Unit abstraction?

Carl,

Just a little footnote here, since I hope you decide to purchase the game for all of it's great qualities and not this single one that is divergent from your desires.

Dom2 has a modding tool. In this tool it is possible to adjust upkeep, statistics, gold/resource cost and even .tga (the icon representing a unit).

You could if you desired Mod the game, keeping all of it's current balances and nation/theme ideas (the whole of Dom2) but change aspects to create a more epic feel. Say, lower the cost of every unit by 1/4 and upkeep by 1/4 and stats by 1/4, increase the leadership of all commanders by 3/4ths and suddenly those armies of 200 that we were talking about are 800 without directly changing anything in the game. This might be hard to represent those big battles (The battlefield is unfortunately only so big) but even small skirmishes (75-100) all take on a grander feel for you and it would more than likely fill up your battlefields from edge to edge.

The limitation on that would be the size of maximum units (32000) in the game, but its worth a shot. Or alternatively you could modify the .tga so that it's like MoM and add multiple figures (if you can squeeze it in) per unit.

Some ideas at least to fit your style of play.

[CarlG2]

Originally posted by Arralen:
Did you ever try out HarpoonIII ?
Harpoon Headquarters .com

Why I mention it?

It's the most "simming" conflict simulation I know off. A "professional" Version is even used by the Australian Military. I was beta tester for the civil Version as long as my time allowed.

A.

Hey Arralen,

I played the heck out of Harpoon years ago, and tried to get into Harpoon II, but my computer at the time wasn't powerful enough to play it...

Since then I've been dreaming of Harpoon 4 and its ever changing release date...which now seems to be hanging out in the abyss somewhere.

Did you ever play the Simulations Canada games Northern Fleet or Red Sky at Morning? Both of those, while SERIOUSLY lacking in the graphics department, were quite a bit of fun...

Back to Harpoon 3...from your link it sounds like they took Harpoon 2 and updated it for Windows, fixed bugs, updated units, etc. Is that a good assessment? How does the interface hold up to modern standards, and is it pretty stable?

Harpoon used to have me sitting on the edge of my seat as Soviet SSM's came streaking in towards my carriers while my integrated air defenses based on Standard SM's and CIWS engaged them... Primitive graphics but good stuff!!! Those games sure gave me an appreciation for the differences in philosphy between NATO/United States and Warsaw Pact/Soviet Union naval strategy and ship design!

To pull this into Dominions 2, I think that the Harpoon series was a great balance between game design and realism...things worked like they should in real life (or, in fantasy terms, as the mythos of the game world says they should), but a lot of the minutiae was either fully abstracted or handled by the computer.

Good gaming,
Carl G.

[CarlG2]

Originally posted by Zen:
Carl,

Just a little footnote here, since I hope you decide to purchase the game for all of it's great qualities and not this single one that is divergent from your desires.

I am heavily leaning towards picking it up. I really like so much of what I have read/experienced of the overall design and scope of the game (i.e. scope as in all that it encompasses, not scope as in unit scale, etc.), and developers like illwinter are too rare (i.e. game design before graphics). I'd love it if the game looked like a big-budget Total War game, but companies producing eye candy with nothing behind the mask are a dime-a-dozen... (not to say that the Total War series has nothing behind the mask, as I think Shogun and Medieval are quite excellent...just using Total War as an example of very good graphics on the strategic and tactical levels).

Dom2 has a modding tool. In this tool it is possible to adjust upkeep, statistics, gold/resource cost and even .tga (the icon representing a unit).

Funny enough, I saw on Blues News a few days ago that the new patch was out which expands the modding capabilities. That, combined with the CGW review got me interested and I started doing some research on the game, and ended up here with this thread. I think I mentioned way back in my first post that I have been searching for a tool/game engine that might let me build a scenario based on Robert E. Howards Hyboria...awesome backstory, well developed nations and history, etc. Would make a great wargame!

You could if you desired Mod the game, keeping all of it's current balances and nation/theme ideas (the whole of Dom2) but change aspects to create a more epic feel.

The limitation on that would be the size of maximum units (32000) in the game, but its worth a shot. Or alternatively you could modify the .tga so that it's like MoM and add multiple figures (if you can squeeze it in) per unit.

Some ideas at least to fit your style of play.

Very interesting proposition. I noticed that there was a group doing multi-figure graphics for Civilization 3, most likely for the same reason (although, the Civ games have always had a huge abstraction inherent when considering what each "unit" represented).

Out of curiosity, and because I'm too tired to look, how many .tga's are there for the 1,000+ units in the game?!? Okay...I looked...I don't see the individual .tga's for the units, and am assuming they are packed in another file. I'm sure that is all covered somewhere else in a modding thread.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions!

Good gaming,
Carl G.

[ January 15, 2004, 05:24: Message edited by: CarlG2 ]

[PvK]

Two more mod ideas.

1) Looks like you might be able to do a two-line mod which would get larger armies. There are mod commands for changing the gold and resources generated per population.
As has been said, it would get somewhat clumsier dealing with really large numbers of units.
On the other hand, I don't agree that it would increase the time required for battles too much. Most of the unit movements, fighting, and arrow flights are simultaneous, so while it might increase it a bit, and make it harder to see everything that was happening, I don't think it'd increase the time all that much.

2) If you wanted to do a mod with abstractly large units where more casualties came into effect, you might be able to use some of the "stage loss" ability from some rider units. For example, some Machakan spider riders and Jotun wolf riders (and other units) turn into a riderless unit after they take damage - you might be able to use this to make full units and remnant units, to abstractly represent Groups. This might make a reasonable abstraction for companies as units. Maybe make the decimated forms be smaller unit sizes, so a front of them would have the same front strength as a front of full units.

However, speaking as a gamer with similar tastes to what it sounds yours are, I think you'd find Dominions II well worth the investment, if not exactly your dream game. I think the number of units involved works quite well, and the large battles do have a suitably impressive feel to them, even if they aren't literally tens of thousands of men.

PvK

[ January 15, 2004, 05:55: Message edited by: PvK ]

[Saber Cherry]

Related to the earlier mention of modding TGAs to make it seem like there are more units.

Dominions has the ability for wounded units to change shape, or lose riders... things like that. I imagine you could mod it so that a 6-figure (MoM-size) platoon, on taking lethal damage, became a 3-figure platoon, with half the stats...

Just an idea.

[Keir Maxwell]

To much of interest to reply to so I'll just doodle along.

I'm like you Carl in seeing game mechanics as attempts to as accurately capture "reality" as possible. I came to gaming through history, and history through gaming, and I have never left.

I found dom1 looking for an historical PBEM and stuck with it. Sure there are many compromises but I would argue much less than Medievil Total War which, for all its flash, is deeply flawed as a representation of feudal society - a topic all to itself. I found Shogun far more convincing on this level.

On the scale question I use a figure scale in my imagining. Most discussion uses the term unit to describe a single warior you recruit. Like you I find the numbers way to small otherwise and I think Pocus has it about right suggesting 100 for a standard unit. Sure there are problems with this but I find concerns over all 100 men having lost their legs far and away secondary to fundamental questions like how many dudes are at the battle. Is this a skirmish or a battle? Damn Games Workshop! Ooops - got off topic.

I do not believe it to be a good idea to try and mod Dom to enable players to get 1000's of units at a battle. To much micormanagement involved. Others, younger and/or more fanatical, may think different but the thought scares me. You need to recruit by regiment to do this.

Could the units thing be done better - hell yes! Try out Chariots for a game that does battles and armies fundamentally well. Far more realistic than the Total War series though not enough units involved - Slitherines next product based in ancient Greece will double the number of units on a table. Slitherine is headed up by one of the worlds top ranked ancients gamers and reflects a deep understanding of warfare (if not the period which is not his speciality). However the games scope is very narrow when compared to Dom.

The key advantage of both TW and Chariots apporoach against Dominons is that you recruit a unit with multiple warriors (at whatever the scale is) rather than one warrior at whatever scale. It just looks better and its alot less fiddly than the dom system of making larger units. I would like a unit in Dom to be a regiment. Sure regiments are not perfect but they are better.

Other than that, and lots of minor gripes, Dominons slaughters the competition - including Chariots, the TW series, etc. It is the best strategy game yet made for those with a love of deep involving and highly challenging games. The added ability to produce your own scenarios and nations (I'm working on Middle Earth) is wunderbar! This game rocks and no I don't work for Illwinter. Hell they just shafted a major chunk of my favourite race designs in the patch and I'm still saying this.

Cheers

Keir

[ January 15, 2004, 08:24: Message edited by: Keir Maxwell ]

[General Tacticus]

A few comments :

- When we think of epic battles, we think of tens of thousands of units, if not more... because a battle with more people always seems more important. Yet there are many times and places in History when the scales where much lower, and the battles were no less contested : the Middle Ages in Europe, some periods of Japan history, The Greek cities...

- Saying an army fielded 60,000 men doesn't mean they all made it on the battlefield. Many would be guarding the rear, or the flanks, or an important bridge 10 kilometers upstream, or even the baggage. For that matter, the "battlefield" is an approximation, fighting often occured only a a few, scattered spots.

- Even in fantasy, not all authors need tens of thousands of men everytime.

All that being said, I find a battlefield with 400 people on it, counting both side, is OK. This is a struggle in a smaller land, with less people, but it does not make it less epic. In fact, I am sure that I killed more people in my Mictlan AAR so far than died in the entire Illiad, and I am not yet in turn 10.

And the current scale has one very, very big advantage : you can survey the whole battlefield at a glance, and both see the individual soldiers and the whole army. You are not sending big square of moving pixels against each others, and you are not getting lost in the details and missing the big picture.

That being said, if you want to say each man represents 10, or 100, or 1000000, be my guest.

[licker]

I highly doubt that anyone really cares that much what ever anyone else wants to 'rationalize' as far as unit size, time scale, land dimentions...

It only matters (and even then not to everyone) when people want to effect changes in the game to accomodate some other rationalized view. For many aspects it's entirely inconsequential, for some it's detrimental to the game in some way (added complexity, added system requirements, ...) for others its such a matter of personal taste that its impossible to arrive at a consensus.

I don't get the feeling that anyone here is actually asking Illwinter to change the scope that they have built the game around, its more about resolving the incongruities in their own minds rather than trying to foist a new dynamic on everyone else. As to what 'epic' means... well that's going to differ for everyone, and everyone is going to have a different limit to which they can rationalize the inherent abstractions in the game. Its all good though, as others have said, if you like a game with good strategic depth you'll soon stop worring about the trees and start concentrating on the forest. If you can't (see the forest for the trees that is) then you'll gradually become frustrated and lose interest. Nothing wrong with that, just means Dominions isn't quite your cup of tea.

I dunno, I just find it funny (as in strange) that people need to validate their rationalizations, as if some consensus of forum dwellers saying 'yes it's 100per' or whatever should have any impact on an individuals ability to make the rationalization in the first place. Don't take that the wrong way, its not ment to be critical, just an observation that I see frequently in game forums, and it makes me wonder

I'd be curious though to see a mod where someone tried to change the scale as others have suggested. I don't think I'd use it as I think the added micro wouldn't be worth the bother, but I'd still be interested to see how it shook out.

[DimmurWyrd]

A Thought or two on this topic...

First off let me say that my overall view of games very nicely syncs with the originator of this topic hehe I also really look for the "realism" underlying the fantasy of a game.

That said I think the major reason that the ancients fielded such immense armies and the more modern such smaller ones (before industrialization) is simply that as time passed better and better armaments were developed requiring geater resources and time to manufacture leading to fewer full time soldiers. (note that in medieval armies quite often more than 60% of the force are milities (peasants with farm implements mostly) with a large but almost completely ineffective force of archers (no training worth mentioning and garbage for equipment) so all total maybe 30% of the whole force were effective fighting forces hehe. but that 30% were probably more effective than 100x thier number of the ancient types.

I think DOM 2 represents that fairly well in some ways... for example a nice ulm plate wearing infantry is 28 gold 24 resources but a peasant with a bow and some rags on is 7 gold 3 resources hehe... now you can recruit 4x as many of those archers as the infantry but I'd put my money on the infantry in a fight every time **EDIT** that, of course, is barring magic

[ January 15, 2004, 17:05: Message edited by: DimmurWyrd ]

[PvK]

Originally posted by licker:
...
I dunno, I just find it funny (as in strange) that people need to validate their rationalizations, as if some consensus of forum dwellers saying 'yes it's 100per' or whatever should have any impact on an individuals ability to make the rationalization in the first place. Don't take that the wrong way, its not ment to be critical, just an observation that I see frequently in game forums, and it makes me wonder
...

It makes me wonder sometimes too, though often, as in this case, I think the answer is that the person wants to avoid investing a lot of time in a game, only to find out that it's not interesting to them, generally due to logic/realism/history issues. So, the player explains the elements they would like to see included in the game, to see if there are other players with similar interests who have come to the game before them and can explain how the game fits their interests or not.

PvK