[Cainehill]

Graeme Dice said:

As an aside, even if you only played the single player game for 20 hours you got more than your money's worth out of the game considering that any non-strategy game has about that much actual gameplay.

When I'm more wide awake I may address the first part of what you wrote, but for now : "Any non-strategy game has about ... 20 hours of gameplay"??? I'd love to be able to say, "Ad hominem!" or whatever ( ) but I'll have to settle for saying, patently untrue. Diablo and its clones certainly aren't strategy games, agreed? Not true RPGs, but hack-and-slash beer-and-bloodshed games aren't strategy titles.

Yet lots of people have gotten hundreds or thousands of hours of gaming experience out of them. Similarly, a game genre I don't play but whose players seem to manage to get hundreds or thousands of hours out of : First Person Shooters - okay, admittedly that's because of the MP thrills, but still - that's more than 20 hours.

Any numbers of RPGs have given players hundreds of hours of gameplay, as they restart with a different party, a different alignment choice, a 3 member party vice 6, etc. Hades - how many hours have people gotten out of driving games, golf games, or (gag) Dance Dance Revolution? More than 20.

You and Zen are comparing the game to movies - sorry, but that's comparing .... *shrug* Whiskey to milk. We drink both - but we don't expect milk to last as long as whiskey, and we don't expect as much fun out of it.

When we go to a movie, we expect at most around 2 hours entertainment. There's totally different expectations between the two entertainment choices / commodities, so please, just stop comparing the two. I doubt if many people would argue that (most) games are a better value, weighed in terms of money divided by time. I also doubt if many reasonable, intelligent people would say that a game was a life-changing experience, while people do sometimes feel that way about movies.

Even more pointedly : saying, "You got more gameplay for your dollar than you would've for a non-strategy title" is crap. Know anyone in recent years who ever bought a strategy game expecting 20 hours of play? How about a chess game that, because the AI is bad, occasionally removes one of your pieces from the board? That's what the Seeking Arrow from 30 provinces away on turn 12 is. "But they both make the game more challenging in the absence of better AI!" Gee - thanks!

And yes, I can think of a number of strategy games that had a much more solid, satisfying SP gameplay, without blatant cheating (sometimes without cheating, period) than Dominions 2. The original Warlords - just one map, 100s of hours of play. Sword of Aragon - not exactly scripted, but early battles were easy; to win the later battles you really had to improve your game, to the point of replaying once you'd improved, in order to build up your armies / cities better through the course of the game. Again - 100s of hours of play. Stars! ( The one by Stardock.) Master of Orion. Master of Magic. Anacreon, even.

(Note : Moo / MoM gave huge bonuses to the computer players. That isn't "blatant cheating", just as the AI getting huge bonuses in pretender creation isn't in Dominions.)

And again - I'm not unhappy with Dominions. I'm not unhappy with J & K. Quite the opposite. What I'm unhappy with is the knee-jerk response of calling someone's reply "close minded" just because they're not nearly as happy with Dominions as you are (or for that matter, as I am). People can have legitimate complaints, regardless of how wonderful a _MP_ game Dominions is. After all - it's designed and meant to be a MP (and PBEM at that) game.

But it wasn't really marketed that way. Not that it was particularly marketed in the modern sense but - Shrapnel never put a blurb out, "By PBEM gamers, for PBEM gamers - if you're not womanly enough for MP, you're not woman enough for this game", nor anything like it.