Updated Manual?

[Illuminated One]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Now, given that the vanilla game is horribly balanced ...

I'll grant you that the balancing is better in CBM (although I can only fully agree on the gods and pricing part + (many) spell changes - the luck scale I took in the non CBM has certainly paid off).

When i get a new car, ...

You missed my point. When you start driving a new car you don't read the documentation, you just drive. Every car drives differently, but the basic "mechanics" of driving are the same.
It's the same for the game - your strategies (and exploits) remain completely the same (prot vs damage - att vs def - awe versus morale - rout and take retreat route and defending against it - buff vs damage spells - etc) only the tools change (this spell has double aoe, berserker costs gems).
In most cases you shouldn't even have problems using something that works well in vanilla in CBM, only that you have more counters and alternatives.
...

One should argue that CBM's continuing to get updated is an advantage

...
It is certainly an advantage but it's another point why it is not good to learn the game by learning CBM 1.6. by heart, instead you learn the mechanics and adjust to it in the game you are (as you do in any case).
Which makes "play only CBM in order to learn it by heart" a moot point.

And lastly you have not provided a single reason why you want to have a fixed standard in any case. Of course you are free to play only CBM games. But that doesn't mean that "every game *should* use it".

[Ballbarian]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

I hate to say it, but the devs are wrong if they think its ok to obscur information in an RTS. If they want to write a non-competitive game, like an RPG, they should do that instead.

During a game where you compete against other players, access to the rules should not be made hard.

I think the devs are right. My own preference is to have a little obscurity. I tend to play more by feel than by spreadsheet. Nothing wrong with playing by spreadsheet, but I find learning what works and what doesn't to be part of the attraction of the game. I absolutely detest games where Unit A has a strength of 3 and Unit B has a strength of 2 and the outcome of every battle is always Unit A beats Unit B. No edge of your seat combat there.

[Edi]

As someone who has done extensive documentation for Dominions 3, here is my opinion:

The manual is quite okay as manuals go. Some information has been outdated by patch changes. Some information was slightly incorrect to begin with, but for the most part even the incorrectly explained mechanics worked more or less in the direction the manual explanations pointed to.

You won't learn to play the game by reading the manual alone. For the most part you learn to play the game by actually playing the game and every now and then checking some little detail in the manual or some other thing for some generics.

There is a Strategy Index thread on this forum for a good reason, to give a handy reference to many of the resources provided by this community. Together with the existing game manual, the documentation resources here on this forum and lch's wiki and playing and experimenting by trial and error it's quite possible to learn the game and arguably do it more quickly than when it had just come out and large swathes of this documentation did not exist.

Writing good, user-proof documentation takes a LOT of time. When you have only a two man team, that documentation is going to be hard to get done thoroughly partly precisely because the developers know the code and the mechanics inside out closely enough that they won't be able to anticipate certain basic questions from completely new users. Never mind necessarily putting together a 1-2-3-A-B-C level of manual.

Never mind also that the documentation is required to be written in a non-native language. Knowing how to speak a foreign language and read and write in it is nowhere near the same as being able to write good technical documentation in that language. Not a trivial task when you combine it with all the other resource constraints here.

I originally found the unit stat listings too incomplete for my own requirements. So I made my own. That then ballooned into documenting other kinds of things that were amenable to listing so I'd have it all in one place. Thus the Dom3 DB.

Later I found the modding manual and the mapmaking manual unwieldy for my purposes. So I took the original documentation and rewrote it to better match what I needed. Funnily enough, those rewritten manuals are now the official documentation that comes with the game when you patch it.

The whole point of this is that I didn't sit around twiddling my thumbs and looking perplexed but instead took action.

So, in conclusion, if people want a completely updated, fully accurate manual, then they should write it themselves. If they can't be arsed, they had better learn to do with what they've got, which at this point in time is a considerable amount.

Would it be hard work? Yes. Would it cut into your available playing time? Yes. Would it require actually learning the game in order to accomplish it? Yes, though for non-newbies here this question is irrelevant. If all the effort spent on demanding improved documentation for x, y and z in Dominions had been spent on actually making that documentation, we'd probably already have an improved manual.

Illwinter is currently involved with a new project, with Dominions 3 support more of a sideshow, since it works "well enough" by now. That and everything I said above establishes the baseline circumstances surrounding this issue. If anyone has a problem with that, well, it'll stay as their problem until they do something about it on their own.

[Gandalf Parker]

@EDI
I was hoping you would show up. I had a thought (plug in the mandatory groans here)

Since it was brought up that CBM is so popular, and changes the game so much, have you felt a need for a cbm version of the DB? Not that Im suggesting that its you that needs to do one but I thought you might have looked into it and had a semi-neutral feel for how much difference there was.

[Edi]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

@EDI
I was hoping you would show up. I had a thought (plug in the mandatory groans here)

Since it was brought up that CBM is so popular, and changes the game so much, have you felt a need for a cbm version of the DB? Not that Im suggesting that its you that needs to do one but I thought you might have looked into it and had a semi-neutral feel for how much difference there was.

I have no objection if someone does a CBM version as long as I'm credited with the base work of the original DB in it.

The changes in and of themselves would not be hard, especially if it was automated. The only things you need to change in the DB document are the BaseU (units), BaseW (weapons) and BaseA (armor) tables. Everything on the display pages for units, weapons and armor is automatically taken care of by the spreadsheet functions in the full (non-static) DB spreadsheet file. A static version can then be made by copy-pasting the display page data contents and paste-specialing only numbers/text over it and saving the file with a different name.

Any new units, weapons and armor would have to be entered manually (or the entry automated if someone feels like writing the code) into the tables.

Any changes to existing weapons, armor and units could be automated by having a program that reads the mod file (since mod syntax dictates what stat goes where in the tables and is caused by what command). The program would then write the values of those commands directly into the corresponding column on the row related to that monster. Some things like the domsummons etc would probably be best to enter by hand, because they are the iffiest part of the DB documentation. Unlike lch's data dumps, they were not extracted from the game but extrapolated since the information was not directly visible from the game UI.

I know there are several competent programmers here, so if anyone feels up to it, go right ahead. I know quite specifically what needs to be done on the general level, but my coding skills are not up to the task. Hello World I can do, but ask me much beyond that and it starts getting hairy.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

So I would tend to fault the manual only for things that are wrong. And only if they were wrong at the time it was created, not changed later. Its all impressions unless someone wants to create some actual percentages but my impression is that the manual is 99% good. That is if you arent expecting a strategy guide or a complete code breakdown. That was left to us to do and I think we did it very well.

Feh. It's not a matter of fault. Who cares which problems in the manual are justified or not? This thread is about the state of the manual now, not when it was written. Has it been updated? No. Does that mean it isn't reliable? Yes.

This does not indicate a judgement of the devs, Bruce Geryk or anyone else. It definitely raises the topic of documentation generally, but that discussion does not have to involve finding fault.

[Edi]

Hmm, it came to me that there is one very important thing regarding the manual that should be kept in mind.

It is NOT meant for ANY kind of digital distribution. So in case anyone does have the inclination and the stamina to rewrite the manual to be accurate, CONTACT SHRAPNEL GAMES STAFF FIRST AND ASK PERMISSION. Annette would be the best choice.

Errata documents such as the ones we already have are a different beast, because they simply correct erroneous information in the manual and at most quote the erroneous excerpt. An errata document does not reproduce the manual in its entirety, like a complete rewrite would.

The modding and mapmaking manuals did not suffer from this problem when I did them because they were already distributed in electronic form with the game and that information was simply rearranged in the new modding document. By the time we had the new mapmaking manual, those rewritten documents had become the official ones.

The issues in this post cannot be stressed enough, since they involve intellectual property rights related to Shrapnel Games and Illwinter Game Design as companies and only those entities can have final say on the matter. I don't want anyone to get in hot water because of my previous post on overall Dominions 3 documentation.

[Sombre]

I wonder why that came to you.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Except in a lot of cases, the mechanics in the manual are wrong. *snip some valid examples* Want to know why shields are so effective against arrows? The manual is wrong - it would have you believe that blocking an arrow with a shield is the same as blocking a melee blow with a shield. In actuality, a successful shield parry totally negates the arrow.

Actually, that's actually how the manual says the missile equation works. Shield Prot should only come into play in melee, according to the manual.

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Sombre

I struggle to accept that anyone can have 'no idea' what att 12 and def 10 mean after looking at a handful of units.

Militia has 8 attack, a soldier has 10, an elite has 13. Durr, what could they possibly mean?

I agree they wouldn't know exactly how they worked *snip*

I meant that in a quantitative sense. In Diablo II, it was pretty clear to me that higher Attack meant you hit more often, and higher Defense meant you got hit less often. It NOT clear, without recourse to the LCS or the smart people on the web, to figure out whether a +200 boost to defense was worth losing +1000 to attack versus monsters in Act II. In Dominions, what I meant is that without knowing the formulas in the manual it would be extremely hard to make quantitative decisions, e.g. to evaluate whether Helheim is better off with an E9S9 bless or an F9W9 bless vs. EA Ermor. Or to use your example, how many militia does it take to beat an elite soldier? How many regular soldiers does it take? Which is more cost-effective?

While there is some fun in discovery, and there is even fun in discovering mistakes in the manual, if we didn't at least know that the basic Dom3 mechanic is almost ALWAYS an opposed roll with DRN added to both sides--which we do, thanks to the manual--we wouldn't even know the correct form of questions to ask.

-Max