My 2 wishes for Dominions 3!!

[lebarjack]

DominionsFAN said:
I just purchased Kohan 2 Kings of War, and the multiplayer lobby is really awesome, and gamespy is hosting it.

You can't compare Kohan (games are 2-3 hours long) with Dominion where you can play the same game for days.
There is some chat channel and these forum. I think it is sufficient for finding players and starting a game.
Not even mentioning that shrapnel's people has on their todo list setting up a server 'a la' Mosehansen.

[Gandalf Parker]

Its a good idea but I dont know if I want Johan to put it in the gaeme.

GameSpy and such lobbys are available for download. Someone could probably look into making it work with Dom3 (and Dom2 for that matter)

The concept of lobby is closer to the concept of the web servers for games. And the headaches involved with security, compatability, being load friendly, etc is a whole new truckload of garbage for a programmer to bang their head on. Especially since the same thing, at various levels, could be easily done by modifing something like a chat or forum or bbs package.

I think something like that would best be done by a 3rd party programmer. And as was done with my requests, and Esben Mose Hansens requests, I am sure that Johan would be more than willing to consider putting in any switches or handles which such a program would want.

[DominionsFan]

lebarjack said:

You can't compare Kohan (games are 2-3 hours long) with Dominion where you can play the same game for days.
There is some chat channel and these forum. I think it is sufficient for finding players and starting a game.
Not even mentioning that shrapnel's people has on their todo list setting up a server 'a la' Mosehansen.

Wait, hold right there! Example in Kohan 2, you can save the multi game anytime, and just load it up later on!!! Yes all this with a gamespy lobby system!
So if someone has to go....the host just saving the game, and loading it up when everyone available again!

[Thufir]

DominionsFAN said:
Wait, hold right there! Example in Kohan 2, you can save the multi game anytime, and just load it up later on!!! Yes all this with a gamespy lobby system!
So if someone has to go....the host just saving the game, and loading it up when everyone available again!

Pardon me, but this is a ludicrous comparison! Kohan plus GameSpy are provided by two separate companies, that are very comercially oriented, with huge resources.

Illwinter Design is a very talented, non-commercial development house, with two developers. IMNSHO, the fact that Dominions II (and no doubt III), has such an elegant design base, combined with an excellent implementation (especially when consider w/r to the limited dev resources available), that it far outshines any of the more commercial titles available. I am not an anti-commercial snob - I have greatly enjoyed many commercial titles, but if you like epic scoped, turn based strategy games, Dom II is the hands down winner, as far as I am concerned.

Now, when considering Dom III, the Last thing I would put on my wishlist is a game lobby. This is not to say that a game lobby would be a bad thing, but the task of creating a game lobby does overlaps little with game development, and I would far, far prefer to have our most excellent IW game designers/developers doing, well, game design and development.

If a game lobby were to be done, it should be as others have said, done by a third party. If this could be arranged, that might be nice, but I suspect (as was also suggested), that this would have to be set up by Shrapnel, rather than IW (the steps to initiate this would have to be on the business side, rather than development). I suppose it might be nice if GameSpy itself were to take an interest in Dom II (I don't know enough about GameSpy to even know if this were a good thing), but from a business perspective, this sound more than a little unlikely.

But even if a likely third party is identified, there are so many steps that precede game lobbies, that game lobbies still fall down on the list. Before you can talk about game lobbies, you will need servers run by some company, that can afford to maintain them and keep them running. To that end, if Shrapnel stepped up to the plate and provided servers to run Esben Mosehansen's *very* nice (and by my guess, low maintenance) PBW Dom II server, that would be a wonderful thing. I'm not sure that it would pay for Shrapnel to do this, but it would certainly be far cheaper to do this than to provide a game lobby.

- Thufir

PS My apologies if the tone of this sounds hostile, but there is just *so* much to this question that I couldn't help myself from spewing out a lengthy response

[DominionsFan]

Thufir, a game lobby cant be bad, dont even try to tell me that.
Sure we cant compare and RTS to a TB game so what?! Just because Dominions is a TB game, does that means that its not worth to have an own lobby???? Trust me, a lobby would be a very good thing, and many players would like it. Who the hell wanna use a web-based server all the time and wait for the emails etc, when we could have an awesome lobby, host directly from there, chat with the others etc.
Do not tell me that this is bad! Since Dominions is very MP oriented this should be a must have.

[Thufir]

DominionsFAN said:
Thufir, a game lobby cant be bad, dont even try to tell me that.

I'm not saying that, at all! But I do question what priority it should be placed at. And a large part of my questioning is based not on the value it would provide to players, but rather on what it would cost Shrapnel/Illwinter to create.

Can I ask you - have you ever played an MP game using mosehansen as the server? Personally, I think MP games work on this very nicely. IMO, the biggest problem with mosehansen is not the lack of features, but rather it's limited availability. Since this server is provided by a private individual entirely free of charge, it's kinda hard to complain about that. Bottom line: I would personally place as a higher priority having Shrapnel (or a 3rd party - if such a deal could be done), providing/maintaing a small number of PBW servers running Esben Mosehansen's Dom II web front end. This would be relatively modest in cost, and would greatly improve our ability to conduct MP games.

Since Dominions is very MP oriented this should be a must have.

Well, clearly since there is a sizeable community already playing Dom II, it's not quite a must have. Perhaps, if Shrapnel found a way to make this happen for Dom III, and the interest in Dom III skyrocketed, and the sales therefore skyrocketed, and the investment in the game lobby were thus payed off - I would be proven wrong. I'm a bit skeptical about that prospect, but I sure would be happy to see such a thing occur

[Cainehill]

DominionsFAN said:
Trust me, a lobby would be a very good thing, and many players would like it. Who the hell wanna use a web-based server all the time and wait for the emails etc, when we could have an awesome lobby, host directly from there, chat with the others etc.
Do not tell me that this is bad! Since Dominions is very MP oriented this should be a must have.

I don't see what good a lobby would do, given that the great majority of the games don't run with all of the players playing at the same time, and the games that are done with all the players Online at once (blitzes) have serious issues in that some players take half an hour (or longer) to do a turn, while another player is finished in 5 minutes and has to wait on the sluggards who take 40 minutes for the 1st turn, and the ones whose empire is larger enough to require a lot of management.

For chatting with the other players, IRC works just fine - far better than the chat facility in most of the lobby software out there right now, even ones done by relatively huge companies like Blizzard (Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft, etc).

So - since the majority of the games run with 24 or 48 hour turns, how does a lobby do anything that benefits the game or the players?

The one thing that would be nice would be an official server that could be set up like Mosehansen, with a bit more dedicated resources so that more games could be hosted.

[DominionsFan]

Guys, I understand you all, sure maybe this is not a must have but a lobby with mp system would be lot better and easier and more user friendly, than the current Dom 2. MP system.
Perhaps the IW devs can do something about it.

Yes as it is now, 1 turn takes hella lot of time to play in MP, with a lobby/mp system this would speed up drastically. You have 1 hour to play? Hell you are logging in, and if a game is up you join. No games up? Others in the lobby? You can talk with the others in the same place about hosting a game etc. You wont have to wait for an email to do your turn. You won't have enough time to finish a game? There should be a save function for the host.
Seriously imho this would be an awesome addition for the MP. Hopefully IW will consider to add something like this.

[Gandalf Parker]

DominionsFAN said: Hell you are logging in, and if a game is up you join. No games up? Others in the lobby? You can talk with the others in the same place about hosting a game etc. You wont have to wait for an email to do your turn. You won't have enough time to finish a game? There should be a save function for the host.
Seriously imho this would be an awesome addition for the MP. Hopefully IW will consider to add something like this.

That sounds like the #Dominions IRC channel.

[Cainehill]

DominionsFAN said:
Yes as it is now, 1 turn takes hella lot of time to play in MP, with a lobby/mp system this would speed up drastically.

I'm beginning to wonder what drugs you're on. How in Dog's name does a lobby speed up the process of taking turns in MP? If I have 30 provinces and 43 mages to manage and it takes me 45 minutes to do so, the other players have to wait 45 minutes.

You have 1 hour to play? Hell you are logging in, and if a game is up you join.

If a game is already up, there's no way to join in the middle of a game. If a game is starting and looking for players, it tends to take over an hour for people to get their pretenders, decide game settings, house rules, and nations. After going through all that, if a player joins and thinks to quit after 1 hour of play, that player probably isn't going to be welcomed back by the group of players.

When _ONE PLAYER_ decides they've played enough, that's it for the whole group of players, unless Player #1 goes AI. And with games often taking months to play, and often over 100 hours of player time, talking about "1 hour games" or 1 hour of playing time just doesn't make much sense.