Problem Saving Games

[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

[Peter Ebbesen]

Manuk said:
and for the save-reload mechanic or cheats like "research all" or "1 million bucks" are pointless and I don´t see why some people cheat. What point is to win a game that way?

Some people have fun using saving/loading or using cheat codes, some people have not, the only thing that is certain is that having access to those things does not adversely affect the gaming experience of either of the two groups whereas not having access to them certainly hurts one of the two groups.

The whole "I don't see the fun in feature X, so I choose to believe that others would not, despite their protestations to the contrary, have fun in it either, so I argue against it on the basis of it having no point" is reminiscent of the worst of early 1980'ies game programming and has been abandoned by just about everybody: People have different ideas of fun and the only people who are not worth listening to as a developer are those who argue against features that others would find fun but which wouldn't affect the one arguing or worse, those who argue against it on the basis of others "not playing the game as it ought to be played" (there are always a certain amount of such deadwood in any forum of fans for a game but they really aren't worth listening to as a developer once they begin arguing for limiting other players' fun rather than enhancing their own).

If I cas Haruspex searching sites in a province and detects no sites I could reload and search elsewere. AI would not have a chance to this kind of cheating. Reload if a fire destroyed my lab. etc

If you had fun playing like that, great! The game would be more fun for you than if it lacked a load/save in-progress feature. If you did not have fun playing like that, great! The game wouldn't in any way, shape, or form force you to play like that even with the best load/save feature invented enabled.

And if you'd make a stable save every 5 or 10 rounds or as the fancy took you [or how about automatic autosaves with different nations every fixed N rounds to go even further ], just in case the not-particularly-bug-free game engine decided to corrupt a save, such that you could return to a previous save in case of corruption and keep playing on, instead of having to abandon a game in progress, GREAT!

[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.

[Potatoman]

Failing to support saving/loading is a huge mistake. One of the reasons dominions is so difficult to learn is because you can never revisit a decision and observe how different actions yield different results. Experimentation is discouraged in a game with the knowledge that, if something bad happens, you'd need to replay for 2+ hours to reach that position again. Everyone I've showed Dominions off to has found it incredibly backwards that a game with such a huge learning curve is so unforgiving about mistakes. I know I've wished for the ability to go back a turn and undo a game-destroying minor mistake or fluke (e.g. that newly summoned group of Summer lions got default-placed in the middle of my force and they burned 20 friendly mages to death with their auras on round 2 of combat) way too many times. You're essentially playing the entire game in Ironman mode- and while that's fine for hardcore fans, it's anathema for anyone unfamiliar with the system or less serious about the game.

If this were a democracy I'd place my vote for a real save/load mechanic. Because it's not, I'm just going to urge Johan or Kristoffer, if they're reading this, to DEFINATELY put in a save/load. People will love you for it.

[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.