Player controlled battles???

[Wendigo]

Originally posted by HJ:
Something like a Total War system, where you can autoresolve battles or choose to fight them out yourself, would be ideal - and please everyone.
[/QB]

Well I am afraid it wouldn't please me.

Note that Dom's is not an autoresolve battle system in the pure sense, you do not just get told you killed X & lost Y due to some obscure formula, you actually _do_ issue orders to your guys, it's just that you do it before the battle instead of during it.

To me, this is a much richer system than the autoresolve algorithms from other TBS games that I find simplistic & boring. In a sense, the battle engine is the part of the game I value the most (and have most fun with).

I don't play PBEM, so that doesn't influence what I like or don't like either. I'm just saying what would make the game even more enjoyable for me personally.
[/QB]

The arguments against this have been rehearsed before:
-It would make MP unviable with full control (or simplify it immensely with autoresolve)
-Battles with 50+ commanders & 500+ troops per size would be totally unplayable, even in SP.

The game would need a huge rewriting for this aproach to even be considered (starting with troops operating only in units & finishing by limiting a lot the nº of mages & spells they can use), and I do not think the end result would even improve on what we currently have.

And I never said anything about RTS. Actually, I was thinking about TBS tactical combat. Why do people immediately assume tactical combat has to be RTS as if they've never heard of or played HOMM or AOW, I don't know. I mentioned TW purely because it has the option to autoresolve or fight it out yourself. AOW2 has the same option, and I could've used it as an example as well. I didn't, well, my bad, I still wasn't thinking about RTS. In any case, since you'll be autoresolving battles anyway, I don't see why you would care either way.
[/QB]

Note that 2 of the above examples are games with 8 or less stacks/commanders/units per army, and the other one doesn't even have mages. The difference of magnitude for every single battle is huge.
And no, once again I wouldn't like autoresolve.

And this is the only forum I've seen where suggestions, regardless of how polite the tone is, are so vigorously shouted down by the people who play the game that it's becoming ridiculous. [/QB]

I guess we have a certain clash of cultures here:
-On one side we have enthusiastic newcomers to the game proposing changes left & right to things that actually work in their current estate.
-On the other we have the vet players from Dom I with ample experience in the game (2 years in my case), who feel a sense of 'deja vu' with many of these proposals (ie, they have been discussed already, maybe even many times in previous forums).

The first group doesn't understand why the brilliant (in their minds, at least) proposal gets rejected or disliked, the 2nd group doesn't understand how something so glaring obvious (to them) is not immediately seen by the revolutionary newcomers.

Stuff like control of battles or naval battles fall in this bag, they have been discussed before & the arguments against have not been rebuted yet.

Longer term a FAQ could alleviate this type of conflicts, so that newcomers could get pointed to the previous debate on the topic, for now we will have to do with what we have.

One way or the other, the tone could improve and I am myself guilty of having a too sharp tongue at times.