[Dragar]

I just came across this thread..

The argument regarding whether save/reload is cheating or not I’ll sidestep – personally I think it would be convenient, especially for a new player, but its not a big deal once past that point. I’d agree it is a barrier to entry, it was frustrating at the beginning when I managed to self-destruct every few turns one way or another

One very interesting thing about all of this is that the devs really don’t seem to care about selling a lot of copies. This is bad in some ways, but overall good so I’m happy 

The bad – there really is a lot that could be done from an interface point of view to make this game better; save games, repeat forging, waypoints, automated troop movements, etc etc. Especially for single player where one just seems to flip through the turns, a lot of the game is a tedium. I am sure that between all that, the complexity and the graphics, a lot of players get turned away from the game and sales are lost. The complete lack of attention to SP doesn’t help there either, but I can see what a massive job that would be, and really it would take a lot to make Dominions really good purely as a SP experience.

The good – devs with a primarily commercial aim in mind tend to dumb down games too much for the gamer that really wants to be involved. Having just started playing multiplayer I can see why people regard it as totally different. With such a range of options from people and unpredictable behaviour, you never just go through the motions, you have to consider everything carefully and react quickly. The tedium vanishes because everything must be considered. Dominions isn’t forgiving – I’m sure I’ll be 4 weeks into my first MP game when one action Ididn’t know was possible will destroy me. That’s great!

A few years ago I played an MMPOGD called Faith for a couple of years, a team based strategy game that operated in real time. In a lot of ways that game really rocked, it had massive potential and a core of very involved, passionate players that spent a lot of time on it – much like Dominions. The major difference is the devs’ attitudes. In dominions they focus on making the game better for the existing player base, and focus on what is important for them – balance and new content. Stress the balance here! In Faith the emphasis quickly moved to keeping new players, which meant neglecting balance and dumbing down the lethality of combat. They also kept creating new content and fluffy roleplay stuff before they had their core mechanics sorted properly, which compounded initial problems rather than improving the game.

I would love some of the nice to haves sorted out, especially AI improvements, but all in all I’m just grateful to have a game where development targets improving the experience for existing players. Transparent development, a simple and understandable (even explained in manual!) game mechanic with complexity out of the vast number of races/units/spells/items and their combinations. Its all good 

And should our Swedish friends ever want to take it to the next level where it will appeal to a wider base (though it will always remain a niche game), I’m sure they will have plenty of support here to get those things sorted.