[HJ]

Since we're discussing it, here are some possible answers, if you don't mind:

1) How will the different armors and weapons be spread among the nations? Potential problmes I see here are either giving all nations access to the same sets of numbers (boring if you ask me) or risking imbalances in certain nations that cannot handle certain attacks or defenses very well. Furthermore, if you want to provide for more coverage of attacks or defense you will increase the number of units that each nation has by roughly 9 units!!! That seems just insane to me, but it wouldn't kill anything, just make the game more annoying by having to keep track of those ~9 new units.

It might exactly be the point to create slight imbalances. Even now there are slight imbalances: not all nations have the priests of same power and hence cannot handle undead attacks equally, for example. Or thay have mages of different strength, or they don't have cavalry. These imbalances cause you to adapt, and I don't see why would SPB system be any different. It's not like you won't do *any* damage with piercing attacks to the undead, e.g., it's just that you won't do as much as you would with bludgeoning ones. Hence, a very simple solution would be to build more units numerically to get the same result.
And the notion about annoyance to keep track of new units is exactly where we differ. I'm not asking for new units, but if they were added, for whatever reason, I would perceive it as anything other than annoyance, unlike yourself. It seems to me that some people simply don't want to learn new stuff and new tricks in the game system they already know well. Btw, I'm a new player to the Dom series, although not games in general, and I don't find this addition overwhelming at all, with regard to previously stated assertions that it would make the game less newbie-friendly.

2) What kind of scale are we talking about for the effectiveness of the three new damage types? Potential problem, if its too big the game really becomes rock/paper/scisiors, if its too small, then its game play value is diminished (other than for the imersion quality, which is not really high on the list of why to add this system I think).

It's kind of hard to tell beforehand, without actually giving it a try, but I certainly wouldn't want to see things like immunities and strict rock/paper/scisiors system, as I already said. The thing to strive for would be to achieve distinctive shades of gray, not black and white system or uniform blur that we have now.

3) If the nations are to rely more on independant troops to fill their holes (assuming they don't get coverage for each area) how is the starting position imbalance addressed? Outside of scripted maps I don't see how this would work. It might be fine for SP, but I can see the MP people taking issue with this potential problem.

It would depend on how lucky you are? If you can't handle it this time around, well, better luck next time. Isn't it how it functions now as well?

Btw, I only play SP. And I don't want to get into another discussion on how SP improvements ruin the MP game and vice versa. I'll just say that I liked it better in the old days when all games were SP, and hence it was gameplay that counted. Today, most games don't have gameplay or good AI, since that's going to be covered by other human players anyway, so why bother coding it. Me not like that, in short....

4) Not so much a question as a clarification...
There are three new damage types (and the corolary resistances to them) call them S, P, and B. How fine of a matrix would be involved in determining the varing levels of S, P, B and rS, rP, and rB? Would we have 9 different units comprising all the combinations? 18 units? 3 units? What? Moving to a completely different direction in unit creation would fix this somewhat, that is buying the base unit with money, then buying the base equipment for that unit with resources and equiping your base units in a similar fasion as your commanders, however, I expect a solution like that would be fairly unweildy for the Devs to want to implement. That suggestion would definately add to micro too.

Well, those were my initial thoughts when I started to play the game: "wouldn't it be cool if I could buy the equipment as well". But I'm not asking for that, and I don't believe the initial idea had this in mind either. Apart from that, the answer would be pretty much identical to the answer to question 1).

[ October 08, 2003, 16:19: Message edited by: HJ ]