wut can u wish for with wish?

[Gandalf Parker]

The desire to make Dom2 more "strategy" pops up in many ways. Desires to disable features, or make maps more fair and balanced, or take the extra random dice out of many of the rolls, balance the playing pieces between the races, take out the random events. Mostly from the multiplayer tournament folks who want winning the game to be based purely on the players skill and no luck rolls.

On the other hand, there are people who would like all of the above to be increased. Mostly from the solo players. (myself included)

It was suggested that it would be nice to have a switch that could set all of the randoms to a level from 0-9 but they are scattered thru the whole game so apparently it went to the wishlist for Dom3. I have no idea if it will be part of Dom3 or not.

Gandalf Parker

[Evil Dave]

I'd be in favor of switches like that as well.

I'm a bit surprised people object to 2d6OE. It seems to simulate "the fortunes of war" w/o going overboard. Do you happen to know why people wanna reduce its effects? I can think of some, but they're not good.

[Gandalf Parker]

In a strategy game you are always having to scale things between extremes. And no matter what choice is made, some will complain. Hmmm ok, not just games, thats true of everything. But in this case the extremists at one end of the scale consider a strategy wargame to be best when it has no balance-affecting surprises. They want the "winner" to be decided purely by who has the best plans and strategy. They think alot before the game and they dont like their battle plans knocked out by a random. The extreme example of such a game would be Chess. Perfectly fair map, perfectly matched units, no randoms, no surprises.

The other extreme likes a game which has a ton of randoms. They love it when one of the "opponents" in a game is "chaos". Even if if has a map generator which is so EXTREMELY crazy that you have to throw out 4 or 5 maps to get one that you MIGHT be able to win. For them its the joy of tactics and making best use of whats thrown to you.

Of course MOST players are not at one end or the other of the scale. They are somewhere along it. But we see the push/pull in this forum often. Efforts to "balance" pieces when it would destroy the rock-paper-scissors at national level. Or efforts for more favorable random events where it could shift the positions on the scoreboard, especially with fast games on a small map.

As a "chaos" person myself I have created some game scenarios which can be found at my site www.dom2minions.com which you wont see mentioned much. They arent good to recommend unless someone (A) prefers solo play or (B) is bored with the game having tried all of the combinations

Gandalf Parker

[Evil Dave]

Gandalf Parker said:
But in this case the extremists at one end of the scale consider a strategy wargame to be best when it has no balance-affecting surprises. They want the "winner" to be decided purely by who has the best plans and strategy. They think alot before the game and they dont like their battle plans knocked out by a random. The extreme example of such a game would be Chess. Perfectly fair map, perfectly matched units, no randoms, no surprises.

I can see this, but perhaps not for Dominions. For example, I'd think the game balance would have to be looked at very closely before replacing 2d6OE with 2d6. As it is, if a unit has 10 more armor + natural protection than his expected opponent has strength + base weapon damage, he's very likely to escape unscathed (barring AP weapons, etc). But that's very different than knowing it's a sure thing. I think Dominions may be too complex to ensure that toning down the randomness doesn't result in "ultimate weapons".

But that's why I'd like switches -- if somebody else wants to play that way, great, so long as I don't have to.

[RibbonBlue]

Can some one expalin this 2doe and 2d6 stuff and whey its bad/good.

[Zen]

2d6oe is open ended.

This means if a 6 is rolled on a die then it is given another roll that adds to the total. So potentially you could roll as many times as you get 6's on the dice.

OE is important because it gives even the most ironclad of defenses the chance to be penetrated. It also allows even the lowliest of soldiers the chance to defend against a far more powerful opponent if they are lucky enough.

Certain rolls in the game are OE and others are closed.

[Evil Dave]

I can try...

2d6 is your bread-and-butter die roll for games: throw two six-sided dice and add them. If you do this a lot and keep stats, you'll see that you get a bell-shaped distribution centered at seven, and obviously, the score is limited to two to twelve.

The OE is short for "open ended". It's a bit different: throw two dice as before, but if you get any sixes, roll another die for each one. Keep doing this as long as you keeping rolling sixes. Then add up the all the dice. OK, there's a further twist that for each of the additional dice you throw, you substract one point, so they give 0-5 rather than 1-6.

So, 2d6OE gives stats that are a bit different. The distribution of scores is biased a little towards higher numbers, and there's (in principle) no upper limit. Of course, the odds of getting very large numbers are pretty slim.

Dom2 uses lots of 2d6OE rolls, especially for attacks and defenses. What this means to players is that sometimes odd things happen. Once in a while, a wimp with a knife will hurt a knight, or a crushing blow will be absorbed by light armor -- or a sure-thing attack will just miss, because the defender got an unusually high dodge roll.

As Gandalf said, some people don't like this, because it messes up their finely-honed strategies. I do like it, because lucky shots have been a part of war pretty much since the beginning.