Move Along, Nothing to See Here

[Saxon]

Fryon,

I remember you from my SEIV days and know that you really like the system that SEIV has in place. I found it ok, but not great. Everything was so clear cut and the people with the best spreadsheets won; I ended up finding it very dry. In the case of Dominions, it is more of a touchy feely game and I really love it. The very ambiguity makes it fascinating, makes it more like a real world where you do not know the statistics of people, you have to make a best guess. You are not impressed by the game, which is your right. I suspect that you will never really like this game because it is quite different than the more clear cut kind of game which I believe you like.

[General Tacticus]

Erm... I was talking specifcally about in individual provinces, not globally. *note that this is now obseleted by later complaints of poor interface design*

Well tax income is determined by land terrain (farmland is the best), population, presence and type of a fortress, and unrest. Oh, and additional gold producing structures, like a gold mine... Plus the dominion effect affecting the province, specifically order, productivity, heat/cold, and growth. Perhaps size of the territory as well, but I am not sure.

I do not recall off the top of my head, but there were a lot of log Messages that lacked anything specific about the event, just stating that it occured.

I find the reports adequate, but no more. They are full of "a handful", "many", "some", or "one fifth" (as in "one fifth of the population there"). In fact, I have taken to reading one message, going to the province, figuring out how bad (or good) it was, and going back to read the next one. Easy with keyBoards shortcuts, but time consuming.

They still amass large numbers of resource-intensive troops, and it doesn't matter if I build resource-cheap troops.

On the other hand, they almost never build a fortress. And those huge armies of them are usually 80% militia, led by the cheapest commanders : not just cheap, but dirt cheap and nearly worthless. I suspect that in the first turns the AI is putting all its gold in recruiting militia wherever it can. They can easily outnumber you 2 or 3 to one that way, with the same budget.

Umm... I said, on the map itself. So you can see the relative levels of troops in ALL territories at once, not have to clumsily select all of them at once. SE4 suffers from this as well, though it is not as big of an issue there because the system map is the game, whereas there is no territory map at all in Dominions.

It is on the map. If you don't see it, go to map filters and chack "show troops". It will show, on the map, the rectangles giving you ary size. Of course, you only see yours, and the enemy when it is at your frontier. Or if you have a scout in the province.

It is the very fact that you have to do that memorization to even think about interacting with them that is the problem. There is only one hidden screen that shows the correlation. It is not any fun to get Messages from an AI and have no idea which empire it is that sent it on the game map because there is no good way of figuring that out. Not even showing enemy troops or engaging in combat has the enemy's name! Just a flag. Ridiculous.

Well, for combat at least, if you click on the message, you get a losses report witch clearly tells who attacked whom, and where. Of course, you need to figure out the name of your neighbors, but if you keep playing a little it will soak through. And wathcing the battle replay also gives you the names.

Actually... none of the function keys do anything for me. No info screens pop up at all. So no, I did not check any info screens, as none are accessible to me.

Are you by any chance using a fancy keyboard with "alternate" functions on the function keys ? In which case there should be a small button next to them to put them back to their original value ?

That purple and red box? Rather silly icon for a button if you ask me. There is no way to know what that is trying to show you unless you want to take hours figuring it out. This is a disturbing trend in this game, and makes for a rather poor demo.

I don't know... a big square that gets bigger when you recruit, blue for your troops, red for the enemy. The symbol is even the NATO symbol for infantry (but you do need some experience in wargaming to know that). But everybody agress with you : it takes time to learn that game. By the way, there is a walkthrough available, which should take you through all the steps to help you learn. There is a link on illwinter's page...

No, there is no level of micro. There is only tedium where there should not be. You can not do any micromanaging. The kind of stuff you do is not approaching micromanagement.

Yes you can, you just haven't found it yet. You can set taxes in each province, you can put your army in neat little formations and give lots of orders to your commanders, including which spells to cast and in chich order. May I recommend the walkthrough again ?

Scale level? Are you referencing the various empire attributes?

He is. Order for exemple gives you a 7% gold income bonus, per level. But only in provinces where your God's influence (the candles) is strong enough for your empire bonus to take effect. And so on...

That is another indication of a very poor interface. There are no buttons for any of these, no menus, nothing. Just phantom links waiting for hotkeys without reference. At the very least there should be a "game" menu that has "links" to all of those screens.

All those "F" things are also available via the Menus (icons) on the right of the screen, most notably the "statistics" and "magic" ones. Using the hotkeys just saves you two clicks...

There are not very many filters (4 in fact), and half of them are not even useful filters for gathering more information. The only useful filter is the troop size one, which doesn't look anything like what it does. At the least it should have a picture of a troop, not just a purple and red box, as its icon.

I think you misunderstand. That red box is not an icon, it is a representation of troop strength. When you click on it, you actually click on the province under it, which brings all the details for the province, including the army list. In an enemy province, the "province info" button gets you a more detailed report of enemy troops, as far as you know them.

So overall... my complaints boil down to (mostly) one thing: this game has an extremely poor, unpolished (dare I say unsophisticated?) interface that makes it much harder to get into than it should be. Very elementary mistakes were made in designing it that give it a very unprofessional feel.

That was one of my first impressions : the interface is not what it could be. On the other hand, in my experience, The game with the most fancy interface are seldom the most interesting. And wirh experience, you'll see that the interface is adequate. Even if it still has some rough edges.

OOpsies, by the time I put this together, you posted again... Ok, half of my answers are probably off the mark

[ January 06, 2004, 06:56: Message edited by: General Tacticus ]

[licker]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Oh dear... that was the Dominions 1 demo, not the Dominions 2 demo... boy is my face red. Guess I should get the Dominions 2 demo now... pretend I said "Dominions 1" everywhere I said "Dominons 2"... lets hope Illwinter has gotten their act together in the second incarnation... I still don't see what the big fuss was over Dominions 1...

Heh

Well as they say... no blood no foul

Some of your complaints did seem rather strange as all of the hotkeys can be accessed from mouse clicks as well, but seems we've figured out what the problem was

I didn't play much of Dom1, and I'll agree that if I had simply come to it without trying to find additional information and bugging the forums with questions I would have dropped it as well. The interface to Dom1 was a royal pain, Dom2 is at least an order of magnatude better, however, the documentation is still rather lacking in my opinion.

Dom1 was really more of a love it or hate it game, Dom2 does a good job of making it more difficult to hate

[Gandalf Parker]

Dom1 generated alot of excitement in places such as the strategy newsGroups. Obviously not from the "buy a pretty box" crowd of average gamers. What kept it in the conversation is that it was the best game for people into wide variety and deep strategy.

And alot of the discssion did also revolve around the graphics, interface, learning curve, etc. What kept us going was the fact that the developers were in the newsgroup joining in the discussions. Well actually, I feel like I should say the programmers and graphic artists were there. This was one of the few games Ive ever been involved in where I felt we were all developers rather than just complaining Users.

Now Dom2 exists. Most of what we asked for is in it. Much of what we have asked for in this new forum for Dom2 has been acknowledged by the programmers. I fully expect numerous patches. Not to fix bugs, but to add our requested features.

This is not an off-the-shelf game, and in my opinion its not a game for off-the-shelf Users. IF you can get past the learning curve then I can almost gaurantee this is a game which will outlive a dozen off the shelf games.

[ January 06, 2004, 16:02: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

[aldin]

I find myself really confused about the underlying complaint, namely that the game has a poor interface and (the game) is unpolished. Let me explain.

One of the games that is widely acknowledged as being highly polished with a great interface is Warcraft III. When I tried playing that game I ultimately came to realize that, interface-wise, there were many things that needed to be done which could only effectively be done by hotkey and which weren't at all obvious to a new player.

Dom II, by contrast, is completely accessable with a mouse. If there's something you want to do you can probably click around and find it. All it takes is the realization that much of the visible information can be interacted with. Once you know what you want to do, Dom II has a HUGE set of hotkeys that let you easily manage almost every usual function.

Warcraft III's 'polish' seems primarily to be in it's simplicity. There is more-or-less a 'right' way to set up your base that quickly becomes automatic because the number of options is small - you need to harvest resources which means you build the resource harvest units and buildings first then you either upgrade your resource gathering ability or start the intial armies all while scouting the surrounding area.

Dom II's polish is in the details. Every time you try a different type of Pretender with any given theme/nation you have to reconfigure the way you play the game to a certain extent. Ulm with the Iron Faith theme and an Astral 10 Pretender plays completely differently from Standard Ulm with a Rainbow Pretender. The polish shows in how many different VALID ways there are to play.

Yes. There IS a learning curve, and it IS severe. But the basic complaint should have been that the game was too complex, not that the interface is bad or that the game is unpolished. Though to be fair, I suppose that may be the benefit of having survived the initial part of the learning curve speaking and that there is no way to perceive the difference until one has done so.

~Aldin

[Fyron]

Comparing any real strategy game to filth like Warcraft is just plain silly... Warcraft is not a strategy game.

I see that you missed the post where I mentioned that this was from playing Dominions 1 demo, not Dominions 2...

It is entirely possible to see past a learning curve... that is what makes people try to get past it in the first place, because they see something worthwhile.

[aldin]

Do you mean to retract your complaint that the game is unpolished and has a poor interface? I didn't understand that from your post that you'd been playing the Dom 1 demo rather than that of Dom 2. If so, my post is moot. If not, my comments about WC3 are legitimate because they address the two issues you were complaining about, not because they served any comparison within the realm of "strategy games".

~Aldin

[Fyron]

I had edited it to mention Dominions 1 instead at the top quite some time before you made your post... My statements still stand about Dominions 1.

[ceremony]

Originally posted by aldin:
Warcraft III's 'polish' seems primarily to be in it's simplicity.

I don't think simplicity is the same as polish. Polish means getting the little things right, and in interface terms means anticipating what a player might want to do, and giving him a way to do it that's as straightforward and as easy to use as possible. I love Dom2 to death, but the game definitely isn't "polished." There are a ton of things that could be cleaned up. These things range from the completely inconsequential - like typos, and the text in some windows exceeding the window space - to the mildly annoying - like the lack of a mouse map scroll - to the truly aggravating - like the inability to scroll the army setup screen except by clicking on the scroll bar. Dom2's interface isn't as bad as some people say it is - I feel that, as you say, it lets you do most things you want to do - but it certainly could be much better, and isn't "polished" in any way. There are lots of places for improvement: the message screen, the army setup screen, the way information is presented about what is in an enemy province, etc. There should be a command to just cycle through (or reveal) your own scouts, since these are the commanders most often "lost" in a game since you can't see them on the main map if you don't have their province selected. Yes, you can cycle through all idle commanders using [N]ext idle commander, but I almost never want to do this - I just want to find my scouts. In the late stages of PBEM games, where I might not have seen my map for a few days, this is the first thing I forget, and want to be able to do. But I can't. Lack of polish.

A good example of polish in a fairly complex real-time strategy game is Rise of Nations. The designers there anticipated almost everything a player might want to do in a game, and gave him or her a simple way to do it (not in terms of strategy, but simply interface mechanics). In Dom2, you can also do most of what you want to do, but it's a much bigger pain.

I think Dom2 is the best strategy game I've ever played. However, I do understand when people complain about its lack of polish. I think that the game is so rewarding that this lack of polish is forgivable. I disagree with those who claim the game should cost less because the lack of polish doesn't justify a $50 price - I think that's crazy when you consider how many hundreds of hours of total enjoyment you'll probably get out of the game. But as to the simple claim that the game is unpolished, I have to agree.

[Pocus]

Fyron, tell us when you get into dom II demo. as a pillar of the Shrapnel forums, your opinion is rather interesting to hear.

It would be the first time (truely!) that I hear from a grognard strategy gamer that he dont appreciates dominions. Perhaps you will be such person, but I hope you will be as engrossed as us by the richness beyond belief of this game.

Happy playing.