I dunno, guys...

[Emperor Fritsch the Dense]

i DL the demo. while i think its a good game for people like us that dont seem to give a rats *** about graphics......at this time i dont feel its worth the price ive seen it going for. when i drops down to 20 bucks ill pick it due to the replay value. either way if it cost the same as SE id be playing SE over D2 any day. but like i said when price drops and im out of eye candy games (FPS) ill pick it up and enjoy my time consuming non eye candy game.
Emperor Fritsch the Underpayed

[Renegade 13]

Now you guys have got me curious, and I'm downloading the demo for Dom2. Unfortunately, it's going to take about 6 hours to download on my crappy dialup internet! Ah well, more time to play SEIV in the meantime!

[Gandalf Parker]

I definately believe that its a game for SOME people. Thats why I dont recommend the game, I strongly recommend the demo. IF you can get past the learning curve, and be intrigued by the strange way of balancing the game, then buy it and I can pretty much gaurantee that it will live for years on your harddrive. Well worth the price.

As for comparisons to the demo, much of what is said might come in perspective if you were to compare it with the SEIV demo. No patches, no mods, nothing other than the starting races and files. ick

The developers are grat about using player suggestions. And they have butted up against many that were good ideas but just couldnt be put in. But they have already announced Dom3. Until then Id love to see some of the creativity here be aimed toward Dom2.

The balance thing is interesting and sparks alot of fire. people saying its broke but cant agree on what is broke if they havent really tackled learning the whole game. Instead of a unit-to-unit balance like chess, or a rock-paper-scissors balance on unit level like many deep strategy games, they do a rock-paper-scissors balance at nation level with very deep strategy layers. VERY difficult to balance but I love what it does to a game. When I play any nation I know that certain nations I come up against I will have a big advantage, and others I will need to get very defensive or change tactics for.

[deccan]

Renegade 13 said:
Now you guys have got me curious, and I'm downloading the demo for Dom2.

I remember when I first played Dom2 for the very first time (SP of course) in December Last year. I picked Tien Chi (cos it's China and I'm Chinese), picked a sage as a pretender (cos it would be sort of thematic).

On the very first turn, I recruited a Prince General, and spent the next few turns recruiting a sizable army of archers and footmen, going for the fairly starndard pike-and-bow setup, and equipping my Prince General with a good assortment of early equipment. I didn't attack my first independent province until well past turn 10, and when I did, because of the big size of my army, I won handily and felt quite pleased with myself.

Over the next several turns, I conquered more independent provinces easily and spent a lot of gold building up provincial defense (PD). My empire consisted of like four or five provinces and PD built up to at least level 20 in each and I was quite happy.

Then I met AI Marignon after turn 20 or so, and I was shocked that he had about a dozen provinces. He came after me with multiple armies that tore through my PD like they were tissue paper, and attacked my capital with his own Pretender, a fire 9 Phoenix, and his fire darts dropped my own footmen and archers like flies while my puny human sage cowered in fear. His crossbowmen took down my footmen in droves while my archers seemed to be able to barely scratch his swordsmen and Marignon took my capital at about turn 25 or so.

After that, I was thinking that this game sucked and didn't touch it for another four or five months.

[Alneyan]

That reminds me of my own first Dominions 2 game (I went with a Great Sage, standard T'ien Ch'i, but actually expanded like mad with archers alone. Can you guess I love Man?). I had to leave this game though, as I couldn't connect to the server via TCP/IP any more, but the end result wouldn't have been pretty.

Out of idle curiosity PvK:

In single player or with a GM, you could even do it during play.

Do you believe any GM could be lured in organising one such game for Dominions? Or yourself? *Hint hint*

[Suicide Junkie]

I've been trying the demo lately.

Took me a while to get the first game started, and I promptly got myself killed against the first independent province.

Then I got wounded to uselessness on the next attempt.

Still slogging up the learning curve for the interface, I started to toss other people into battle instead of me...
Worked a little, but the easy AIs started swarming over the hill before I got more than a handful of provinces.

Finally, one on one I got my army marching... The territory I had was useless for production, and in short order, I had 1000's of gold that I couldn't spend as fast as it came in. Hiring mercenaries for more than they asked for, and then throwing them across the map was the name of the game.

Having sent myself and my little smithy guys around searching for treasure while my three armies (two mercs) went stomping to the west for fun and profit, I was making piles of gems and even more money that I couldn't spend.

When I encountered the enemy, I stomped through his empty territories and ganged up on big red X's which I'd recently figured out meant enemy concentrations.
I tried out the defenses, and tossed up 30-35 on four or five provinces near the front lines.
Once I saw what it did, I boosted that to 50-60. (did I mention that I couldn't spend the money I was making as fast as it came in?)

I basically stormed the enemy with conventional forces and was just now managing to gather enough cavalry to form an attack force.

I managed to forge a few trivial magic items, but they never got to see combat use, before I broke through and closed the noose around the enemy home province.

Even without magic, the battles were decent.

-----

Some comments/questions:
This game could use a tutorial, to lead you through a couple turns and a battle on a tiny map, say.

How does production work? Is there anywhere can I see the progress being made on the multi-turn buildtime units?

Is it possible to move units without a leader between friendly provinces? If not, why do these military warriors need a priest or other guy to hold their hands?

[deccan]

If you have too much gold and too little resources for production, then you haven't spent enough gold building fortresses. Provinces don't get access to their full resource allocation unless there is a fortress in it. Plains, farmlands have the least resources but are the best for gold. Mountains have the most resources. Fortresses also suck resources from neigboring provinces, so a fortress in a mountain province surrounded by other mountain provinces has mega-resources.

I guess that you were playing Ulm which has decent xbowmen for Provincial Defense. However, in MP game, massed missile fire can be dealt with relatively easily and any flying enemies will carve up missile troops. Ulm is generally considered the weakest of the nations.

And no, all units need a leader type to lead them and can't move by themselves. They will rout if they are left on the battlefield without a leader. That's just the way the game works I guess.

[Slick]

I haven't made it over the "hump" yet. By that I mean I haven't been able to put together a coherent empire before I got frustrated with things and restarted. Total time spent on the learning curve so far is about 4 hrs. The jury is still out, but so far I'm a little less than impressed enough to buy the full game. I think it will take a little more playing time before I have a clue what is really going on. Thanks Deccan for that info. I have gone thru the "walkthru" and read some of the write-ups but still have yet to put it all together.

Some of my complete unknowns (who, what, when, where, how, why):
- placement of troops for battle,
- "scripting" - I'm guessing this is a term referring to what you want your little warriors to do in battle vis-a-vis SE4 strategies
- what to apply my research to. I'm thinking this is a combination of discovering what my empire is good at, reading the spell lists and applying the research to get the best spells for my empire. I have done neither of these yet.
- and probably about a year's worth of other things that I don't even know about yet.

I guess I should start posting in the D2 forum, but I trust you guys here a little more for now. BTW, who are the gurus in the D2 forum? I'm thinking I could search for Posts by them.

I started lurking here almost a year before I registered in April '02 and I noticed that SJ was most knowledgeable and helpful to newbies so I searched for and read hundreds of his Posts. I never thanked you for that, SJ , but you really turned me on to SE4 unknowingly by answering other people's questions. Those where the same questions I had, of course.

Slick.

[Kamog]

Renegade 13 said:
Now you guys have got me curious, and I'm downloading the demo for Dom2. Unfortunately, it's going to take about 6 hours to download on my crappy dialup internet! Ah well, more time to play SEIV in the meantime!

Same here. I have a slow dialup connection also. I'm getting a transfer rate of 2.6 KB/sec and it will take 6.5 hours or so to download. For some reason, whenever I download something, the rate is faster at first, like 4 KB/sec and it gradually gets slower and slower. 60 MB demo file... I think I'll just leave it downloading overnight and it should be done by morning.

Speaking of demos, I remember the original SE4 demo, Version 0.51. It was so exciting to get that demo after many months of waiting! When was that, like 4 years ago? The A.I.'s didn't know how to put ships into fleets and they always attacked one ship at a time...

[deccan]

I guess the biggest Dom2 guru would be Zen but he isn't always around. But nothing beats having the developers themselves answer your questions on the Dom2 forums, which they often do (though sometimes they forget what they put into the code )

Some of your questions:

- Placements of troops.

Whatever makes common sense I suppose. If you have missile troops and your enemy does not, you want to put them way back and slightly to one side (to avoid them firing over the heads of your own troops) and have your melee tanks (heavy infantry types) on hold and attack orders to maximize the number of shots your own troops get off before engagement. If your enemy has missile troops and you do not, you want your troops as front as possible to engage their archers quickly and so forth.

Placement of mages depends heavily on what spells you want them to cast and the ranges of those spells.

- Scripting

This is sort of like SEIV strategies for normal troops. But it is most important for mages because you can control the first 5 spells that they cast using this. After that, the combat AI chooses for you.

- Research

Like you said, it all depends on what your overall strategy will be and what nation you're playing. When I first started playing Dom2, I thought that combat spells did very little compared to troops. I mean, give me a troop of longbows over a couple of mages casting fire flies any day, and the troop of longbowmen will be a lot less expensive.

But later in the game, you'll see spells like "Blade Wind" (chews through massed concentrations of low armored troops, like most missile troops, shockingly fast), "Wrathful Skies" (destroys any conventional army just like that, really) etc.


I think that when you get into Dom2, one mindset that you need to get rid of is to think about creating an empire in the way that you create an empire in SEIV. Really, Dom2 is all about pure offense so provinces change hands all the time. The only really essential province is your capital because that is where your capital-only mages can be recruited. There are no safe backwater provinces in Dom2, so don't get upset when you lose a bunch of provinces in a single turn. You just take them back.

Forget too about shepherding your people to a safe and prosperous future. By the time the game ends, the world will likely be a bLasted, depopulated landscape filled with all manner of undead, monsters and other weird things.

Also, luck and chance plays a bigger role in Dom2 than in SEIV. If you're not comfortable with that, then Dom2 isn't your game. Random placement of magic sites, which nation you start next to, random events, what independent mages you find to recruit etc. has a huge impact on the game. In one MP game, my lab burned down on turn 4 which set me back a whole lot due to the cost of rebuilding. In one current MP game as Ermor (who has no money), my temple burned down twice!! within the first ten turns. It was incredibly demoralizing.

The graphics in Dom2 may be crappy, but the battle replays, when you have lots of high-end summons, and all sorts of battle magic, and super combatants carrying powerful artifacts, can be incredibly entertaining to watch. Pulling off cool spell combos with the right kinds of troops is really very satisfying.