I dunno, guys...

[Renegade 13]

Now you guys have got me curious, and I'm downloading the demo for Dom2. Unfortunately, it's going to take about 6 hours to download on my crappy dialup internet! Ah well, more time to play SEIV in the meantime!

[deccan]

Renegade 13 said:
Now you guys have got me curious, and I'm downloading the demo for Dom2.

I remember when I first played Dom2 for the very first time (SP of course) in December Last year. I picked Tien Chi (cos it's China and I'm Chinese), picked a sage as a pretender (cos it would be sort of thematic).

On the very first turn, I recruited a Prince General, and spent the next few turns recruiting a sizable army of archers and footmen, going for the fairly starndard pike-and-bow setup, and equipping my Prince General with a good assortment of early equipment. I didn't attack my first independent province until well past turn 10, and when I did, because of the big size of my army, I won handily and felt quite pleased with myself.

Over the next several turns, I conquered more independent provinces easily and spent a lot of gold building up provincial defense (PD). My empire consisted of like four or five provinces and PD built up to at least level 20 in each and I was quite happy.

Then I met AI Marignon after turn 20 or so, and I was shocked that he had about a dozen provinces. He came after me with multiple armies that tore through my PD like they were tissue paper, and attacked my capital with his own Pretender, a fire 9 Phoenix, and his fire darts dropped my own footmen and archers like flies while my puny human sage cowered in fear. His crossbowmen took down my footmen in droves while my archers seemed to be able to barely scratch his swordsmen and Marignon took my capital at about turn 25 or so.

After that, I was thinking that this game sucked and didn't touch it for another four or five months.

[Alneyan]

That reminds me of my own first Dominions 2 game (I went with a Great Sage, standard T'ien Ch'i, but actually expanded like mad with archers alone. Can you guess I love Man?). I had to leave this game though, as I couldn't connect to the server via TCP/IP any more, but the end result wouldn't have been pretty.

Out of idle curiosity PvK:

In single player or with a GM, you could even do it during play.

Do you believe any GM could be lured in organising one such game for Dominions? Or yourself? *Hint hint*

[Kamog]

Renegade 13 said:
Now you guys have got me curious, and I'm downloading the demo for Dom2. Unfortunately, it's going to take about 6 hours to download on my crappy dialup internet! Ah well, more time to play SEIV in the meantime!

Same here. I have a slow dialup connection also. I'm getting a transfer rate of 2.6 KB/sec and it will take 6.5 hours or so to download. For some reason, whenever I download something, the rate is faster at first, like 4 KB/sec and it gradually gets slower and slower. 60 MB demo file... I think I'll just leave it downloading overnight and it should be done by morning.

Speaking of demos, I remember the original SE4 demo, Version 0.51. It was so exciting to get that demo after many months of waiting! When was that, like 4 years ago? The A.I.'s didn't know how to put ships into fleets and they always attacked one ship at a time...

[deccan]

I guess the biggest Dom2 guru would be Zen but he isn't always around. But nothing beats having the developers themselves answer your questions on the Dom2 forums, which they often do (though sometimes they forget what they put into the code )

Some of your questions:

- Placements of troops.

Whatever makes common sense I suppose. If you have missile troops and your enemy does not, you want to put them way back and slightly to one side (to avoid them firing over the heads of your own troops) and have your melee tanks (heavy infantry types) on hold and attack orders to maximize the number of shots your own troops get off before engagement. If your enemy has missile troops and you do not, you want your troops as front as possible to engage their archers quickly and so forth.

Placement of mages depends heavily on what spells you want them to cast and the ranges of those spells.

- Scripting

This is sort of like SEIV strategies for normal troops. But it is most important for mages because you can control the first 5 spells that they cast using this. After that, the combat AI chooses for you.

- Research

Like you said, it all depends on what your overall strategy will be and what nation you're playing. When I first started playing Dom2, I thought that combat spells did very little compared to troops. I mean, give me a troop of longbows over a couple of mages casting fire flies any day, and the troop of longbowmen will be a lot less expensive.

But later in the game, you'll see spells like "Blade Wind" (chews through massed concentrations of low armored troops, like most missile troops, shockingly fast), "Wrathful Skies" (destroys any conventional army just like that, really) etc.


I think that when you get into Dom2, one mindset that you need to get rid of is to think about creating an empire in the way that you create an empire in SEIV. Really, Dom2 is all about pure offense so provinces change hands all the time. The only really essential province is your capital because that is where your capital-only mages can be recruited. There are no safe backwater provinces in Dom2, so don't get upset when you lose a bunch of provinces in a single turn. You just take them back.

Forget too about shepherding your people to a safe and prosperous future. By the time the game ends, the world will likely be a bLasted, depopulated landscape filled with all manner of undead, monsters and other weird things.

Also, luck and chance plays a bigger role in Dom2 than in SEIV. If you're not comfortable with that, then Dom2 isn't your game. Random placement of magic sites, which nation you start next to, random events, what independent mages you find to recruit etc. has a huge impact on the game. In one MP game, my lab burned down on turn 4 which set me back a whole lot due to the cost of rebuilding. In one current MP game as Ermor (who has no money), my temple burned down twice!! within the first ten turns. It was incredibly demoralizing.

The graphics in Dom2 may be crappy, but the battle replays, when you have lots of high-end summons, and all sorts of battle magic, and super combatants carrying powerful artifacts, can be incredibly entertaining to watch. Pulling off cool spell combos with the right kinds of troops is really very satisfying.

[PvK]

Yeah, there would probably be some players who would say they just wanted an extra Infantry of Ulm who carried a hand axe and shield, while others would want Mictlan to have Pythian Principes. Which brings us back to the answer why it is nice that there are thematic limits on choices, so it's not just a munchkinfest of everyone wanting and getting the best of everything.

So the GM and his system should come up with balances, which is of course tricky.

PvK

[Gandalf Parker]

I see me mentioned but I lost the thread of the conversation. Is this the "mod on the fly" idea? A web form for selecting all of the game variants then writing the game files?

[Alneyan]

It would be the "change your own nation" mod, either before game creation, or even during the course of the game. A silly example: you could have a military revolution, leading to a more elitist military, or the opposite, where your whole military collapses.

For changes at game start, it would be either customisation, or something looking somewhat like a new theme, or a variation on an existing theme.