combat

[Tharivol_Street_Prince]

Fate said:
[i]~More features and control than what I expected Illwinter to contribute and in ways that I was even thinking about.~

*joygasm* Holy crap! That's awesome! I don't have to hope that my archers will kill the enemies before the "Hold" part of "Hold and Attack" wears off!

The only thing I could ask for, compelled by the human impetus to emote regardless of the relevancy or impact, is that spies could relay the positions of soldiers back to you. (It'd be a guess, of course. The enemy could switch up his army positions the turn before the battle and the spy couldn't report real-time changes like that.)

[Agrajag]

Then at the very last you should be able to command a single "leader" unit on the battlefield that will dinamically send your instruction and share combat progress.

(And I don't propose to instruct all the individual soldiers in a battle as you watch it going along, I'm just saying thematically it makes sense)

[Gandalf Parker]

Thematically, the best I could see would be a more direct (but still not perfect) control of the action IF you send your pretender into the combat. But even then Im not sure how it might be done in a play-by-turns game (and I REALLY do NOT want the game to be changed from PbEM). Maybe if the pretender could do more than 5 commands to reflect his "on the battlefield" position

[Morkilus]

I'm parroting what's been said in previous threads on tactical control... but the more control you have over tactics, the more difficult it becomes for the AI to compete. I'm assuming that the players that demand more individual control could care less for multiplayer since simultaneous turns are inherent to what makes this game work, so...

[DominionsFan]

Morkilus said:
I'm parroting what's been said in previous threads on tactical control... but the more control you have over tactics, the more difficult it becomes for the AI to compete. I'm assuming that the players that demand more individual control could care less for multiplayer since simultaneous turns are inherent to what makes this game work, so...

Indeed, this is very true. Tactical combat is giving the human player a huge advantage. Take AoW for example. The tactical AI was good, but ofc not good enough, so it was possible to beat a stronger AI army with a weaker human usually.

[NakedLunch]

That's not necessesarily a bad thing. I.E. America technically had a "stronger" army than the Vietcong yet we still got beat (note: generalization). The problem I see with tactical combat in the Dom games is one of focus. Tactical combat is cool, yes, but I think it would draw too much away from the rest of the game. Take Medieval Total War for example. It has a great strategy portion of it, but the main bulk of the game is tactical combat with most things geared towards it. I'd rather have future Dominions games stay as they are, with their hand in each pie equally.

Another point is that it does give the game a sense of yes, you ARE the ruler of this nation because you're somewhat detached. In real life, George W doesn't go out and personally command the troops and lead them into battle. He and his cronies just give the orders and down the chain of command and so on and hope they get carried out, which all depends on morale, leadership etc which is exactly what Dom models.

[Ballbarian]

I like it as it is, but if I could change anything about combat, it would be an extension of scriptable turns (ie 10,15 or 20 combat rounds) and the ability to 'turn off' certain spells from a given mages arsenal. In my games I avoid many research paths just so that my mages cannot cast a bunch of buffing spells after their scripts run out.

I realize that the effect becomes exponential in terms of system resources when dealing with large numbers of commanders, but...

While I am on the subject, being able to script independent mages in indy provinces as a part of map editing would be fantastic.

[DominionsFan]

Yeah, hopefully we gonna have more scriptable turns in Doms 3., this is a must have. Kristoffer or the playtersters can give us a hint about this maybe?

[NakedLunch]

Well, if it's any consolation I'll be writing rather in-depth about the combat in my impressions (which, coincidently, is going to be posted as an article at Tcancer) but I don't get what you mean by "scripting." Sorry if I sound n00bish but is that like choosing the orders you want and stuff like that or am I missing something?

[alexti]

What I would like to see in combat system is ability to have different scripts for different situation. I find Dom2 system flexible enough to achieve desired behaviour in particular battle. The problems start when you're about to storm enemy castle. Typically, you expect to be attacked by Ghost raiders, then by something like wrathful-skying sortee and finally you'll be storming the castle. Obviously, the battle plan in all 3 encounters is very different. Unfortunately, the one and only script will be applied. This makes the planning really nightmarish as you need to make sure that despite using the same plan you get different behaviour in different battles. This doesn't seem very logical. Army should be easily figure out whether it is storming the castle or dealing with sortee and apply corresponding battle plan.