Dark Knight

[Folket]

The question is whether this is a bug or not. Explotation of bug is cheating.

[Tuidjy]

I think that it is A-OK to use the order on Bogus and his companions. To copy
and paste the order on other units is using an unintended consequence - because
it is hard to believe that the developers wanted it that way. In all honesty,
while I have been doing the former ever since Dominions II, I have never done
the latter - as in, I was not smart enough to think of it... so maybe I am biased.

[sector24]

This is an interesting conversation. On a related note, Aezeal, you can save the reload the game in single player if you want to try your hand on Bogus and his allies. However, with all the subjective morality being tossed around I'm not sure I want to post how to do it.

[Ironhawk]

Folket said:
The question is whether this is a bug or not. Explotation of bug is cheating.

Well, its been around since the Dom2 days and the devs are aware of it... but still no changes to how it works in all that time.

So what does that mean?

[Velusion]

While I wouldn't call it cheating I know I'd be pretty pissed if this "tactic" were to cost me really big MP game battle.

It's a pretty lame tactic IMHO, but some people will do anything to win *shrugs*.

[K]

I consider the "Attack Commander" and "Fire Mage" to be the natural right of Blood and Nature nations.

Even then, I don't consider it even an exploit.

Consider:
1. You need bad luck to even get a Bogus event
2. You need to build a specialized posse of mages equiped with Penetration items to have a decent chance of getting Bogus
3. The commands aren't that effective in SP or MP since even with items boosting Precision the chance to hit a SPECIFIC target placed at the rear of an army with a Fire command is very small, just like attacking a commander with a small amount of chaff on Guard Commander means that you don't get near that commander before other units take them out.
4. The Devs could make it almost impossible to charm Bogus and get the command by simply adding some high HP chaff to the Bogus event, or just increasing Bogus's MR. This could have been done in any of the many patches they have done.

Thats not counting an actual patch that codes the command out of player hands.

Oh, and as far as I can tell its not on the buglist, so its not even an exploit or a bug despite being a well known feature

[Velusion]

K said:
4. The Devs could make it almost impossible to charm Bogus and get the command by simply adding some high HP chaff to the Bogus event, or just increasing Bogus's MR. This could have been done in any of the many patches they have done.

*rolls eyes* The devs could have fixed the other bazillion minor bugs easily too... I guess all of those are intended?

It's called prioritization. As you pointed out it is very difficult to use this strategy (you have to get lucky), so I'm sure they don't feel the urge to "fix" it when there are other, larger bugs to worry about.

...but saying it isn't an exploit because the devs never fixed it is faulty reasoning.

Now if you show me a post where the devs said something like "We want this to be a part of the game..." then I'll agree that there is nothing fishy about it and simply write it off as retarded game design...

Right now it smacks of a minor bug that was never fixed because because it was deemed that there are more important problems to address.

All that said I'll allow it in my games - simply because it isn't on edi's list and I'm too lazy to upkeep a separate list.

[Sombre]

I don't think it's cheating, I just think anyone who uses a tactic like this is lame and I wouldn't be tempted to play more games with them.

I'm sure they realise how lame it is when they do it.

[Sensori]

Ironhawk said:

Well, its been around since the Dom2 days and the devs are aware of it... but still no changes to how it works in all that time.

So what does that mean?

It means that it's a mechanic from the times of Dominions *1* that just hasn't been changed for one reason or another. Probably due to the priorization thing people have been talking about.

Personally, I think that abusing it is lame and completely out of the realm of D3. It's an ancient thing from the olden days when it was the norm which should've been removed ages ago, but hasn't been. This sort of reminds me of bugs (even exploits) for which people have been banned for that have been in Anarchy Online from nearly the start and are only now being fixed (after 6 years of the game being in existence). The major difference between Dominions and AO in this field however is that FunCom has a lot more people working on their game.

Yeah. It's a relic from a time when you could make limitless amounts of elemental kings and queens (sort of like Tartarians of those days, except you could make craploads of actually good freespawn stuff too), devils of all sorts, gem hoarding items were cheap, wishing for Doom Horrors and having armies of them was possible and when Arcane Nexus was truly awesome (those two were prolly in D2 still, though)... Ahh, those were the days.

/ramble

[Aezeal]

It's explotation of a but IMHO and in most games/settings/MPthingies that is not the same a cheating but it usually IS punished the same as cheating and frowned upon nearly as much.

Having said that I think one should not use it in MP games