What about interactive Tactical Combat ?

[Hullu]

Because I'm a kind of person who values comfort over work If something is easy/comfortable enough for the gain, I do it, if it's not I skip it.

If using such an advantage is mandatory to be competitive and it causes too much discomfort, I quit playing. I doubt we'll ever reach that situation, although a careful planner AND user of this feature (simulating incoming battles) would have an enormous potential advantage over people who don't do it.

[Gandalf Parker]

I think a battle simulator would be a great advantage, to certain players. And a bad thing for the game overall.

That said, did anyone notice that I posted a link to a battle simulator? I dont think Johan needs to bother making the editor simulator into something user friendly and adding it to the game tools menu.

[Graeme Dice]

Gandalf Parker said:
I think a battle simulator would be a great advantage, to certain players. And a bad thing for the game overall.

There is no possible way that a battle simulator could be construed as a bad thing unless you don't want the players of the game to have accurate information on the capabilities of various units. Accurate information is not a bad thing in a strategy game, no matter how much the anti-powergamer crowd wants it to be. Accurate information is the only thing that makes a strategy game worth playing, as without it your decisions are not meaningful and might as well be randomly assigned.

That said, did anyone notice that I posted a link to a battle simulator? I dont think Johan needs to bother making the editor simulator into something user friendly and adding it to the game tools menu.

No, you did not post a link to a battle simulator. You posted a link to a map that can be used with some difficulty to create potential battles directly in the dominions game. It's nothing like a properly featured simulator that could be used to run the few thousand test casts that are needed to properly balance the gold costs on the vast number of overcosted units in Dominions.

[Hullu]

There is no possible way that a battle simulator could be construed as a bad thing unless you don't want the players of the game to have accurate information on the capabilities of various units. Accurate information is not a bad thing in a strategy game, no matter how much the anti-powergamer crowd wants it to be. Accurate information is the only thing that makes a strategy game worth playing, as without it your decisions are not meaningful and might as well be randomly assigned.

Accurate information is good you say? This taken to the extreme -> The game tells you "You will win" or "You will lose", even before you submit your turn (if orders/army compositions don't change). That's accurate information, and it would utterly ruin the game.

An easy to use battle simulator would be one step towards that. Certainly not even close to all the steps, but one step nevertheless.

[Maltrease]

With the amount of option in Dominion is unlikely that a "Perfect" strategy will ever be found. Sure there are optimal strategies in specific situations. Finding these and being able to actually create the scenario to your advantage is what strategy gaming is all about.

I think Graemes post sums it up perfectly. I would simply add that there are already people that ENJOY building custom maps to run battle tests. So in essence that advantage already exist to the dedicated (obsessive) player... having an easy to use simulator will lower the bar on the how much effort it takes to learn the "tricks" and allow more players access and UNDERSTANDING of the mechanics.

[Hullu]

Finding these and being able to actually create the scenario to your advantage is what strategy gaming is all about.

To me what they're all about is seeing the advantage yourself, not bruteforcing it with a computer. In other words, outwitting your opponent instead of out-tooling him.

[PhilD]

Hullu said:
Accurate information is good you say? This taken to the extreme -> The game tells you "You will win" or "You will lose", even before you submit your turn (if orders/army compositions don't change). That's accurate information, and it would utterly ruin the game.

No way, because this is a simultaneous turn game. If you can see your opponents' orders, then you can potentially (theoretically) prepare an optimal strategy against them, and a very powerful simulator would help you with that.

But we're not proposing a cheating device, we're proposing a tool that would make it possible to ask, "hey, what would happen if I had an army of X, and gave it such and such orders, and pitted it in such and such conditions vs an army of Y". This is completely different, and would be used, to various degrees, by people, depending on how much they want to get a feel for how the units' stats turn into performance on the battlefield. Depending on how much they wanted to get better at the game, some people would spend a lot of time with the simulator, and others wouldn't - and it's absolutely not certain that those who spent the most time with it would end up winning more, because some have a better tactical or strategic mind than others.

But it would make the option available.

[Hullu]

"hey, what would happen if I had an army of X, and gave it such and such orders, and pitted it in such and such conditions vs an army of Y"

I'm not really against that. I'm just against the fact that some people (probably not too many) would use it excessively in multiplayer games.

I'm personally against all 'unfair advantages' in all games, very heavily against. As you might see since I consider this one.

I have zero problems doing that kind of analysis just for fun for yourself or perfecting your strategies. I however have a problem with it if you are pitting your army against what you know about my army, and win because of that. It's a problem of principle, nothing else.

[PhilD]

Hullu said:
I'm not really against that. I'm just against the fact that some people (probably not too many) would use it excessively in multiplayer games.

Actually, this is all possible right now, by scripting a map and playing two nations. Anyone who wants to do it, can do it - and it's probably possible to actually script a map where almost any two armies could be recruited and sent to fight each other in a few turns (you wouldn't be able to easily control dominion or things like that, but most of the rest would be doable). People are probably not doing it right now, because getting reliable information for large battles would require a huge number of runs and trials ("what if I move this squad two squares forward?"), and this will always be tedious to do.

As it is now, the lack of integrated tools makes scripting a map as a learning tool, just as tedious as scripting a map to do some powergaming testing. I'm pretty sure that a reasonable tool would make the learning tool usable without taking the boring part out of the powergaming testing.

I'm personally against all 'unfair advantages' in all games, very heavily against. As you might see since I consider this one.

There is no unfair advantage in a widely available simulator, other than that some people have more free time to use it than others. But that's already true - some have more free time to play games than other.

I have zero problems doing that kind of analysis just for fun for yourself or perfecting your strategies. I however have a problem with it if you are pitting your army against what you know about my army, and win because of that. It's a problem of principle, nothing else.

Yeah, but you cannot prevent me from writing down what I know about your army, and scripting a map with that, and doing some testing - if I have the time and inclination to do so. So the game's all ruined up for you, already. Now what?

[Maltrease]

In all likely hood any sort of automated battle simulator would not account for things like orders and spells. Or even accurately representing how units target and gange up on each other.

However you could do some basic functions for MELEE combat (by simulating the mechanics) where you could see things like "how much difference does adding 4 protection (Legions of Steel) to my army make".

Something like that you could set to run 50 times and get the average results.

For a "REAL" battle simulator you will likely need to use the MAP method. I've got an idea for a tool that would help automate the map creation with the units you want, but you would still have to manually position the armies and assign all the orders.

I suppose if you could recreate the Battle field placement and order assignment in your program, build the turn files manually, send and run them through a Dom3 server for processing, parse the battle results and automate this entire process you could get something more advanced... but that sounds like A LOT of work.

Frankly if someone is willing to spend time "practicing" things why shouldn't they be a better player then those that don't want to "practice". I think almost any game or sport works that way.