What about interactive Tactical Combat ?

[Maltrease]

In all likely hood any sort of automated battle simulator would not account for things like orders and spells. Or even accurately representing how units target and gange up on each other.

However you could do some basic functions for MELEE combat (by simulating the mechanics) where you could see things like "how much difference does adding 4 protection (Legions of Steel) to my army make".

Something like that you could set to run 50 times and get the average results.

For a "REAL" battle simulator you will likely need to use the MAP method. I've got an idea for a tool that would help automate the map creation with the units you want, but you would still have to manually position the armies and assign all the orders.

I suppose if you could recreate the Battle field placement and order assignment in your program, build the turn files manually, send and run them through a Dom3 server for processing, parse the battle results and automate this entire process you could get something more advanced... but that sounds like A LOT of work.

Frankly if someone is willing to spend time "practicing" things why shouldn't they be a better player then those that don't want to "practice". I think almost any game or sport works that way.

[markmarques]

As someone stated before the inclusion of the option ( focus on option) of interacting in combat would mean a greater micromanagement burden.
What I meant would be the possibility to interact a bi more in tactical combat.
As an example (someone pointed that out sometihng similar) I had a spell caster that "incidentaly" destroyed everybody around him due to the nature of it own spell.
The ability to choose when to activate that spell would change completly the outcome of the combat.

The single ability for commander+squad to decide when to "attack|move| stay| spell" during turns would make a more deep commitment to the tactical decisions.
Of course a timeout would be needed.

For MP games the interaction during combat would not be needed.

Someone stated before the idea of a pre-combat set of orders (scripting) in order to achieve the ability to control the tactical combat...
If that is a way to achieve some control over tactical so be it...

Of course something like that would change the game mecanics a lot...
But for better I suppose.

Regarding the simulator issue I would agree that using a tool like that would ruin the "magic" deep of this game...

[tombom]

Also a lot of results involve random numbers which would be different.