D2 vs Aow:SM

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Particle:
Hum this is weird. I asked like 20 ppl about dominions 2, and all of them said that what the **** is this piece of ****! I don't agree with them of course..

Who did you ask? Barbie: Fashion Designer fans? Or even worse, Final Fantasy 7+ fans? The former tend to be mindless (or at least feebleminded, or possibly just very young) while the latter tend to value graphics, cutscenes, dumb plots, and bad music over gameplay, coolness, good plots, and good music (or else they'd be playing Square's good games). Or perhaps you asked Warcraft 3 fans, who don't necessarily understand the concept of a strategy game.

I know a lot of people reacted the way you describe to Doms I, but I have not seen that reaction to Doms II in the forums I frequent=)

[HJ]

I think that the main difference is in the amount of options you have. Once I explore all the options and get a hang of most of the tricks in the game, it loses much of its appeal. In AoW, it was pretty easy to do. The main tactics become apparent very soon, and the variety is very limited. All the battles play out the same way, and start to look the same fairly soon. In other words, after about 10 days, there was nothing else to do, and nothing new to discover. In Dominions, the amount of options and their combinations is vast. There is always something new to try, especially if you're not just sticking to the optimality recipes, and I don't see the game getting stale any time soon. To achieve this, a game doesn't necessarily have to have 1000 unit types (chess doesn't), but it can help nevertheless.
Plus, there is a notable difference in design intention. In Dominions, some things are there just because they would be cool if they are (at least that's how it seems; you can always find a way to use them), while in most big-studio games no effort is put into anything that is not immediately and overly useful and gives good returns while at the same time being easy to grasp. This again means reduced variety, and reduced replayability, and I don't really consider myself as target audience for those games, even though I buy them from time to time. I guess I could boil it down to market requirements vs. ars gratia artis.
SP experience of Dominions II is still great, and I hope it's going to be even better in the future, and production values, even though not as high as something like Morrowind, are still more than satisfactory. There are some things that I'm not exactly fond of in Dominions, and some that I would create differently if it was my design, but that's true about every game that exists, since we are all different. In the end, it all depends on what you want to see in your games. Do you want just another product, or do you want something to really boggle your mind when you explore it. And no, Civilisation games are not a good example of the latter.

ps.
Yes, the manual could be better in explaining gameplay nuances.

[ November 25, 2003, 21:27: Message edited by: HJ ]

[LordArioch]

I definitely like Dom2 better...it got pretty tedious having my super stack need to be led through the proper abusive tatics to beat the enemy ai large Groups of level 1 troops *again*

Dominions has a better combat system and a larger scale game with troops that feel more different. AoW seemed to consist of red swordsmen swinging ineffectively at blue swordsmen again and again until one hit and killed the other pretty fast. It seemed like MoM, but without the epic scale and fun...no armageddon, no great wasting, no zombie mastery? Instead lame spells like fire mastery. How sad...
Dominions might not have those exact spells, but burden of time, haunted forest, etc., still have the impressive power that global enchantments should, and the national mages give each race alot more flavor despite at least as similar infantry as AoW in a lot of cases.

[ceremony]

Originally posted by HJ:

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Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

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Originally posted by Altus:
SM is a great 'beer and pretzel' fantasy wargame. I've had a lot of fun with it.

A lot of people talk about beer and pretzel strategy games. What does that mean? What's the origin? Is it more fun playing Dominions II while consuming beer and pretzels? I don't think I've ever ingested them together.

-Cherry

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AFAIK, the term describes a game that you can play casually, without much mental effort, and finish in a short time span. I've seen it mentioned a lot on the Underdogs site.

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It's a boardgaming term. It was used to differentiate between hardcore wargames that required your full attention during your turn, where you had to manipulate many stacks of counters, or constantly consult the rules, or both. A beer-and-pretzels game was one in which you and your opponent could shoot the breeze while playing and drinking beer and eating pretzels. Of course, you can always drink beer and eat preztels, but it referred also to the general atmosphere, less mental effort, etc. as HJ said. Shorter games with simpler rules were more social. As an example, War in the Pacific was a hardcore wargame, while its "beer & pretzels" counterpart was Victory in the Pacific (which, ironically, was the much better game).

The term doesn't make much sense as applied to computer games, except maybe in the general sense of "less complex rules." Still, computer games require a different kind of attention than boardgames. I wouldn't call Shadow Magic a "beer & pretzels" game at all. You need to pay really close attention to a lot of things, much as you would in a hardcore wargame. I've had players hand me my *** in m/p because I miscounted by one movement point.

Dominions 2 is, in my opinion, a far superior design to Shadow Magic. But neither one is a "beer & pretzels" game.

[Elmo]

Lost my Last game of SM after misplacing an army by one hex. Ended up attacking with only half my force and lost both halves eventually. One thing I did not like about the game was the difficulty in seeing exactly which hex your units occupied. Even with the grid turned on it was tough sometimes.

I agree that SM is not beer and pretzels, at least not in MP mode.

Thanks again for all the feedback. I'm playing the demo with help from the walkthrough and so far it's a lot of fun, and a very different experience from SM.

[ November 26, 2003, 12:29: Message edited by: Elmo ]

[Elmo]

After all the positive feedback and a run through the demo I ordered D2. Now all I have to do is convince my wife it's not going under the Christmas tree!

PS - Now when is that patch coming out?

[ November 26, 2003, 15:42: Message edited by: Elmo ]

[MythicalMino]

cool...welcome to the pack