Automation vs Micromanagement

[Pnakotus]

I searched for 'micro' and 'automation' and didn't find much. I appreciate that its been done to death; as I stated, I was trying to get a feel for the community.

That feeling is that most people are PBEM nazis who ENJOY being forced to give orders to everyone every turn, even for moving. I'm sure the way each turn is essentially unrelated to the others (execpt for monthly rituals, doubtless a hated automation feature) is fun in PBEM, but when you're playing on a LAN and you set the previous moves 5 minutes ago, its retarded to have to go back and do them again. But hey, whatever.

[Graeme Dice]

I don't see how you could ever set your troop movements more than a turn in advance. The situation changes far too rapidly for automatically moving to be of much use.

[Gandalf Parker]

Pnakotus said:
That feeling is that most people are PBEM nazis who ENJOY being forced to give orders to everyone every turn, even for moving. I'm sure the way each turn is essentially unrelated to the others (execpt for monthly rituals, doubtless a hated automation feature) is fun in PBEM, but when you're playing on a LAN and you set the previous moves 5 minutes ago, its retarded to have to go back and do them again. But hey, whatever.

PbEM Nazis? Heehee. Cute one. Nice choice of biased wording for your cause. Lets see if I can do it...

So then your problem then is that the PbEM game you got has a community full of PbEM players who feel there are too few good PbEM games and resent the speed freaks trying to convert it into a nintendo game?

Heehee. Dont take it serious. I was half kidding.

[Atrocities]

One of the things that really made the game less fun for me was the micromanagment. I am sorry to say that I found it a bit more "job like" than I wanted too. When you have several dozen provinces under your control and you spend an hour each turn just managing those provinces, well the fun sorta slips away.

Again Sorry.

[Boron]

Yeah lots of automation would be indeed good in dom 3 .

If you could queue moveorders and the like would also be nice then when you have time on one day you could plan your advance from your main armies 5 turns ahead and only make small corrections on the next days . So you can plan your turns on the weekend and then aren't as busy on working days .
This would also lead to quicker going games .

Civilization 3 or Master of Orion 2 or Victoria are quite good with useful automation features , queueable orders etc. .

I myself tend to do rather summon based armies then making lots of SCs because i can do montly summoning . With SCs though i need all the forging which is a lot of work .

Also there is the huge bottleneck with the way too small magic item forge capacity .

After turn 50 you can always fill the 50 forgeslots if you play forge strategies .

[Pnakotus]

The game situation does change at quite a pace; however, moving armies around behind the front line (particularly with 20+ forts) is fiddly and annoying when you should be able to set a destination and just change it later if needed. How hard would it be to have a 'move to prov no. 49' order? Your client can work out the quickest route and reset the orders on that unit at the start of each turn, from a server perspective it would be totally transparent. The order could be changed any time before hosting, just like normal. No negative game effects, some positive game effects... I can see why there is such resistance to it!

False dilemmas can be fun - Nobody wants a Nintendo game; I'm simply requesting sensible scripting to reduce player workload. Players should be able to be as manual as the like or not. Turn length could be reduced by allowing values (moves, scripted strat orders, whatever) to carry over between moves: I'm glad noone has contested this. Whether it suits your style of play is unfortunately irrelevant. I'd never even considered PBEM: the games format does indeed fit well with that method of play. Guess what? There are OTHER ways of playing too. I'm not sure exactly where 'making things easier on the player' translates into 'heretical attack on PBEM roots of game' in your mind, GP.

The game would still be opaque, would still eject 95% of players within 10 minutes, would still be deep and flexible and the only decent fantasy strat in existence. It would just be easier to play, and maybe even have more players. We wouldn't want that now, would we.

[The_Tauren13]

Im sure its nothing personal. The knee-jerk reaction of nearly everyone on this forum is to label someone a heretic for suggesting something new. You should have seen what happened to Boron and I when we suggested upkeep for summons. People still hate me for that, and it was 6 months ago.

[Oversway]

Play by EMAIL? Christ. No wonder you people are so anti-automation; you've got DAYS per turn.

You make statements like that and call people PBEM nazis, yet take offense about being called a heretic?


Anyways, I don't think anyone is against automation, but 1.) everyone has their own concept of the 'best' way to eliminate micromanagement and 2.) I think many people would rather see improvement in other areas first.

[Kristoffer O]

> You should have seen what happened to Boron and I when we suggested upkeep for summons. People still hate me for that, and it was 6 months ago.

Illwinter doesn't hate you. Your suggestion has been considered, discarded, reconsidered, pondered, left alone and placed in the holding box of unused ideas several times since the first steps of dom1 were taken.

Pnakotus: You are right in your conviction that there are several automation features that would make the game easier to handle if implemented. It would be good to reduce micro. Just like it would be good to raise the 'initial reaction modifier' of the game from -5 to -3.

When we started work on Dominions 1 we were actually bothered that there would be too little to do during a turn. This was in the good old days when PBeM was the only possible way of playing multi (at least for us). Therefore we didn't bother much with MM reduction (perhaps we even increased it).

[The_Tauren13]

Kristoffer O said:
Illwinter doesn't hate you. Your suggestion has been considered, discarded, reconsidered, pondered, left alone and placed in the holding box of unused ideas several times since the first steps of dom1 were taken.

I certainly wasn't accusing the great[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Lightning.gif[/img]Illwinter[img]/threads/images/Graemlins/Lightning.gif[/img]of any such thing!!! I was refering to a few select individuals who probably know who they are and will remain unnamed. Of course, who is to say that is the only reason people dislike me?