The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Edi]

Zooko, the idea that repelling and morale checks should be eliminated are, frankly, the ravings of an idiot, and the assertion that they are "not visible" is outright lunacy.

Without morale checks, armies would fight until everyone on one side is dead, and if you think this would not be a major change, you're on drugs. Repelling is a very important part of battlefield tactics, just put a squad of pikemen or hoplites in the front rank and see what happens when some generic troops armed with broadswords, axes or spears try to attack them. Half of the time they fail because the pikemen and hoplites get a repel attempt and use it to successfully attack them, i.e. they get an extra attack while the enemy loses his. Same applies to bigger units like SCs who use longer weapons.

Your idea about eliminating probabilistic mechanisms in favor of absolute ones from combat is equally stupid. It's less realistic, and it has similar implications as the morale check and repelling ones, it changes the whole dynamics of combat and would make it far less interesting. Taken together, these changes would ruin Dominions as it now stands, and would require a huge extra effort on part of the devs to compensate and fix what they broke (and which was working quite well, thank you).

Edi

[ckfnpku]

Personaly I think it's boring as hell when you have all these equations for everything that happens in a game. Playing becomes like a math lesson. No, keep things obscure and make players rely on their feel of things.

Of course you need equations to drive the mechanisms of the game, but don't reveal those equations to the players and make them so they can't be extracted precisely.

[Gandalf Parker]

ckfnpku said:
Personaly I think it's boring as hell when you have all these equations for everything that happens in a game. Playing becomes like a math lesson. No, keep things obscure and make players rely on their feel of things.

Of course you need equations to drive the mechanisms of the game, but don't reveal those equations to the players and make them so they can't be extracted precisely.

NO equation stays obscure for long. In Dominions 2 they very much wanted players to discover what does and doesnt work, but in the forum players are always working out the formulas. Of course you can do what they did and have at least one die roll in the formula. Personally I find a formula without some bit of random to be boring, AND abit unrealistic.

But of course you will get into the solo-players (more randoms) vs multi-players (less randoms) arguments so a switch to run a game with randoms turned off might be a good idea.

[Zooko]

My idea wasn't to have large-scale things like battles to be deterministic. My idea was that if you have a large-scale thing, like who wins when two units fight it out, or which army wins when two armies fight it out, then some of the components that go into it can be simple and deterministic while the overall result is still complex and non-deterministic.

A neat thing about simultaneous-move games is that even if there is zero randomness in the rules then the game is still non-deterministic because you don't know what your opponent is about to do.

When I suggested morale checks as a possible target for simplification I didn't mean eliminate the notion of routing and have everyone fight to the death. I meant make the way routing is triggered simpler.

[Zooko]

Some games have known rules where the player can be expected to understand all of the rules. Others have intuitive rules where the player doesn't understand the details, but only develops a feel for the result. The former kind includes most turn-based strategy games, the latter kind includes most real-time strategies.

ckfnpku above is saying that he prefers the latter kind.

Dominion and Dominions 2 fall into an interesting middle ground. I've played many, many hours of these games, and much of that was in "intuitive" mode. Even today, most of my decisions are made by feel rather than by thinking about what the actual rules will entail. For example, do you really remember what the exact rules are for morale checks? I don't. I learned them once, but now I just move Battle Fraught units into separate squads and remember not to rely too heavily on low-morale units to stick it out.

I'm not sure if I really would prefer Dom3 to be a fully "known-rules" game, but I would definitely regret it if it became and even more "intuitive-rules" game than it already is.

But regardless of which way it moves, one thing that will improve it is more visibility of rules. I'm quite hopeful about this, because Illwinter has consistently improved this over time. Remember when some commander qualities such as Supply Bonus or Recuperation were not shown graphically, for example?

It seems like with each passing year more of the rules of the game become visible elements of the user interface. Hopefully the same will hold true next year.

[Zooko]

Here's a simple wish for more visible rules: have different sound effects for "attacked and missed", "attacked and hit but did no damage" and "attacked and hit and did damage".

Here's another one: show the effects of communion on the power levels of Communion Masters.

[Agrajag]

Here's a wish:
Don't simplify and don't obscure any formula.
I really enjoy playing a game when I know exactly how each calculation is made and predit quite accurately how things will turn up in a set situation.
HOMM, one of the best TBS series (lets ignore Heroes IV and the legendary V), has almost all of its mechanisms out in the open and it makes things a whole lot more fun.
I admit, I play HOMM III with a calculator handy, but having the power to predict all possible outcomes improves my decisions and makes things quite clear (now I can easily see how that pack of lowsy pikemen killed that black dragon).
Besides, lets go for a second to the most well known strategy game of all - Chess.
In chess you know all the rules, you know exactly what you can and cannot do and how your compnion/competitor/enemy can respond to your moves, every "unit" is slightly different from every other "unit" but each turn and retaliation is 100% predictable (though starting to take into consideration all the possible 10^20 moves or so that your competitor might take is impossible for humans).

[Turin]

I disagree about Homm3 being more fun . I actually like it that you don´t know the inside rules for routing etc.

Let´s consider two games:
In one game(1) we know all the rules, in the other(2) we only know generally how things work.

So imagine you have to decide if you want to attack another guys army.
This is what happens in a competitive multiplayer game 1 :
you fire up your handy battle calculator, which tells you the results. You get favourable results, you attack, the next turn comes as no surprise, since the calc is good. Next turn happens and you have to enter the math again, you get bored and quit.

This is what happens in game 2:
You think about the battle, recollect your past experiences with battles under similar circumstances, make a lot of guesswork and decide to attack. The next turn hosts and you see that you either failed, or you get that very nice feeling, that everything really worked out like you planned.

For me game 2 is far more exciting and interesting and luckily dominions 2 is such a game.
HoMM3 on the other hand is pretty and a nice waste of time, but not really challenging, once you know the rules. That means that HoMM3 became boring for me pretty fast.

For the comparison between dom2 and chess, that´s pretty much apples and oranges. dom2 has lots of random elements, which alter the game drastically and a good deal of the fun in dom2 is surprising your opponent with spells/tactics, so dom2 is so radically different, so comparing those two isn´t very helpful.

[The_Tauren13]

Knowing all the rules is not going to get you anywhere near being able to completely predict the outcome of a battle. There is a large enough random factor to prevent that. So I say: let us know all the equations.

[ioticus]

The game is much more exciting and realistic with the element of chance factored into the equations. Taking away chance would ruin the game for me. I love the open ended die rolls!