Problems in demo exist in regular game?

[TruePurple]

What your replying to has the wrong end of the stick as a response to what I've been saying.

Like I've not made any comments at all for or against not being able to choose heroic ability etc (though it is a bit frustrating when your mage gets attack heroic ability)

Nor did I say anything about true resurrection or more HP for heroes (why would they need that?)

And I said nothing against the XP system. Its fine.

Why put words in my mouth?

But "thematically" disease being permanent is wrong. People often recover from disease. Or they die in short order. Long term ailments that just stick with you and cause trouble is only a common issue with modern medicine keeping you from death despite disease. So often disease should clear up (often leaving behind nasties) or kill the unit within a few months. Perhaps a one use herbal remady can be crafted with nature gems in an attempt to cure disease early.

Also there should be more ways to deal with ailments in general in a world full of magic.. thematically speaking. And practically speaking for a more enjoyable game IMO.

And old age should work better.. not be.. your fine till some magic number then magically get a ton of battle wounds and die within a few years.

Plus imagine.. having a super hard high level spell or other method that could actually manage to try to dispel a curse with cost. BTW, does luck attribute help protect you from curse effect? Does being blessed reduce your chances of being cursed?

[PhilD]

paradoxharbinger said:
iirc, and i don't know if it's been mentioned yet, you can back up a game much the same way as you could in roguelikes, by copying the save directory to somewhere else. if you screw up, just drop it back into the dominions directory

The very first roguelike game I played (that was moria, and it was, '90 or '91) didn't let you do a simple copy of your savefile - the savefile included some inode/date info, or something. But someone in my school had hacked a special "moriacp" command to duplicate the "cp" command (this was Unix, before Linus Torvalds made up Linux) that mostly worked...

[Gandalf Parker]

Ahhh memories of the joys of unix.

Gandalf Parker
--
I knew DOS before it was spelled DoS
I knew UNIX before it was spelled L I N U X
and INTERNET before it was spelled W W W

[TruePurple]

Does luck attribute help protect you from curse effect? Does being blessed reduce your chances of being cursed?
Why doesn't shift ? show me a list of hot keys (or do anything at all for that matter) ?

[Taqwus]

No and no.

[TruePurple]

Why doesn't shift ? show me a list of hot keys (or do anything at all for that matter) ? / How do I get a list of hotkeys?

How do I stop the tips for playing that I can read them so they don't fly by too fast to read?

[merlinme]

http://www.freewebs.com/dominions2/ has a lot of useful stuff. For example, it has a list of the hotkeys, and it has a list of all the tips you get between turns.

I do think you're perhaps slightly missing the point with Dominions 3. It's a long way from perfect, and it doesn't have the polish you'd expect from a game produced by one of the major software houses. "Quirky" would be one way of describing it. However it's clearly designed by someone who loves fantasy and loves strategy games, and who has gone to an enormous amount of effort to produce something which is fun to play. I've never seen anything quite like it in terms of the depth of the mechanics and the variety of options available. If you like that and are prepared to put up with the quirks, then I think you'll enjoy yourself. If it's not for you, well there are plenty of other games out there.

Regarding how responsive the developers are, although I'm not sure how regularly they read these forums, clearly the game has been developing steadily for several years now, so if you make sensible suggestions that don't go against their design decisions and can easily be introduced, I'd have thought you have a reasonable chance of seeing them being adopted at some point. Don't underestimate the complexity of some of the things you've asked for though. For example, although I think having squads stick together is a sensible suggestion, how would you code it exactly? What should happen if the squad gets split up in combat, for example?

If the game is to ever get a major commercial release, I think the battles would have to be rewritten from the ground up, but the approach of the developers seems to have been to stick with an engine which has major limits but works in its own way, and concentrate on making the multiplayer side as enjoyable as possible (lots of possible strategies, reasonably well balanced). With a game like this you kind of have to accept it as it is; the developers don't seem to be in it for the money, and they're going to concentrate on the bits which interest them and they have the resources to deal with, rather than making the whole thing amazingly polished. But if you compare it to, say, Heroes of Might and Magic V, that game had amazing graphics and lots of polish, but to be honest I found it quite dull. I may go back to it (I loved the previous versions), but you spent a lot of time doing exactly the same things as in HoMM III, only with better graphics, a worse story and not very exciting maps. There just wasn't enough there to interest me. Dominions, on the other hand, is idiosyncratic to say the least, but the ideas are extremely original, and the amount of options in terms of what to do is staggering. You could spend 100 hours playing it and not scratch the surface of the different strategies available.

I know which game I'd prefer to play.

[Caduceus]

Hot key PDF:
http://download.shrapnelgames.com/do...m3_hotkeys.pdf

As the turns get longer, the tips will stay on screen longer. I don't think there is a way to pause that information.

[MaxWilson]

Ironhawk said:
Scouts: The purpose of scouts is to detect troop movements deep in enemy territory, not near your borders where you get free intelligence. Use them to locate key enemy provs: forts provs, high income provs, low pd provs, etc.

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but how do scouts help you locate high income provinces? You can find out terrain type without scouts, and I didn't think scouts let you know the exact income/population.

Just wondering because sometimes I'd really *like* to know if an indie province is worth taking, (without having to wait for my dominion to spread there).

-Max

[Endoperez]

There are two kinds of stealthy commanders: scouts and spies. Everyone who isn't a spy can scout: Pangaean harpies, normal Scouts, nation-spesific Scouts, a Van or -Centaur commander that you'd normally use to lead an army, even a stealthy mage like Pan. They are all equal when it comes to describing the land they are in.
Then there are spies. Ulm has them, and Marignon, and few other nations. Machaka has Eyes of the Lord, Man has Bards, etc. Spies are stealthy commanders that can 1) cause unrest via a special command and 2) give you much more info about the land they are hiding in. There's no in-game special tag for spies, so sometimes it can be hard to tell whether or not a unit is a spy.