Newbie's first impressions

[PDF]

PCarrol, did you try something like Combat Mission (if anything else exists that is "like" CM ) ?
Games are rather short and fast paced compared to Dom2 et al., and it requires some "battlefield tactics" sense more than analytical brains - surely that's why I suck at it, I was able to make strategy articles on it then get blasted by one of my readers that managed to apply it, while I couldn't !! .
Also it's graphically more rewarding than top-view 2D strat game as it's in full 3D with free camera, even if now it's not really up to date graphic-wise ...

[Endoperez]

EDIT: missed page 3.

I also found Dungeon Crawl through Illwinter's recommendation. They also like ADOM. I enjoy both.

And Crawl has lately seen some development, both "independent" patches and "official" upgrading. The newest beta has added some interesting stuff, and reworked old stats, and you can play as a Giant Fighter (debugging option for new big characters, will be gone from future versions).

I would like to add that Crawl handles religions wonderfully. Character worshipping certain god has to follow its principles, so priest of the Shining One shouldn't backstab or poison, healer god Elyvelon's worshippers should never kill anything while praying, warrior gods prefer killing creatures in their name and accept their corpses as sacrifices (you need a sharp tool to buthcer them, but not an altar)... And you can worship the RNG: Xom! Demonspawn Chaos Knights of Xom are crazy fun, one of mine was dying, and got healed, was ambushed and got few devils to help him, found mace of protection and armor +1 and got to level 3 in first 3 rooms, when he was hungry and wanted to butcher a corpse a magical broad axe just appeared... And then he stepped into a Zot trap that appeared too early due to a bug in the beta, *kaboom!*, dead. If that's not The random-number generator, it comes very close.

[Chazar]

This thread has moved on already, but since someone mentioned that "Settlers of Catan" started a whole genre of these "german-style" boardgames: This is not true! There are much more of these board games around and most of them are much more entertaining (IMHO).

However, it is true that these games are much less fun on the PC than playing with friends around a proper table with a drink and a snack. Nevertheless it is worth to try www.brettspielwelt.de: One can play several modern boardgames there. It is entirely for free and without advertisments, but requires a Java-enabled browser to play. While it is less fun to play online (against humans only) this site is a perfect place to test a boardgame before actually buying it (nothing against the boardgamegeek-reviews, but a review can never replace the actual test play of a game). Most of this site is available in english as well.

[PCarroll]

Molog said:
The AI performs worst with mictlan and best with ermor.

Hmm--guess I accidentally picked the easiest AI of all, then. Probably for the best, since I had aborted a few lost-hope games before this one.

[PCarroll]

PCarroll said:
. . . I guess I've been away from board games for so many years that I'd forgotten how they're played; I've been spoiled by the blinking units and drag-and-drop features of modern computer games. . . .

Played a little more Dom2 last night, and it's growing on me. I'm now convinced that what I said above is true: I've been spoiled by computer games over the past decade or two. Dom2 is bringing back some of the old board-wargame feel that I didn't even know I was missing.

I remember when I first started playing wargames on the computer, I didn't like them. I didn't like the computer handling so many of the things I used to have to do manually, because it separated me too much from the "game engine" and tended to make playing the game a more mindless activity.

But then again, it always took way too long to set up a board wargame; I rarely had a opponent, so I ended up playing both sides against each other; and the process of playing was kind of slow and laborious. . . . So, pretty soon I decided computer games were OK after all.

Dom2 demands a little more from the player than many other computer games. There aren't many prompts; you're expected to know what you're doing. And now that I've played awhile, I'm finding that refreshing.

--Patrick

[Tals]

I love Dominions 2 - although I don't like playing it against the AI - go figure The network game (if you can persuade some poor mug (hands in air) to have there PC on the whole time is very nice and if not then the pbem option is also good. I'd recommend having a go at that to really see where this game rocks.

Tals