Answering the Critics

[curtadams]

alexti said:Well, in Dominions after first few turns you usually set a mage to research and leave him there (and maybe give him research booster once). In Civ you reshuffle the tiles every turn. So while in purpose they're kind of similar, in Civ you have much more options to micromanage stuff. For example, instead of cty building scheme you could just pay fixed gold amount/resources to get a bonus to research, commerce or production (maybe proportional to some research). But that again would make micromanagement more shallow.

Micromanagment isn't depth, it's tedium. Having choices about tile development is depth but redoing them every few turns isn't.

I think a closer analogy to Civ cities is Dom armies. The number of Civ cities is roughly similar to the number of Dom armies you have wandering about. There are many complex decisions about how to set up each - although laying out a Dom army is far more complex, and in a multiplayer game is much more strategic and difficult since you compete directly with other players in outguess.

[alexti]

curtadams said:

Micromanagment isn't depth, it's tedium. Having choices about tile development is depth but redoing them every few turns isn't.

Nevertheless, it's what many people are looking for and that's why they don't like Dominions.

[Archonsod]

I wouldn't say that. One of the stated intentions of the design for Civ IV was to reduce the micromanagement.

I think the problem is simply that they are looking for a different game. They want Master of Magic, when Dominions is more Fantasy General.The only city I've ever seen in Doms III is a fortified one.

There may well be a good city building/economic type game to be had with the Doms III universe (hey, there's an idea for Illwinter's next project!) however it's not Dominions 3. The focus in Dominions is combat, pure and simple.

[alexti]

Archonsod said:
I wouldn't say that. One of the stated intentions of the design for Civ IV was to reduce the micromanagement.

"Reduce the micromanagement" was in context of "comparing to previous Civs" and I think they've mostly succeeded in it.

[HoneyBadger]

Dominions 3 is basic world view/belief system/religion/philosophy vs same. It's 2 gunfighters at high noon, and they both draw iron and one drops dead. That in and of itself precludes a lot of economic complexity if not city-building, because you can't easily establish trade between the witch-hunters and the witches. Their *are* ways to make the internal system more complex, probably without destroying any of the Dominions integrity, but as a game designer with lots and lots of experience designing games that don't get off the ground because they're more complex and interconnected than I can quite get my mind around so far, it's not easy. You'd be talking a game where "magic" levels and other factors affected the very world around you in prime ways, because everything except combat would have to come from your god and end with your god. There wouldn't be Pretender "nations" as such, because all nations would be independents that the Pretenders would influence about as much as Rome was influenced by Christianity. Dom 3 is very complex and very deep, and has the capacity, if taken to it's ultimate extreme, to be the equivalent of playing several dozen games of civilization at once, where the players in one game can fight the players in another game, where each nation got it's own highly specialized tech tree, where your Leader could be Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler, or Shiva, destroyer of worlds, and where the special units numbered in the dozens per nation. Ofcourse, the tradeoff here is how much one wants to hassle the designers to get them to keep redesigning the basic elements of Dom 3. The greatest thing about Dom 3, for me anyway, is that it opens up so many possibilities, not only for what can be done in the game, but what can be done *with* the game. Other games are limited to a single reality. Dominions pits reality vs reality (or atleast perspective vs perspective). So yes, you can compare Civilization to Dom 3 in terms of gameplay and come up with some useful insights, but Dominions has it all over most other games when it comes to potential.

Ok, I'm not sure if this post is all that useful or not, but since potential-realized and otherwise, vs concreteness, is kindof the theme of my post, I'll let it stand.

[Archonsod]

The problem is the method of comparison. Saying the complex combat model of dominions is hiding a poor economic system is the same as saying the complex economics of Civ is hiding a poor combat system.
It's kinda like criticising Space Invaders for it's lack of NPC interaction. It simply isn't the point of the game.