What it will take for me to purchase Dom III

[Zen]

Arralen said:
What gets me back to the topic:
I don't like that. As I don't like the fact that the AI still cannot build castles and commanders from sites, chooses heavy death scale to often and has no clue about supplies - therefore crippling itself very effectivly. What I don't like even more is the fact, that the devs know about this very well but are not willing to fix it ... .
What that tells about me purchasing DOM3? Oh well, guess yourself ...

edit: typo

Interesting and incredibly close-minded thought.

[Ironhawk]

Zen said:

Interesting and incredibly close-minded thought.

Now, now, boys

While I think we can all agree with Arralen that the AI in dom2 is quite poor, saying that the devs are unwilling to fix it is unfair. In programming, sometimes problems which appear very simple on the face of it, are actually exceptionally difficult to make a program do properly. That could be the case here. Or the devs may just feel that the real meat of dom2 is in the MP aspects. So when they look at the list of issues to fix in a patch, MP issues trump all the SP/AI ones and the AI just ends up never getting fixed by default.

[Arralen]

@Zen
Sorry, but I don't get the "close-minded" part. Could you please elaborate ?

@Ironhawk
It's a stated fact from the devs that they want the endgame to be heavily focused on (summond) magic creatures, that it's not a bug that you'll end up with less than starting pop if you go with turmoil-3, growth-3, luck-3. They say it's a big war, and the pop will have to suffer. That the national units get superflous is just a side-effect of diminishing pop and ridiculous powerful LvL 8+9 magic.

And I don't say the AI is bad. In fact, I've seen lots worse AIs in games with 100x the budged for sure.
But the AI not building castles or commanders from (found) sites .. hey, even I could program that. (check my old thread about the suggested very easy recruiting/bulding alghorithm).
Pretender design might be a bit trickier, but the easy solution would be to restrict death scale to certain nations/pretender combos.
I agree that the supply issue might be unsolvalbe in Dom2. I'm not sure though, but I think it worked in DomPPP. As the castle building did, btw.

But the point is - if they arent't willing to even try to fix this, and even if it's (e.g.) with some randomly issued build order for the castles, how can't I assume that it will be the same with Dom3 ?

And that it's a MP game is no excuse. Actually, it's sold with the tag "1-17 players". So it should work correctly in SP as well. And Dom2 still sells well. But there aren't hundreds of players here. So I guess Dom2 is actually played SP by 60-70% of it's owners.

[RedRover]

Arralen: I remember your thread. It inspired me to do a little experimenting with a castle-building algorithm of my own awhile back (all general theory, my actual knowledge of coding is rudimentary).

If I can dig out my notes, I'll post them as a new thread next week, and we can talk more about AI castle-building there.

Thanks very much for your work on this.