Speeding up battles

[joew767]

Maybe i am one of those "attention-challenged" people. Or maybe i value my time more than other people. I do not think the speed of the battle is a 'bug', perhaps a 'flaw'. But it definitely is high on my wish list to be changed. Last night i was playing a game, checked my Messages, saw that i captured the castle in Marginon(sp?) (no results other than i captured it, argh!!). The next 3 Messages were telling me how i found magic items. Then i notice that this items were the same as what was on my prophet, how did she die! So i have to watch the whole battle to find out. I outnumbered them 8+ to 1. I had 4 or 5 commanders, they had 10+ commanders plus their pretender (about 12 troops). Every turn would consist of each of their priest/mages casting some fireball/firefly/fire something spell, watching the fireball spell ...slowly...arcing ...thru...the...air, then hitting something (or nothing), then the next spellcaster would cast and slowly watch the graphic. more than 10 times each turn till they fatigue. Plus my 2 archer units, the castle's arrows, my 3 spellcasters, and unit movement. I had to watch the entire battle to find out that the 2nd Last castle firing hits my prophet. I already have the graphics turned lowest in hopes of it being faster (it doesnt really help) and in hopes that i can view the whole battlefield without that darn tree getting in my way ;-).

most of the time i just want to see a specific thing or get a general idea of what went wrong. A speed control on the battle woudl be great!! But i dont think it makes the game unplayable, just have the TV on or have something to read while you are 'watching' it.

[Arryn]

Originally posted by joew767:
it definitely is high on my wish list to be changed

I quite understand your frustration. I, too, have had to sit through 20+ rounds of castle assault to see how a particular leader died by castle missiles. But, IMO, speeding up the anims, assuming it's even viable (which I doubt, even if the devs are willing to do it, which they haven't said) may bring on a *new* set of problems. Namely, not being able to tell what is killing what. As has been mentioned, the ideal solution is a variable-speed playback, with rewind ability. That should make everyone happy. Those that prefer to fast-forward and get an overview of what's happened, and those that want to see every Last detail.

[Arralen]

To really speed up your battle replays hit the "w" key. This will hide all 3D things, you'll be left with the combat grid and the bitmaps from the units. Should run pretty fast on every machine.

There was a adjustable speed like in DOM2, but the devs took it out as it caused some bugs which haven't been solved 'til now. (Wonder if they are related to the random-number-problem in the battle engine)

I'm running DOM2 on a P2/400 with 384 MB and W2kSp2, Ge2Ti card, detonator 41.09. Most times I have a mp3 player running too, but still missiles need only 3 sec to cross the whole battlefield from end to end. This is windowed at 1080x810 and low detail, normal filters. So if they take 10 on your 2 GHz machines, you're doing something wrong.

How would you handle spellcasting, if not sequential? Even now there are endless complaints from people who can't understand what is happening during spellcasting - what do you think will happen if all spells of a combat turn will go off at once?


PS: RE-windable combat "replay" isn't possible, as in fact it isn't a re-play, but a re-calculation. Saving all combat data or a video into a savegame is impossible for e-mail game. So essentially a combat is stored as initial random seed and troop setup.

[ March 03, 2004, 16:56: Message edited by: Arralen ]

[Sand]

The only part of battles that is "too slow" is the "arcing" effects: arrows, shard spells, etc., each of which take 5 seconds or so. There's no question in my mind that this is an issue which should be improved on (someday, even if only for dom3). I have a fast (3.0 GHz, Radeon 9800 Pro, 1 gig RAM) machine. It's clearly not an issue of calculation time, but a choice on the part of the developers.

Possible solutions:

-- hitting a key ends the volley and goes straight to the damage effect animation
-- a slider bar to set speed of volleys
-- a switch to eliminate the volley animations entirely
-- enhanced source and target indicators
-- a rewind / slider bar
-- a text log of effects in combat (like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, where you can go back and review each die roll and modifier)

I'm compiling a list of feature additions/changes I'd like to see, and this is a big one.

[Gandalf Parker]

PS: RE-windable combat "replay" isn't possible, as in fact it isn't a re-play, but a re-calculation. Saving all combat data or a video into a savegame is impossible for e-mail game. So essentially a combat is stored as initial random seed and troop setup.


The "jump to the end" and "replay" might be achievable by having the computer run thru the calculations without trying to display it. I dont know if that would be fast enough to be useable. It would probably have to be tested.

[ March 03, 2004, 17:04: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Arralen:
I'm running DOM2 on a P2/400 with 384 MB and W2kSp2, Ge2Ti card, detonator 41.09. Most times I have a mp3 player running too, but still missiles need only 3 sec to cross the whole battlefield from end to end. This is windowed at 1080x810 and low detail, normal filters. So if they take 10 on your 2 GHz machines, you're doing something wrong.

Heh, nice to see I'm not the only one to find 10s missile volleys 2-3x too slow. I run a 2.1GHz AMD, 512k RAM, GF4 4400. Dom windowed 1280x1024, at very high graphics detail, with a half-dozen or more apps, including Mozilla, Photoshop, and WinAMP in the background and arrows at most take 6s to reach their max range, usually only 3-4s for a hit at range ~25-30.

You're running it on a system that's only 100MHz faster than the minimum spec, and it blows rings around that P4 2.4 (that has 6x the speed and 20x the CPU power, nevermind the 2 full generations of GF video) ...

[Arryn]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
PS: RE-windable combat "replay" isn't possible, as in fact it isn't a re-play, but a re-calculation. Saving all combat data or a video into a savegame is impossible for e-mail game.

Good point, I keep forgetting about the MP aspects. Thanks.