Updated Manual?

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Seve82

Sad but true after cbm. After I have played this game with cbm I think manual seems to be less and less usefull tho I find spell index still somewhat usefull not much else in manual.

Formulas in the manual are invaluable IMHO. A new player has no idea what "Attack 15" or "Defense 12" means, or how that applies to what makes a unit good or bad. He can probably figure out Protection, at least in a gross sense (Prot 10 vs. 20 points of damage will usually take 10 points of damage) but doesn't understand how the variance works--how much damage will a Prot 20 guy take damage from a 10 point attack? He will have no clue at all how morale works, or fatigue.

Unless you know the rules you play by you might as well be playing an RTS, and you can't learn the rules without the manual or someone who learned it from the manual. Unless you have the source code, like lch.

-Max

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by MaxWilson

Formulas in the manual are invaluable IMHO. A new player has no idea what "Attack 15" or "Defense 12" means, or how that applies to what makes a unit good or bad. He can probably figure out Protection, at least in a gross sense (Prot 10 vs. 20 points of damage will usually take 10 points of damage) but doesn't understand how the variance works--how much damage will a Prot 20 guy take damage from a 10 point attack? He will have no clue at all how morale works, or fatigue.

I struggle to accept that anyone can have 'no idea' what att 12 and def 10 mean after looking at a handful of units.

Militia has 8 attack, a soldier has 10, an elite has 13. Durr, what could they possibly mean?

I agree they wouldn't know exactly how they worked, but it isn't like the manual is reliable in the cases where you need to know exactly how things work. It doesn't properly explain how prot works, for example. It incorrectly explains how various other things work. No point in me listing this stuff - there's a thread about it.

[Gandalf Parker]

At the time that the manual was being created I got the impression that it wasnt supposed to explain all that. The devs, and Kristoffer especially, seemed to want the players to play for the info. The manual only had to tell them how to play the game, not how to win it. I remember arguments given on how long it would take the community to break down and make the formulas available. (it did take longer than predicted)

So I would tend to fault the manual only for things that are wrong. And only if they were wrong at the time it was created, not changed later. Its all impressions unless someone wants to create some actual percentages but my impression is that the manual is 99% good. That is if you arent expecting a strategy guide or a complete code breakdown. That was left to us to do and I think we did it very well.

Of course that disregards what its like to use it playing with any mod that massively changes the game. In that case the manual is probably not going to provide much.

[Sombre]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

So I would tend to fault the manual only for things that are wrong. And only if they were wrong at the time it was created, not changed later. Its all impressions unless someone wants to create some actual percentages but my impression is that the manual is 99% good. That is if you arent expecting a strategy guide or a complete code breakdown. That was left to us to do and I think we did it very well.

Feh. It's not a matter of fault. Who cares which problems in the manual are justified or not? This thread is about the state of the manual now, not when it was written. Has it been updated? No. Does that mean it isn't reliable? Yes.

This does not indicate a judgement of the devs, Bruce Geryk or anyone else. It definitely raises the topic of documentation generally, but that discussion does not have to involve finding fault.

[MaxWilson]

Originally Posted by Sombre

I struggle to accept that anyone can have 'no idea' what att 12 and def 10 mean after looking at a handful of units.

Militia has 8 attack, a soldier has 10, an elite has 13. Durr, what could they possibly mean?

I agree they wouldn't know exactly how they worked *snip*

I meant that in a quantitative sense. In Diablo II, it was pretty clear to me that higher Attack meant you hit more often, and higher Defense meant you got hit less often. It NOT clear, without recourse to the LCS or the smart people on the web, to figure out whether a +200 boost to defense was worth losing +1000 to attack versus monsters in Act II. In Dominions, what I meant is that without knowing the formulas in the manual it would be extremely hard to make quantitative decisions, e.g. to evaluate whether Helheim is better off with an E9S9 bless or an F9W9 bless vs. EA Ermor. Or to use your example, how many militia does it take to beat an elite soldier? How many regular soldiers does it take? Which is more cost-effective?

While there is some fun in discovery, and there is even fun in discovering mistakes in the manual, if we didn't at least know that the basic Dom3 mechanic is almost ALWAYS an opposed roll with DRN added to both sides--which we do, thanks to the manual--we wouldn't even know the correct form of questions to ask.

-Max