A few very newbish questions

[Lord Hammer]

I always watch the battle replays as it can be a valuable learning tool . After a week of playing solid i may skip one against a handful of militia . They are SO fun to watch, you get to see all the "cool stuff" in action...to me it's a big plus in this game and you can just sit back and watch. No click...click...click... Besides, how are you going to see all the cool spells you researched? Or what the enemy has in store for you?

[ January 10, 2004, 04:32: Message edited by: Lord Hammer ]

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by tylertoo:
1) Is there a map editor? (Sorry, I'm sure this is mentioned somewhere, can't seem to find it.)

Map Editing can be done with any programs. I use NotePad and Paint. Im trying to learn GIMP as a better paint program (its free and what the devs use). The maps are made up of 2 files. An image of .TGA extension. And a text file of .MAP extension. The .map file uses commands such as
#dom2title Hard2Beat
#imagefile hard.tga
#description "a game I made. best with 4-6 players"

There is a mapeditor as part of the game but at the momnet it just makes some things easier for making the map file such as assiging terrains and neighbor commands.

2) Do most of you vets just bypass the battle replays? It seems like it would get old after a bit. Is there any strategic/educational value to watching these?

I skip alot but end up watching maybe 1 of every 10 combats. There would be something I need to know such as if my latest tactic worked, was my mage smart enough to use the item I gave him or do I need to script the commands, who was left at the end of a battle I lost and how banged up were they, what mages did the other guy have and what tactics did he use.

3) Who are the two guys who made this game? Where are they from? Do they post here? What is their experience with post-release support?

Kristoffer Osterman , Johan Karlsson. Both are here in this group. Also Johan Osterman which is a brother will often field questions. Southern Sweden near Lund I believe. Yes they post here often. Well they read here often, they post rarely. But they definetly listen to us. They seem to let us do the debating and just toss in formulas and such occassionally.

With Dom1 (which I played for 3 years) patches were frequent and rarely needed to fix bugs. They tended to be full of any suggestions or tweaks we requested and could convince them were a good idea. The support of Dom1 can be seen in the Version history on the illwinter site, and in googling for the conversations that happened in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic newsgroup.

4) How is MP hosted? Is PBEM more popular than real time?

Real time is more popular. But the PBEM Version will support a web server hosting hundreds of games at once. Even if it uses some sort of easy drag-n-drop arrangment instead of actual emails.

additional 1) Is there a way to save your preferred camera angles for the battle replays?

I dont think so.

additional 2) Is there a way to have multiple save games? The save game thing confuses me a bit.

The save game is based on being PBEM. A player makes his turn, saves it, sends the turn file to the host. When all turn files are in then the host processes them together to get the results. A result file is created for each player and sent back to them. The player views the results of his actions, gives instructions to his units, and saves another turn file. Understanding the PBEM structure tends to exaplain alot. Such as why combat cant be managed. Its already managed at the host. What you watch is already history. A report from your commanders.

And the game saves. When you hit save, it creates a file that has all your plans and actions. If you hit save too fast then you can pick it back up and make changes. But once you hit host, everything is history.

You can have multiple saves but (for now, maybe changed later) its all done outside the game. If I have a game called "mygame" then its in a subdirectory off of the Dominions 2 directory. I can manually make a copy of that at any point before hitting host thereby having that turn saved. Some people have written 3rd party routines to do this. For my larger test games I just have a desktop icon to copy mygame to mygame2, and another icon to copy mygame2 back to mygame. Its kludgy but it works.

[tylertoo]

Thanks to everyone for the detailed replies. They help a lot.

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Kristoffer Osterman , Johan Karlsson. Both are here in this group. Also Johan Osterman which is a brother will often field questions. Southern Sweden near Lund I believe.

Age of Wonders is also from Sweden, is it not? Is there something in the Scandanavian air that lends itself to the creation of turn-based strategy games?

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Understanding the PBEM structure tends to exaplain alot. Such as why combat cant be managed.

Not to get into a game-to-game comparison, but AoW2 gives you the option to manage combat for SP (though not, of course, PBEM). Why not here? My guess -- the devs would face a huge amount of additional work to allow player-managed tactical combat for SP.

Originally posted by PvK:
I generally wouldn't recommend "returning to a saved game" in cases when later play goes wrong, because in my opinion that's just cheating yourself. This game is rich enough not to need that kind of cop out,

Over the years I've ended up in many a debate over whether multiple save games are "cheating." I understand where you're coming from and don't care to debate it here. But I need multiple save games because my love of strategy gaming far outstrips my meager abilities. In many other games I have found going back to earlier saves allows the opportunity to try new things, to examine closely where I went wrong. The lack of this feature for Dom II is, IMHO, a drawback.

In fairness, though, I will add that the inclusion of multiple save games in AoW2 made PBEM a real *****. In the few I played it seemed that players were not always certain they were receiving the right file from the Last to post.

[Gandalf Parker]

Building a multiplayer game around PBEM is a major project. And building a solo play game is also a major project. To do both at once is like trying to build a car thats also a boat. There are lots of cars, and lots of boats, but few carboats. And generally they arent very good at being either.
Im not saying it cant be done (in computers nothing is impossible) but it cant be done easily. IMHO

[ January 10, 2004, 18:41: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[ceremony]

Originally posted by tylertoo:
Thanks to everyone for the detailed replies. They help a lot.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Kristoffer Osterman , Johan Karlsson. Both are here in this group. Also Johan Osterman which is a brother will often field questions. Southern Sweden near Lund I believe.

Age of Wonders is also from Sweden, is it not? Is there something in the Scandanavian air that lends itself to the creation of turn-based strategy games?

---

No, Lennart Sas and most of the team at Triumph Studios, who did the Age of Wonders series, are Dutch.

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by tylertoo:
My guess -- the devs would face a huge amount of additional work to allow player-managed tactical combat for SP.

It is the other way around. The game begun (1997) as a tactical battle simulator where you gave individual orders to every soldier. This was not feasible in a strategic multiplayer game with simultaneous hosting and hundreds of units. Thus it was removed when we made a game out of it.

- This was in the ancient times when there were only two nations. Pythium and Man. Pythium and Arcoscephale had not yet been separated and there was only one monster - the hydra. Spells did not exist and neither did arrows.

[tylertoo]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
Building a multiplayer game around PBEM is a major project. And building a solo play game is also a major project. To do both at once is like trying to build a car thats also a boat. There are lots of cars, and lots of boats, but few carboats. And generally they arent very good at being either.
Im not saying it cant be done (in computers nothing is impossible) but it cant be done easily. IMHO

So its finally starting to sink in (I'm pretty dense) that Dom II is primarily designed as MP. Is this correct? Is SP enjoyable once you're beyond total newb level? How is the AI? Am I asking too many questions?