What about interactive Tactical Combat ?

[Hullu]

I'd also like to remind you we already had a fan-made combat simulator in dom2, and it didn't ruin MP for anyone.

Maybe you just didn't see it ruin it for anyone!

But I don't think we're talking about an extra ten minutes here. To get good advantage you need to run dozens of combats or more. If it's fast or even trivial with a simulator compared to hours when doing it manually then I wouldn't give the simulator to the public...

[Agrajag]

Hullu said:
But I don't think we're talking about an extra ten minutes here. To get good advantage you need to run dozens of combats or more. If it's fast or even trivial with a simulator compared to hours when doing it manually then I wouldn't give the simulator to the public...

But we are talking about an extra ten minutes here, you can try it for yourself even without map commands.
Just start a new sp game with you as two nations (and no AI), giving both of you (:P) half the provinces in the map (by way of starting provinces at game setup). Just Host a few turns (without actually doing anything) untill you have enough gold to buy everything you want, buy it. Host a few more turns because it probably will take more than one turn. Send everybody to the front. Save the game. Now try different settings and reload as you see fit.
Getting the right spells is also easy, just get a few mages and host until you research whatever you want to.
It might get a bit more tedious if you want hunderds of specific summons that take very hard paths to summon, but even that's not that hard.

And with map modding commands its even a whole lot easier, since you can just spawn almost anything you want to test.

[Hullu]

Well, still that's something I wouldn't be bothered to do. But with a simulator I might be

[Agrajag]

Hullu said:
Well, still that's something I wouldn't be bothered to do. But with a simulator I might be

Why not? You are at a disadvantage to someone who does bother

[Hullu]

Because I'm a kind of person who values comfort over work If something is easy/comfortable enough for the gain, I do it, if it's not I skip it.

If using such an advantage is mandatory to be competitive and it causes too much discomfort, I quit playing. I doubt we'll ever reach that situation, although a careful planner AND user of this feature (simulating incoming battles) would have an enormous potential advantage over people who don't do it.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think a battle simulator would be a great advantage, to certain players. And a bad thing for the game overall.

That said, did anyone notice that I posted a link to a battle simulator? I dont think Johan needs to bother making the editor simulator into something user friendly and adding it to the game tools menu.

[Graeme Dice]

Gandalf Parker said:
I think a battle simulator would be a great advantage, to certain players. And a bad thing for the game overall.

There is no possible way that a battle simulator could be construed as a bad thing unless you don't want the players of the game to have accurate information on the capabilities of various units. Accurate information is not a bad thing in a strategy game, no matter how much the anti-powergamer crowd wants it to be. Accurate information is the only thing that makes a strategy game worth playing, as without it your decisions are not meaningful and might as well be randomly assigned.

That said, did anyone notice that I posted a link to a battle simulator? I dont think Johan needs to bother making the editor simulator into something user friendly and adding it to the game tools menu.

No, you did not post a link to a battle simulator. You posted a link to a map that can be used with some difficulty to create potential battles directly in the dominions game. It's nothing like a properly featured simulator that could be used to run the few thousand test casts that are needed to properly balance the gold costs on the vast number of overcosted units in Dominions.