combat

[Edi]

But there's the rub: You're not a god yet, or not an omniscient, omnipotent one at least. You're trying getto that point, but in the meanwhile you're still stuck with some limitations like not being able to zombify your units with mental domination.

Edi

[Agrajag]

If you can't send telepathic messages, then how can you run an entire multi-nation kingdom?
Even the month it takes to make a turn is not enough to get a message to attack all the way from your capitol to your borderline provinces.

[Edi]

Sending messages via telepathy != total mind control puppeteering.

Edi

[Agrajag]

Sending messages via telepathy == The ability to instruct individual soldiers during battle.

[Cainehill]

Nope - that would require omniscience, to know and understand the situation of hundreds of individuals and send them instructions all at the same time?

The pretender would probably be catatonic, if not from overload then from the amount of agony/pain/fear coming along those telepathic links to all the soldiers.

But in any case - it's _still_ going to be a PBEM game. HTF do you propose to instruct all the individual soldiers in a battle as you watch it going along?

[Gandalf Parker]

There are games that do both but they are setup so that you have to select at the beginning of the game. Basically, you are selecting PbEM (Play by Email, save a turn, send it, its hosted, turn comes back) or doing it as a direct interactive game.

As far as I know, programming that means you program in two complete ways of handling the game. Its not a simple switch. Its a full module to run the game one way, and a full module to run it another way. That might be ok for some corporate team of programers but not fun for one guy Im thinking.

Maybe (a BIG maybe) if Illwinter programs a direct-action game next, then they might down the road do a version of Dominions with both.

[Edi]

The original AoW and the sequels had a system where you could do a PBEM game where combat between players was automatically auto-resolved in quick combat but you could whack indies in normal tactical combat as much as you pleased. Of course, it didn't have simultaneous turns for PBEM, but the old fashioned turn structure where things happened in sequence.

Dominions can't be made to run that way without massively changing the simultaneous turn structure, which is a rather damned important cornerstone in the architecture.

Edi

[Randar]

(Oops! Sorry for the double post but I thought the first one did not go through.)

So is the combat like the Total War games. (I have never played any of the Dominion games. I play TBS games like AOW:SM, Total War series and the Civ series to name a few. I am currently playing and moding AOW:SM a lot and am looking for a new Fantasy TBS game.

[DominionsFan]

Randar said:
(Oops! Sorry for the double post but I thought the first one did not go through.)

So is the combat like the Total War games. (I have never played any of the Dominion games. I play TBS games like AOW:SM, Total War series and the Civ series to name a few. I am currently playing and moding AOW:SM a lot and am looking for a new Fantasy TBS game.

The combat in Total War was real time. In Dominions combats are automatical. You give orders to your commanders/mages, and the AI is playing the battles.
Like I said before, tactical combat wouldnt be a good option in Dominions. In AoW: SM you played around with a small number of units, here you play with thousands sometime.

[ioticus]

The automatic combat in Dom gives me just as much thrill, if not more so, than the tactical games. Tactical combat in which you control every unit simply would not work in Dom for obvious reasons.