Dominions 2: King of Turn-Based MP Games

[Ironhawk]

Boron said:
If you play only with your friend combat mission b2b and combat mission ak are the turn based games you are looking for . You can download the demos and try a game against your friend. You will probably like it.

What is the turn-style for Combat Mission? All the other pure wargame type games I looked at actually turned out to be Serial-turn. Not so bad for those games because they are all 1v1, but you have no diplomacy and political intrigue like you do in a dom2 FFA.

[djo]

Combat Mission is 1-on-1 and low-level tactical (units=squad/single vehicle, totalling up to about a batallion per side). Each battle simulates about 1 hour of real-time, so no diplomacy, supply, etc. The turns are 1 minute sim time, orders then replay. The AI is not bad (buys more than militia), and you also have hotseat, PBEM, and network.

Battlefront.com has demos for all 3 variations (west, east, & Italy/Africa theaters) for PC and Mac (OS 9 only, alas).

[Ironhawk]

Thanks djo. I might take a look at it to solve the immediate need of something to play with this particular friend. Is it Simultaneous turns? Or Serial, like most of the other wargames I found. I'm also toying around with going back to Wesnoth for a little bit. But both of those games are so radically different from Empire-Building types of games. Those are my true pride and joy!

It is really distressing, tho, to have this realization - that there are for all intents and purposes no other MP turn-based games - confirmed by other veteran players :/

[djo]

If I understand what you mean, it's simultaneous, like dom2. Each player submits orders for a turn, the computer resolves them together, and then each player sees the replay.

Is that what you mean?

[quantum_mechani]

Ironhawk said:


It is really distressing, tho, to have this realization - that there are for all intents and purposes no other MP turn-based games - confirmed by other veteran players :/

What do you expect? Those that bow to the One True Game will accept no other.

[Ironhawk]

Hahhaha, just so!!

So, hey - about SE4: what are people's opinions on it? When I played the demo so many moons ago I thought there was just way, WAY too much MicroManagement, even for a PBEM-style game? Was I doing something wrong?

[Alneyan]

SE4 doesn't have much micromanagement. Really! Well, yes it does, though you can elect to play a slightly less optimal game and save yourself a lot of micromanagement.

Heavy use of retrofits or fighters are the kind of things that can result in micromanagement hell, but even then, most turns do take a while to play: one hour per turn was my average in the middle game, and two hours in harder situations, and some players have claimed to spend several hours per turn, without paying much attention to some details.

My other main complaint with the game is balance: there is really no widespread balancing mod, and the standard game is not exactly balanced; or rather, there are simply options that cannot be bypassed, and only one working Empire setup with a couple of variations. Don't even think of seeing something half as varied and half as balanced (relatively speaking) as Dominions 2; I'm afraid it won't be the case.

I believe the game does shine with certain mods, and in multiplayer if you like diplomacy and the like. I am personally quite fond of Proportions, where micromanagement goes down to manageable levels, and where all the good stuff is all of a sudden just a bit harder to reach. That would be the difference between playing Easy research and Magic 3 and Very Hard research and Drain 3: in the latter case, research choices actually matter. Proportions is fun, really.

Now PvK, feel free to send me that check for the free ad, will ya?

[Oversway]

SEIV can have a lot of micromanagement, but they have a lot of time saving shortcuts - saving build queues, waypoints, etc. Overall the micromanagement was never a game killer for me. Do you remember what specifically you had problems with?

I agree with Alneyan, the base game is somewhat constrained (like life-draining weapons, wrathful skies, can be in dom2).

The SEIV AI can be dumb, but because the ai can be modded to an extent (illwinter: hint hint ) you can find many mods that improve the sp aspect as well.

I havn't played seiv awhile but I really liked the devnull mod. I don't think people use that anymore, though.

[Gandalf Parker]

The thing I liked most about SEIV was how the MODding totally made it. The original game feels like a demo now. Small galaxy, 8 races, few random graphics, no random space monsters or pirates or nomads or... well anyway, the players made mods that changed ALL of that. Now the galaxys are huge, full of surprises, hundreds of races covering just about any space movie, tv show or novel you can thing of.

Gandalf Parker

[PashaDawg]

Hmmmmm... maybe I need to reload SEIV onto my computer. I never tried the mods. Are they as easy to install as on Dominions 2?