Well, I'm through with the game

[Tuidjy]

It's a shame that no one told you that Dominions III is first and foremost a MP
game. I would have never bought it for the SP, as I knew well enough that there
would be little improvement from Dominions II's mediocre AI.

You can make things better by picking the AI pretender, or playing scenario maps,
or using the command line switches that restrict the AI pretender choices. But
I am the wrong person to ask for specifics, I never play SP against the AI... I
just test stuff.

But man, are you missing out on MP!

[jscott]

Even if the AI doesn't starve its armies, a death scales strategy only works for nations that don't require much gold to produce units. If the AI is randomly picking it, its gutting its own economy and making itself weaker over time (when it should be getting stronger!).

You can't pick the AI pretender. If you start a game as a human player and then set control to the AI, it sets to the normal AI only. The normal AI isn't challenging enough.

I can't use RanDom to create scenario maps, so that's out (there aren't enough maps in the first place that can be used for a long term single player game).

I understood it was a multiplayer game. I probably got close to my money's worth. Its just ridiculous that the designers couldn't take two minutes to make sure the AI was choosing correct scales.

Its not as though you have to make a very hard call on who is going to use death 3 scales. Only 1-2 nations can get by with it!

[Rathar]

Sp dominions is sadly boring and easy. MP on the other hand is tricksy and deep.

The AI is especially stupid in this game though. I can't bring myself to play against it anymore, I just start to yawn.

[BigJMoney]

Patch? Honestly, I remember seeing this but not really "taking notice" of it. I guess that's because if I want a challenge, I make the map larger and put in more opponents or handicap myself. I agree it's annoying to know a certain percentage of your opponents are going to be no challenge; annoying enough maybe to make it a patch-worthy issue, but the game is definitely playable/difficult for me in SP.

As you can see, I'm not that hardcore ;-)

[quantum_mechani]

jscott said:

Its not as though you have to make a very hard call on who is going to use death 3 scales. Only 1-2 nations can get by with it!

This is not really true for MP. And as far SP goes, it could improve the AI in a lot ways, to lock it's pretender choices, but it would also make them much more boring. If you truly feel strongly about it you could always start them as human players and set them AI on the first turn. As has been said though, the easy fix for most of the problem is simply to up the world supply level.

[jscott]

quantum_mechani said:

This is not really true for MP. And as far SP goes, it could improve the AI in a lot ways, to lock it's pretender choices, but it would also make them much more boring. If you truly feel strongly about it you could always start them as human players and set them AI on the first turn. As has been said though, the easy fix for most of the problem is simply to up the world supply level.

As I said above, I've already tried that. It sets the AI to the normal difficulty level. It won't let you pick anything harder than that. Normal AI is even easier than the higher levels, so its a net result of about zero improvement to give them intelligently designed domains, but force them to be a low difficulty level.

Also as I said above, supply isn't the only issue. Gold is a huge factor as well. If the AI nation is gold-dependent to produce its units, but set at Death 3, then its completely screwed. I've seen this repeatedly. I'll take over 40% of the map or so, be 100 turns into the game or whatever, and run into AI nations with no units because they've killed their own population completely and can't produce any income. Increasing supply is a band-aid that fixes only one aspect of the problem.

The game is perfectly set up to allow no solution to this problem without elaborate mods to create a scenario map for EVERY GAME YOU START. That's a ridiculous way to work around a very simple problem that everyone can see; the designers should just simply limit when the AI takes death scales on its domain to very few circumstances. How hard could that possibly for them?

[quantum_mechani]

The thing is though, the AI is pretty much a pushover by turn 100 in any case, and no meddling with death scale is going to change that.

[Aezeal]

play MP, I don't play SP either... did it, saw I woul'dn't learn much from playing SP (to advance my MP skills) and so I just play MP now..

I maybe have played 5 finished SP games... 10 max... who needs it anyway

[sector24]

I'm surprised you got to turn 100. In single player I find the micromanagement after turn 50-60 to border on the unbearable. Who wants to recruit from 12+ castles and attack on 8 different fronts while bloodhunting from 12 different provinces? Once you start making SCs, you know you've won because the AI has no counter and automatically loses. It doesn't matter if all their scales are 3, you can wipe out thousands of units with a single commander.

Just like in Galactic Civ II, there's a point at which you know you've won, but you may have to spend a hundred boring turns to prove it. It's not unique to Dominions, I think it happens in most turn based strategy games. Instead, you have to find the enjoyment in fighting the first or 2nd war to establish dominance. That may be deliberately taking less than ideal scales, or just sitting in your capital doing nothing for 5 turns to give the AI a head start. In the end you just have to find a way to make the game enjoyable.

[AreaOfEffect]

Single player is a suitable testing ground for testing out your first year of a new strategy or for testing out a modded faction. Aside from that, its all about the multi-player.