D2 vs Aow:SM

[MythicalMino]

[quote]Originally posted by licker:

Originally posted by Elmo:
....and visiting smackdowns on anyone unfortunate to be next to them.

LOL....wrestling fan?

I I just bought Smackdown: Here Comes the Pain Last week....

[licker]

Heh, I'm a fan of it in passing, I do enjoy some of the lingo though, it entertains me to no end

Though without cable, and with my wife booking up the TV on Thursdays I rarely if ever watch, and it's been a long time since I had my descrambler to watch any of the PPV stuff

I do kinda like the WWE vidio games, though I never play them, stupid Best Buy never has them on their display units anymore, its all that Soul Caliber crap

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Altus:
SM is a great 'beer and pretzel' fantasy wargame. I've had a lot of fun with it.

A lot of people talk about beer and pretzel strategy games. What does that mean? What's the origin? Is it more fun playing Dominions II while consuming beer and pretzels? I don't think I've ever ingested them together.

-Cherry

[HJ]

Originally posted by Saber Cherry:

quote:

---

Originally posted by Altus:
SM is a great 'beer and pretzel' fantasy wargame. I've had a lot of fun with it.

A lot of people talk about beer and pretzel strategy games. What does that mean? What's the origin? Is it more fun playing Dominions II while consuming beer and pretzels? I don't think I've ever ingested them together.

-Cherry

---

AFAIK, the term describes a game that you can play casually, without much mental effort, and finish in a short time span. I've seen it mentioned a lot on the Underdogs site.

[ November 25, 2003, 20:55: Message edited by: HJ ]

[PvK]

I own Doms and Doms II. I've played AoW, but only the demo, because one game of the AoW demo was enough to enjoy what it had to offer and become pretty sick of it. Others have different tastes, though.

AoW is very derivative of MoM. Doms has tons of original ideas.

Doms has massive quality of play advantages over AoW, as far as I'm concerned. But different people have different tastes, and they are very different games, so try the demos and decide for yourself.

PvK

[SurvivalistMerc]

I think they mean that SM is more relaxing.

If you drank too much beer while playing dominions, you'd probably make a mistake and lose. SM gets predictable after a point, such that you can have beer, eat some pretzels as a snack, and beat the computer opponents at a leisurely pace.

I like Dominions. It's a very deep game and quite challenging. I'm not a fan of the downward ecomonic spiral or the extreme disaster luck events (which lack positive counterparts), but overall the game is spectacular.

[Nerfix]

If you want an Illwinterian Beer n' Pretzel game, try Conquest of Elysium.

[Saber Cherry]

Originally posted by Particle:
Hum this is weird. I asked like 20 ppl about dominions 2, and all of them said that what the **** is this piece of ****! I don't agree with them of course..

Who did you ask? Barbie: Fashion Designer fans? Or even worse, Final Fantasy 7+ fans? The former tend to be mindless (or at least feebleminded, or possibly just very young) while the latter tend to value graphics, cutscenes, dumb plots, and bad music over gameplay, coolness, good plots, and good music (or else they'd be playing Square's good games). Or perhaps you asked Warcraft 3 fans, who don't necessarily understand the concept of a strategy game.

I know a lot of people reacted the way you describe to Doms I, but I have not seen that reaction to Doms II in the forums I frequent=)

[HJ]

I think that the main difference is in the amount of options you have. Once I explore all the options and get a hang of most of the tricks in the game, it loses much of its appeal. In AoW, it was pretty easy to do. The main tactics become apparent very soon, and the variety is very limited. All the battles play out the same way, and start to look the same fairly soon. In other words, after about 10 days, there was nothing else to do, and nothing new to discover. In Dominions, the amount of options and their combinations is vast. There is always something new to try, especially if you're not just sticking to the optimality recipes, and I don't see the game getting stale any time soon. To achieve this, a game doesn't necessarily have to have 1000 unit types (chess doesn't), but it can help nevertheless.
Plus, there is a notable difference in design intention. In Dominions, some things are there just because they would be cool if they are (at least that's how it seems; you can always find a way to use them), while in most big-studio games no effort is put into anything that is not immediately and overly useful and gives good returns while at the same time being easy to grasp. This again means reduced variety, and reduced replayability, and I don't really consider myself as target audience for those games, even though I buy them from time to time. I guess I could boil it down to market requirements vs. ars gratia artis.
SP experience of Dominions II is still great, and I hope it's going to be even better in the future, and production values, even though not as high as something like Morrowind, are still more than satisfactory. There are some things that I'm not exactly fond of in Dominions, and some that I would create differently if it was my design, but that's true about every game that exists, since we are all different. In the end, it all depends on what you want to see in your games. Do you want just another product, or do you want something to really boggle your mind when you explore it. And no, Civilisation games are not a good example of the latter.

ps.
Yes, the manual could be better in explaining gameplay nuances.

[ November 25, 2003, 21:27: Message edited by: HJ ]

[LordArioch]

I definitely like Dom2 better...it got pretty tedious having my super stack need to be led through the proper abusive tatics to beat the enemy ai large Groups of level 1 troops *again*

Dominions has a better combat system and a larger scale game with troops that feel more different. AoW seemed to consist of red swordsmen swinging ineffectively at blue swordsmen again and again until one hit and killed the other pretty fast. It seemed like MoM, but without the epic scale and fun...no armageddon, no great wasting, no zombie mastery? Instead lame spells like fire mastery. How sad...
Dominions might not have those exact spells, but burden of time, haunted forest, etc., still have the impressive power that global enchantments should, and the national mages give each race alot more flavor despite at least as similar infantry as AoW in a lot of cases.