to win that battle more completely.

If he got hit by an ethereal crossbow or something, there's really nothing I can say about it, but this? (And plus, if he DID got hit by an ethereal crossbow, he had the Elixir on him...)

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

I wouldn't say there is no risk beforehand when your pretender ends up dead...

You knew (or should have known) that your pretender was a berserker.
Berserkers die when the time-limit goes out, like Golems (iirc), someone paralyzed, or others who don't rout.

Perhaps not as apparent as what happens when you rout and have no territory to retreat to, yet a risk all the same.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

I wouldn't put it quite as harshly as Redeyes did, but in a game as complex as Dom3, statistical risk usually takes a backseat to real uncertainty. A pretender is less likely to be killed by something you anticipated but dismissed as unlikely (the fluke attack that blinds and cripples your pretender so the chaff can swarm him) as by something you didn't realize existed ("I didn't realize fatigue allows critical hits which halve Protection!" or "I had no idea the enemy was going to spam me with Living Water from a W9 caster").

Creating a new game is a completely fair thing to do--call the prior one a "test game" which ended up teaching you some new rules. And don't use the Unquenched Sword or Rigor Mortis in any battle where you have units you can't afford to lose, unless you have some way (e.g. Fire Storm) of guaranteeing that you won't lose. And even then, be prepared to be wrong. :)

-Max

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

Just be glad it happened in a single player game!

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

I would really say, that's a bad design choise. Sure you can say: "You should have known the risk, it's your fault." But once you accept, that anything can happen any time, you can just stop playing the game, roll a die and be happy it it shows a 6.

It's the compromise that "something has to happen to prevent infinite battles" - but it's a bad choice. Something a little more complex could have felt a lot better in the context of "little people that fight for you".

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

I would completely take it and swallow it if it was a fluke hit that rolled 16 6s on the DRN or if it was a proper mechanic.

But in this case, it basically boils down to this: "I lost the battle because the enemy fainted." I don't think that makes any sense. HOW, exactly, is my pretender going to die, if all enemies within three months walking distance are fainted on the ground dying from the heat?

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

Call it a side-effect of the berserk state lasting too long if you want a rationale.

Or of mindless commanders trying to remain active too long. I think that's the only other common example.

And it's easy to avoid. Don't combine battlefield fatigue effects and berserk SCs unless you're sure you can actually kill everything on the field.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

I agree with Maraxus that it's one of the poorer design choices in Dominions, particularly because it's so jarring to your suspension of disbelief. I think I would prefer to see the 75-turn limit work more like the 50-turn limit: at turn 75, all pieces are removed from the board. All the defenders live, and remain in the province. All the attackers flee, and die if there's no province to retreat to. It might be annoying to some people that your Enc 0 Morale 99 berserkers packs it up and goes home after 75 turns of combat, but it wouldn't feel quite so gamey.

RE thejeff's point that this is easy to avoid: yes, but there are still a ton of other surprising things that can kill rookierookie in surprising ways. I would still avoid taking a 4-global pretender into combat until I was pretty sure I'd seen most of them. Of course, maybe I'm just cautious--I typically avoid taking pretenders into combat at ALL unless they're immortal.

-Max

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

By the way, this can happen even without the berserking. You only "heal" 5 fatigue per turn. If a battlefield fatigue effect like Rigor Mortis hits you with some unlucky rolls and you get up to 150 fatigue or so, it will keep hitting you with about 5 fatigue every turn thereafter, and without reinvig items or an Earth bless you may never recover in time to flee the battlefield before the 75 turn limit.

I have occasionally used Rigor Mortis + a single SC to clear out AI armies of 800-900 EA R'lyeh chaff. The SC may only kill 50-100, but Rigor Mortis will kill 400+. Edit: Although come to think of that I think that's because of the fatigue/damage conversion more than because of the 75-turn limit--hitting the 75-turn limit is in fact bad because it kills off my poison golem SC. Ah well, such is life.

-Max

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

True that you can lose SCs because they are unconscious and can't flee, but that doesn't fall quite so far into the "clearly winning" category. You weren't winning, you were passed out in the corner...

And an SC really needs some reinvig. If you're relying on a life drain attack you can get by without any. Or 0 fatigue non-casters, I guess, but even that's risky since any fatigue from spells or attacks won't go away.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

thejeff,

All of what you said is true. I was just trying to minimize the chanes of rookierookie dying unexpectedly to this rule in the future.

-Max

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

And then they had cornered the Destroyer of Worlds and the banners charged, drowning him in flesh and steel. But from blood and dying horses he emerged and came upon the pikemen. They held, pikes splintering, their ranks thinning while the raspy screams of the inquisitor reminded them of the torment awaiting deserters. But not even a single scratch they could inflict and with each man he killed he became stronger.
And then an inhuman voice thundered over the burning plains:
"Jim, come home, tea is ready!"


Yeah, really I hate the 50 turn limit. Maybe make it so that after turn 50 every two rounds there must be a kill to keep going to avoid exploits.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

But if you had a couple of skelly spammers going, you could have a kill every round forever.

It's an arbitrary limit. Deal with it. It could be extended and probably should be, but there are all sorts of arbitrary limits in the game.

Since a single thug can conquer an entire province in one short fight, why can't he conquer others in the same turn? It's not like beating a handful of PD takes very long and if he has the movement.... How does one guy take over an entire province anyway? It's not like he can be everywhere. He just flies in, plants the flag and all the locals go "sure, whatever. Guess we've changed sides again."
Why only two (sometimes 1 or 3) misc item slots? They're all different types of items. It's an arbitrary game balance limit.
Why when a shapechanger changes to a form without a particular slot do those items disappear? They don't drop onto the ground where he can pick them up when he changes back. They just vanish. Unless he's in a lab in which case any commander in any other lab can take them. Makes no sense. It's just the way the game works. (And I've lost SCs that way too. Stupid Skratti wolf form.)


There are arbitrary limits because it's a game. Not a world simulation. You can rationalize, learn to use them to your advantage or just live with them. Or you can, of course, continue to ***** about them.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

All I'm going to say is that, if that's the way we are going to deal with every clearly problematic mechanic, we might as well do away with patches, and we'll be stuck with games that never improve, ever.

Not a good line of reasoning, me thinks.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

I'd have to agree with Rookierookie. It seems that the main reason for the mechanic is to solve the halting problem for Dom3, and cut short battles that will never end, or will only end after 1000's of turns (e.g. two opposing thugs with high regeneration but low attack). If the limit was increased to 100 (which might be a very easy change for the devs), you would have many fewer "victorious" battles that are lost strictly due to the time limit. As it is, the turn limit is a definite concern whenever you combine in a SC with battle-field wide fatigue effects, and it generally turns a couple of battles from victories to defeats in each game.

Of course, you'd have to consider the effect this would have on other aspects of the game. It would make Vengenance of the Dead less deadly, and would make it more difficult to swamp SCs with chaff undead in order to stall their advance or force them to retreat.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

This discussion was already discussed, and the group that wanted the 50-turn and the 75-turn limits changed was very vocal. It's been a while since then, and patches haven't made many changes to existing mechanics in a while. Additions, yes, but not changes. Why? I don't know. Perhaps it's too much work. Perhaps it's hard-coded and trying to change it at all would cause all kinds of trouble. Perhaps it would invalidate ongoing games.

It would be nice, I agree, but it doesn't come up often. I doubt it will change, now.

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

I agree that bumping up the limit would be nice, though unlikely to happen.

I'm suspicious of more complicated fixes designed to try to guess whether a battle is actually stalemated or is still progressing to an end. Those are likely to introduce other, subtler and more abusable problems. And are even more unlikely to happen:)

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

The turn limit is also an important influence on the game's tactics. The main attraction of area-effect weapons like Sunslayer and Shadow Brand is that they kill more enemy before the 50-turn limit. If there weren't any limit you might as well use a Sword of Sharpness.

-Max

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

Well, the troop limit was changed wasn´t it?

Re: Best way to lose a battle...
 

Still considered a fix - it wasn't just something that people wanted, it was breaking games completely.