How do YOU play the game?

[fahdiz]

I'm definitely a sandboxer, but occasionally I have gamist tendencies.

[Taqwus]

I'm definitely a sandboxer, but one with a strange predilection for role-playing the eccentric, impractical or downright insane. Why yes, the gods must indeed be crazy!

[Vynd]

I'm a gamer!

[Norfleet]

My style defies classification. I play for survival, thus my noteworthy slow, grinding combat style: I'm not actually trying to win, it just happens as a kind of side effect of outLasting everyone else. While a gamer would likely commit himself to crushing the other opponent, I tend to be less concerned with that and would rather keep a sizeable reserve to defend against surprises....although I guess they're not really surprises when they're expected.

Many think that I'll use anything to win....but that's not truly my goal. This has resulted in some confusion.

[Mad_Lear]

I actually think this is the greatest strength of the Dom II universe- it's so big, there's room for everybody. I could play forever sandboxing against the AI- experimenting and playing with all of the possible spell/hero/event possiblilities- and those people out there who love to match wits against their brethen can play the exact same game and get just as much satisfaction out of playing for keeps and trying to maximize the massive amounts of variables towards the desired results.

I actually think one of the marks of genius of this game is how almost any strategy will work at least a little bit, sometimes. I mean, imagine one player gets beat by another player, so perfectly and completely, that the only damage the losing player does to the winning player is to injure one of his archers slightly, putting out one of the poor fellow's eyes. Imagine if the winning player doesn't notice the injury and then moves the same archer into a pitched battle against another player of equal strength. Imagine that the resulting battle is perfectly balanced- the results of said battle could very well balance on weither or not a single arrow hits or misses its target. Suddenly, the "token" resistance of the first player becomes important!

An extreme and rather silly example, I know, but the point is simply that the game is so big, small things matter. This game has it's own mini Version of chaos theory, y'know? The butterfly flaps his wings, and the whole landscape changes...

Which means sandboxing isn't always useless, and no amount of power gaming can assure victory, simply because little things matter...

Anyway, just rambling. The main point of this speil is that this is a game so wide and deep that it can be played like Chess or like D&D, and I think that's just plain awesome

[Norfleet]

Sandboxers are actually a kind of "foil" element in a multiplayer dynamic: While their lack of competitiveness basically assures that they won't win the ultimate victory, they exist, they can still potentially cause a lot of damage, and if you're in a game with other cutthroat players, the presence of these other people actually serves as a kind of foil: Launching an attack on them outright can be a mistake, since it leaves you open for attack by one of the other players, but ignoring them isn't necessarily a sound plan either, since they *DO* take up space, and could be potentially manipulated into opposing you directly or indirectly. As such, while unlikely to be the ultimate winner, they still play an important role in the game.

[Vicious Love]

On the one hand, I'm ALL sandbox, with a pail and little pLastic stars and lego blocks, awwwww yeah.
On the other hand, my IC pretender USUALLY plays to win. Consequently, I'm functionally identical to a gamer, but instead of seeing myself constantly selecting Groups of blood hunters and pressing Shift-Z, I envision the sci-fi/fantasy cliche of a bunch of haggard, world-weary, melodramatic politicians and generals sitting around a table, arguing about precisely how and why they are doomed, why they will not condone a course of action that will lead our people to war, and why the hobbit can't bloody well take the ring until he gains a few levels. Ah, good times.
On a related note, my favorite bit of the Last LARP I was at was near the endgame, when everyone was going to war, the Apocalypse was at hand, history was being made, and myself and the ruling class of my quasi-Italian mercantile faction convened and had A COMMITTEE, which Lasted well into the Final Battle and ended a few minutes before the world did.
I'm bringing this up because I have the sudden urge to let three or four idle turns pass each time something monumental happens and distracts the senate in my Pythium games. So, basically, I've just persuaded myself to disregard everything I said at the start of this post, about my IC Pretender playing to win. Solid.