[johan osterman]

Originally posted by HJ:

Furthermore, random dice effectively makes all your units very similar in performance. If you like systems like AoW2, where a halfling slinger can kill a dragon without a problem because of the huge random factor in combat resolution, then we fundametally disagree on what we want to see in games. I want to see difference and gradation between units, you want to see everybody performing pretty much the same. The expensive units are just a waste of resources, since this is not backed up by their elevated performance, and you're better off just massing units instead of doing some decision making in the process.

If you are saying what I think you are saying, that the randomisation in the combat in dominions makes all units perform pretty much the same, you you are obviously way off base. If you have played the game it will be abundantly clear to you that there is a huge difference between the performance of a knight and a militia. The random dice enters comes into play in many situations so that it would be a very rare occurence indeed for 20 knights to get whipped by 20 militia, I even doubt it would happen very often that 20 knights route from 100 militia. The costs of most units reflect how they perform, there are occasional statistical abberations of course, but dominions isnt chess.

An if you consider tactical and strategical decisions to be classified as "micromanagement", then what do you call browsing through menus and changing orders every turn? I shudder to think what would you say if there were rumours about implementation of tactical control over the battles.

I do not think that anyone considers tactical and strategic decisions as micromanagement per se, but it is not entirely obvious that the slash/crush/pierce additions would result in decisions that will have a meaningfull impact on gameplay that outweighs the additional micromanagement it would result in. This also pertains to the more general discussion on what level of abstraction combat should occur, it is not a given that the most realistic and complex combat system makes the best game. Dominions has allready gone quite a far in modelling induvidual combat compared to most games in the same genre, it is not necessarily a good thing to reduce the abstraction even further, although it might be. Other ideas in this vein has been to model hit locations etc., although hitlocations would not even potentionally add much of strategical or tactical decisions.

And besides the issue of potentional micromanagenment there is the difficulty of implementing it in a balanced way that works well with the rest of the current system.