Remove Curses and Horror Marks?

[jscott]

Your arguments are incredibly far out of the mainstream.

I can rebut most of your points by simply saying that being a human player I have a massively unfair advantage over the AI opponents.

The game should feature a save/reload system. I know how to save and reload the game by copying the folders. I rarely use it, but I'm not going to lose a 70 turn game because of a bug (which happen all the time and have permanent consequences), a flukish event (pretender being killed by her own archers while pursuing routed enemies), or some other silly event.

I've just purchased Dominions 3 and played only three games deeper than 50 turns (none to completion, because a 100% victory is just tedious), and I've only been challenged by the AI very briefly and this was without any save or reloading.

And only people with abo****ely unlimited free time can afford to play a Dominions 3 game to the end when you are clearly going to lose. I don't have unlimited free time and I doubt my friends and family care how I play in single player.

Again, your response is bizarre and its hard for me to believe you were completely serious.

Edit: I also consider it very likely that the reason there is no save/reload feature in the game is because of the over-emphasis on PBEM and multiplayer. I find it hard to believe that a game that completely neglects its AI to the extent that Doms3 does is attempting to make some broader point about single player gamers being too soft because of excessive saving and reloading. I think the lack of this feature is more a result of lack of emphasis than some kind of ideological purity, but I'm sure the developers appreciate their fans ascribing this level of sophistication to their motives and results.

[llamabeast]

Meh... there are arguments in favour of saving being a faff. It's like ironman mode in an RPG - where once your character dies they never come back. Personally I like it, but I can see why people sometimes get annoyed about it. If it bothers you though, it's easy to either save manually occasionally (if you play in windowed mode - which I highly recommend - it's the job of a few seconds), or even write a little batch file/script to do it if you are inclined towards programming. If you are so inclined then I'm sure people here would be willing to give help or even write the thing if you really wanted.

[llamabeast]

Also I don't really get many/any bugs (apart from quirks in the game like graphs disappearing for dead players etc) - what kind of thing do you get?

[jscott]

llamabeast said:
Also I don't really get many/any bugs (apart from quirks in the game like graphs disappearing for dead players etc) - what kind of thing do you get?

I've twice had my Prophet die in the winter and not be able to create another for many, many turns. I'll admit that I didn't reload on the second occasion (because replaying the 7 turns I let run hoping the bug wouldn't recur was less appealing to me than simply being without a prophet indefinetely), but that option should be present.

I've also noticed other tiny bugs related to random events that I would prefer to simply avoid by reloading the previous turn and avoiding the event altogether.

[Endoperez]

The prophet bug comes from disease damage being applied twice in one spesific month, IIRC. You had very bad luck getting that bug twice while playing relatively little.

What kind of event bugs? Do you mean the way events don't take sieges into account? Or hailstorms/whatever inappopriate things in caves? The shortlist of known bugs only lists three event bugs, and the third is underwater-only so you probably didn't see that.

[jscott]

I don't know that this thread should become a bug discussion, especially when I could be confusing "bug" with "feature I don't understand", but the one event related bug I've seen focused on the event where a group of heroes arrive to liberate a province from my harsh rule. That event occurred in a province with an army moving out of it and the army disappeared. There was only a battle with the province defense and the army neither fought the heroes nor arrived at its destination. I don't have a savegame from that game to prove this, but I would have loved to have been able to reload the previous turn and avoid restarting because I lost an army early in the game on a smallish map.

[chrispedersen]

I get bugs in virtually every game I play - and some days I quit playing for a few days or weeks because of it. I have had a few calls - but the number of times it has occurred has been truly annoying...

Whether this was the abysal, infernal furnaces, the armor of returning, blesses on area affect weapons, besieged by skeletons when I conquered a terrritory or whatever.. there are LOTS of bugs in the game.

As for AI being challenging - I find that you can do more to make a game challenging by the AI's you put in the games and the behaviours you ascribe to them.

So for example, choosing 6-8 strong nations and make them aggressive will give you a tougher fight than early age ermor, abysia, bandar log and making them impossible.
Increase starting strength to 9, decrease special occurence - I routinely get games that are enjoyable into 80 turns...

[Agrajag]

I find bugs to be extremely rare. I've been playing since (a bit before) I registered on these forums (of course, I'm including dom2 play), and I've seen very very few bugs, and maybe once in my entire Dominions gaming "career" have I encountered a show-stopping bug.

As for a ingame saves... I don't think they are really needed. You can save on your own if you really want to, but there is almost no need for saves, and considering how things work right now, it will only make the interface more complicated and will waste developer time.

Last time this was discussed, someone nicely provided a way to autosave, so here it is:
Make a shortcut to the game that will run it with the --preexec command line argument, make it something like --preexec DomSave.bat (DomSave.bat will be the file that automagically saves for you, and preexec means it will be called everytime before hosting a turn.)
To make the DomSave.bat file simply create a new text file and write down something like:
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\*.2h" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak3\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\*.2h" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savedgames\GAMETOBESAVED\*.2h" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\ftherlnd" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak3\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\ftherlnd" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savedgames\GAMETOBESAVED\fther lnd" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\*.trn" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak3\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\*.trn" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savedgames\GAMETOBESAVED\*.trn" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\"
Then save the file and change its extension to .bat instead of .txt.
Also, create a savebak directory and in it bak1 and bak2 and bak3.
What this will do is copy all save related files from the game you want to save into the savebake\bak1, the bak1 to bak2 and the bak2 to bak3, essentially giving you three backups that will continuously overwrite each other, so if you want to go back one turn you go to bak1, if you want two turns you go to bak2 and if you want three turns go to bak3.
Obviously, you will need to change the paths to whatever is right for your computer.

I didn't use it much, and I don't use it anymore, but I still had it on my computer, maybe it will help you

[jscott]

I'm going to leave this discussion at this point alone. There's just no point in arguing that ingame saves are needed, when most of the people playing are willing to come online, concede there are bugs that can severely impact play, but then turn around and argue that ingame saves aren't necessary.

Nearly every game that comes out, in any genre, has an ingame saving feature. It certainly is in every strategy game (turn based or RTS, from Civilizations to Gal Civ to Europa Universalis to Starcraft to whatever you want to name).

It is not a crutch that allows people to play poorly.

It is not a cheat that allows human players to outwit the AI (frankly if you need a cheat to beat the AI in Dom 3, strategy games might not be your gaming genre).

It is a convenience that keeps a person from abandoning a very long game in progress (and Dominions is a very long, deep game) and having to restart because of a bug, a flukish event, or just because something happens you didn't want to happen (like forgetting to produce or a move a unit). This is single player, against the AI, and this condescending attitude that people here have for a feature that is incredibly basic in any PC (or even console game at this point) is unfathomable.

As for it being hard to implement, if it just takes me 1 second to do it on my own, then it can't possibly be very difficult to implement.

[Endoperez]

I and llamabeast both agreed that we can see why some people would like to have it. NTJedi and Agrajag didn't agree, but told you how to do it yourself. The tone used wasn't the best possible, but I hope you see that it's overy defensive - not hostile.

Frankly, at this point, we couldn't get this changed or added in, even if the whole community was for it, unanimously. Not for Dominions 3 at least, and Dominions 4 isn't around the corner, and probably not at the end of the tunnel either, and even if it was the developers might be against the change for one reason or another. The do-it-yourself guides are the only good answer, and NT_Jedi gave you one. I think the next Illwinter game probably should focus on interface much more than Dominions series, because that's where Dominions fails, and depending a save/load system would probably be part of that.




As for bugs... There are lots of minor bugs, I agree. I didn't think they were common, but it could be I just don't notice them any more. However, the game is so complicated that it's hard to now if we have a bug, a misleading description or a misinterpreted ability/event. Lots of "well-known" mechanics have actually been hear-say, and been proven wrong, lately. It comes with the complexity.