Recruting new players - Mission Impossible?

[Saxon]

Two parts to my comments.

Smeone named ceremony was writing a brilliant guide to the game. I am delighted to provide this link to what I have seen.

http://www.maladjustite.com/dominion.pdf

I can not praise this document enough. I got the link after posting a question in January regarding dominion.

I do not know what happened to the author, but I do hope that they could finish the guide or release what they have done. Like an unfinished story, it can still be very valuable to others.

On the other side, I feel that Dominions is a niche game with great depth, so it will struggle to bring in new players. Let me put it this way, my girlfriend is very new to computers. As in, only started using them in the Last year for anything other than word processing. She worked as a journalist for three years and is good at Word, but games are new to her, she is a raw beginner. We play Diablo on the network but Counter Strike with all those different guns is too complicated. Put yourself in her shoes and imagine playing Dom II… This game is for those who have played other turn based strategy games before and even they will have to work at it. Think of it as a violin. You have to work at it before it produces beautiful music.

[Tris]

*Unbearable Smugness*

My girlfriend is currently building far too many salamanders for my own good. Damn things are size 3 and my war minotaurs can't trample them.

[Innocence]

As a newbie I can tell you about my own problems with DomII.

A little background info: I discoveded DomII while looking for a substitute for Stars! The game had to be PBEM ready, run simultaneous turns (real WEGO) and support 8+ players - and frankly besides Stars!, VGAPlanets and a few other older games, DomII was the only game offering these features (very odd indeed - WEGO is by far the best turn-based model!)

I downloaded the demo when the game was released Last year, but quickly lost my way in the interface. Like I said I'm a former Stars! player and not really concerned with flashy GUI, but DomII is much harder to get into!

The demo lay dormant on my harddrive for half a year until i "rediscovered" it recently. I found this forum (and yes, the latest postings should be at the end, not at the beginning - it's confusing ), and thus found my way to the "walkthru".

The walkthru did it for me. It's brilliant, and while it doesn't explain everything, it's enough to get you started. I bought the game Last week, as did a friend of mine.

Now the interresting stuff: Why is DomII so hard to get into?

IMO, it's the lack of clear text info on the main screens. This makes you loose overview and makes you think "where do I begin?" The overview would be much better if all the symbols,units and such were labeled. Like:

Hire troops: Write the name and vital stats of the troop underneath the units. That'd make it 50x faster to compare units. A picture tells me very little in itself. Oh yea, and separate the Commanders clearly from the regular troops - the current view is confusing.

Troop status: Write stats, afflictions and such under each unit.

Main map army size: Write a number inside the square.

And while we're at it, improve/expand the main map filters! Filters in Stars! made it easy to get a good overview of all fleet opreations. In DomII these filters would be a great help:
Show/hide:
- Scouts/Spies
- Commanders
- Priests
- Garrisoned troops (troops w/o commander)

The way Build God/Start New Game works is terrible. Let players build a God and save it under whatever filename they want. Make it so I can reload, change and save any God I choose. And put some default Gods in the game as suggested (to help getting started).

All this said I really like DomII. It may not be perfect (yet) but it's the best we got

[HotNifeThruButr]

I became interested in Dominions when I've heard about it all over Age of Wonders forums.

I really got into it solely because of its complexity. I love stats and features, which Dom is bloated with. It's fun analyzing stats and deciding which units are the best to field in any given situation. The strategy involved in army movement and battlefield tactics were also amazing. For quite a while, I played a "simplified" Version of Dom, where I just left all of my units clumped in the middle without orders and didn't know how to set taxes or province defense. Hell, I couldn't even search for sites or research the right magic schools back then. It's much easier to start your Dom experience by ignoring certain features and learning and discovering them as you go.