Problem Saving Games

[thejeff]

MMOG/TBS :: Apples/Oranges

I'm curious though. How do you usually use the save games? How often do you reload? What circumstances? Just to the last turn or farther back?

I tend to not use saves often in strategy games, even when they allow it, so I really am curious (I'm bad about remembering to save in games that rely on it, too.)

[Morkilus]

Games like Jagged Alliance and Call of Duty would be ridiculously hard without save/loading. But games like Dwarf Fortress and Dominions encourage you to experiment, make mistakes, but then recover from them. Even if your god or prophet dies, you can always call him back or appoint a better prophet. The only true death comes after a long series of mistakes or bad strategies, so you might as well learn and have fun making a comeback. If you are so compulsively perfectionist that you have to reload after a horror kills one of your mages... well, you are a different person than I. Save/loading doesn't make you a very good competetive player either, if that's what you're into.

You do know that you can go back and forth between fullscreen and windowed with ALT+ENTER, right? And if you have a Mac, you can make Applescripts to save individual turns with a hotkey, I think. I don't think you can tell the devs that they screwed up because they didn't make it easy to cheat. I did reload games when was experimenting with tactical battles now and then, and it's really not much of a hassle.

[DominionsFan]

Lads, I think that we gotta agree with new newbies. I don't see anything bad with having a save function, since you can backup your games anyways. That way they wouldn't have to do it.
Everyone who says that saving is cheating...well no comment. Now that the game is much better for SP fans also, a save function should've been added if you ask me. [Actually this is weird, I never thought that a save function would be so necessary, but that is probably because I am not a Doms newbie, but I try to "see" this from their perspective, so I can understand that they would like to see a save function in the game..]
Just my 0.02

[Tortanick]

Putting it there makes it so much more tempting, besides I'm of the forces them to learn side. Maby I'm wrong and experimenting is the key with easy backed up saves but my instincts say living with your mistakes is the only way to learn not to make them.

[PhilD]

OK, the "save game" feature is already there, only it's inconvenient as hell (it's called "save game, rename files manually, reload game").

What good is there in making people sweat over saving their games? The "it's good to learn" argument makes no sense - it's not like not making mistakes in Dom3 games were an important skill in today's society (I'm a teacher, and we deliberately make some things harder for the students - but then there is a good reason for this; with Dom3, we're talking about a GAME, whose only real purpose is to provide ENTERTAINMENT and FUN to the player - and for most people, juggling around with computer files is not particularly entertaining or fun).

In other words, not providing an in-game save function is just silly. I'll even go further: since the game doesn't let you see what the situation was X turns earlier, an automatic "backup files before hosting/sending orders" mechanism would be really useful for those long PBEM games - together with an easy way of loading a previous turn.

[Morkilus]

Eh, I take it back I guess. The thing is, I'm not surprised save/loading isn't supported heavily given that there are links to roguelikes on the devs' website.

[DominionsFan]

PhilD said:
The "it's good to learn" argument makes no sense -

Actually it does. Playing an SP game is very different in the first 30 mins and after 2 hours. This is not an ordinary TBS game. You always have new options as the time is passing. The save function would good for these newbies, so they could continue from a point, correct their errors, and continue the game from there...after that they could discover the mid/late game content also.
They can learn the game anyways, but it would be much easier with that save function for them, this is for sure.

[MarcinM]

I'm a new Dominions player, and when I met the Kailasa holy units for the first time my army got nearly wiped out. Due to a long-time playing games that allow save anywhere I instantly reached for that button...and found out it wasn't there.

I played the rest of the game and defeated them because of that setback. If the option for a quicksave was there, I probably would not have learned from my setbacks.

So that's one newbie vote for no quicksave

[Mortibus]

I like the "ironman" style of play myself.

However, I understand the complaints of other new players besides me. I'm sure that a mod will be released in the future for those who want more control over save files.

But if I had a vote, I'd say keep it the way it is.

It's a niche game for a reason... it's different. This is one of the differences. Yes, it's very "old school" and behind the times, some people like that. Don't hate us because we're old. We can't help it.

[PvK]

IW balanced the game with the idea that people would play it without frequently restoring to a saved position whenever their favorite wood elf died, even though they sent her into a situation where she had a 90% chance of dying.

Players coming from extensive experience with the craptastic ocean of games where players are expected to do things that should get them killed 90% of the time, and are expected to restore to a saved position tons of times as part of the gameplay, would tend to use that in Dominions too if it were an option easily at hand. The result is they might not even realize they weren't really supposed to do that, and would cheat themselves out of having a much better experience, and might even whine about how "easy" the game is, etc.

PvK