One of the best reasons Dominions is an awesome game!

[Arryn]

Originally posted by PvK:
recover one of my heroes who was untimely smashed by a Jotun ...

Hero-squashing is a not-much-spoken-of pasttime of Jotuns. Well, it's not much spoken of by non-Jotuns; Jotuns themselves delight in telling such (usually graphic) tales whilst downing mugs (more like kegs with handles) of ale and scratching the ears of one of the many cute puppies (better known as Winter wolves) that always seem to be underfoot in any such festive gathering of Nordic largesse. You can usually find the nearest such gathering by following the trail of blood that drips off the impaled humans, since the giants tend not to bother with cleaning their weapons until after they've had a good night's carousing.

Remind me sometime to tell you stories of R'lyeh's Version of the Vulcan mind-meld ...

[Coffeedragon]

THE DEVILS OF VIRTUE

/short AAR of my first Newbie game

I was playing Man against half a dozen AIs on Reemergence of Urgaia. My Goddess was Virtue the Virtue with restless followers.

I was under big pressure from Ermor. One day a peasant found an old document and brought it into the palace. It was an unused Soul Pact! It was decided that a Commander of Virtue´s Army should sign and get the Devils.

At first all went well. With the help of half a dozen Devils, the Virtuous Army dispersed the Undead. Soon the Dark Citadel of Ermor was in sight. After a short siege, the walls were breached and the final assault was beginning.

At this very moment, a Horror appeared and ate the Commander who had signed the pact. Having lost their commander, his Devils sat around doing nothing, while undead magicians with highly developed spell technology demolished the Virtuous Army.

It was the total annihilation of the Heroes, the Monks, the Crone of Avalon, the Prophet and of Virtue.

THE MORAL:

-An attack on the Capital of Ermor should be well-prepared.
-Research should not be neglected.
-You cannot always trust the Devils.

[Norfleet]

The devils themselves are fairly reliable. It's that you gave them only one commander, the one who was prone to being randomly eaten by a horror. Had you assigned the contract to an expendable commander, and used someone ELSE as the leader, or used a leader which was not as susceptible to being eaten, things would have worked out much better.

[Targa]

Originally posted by PvK:

I am glad there is no real "return to a saved position" feature - those have undermined the gameplay and the design of many other games, which devolve into "oh I died - I'll just say it didn't happen, since there's not much I can do now".

Yep, I totally agree. Recently I was playing alot of Medieval: Total War, and reading the message Boards I would constantly run across the comment, "And no savey-loadey-savey-loadey" when you play your game!" in reference to people just loading up the Last save when something they didn't like happened. I recently played as Pangaea, and had a beautiful, heroic, experienced, Dryad Prohpet who also was lucky enough to have a great-sounding name. She was preaching in a province and had only a handful of militia with her when it was overrun by enemies and she got killed. That really pissed me off! Labs getting destroyed by earthquakes, etc... these are all things that other games allow you to 'load your Last save and pretend it never happened'. Clearly the way to get the most enjoyment out of any game is to "suck it up and get on with your life". Save/load is the road to an easy win, and not for hardcore gamers.

[Coffeedragon]

Originally posted by Norfleet:
The devils themselves are fairly reliable. It's that you gave them only one commander, the one who was prone to being randomly eaten by a horror.

I know. The seeming unreliability of the Devils was poetic licence for storytelling. It just so happened that the Devils behaved as devilishly as you would them expect to.

[PvK]

Originally posted by Targa:
... Clearly the way to get the most enjoyment out of any game is to "suck it up and get on with your life". Save/load is the road to an easy win, and not for hardcore gamers.

Quite. Sadly, many games are so designed for the "die and reload" mentality, that they are almost impossible to survive on the first try, and/or not interesting at all to replay, so that they can't really be enjoyed in "suck it up" mode. If you "suck it up" in many CRPGs, you're dead and can't do much else except replay from the beginning, in which case you notice that almost everything was scripted and not very interesting to play again. But "die and reload" practically reduces the whole exercise to an endurance test.

PvK

This is why I am glad there is no save feature in Dominions. If you do something stupid, you pay for your mistake and have to try to make up for it.

I hope that Illwinter doesn't put in a save feature, since there is already a script out there for people to 'save and reload' that is 3rd party for those who don't enjoy playing any other way.