Marital breakdown

[magnate]

Clean the bathroom or play some more Dom2 .... what would you choose?

Seriously, this game is endangering my relationship ... just one more turn .... (6am) ....

So, can anybody help me speed up late game turns? Here's what I currently do:

1. Check tax levels (1 min)
2. Raise PD in new provinces or those under attack (1 min)
3. Search new provinces for sites (5 min to find casters)
4. (Re)hire mercs (1 min)
5. Commander orders: (45 min)
a. Build temples/labs
b. Move all necessary commanders
c. Set forgers to forge new items
d. Set anyone else to research or preach or patrol
6. Recruit new units (10 min)

(Somewhere around 5b/5c is the business of giving commanders items from the item treasury.)

Can anyone help me improve that? I can't seem to get round all my commanders in less than 45 mins, especially with the decisions on what to forge ....

CC

[Boron]

hm could you be more specific on turn numbers ?
i myself need that about 30 minutes in lategame , but 60-90 when i have important battles to do .

but the first 30-40 turns at least i need rarely longer than 10 minutes a turn .

you could name your casters e.g. w3 etc for the skills .
i myself don't do this but it helps you finding forgers .

[Gandalf Parker]

Do you use buttons like F1 and N?

[Chazar]

Hmm, I am going to marry real soon, despite playing MP-Dom2 (and nothing else), but already I can really understand your point...

Once (or maybe twice or three times) a single turn took me as long as three hours, but usually I manage a difficult mid-game turn within 60-90 minutes as well...

"F1" and "n" are a good hint, but my own problem seems mostly to be that I am pretty slow in making up my mind (like "should I attack now or next turn?" or "what are we forging now?"). So I decided to be less careful: E.g.: If I already have a decent gem income, I just set the spell casting site searchers to cast it somewhere that they hadnt tried before, rather than reflecting chances with respect to terrain, the success of previous searches, proximity to the enemy etc. The game offers a lot of depth which is cool and tempting, but its not always important to optimize really everything...and that dangerous to pseudo-perfectionists like me.

PS: Oh, and I've decided that playing on any map being bigger than Karan is a pretty bad idea! (To the ones with the paint-brushes: More smaller (wrap-around) maps please!)

PPS: Avoiding the awkward in-game message editor and using this Boards message sending system instead also saves time!

PPPS: Renaming is also useful, but I dislike silly names for roleplaying reasons. So for example, I always rename all sages so that their name starts with the same letter their random path is in, (Fire= Rename him with something starting with an F) in order to find them more quickly if I need to forge a simple item (Luck Pendants, Bracelets, AimingEyes,...). Giving Family names might also speed up things.

[magnate]

I'm talking turns beyond 50, on the Desert Eye map (125 provinces), when I have >60 provinces. I guess I could always play smaller maps ...

Yes I do use F1, all the time - but I wish there were some other handy tables, like -

a table of commanders showing all their equipment on the same screen (oh so HE's got the gate cleaver)

a table of commanders showing all their armies on the same screen (so that's where the fire drakes got to)

a table of provinces (or maybe just fortresses) showing all their recruitment for next turn on the same screen

etc.

I don't use the N key, because I need to cycle through my commanders by type - eg. priests, scryers, spies, troop commanders, couriers, researchers, forgers, etc. etc. The N key goes in an order which does my thinking more harm than good.

Thanks for the comments ... can anyone recommend good SP maps?

CC

[Gandalf Parker]

PS: Oh, and I've decided that playing on any map being bigger than Karan is a pretty bad idea! (To the ones with the paint-brushes: More smaller (wrap-around) maps please!)

I cant help you with the wraparound but there are 30 tiny and 30 small maps generated at www.dom2minions.com every day. They are ugly but playable. And can be used as a starting point for you making a map for us. Add wraparound, use some paint-program tools like blur or smudge to make it more pleasing to the eye. Add graphics (the David Gervais library is a large untapped resource for that).

[Norfleet]

Clean the bathroom or play some more Dom2 .... what would you choose?

Seriously, this game is endangering my relationship ... just one more turn .... (6am) ....

Dom2, of course. The bathroom is always dirty no matter how often you clean it. It's a lost cause, unless you took this into account when designing it in the first place.

As for your relationship, clearly, the two of you are incompatible.

Can anyone help me improve that? I can't seem to get round all my commanders in less than 45 mins, especially with the decisions on what to forge ....

I advise applying some pressure as training exercise. There's nothing like some pressure to improve one's speed. Let's try being on fire. Wrap a towel around your head. Light 'er up. Now get your orders in. Try to do this before the towel burns through. As a side benefit, you'll also learn valuable survival skills for thinking under pressure.

[Agrajag]

I advise applying some pressure as training exercise. There's nothing like some pressure to improve one's speed. Let's try being on fire. Wrap a towel around your head. Light 'er up. Now get your orders in. Try to do this before the towel burns through. As a side benefit, you'll also learn valuable survival skills for thinking under pressure.

Pressure is a good idea actually, while a burning towel probably isnt...
Something along the lines of "Honey, do you want to come over here and join me in bed" from your partner (you said you have one) would probably speed things up in a better, safer way.
BTW, is setting fire to a towel on your head considered a crime?

[Boron]

I advise applying some pressure as training exercise. There's nothing like some pressure to improve one's speed. Let's try being on fire. Wrap a towel around your head. Light 'er up. Now get your orders in. Try to do this before the towel burns through. As a side benefit, you'll also learn valuable survival skills for thinking under pressure.

rofl . very funny formulation hehe .

pressure might be a good idea .

if you have enough space ( 60 provinces are ) you could spread your mages on 5-10 different provinces .

e.g. :
all researchers left in capitol .
all highlevel forgers in one province.
all lvl 1 forgers / researchers in one province .

spread the clammules in some provinces.
make one key province where you send in all unequipped spies and when they have clams spread them in the provinces you chose for clamparking etc.

a side profit is that you won't loose that much when you spread on global artillery spells like flames from the sky like when you concentrate all in one province .
if you don't rename your leaders it is hard to tell to your opponent which mages are the forgers and which are the unimportant researchers .

in very late game when you can cast multiple domes then you could concentrate them in 2-3 provinces , in the best protected the good forgers / summoners and in 1-2 the clam horders etc.

hopefully dominions 3 has even more improved ui though .
i would love too a table where i can see the equipment of all my leaders .
that takes much time to look through 50 mages to figure out who has the dwarfen hammer for something special etc

but i think we get this with dominions 3 .
dominions 2 is already such a big improvement in ui compared to dominions 1

finally you could ask you what you prefer more in dominions : early game or late game ?
rushing or late game extreme battles with lots of scs , hordes of troops etc.

if you prefer early game etc. then the solution is really simple play no map greater than 100 provinces .

i myself like at the moment most games with about 10 players on a 200 province map like karan . this way you have a good mix of all