Dominions 3 News!

[Endoperez]

PrinzMegaherz said:

If the manual is as helpful as the manual of Dom2, you should just drop it, save the money, lower the price and include a good tutorial / launch a Dominions 3 wikipedia as Stardock is doing for GC2. Maybe you could offer a cheaper download only version, saving people the shipping cost.

They are adding 60 pages. If they leave out the things we had in DomII, that's a 200 page manual, not for listing in-game stuff, but for telling how to play the game. With 60 nations, that would be 3 pages of strategy/tactics for each one, and 20 pages for the general mechanics...

I DON'T believe they'll do that radical change, though. I think the 70 extra pages are going to be in addition to the item/spell lists. As I doubt there are enough new items and spells to last for 70 pages, most of that will have to be something else. What else? Explanation of game mechanics can't take that much, maybe 50 pages, at maximum. Currently, they take 30 pages, so there'd still be about 50 pages left for non-mechanics, non-spell-list, non-item-list stuff. That is probably this part:
"A comprehensive manual written by veteran computer game scribe Bruce Geryk will also ease players into the third installment."
I don't really know who he is, but Google tells me that he has done some kind of Dom2 tutorial already. It's a .pdf in Shrapnel Games' DomII downloads page, so I have probably went through it, but I don't remember what it actually says. If you are worried, read through that and see if 50 pages of that would be worth the 5$.

I find this whole price discussion absurd, BTW. If we are waiting for a game this much, we are going to buy it. Of course, we would be much happier to pay only half price for it, but that wouldn't make us buy two of them. Shrapnel Games knows we are hooked, and won't let us just get away with less. They also know what they are doing. Their blog covered this over a year ago.
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/blo...mes-dont-work/

[Agrajag]

Isn't Bruce Geryk a writer for Computer Gaming World?
If I'm not mistaken he's also the one that reviewed Dom2 and fell in love with it.

[Tyrian]

Can you tell me the cost of shipping for France, please?

[Ironhawk]

Endoperez said:
If the manual is as helpful as the manual of Dom2, you should just drop it, save the money, lower the price and include a good tutorial / launch a Dominions 3 wikipedia as Stardock is doing for GC2. Maybe you could offer a cheaper download only version, saving people the shipping cost.

Yeah I'm with ya. I looked at the dom2 manual once and then never again. All the pages devoted to spells and items I never even bothered to look at. 1) it's easier to do that in-game and 2) its more accurate (espeically when you consider modding). In fact I think I would actually prefer an online manual/wikipedia to a physical manual that will just gather dust on my desk.

I find this whole price discussion absurd, BTW. If we are waiting for a game this much, we are going to buy it.

That was never the point I was arguing. Clearly all the hardcore dom2 people like ourselves are going to buy the game unless the price is astronomical. I believe that the point being made was that the pricetag is too high to grant additional incentive to new players to purchase the game and thus increase the player-base.

[Annette]

Tyrian said:
Can you tell me the cost of shipping for France, please?

I see two options at our store for shipping to France. The least expensive is USPS Global Priority Mail for $5.00. If anyone would like a shipping quote, you may go to www.GamersFront.com, add the game to your shopping cart and go through the checkout process until you come to the page for selecting your shipping options. At that point, you may clear out of the store without making a purchase.

[OG_Gleep]

Only games in recent memory that gave me pause about the price are Guitar Hero ($80) and Steel Battalion ($125?). I ended up eventually buying both....funny thing is I hardly played the most expensive game I have ever bought.

Games regardless are still going to be the best value as far as entertainment goes. As long as its not out of the "norm", price never factors into it for me.

Just because we know the situation of the developer, and the publisher is a small company, doesn't mean they shouldn't get a premium for their product. You would be pretty shocked at the actual cost of the items you put in your shopping cart. I'll never buy Jewlery retail...ever. $60 is pretty much the ceiling for games today, the average being $49. Dunno it seems pretty silly to miss out on Dom III because they won't charge less then EA.

Nerfix....that must be by choice, if they want to give my 2 year old a credit card...it can't be that hard. Hell they issue credit card to dead people.

*edit* hate it when I accidently hit send.

[Jurri]

Saber Cherry said:
I could go through all the examples. But at the end of the day, it's personal choice. Most people prefer to use coal power, Wonderbread, rock-hard strawberries, canned/frozen orange juice, LCD monitors, tapwater, console games, television, and fast-food chains. If you are in the minority that believes the alternatives to be superior, regardless of their disadvantages, accept that they will cost more - that's how an efficient (and/or free market) economy works.

What's wrong with tapwater? Bottled water is a strain to the nature, requiring transportation over long distances via ecologically inefficient means and producing plastic waste in the form of discarded bottles. Additionally, I understand a large minority of bottled water is actually tapwater in bottles (something like 40% if memory serves).

In many places the quality of tapwater is more regulated than is the quality of bottled water, if you're worried about contaminants. Of course there are also areas that lack regulations or follow them laxly, so I don't think generalizations apply to either side of the argument: for some the use of bottled water is the only viable choice, whereas for others it's only rational to use tapwater. Easy for me to say, seeing how great the quality of tapwater is in most of Finland. It could be that I've been told to 'like the crap' but then again your preference of alternatives over tapwater might quite as well spring from someone telling you that it's better. Not knowing what the tapwater is like in Crystal Tokyo, I'd better not hazard a guess.

Of course, if the alternative isn't bottled water but a natural spring nearby (like I have where I go for Summer) it's all cool.

Other things in your little rant I have to agree with, although admittedly many higher-quality alternatives for common things aren't ecologically as effective as the lesser-quality alternative. Like LCD-monitors: they use less energy compared to a CRT of same screen-size (1/2 to 1/3 unless I'm mistaken) and when discarded are far easier to dispose of since they contain less ecologically harmful materials. Of course, LCD-monitors are also more expensive than CRTs (which might indicate a larger ecological strain in the production process: I don't really know), so maybe you've got some other alternative that you prefer over either?

[Endoperez]

Ironhawk said:

Actually, that was Prince Megahertz who said that. I argued against him. The comment on the absurdity of this discussion was mine, though.

[Agrajag]

On the subject of the manual; I like manuals that have a lot of flavour and fluff in them, like the StarCraft manual that featured long background stories for the three races. (long compared to every other manual)
Or the IWD manual with "tips" from an "experienced adventurer", which were quite humourus and thematic.
If the planned manual is that kind of manual, than I especially don't mind paying extra for it.

As for LCD VS CRT...
I know this isn't exactly what the "arguement" is about, but I think CRT monitors are far better than LCD monitors:
1) CRT monitors support many resolutions, much higher than LCD monitors, and they support them all just as well.
LCD monitors support only a few resolutions (usually not more than the common resolutions between 800*600 and 1280*1024), and only really support one resolution (their native resolution, most commonly 1280*1024), and other resolution look really bad.
2) CRT monitors cost less than LCD monitors. Atleast in here, a good LCD monitor costs 50% more than a good CRT monitor.
3) I didn't see it in my own eyes, but I heard that LCD monitors tend to produce "smears" and "smudges" in games, especially fast paced and intensive FPS games.
4) CRT monitors don't have the problem of "burnt pixels", which I've heard tend to appear quite commonly in LCD monitors.
5) CRT monitors are just as easy to view from any angle, if you try to look at an LCD monitor from a wide enough angle, things tend to look darker, in strange colors or you get to see reflections (say from the window).

[Jurri]

Yeah, that's exactly the point being made: LCD monitors are crappy. However, CRTs might incur a greater ecological cost for reasons listed above, so there could be a reason for using an inferior product over the better one. (Again, I'm not familiar with the production methods of either, I only know of power usage and recycling considerations.) Of course, Cherry's list was of things that have better alternatives for higher price, so maybe it's a poor example to use the one thing on the list that doesn't comform.

Well, upon reflection this is way OT, but I like tapwater so much that I couldn't not comment!

A paper manual is not a good solution in my opinion and I'm rather saddened to see it used as a reason to have high prices. Also, it's an ecological stress to print paper manuals: small one, I know, but for something that has no value even that is too much. You already need a computer to play the game, so not having the manual on the cd or on the net (a wiki is an awesome solution: minimal production costs!) is something of a missed opportunity, in my opinion. You can't do word-searches or hyper-linked indexes on paper so unless you have a preference to read from paper instead of glass an electric format is superior in every way. Of course, most do have such a preference, but I'd still like to see an alternative offered for those not so inclined. Like selling the manual separately instead of being forced to buy one when you buy the game. There's nothing stopping one from printing a document if it's useful either, so all parties could be satisfied without a paper manual, too.