What it will take for me to purchase Dom III

[Ironhawk]

Zen said:

Interesting and incredibly close-minded thought.

Now, now, boys

While I think we can all agree with Arralen that the AI in dom2 is quite poor, saying that the devs are unwilling to fix it is unfair. In programming, sometimes problems which appear very simple on the face of it, are actually exceptionally difficult to make a program do properly. That could be the case here. Or the devs may just feel that the real meat of dom2 is in the MP aspects. So when they look at the list of issues to fix in a patch, MP issues trump all the SP/AI ones and the AI just ends up never getting fixed by default.

[Arralen]

@Zen
Sorry, but I don't get the "close-minded" part. Could you please elaborate ?

@Ironhawk
It's a stated fact from the devs that they want the endgame to be heavily focused on (summond) magic creatures, that it's not a bug that you'll end up with less than starting pop if you go with turmoil-3, growth-3, luck-3. They say it's a big war, and the pop will have to suffer. That the national units get superflous is just a side-effect of diminishing pop and ridiculous powerful LvL 8+9 magic.

And I don't say the AI is bad. In fact, I've seen lots worse AIs in games with 100x the budged for sure.
But the AI not building castles or commanders from (found) sites .. hey, even I could program that. (check my old thread about the suggested very easy recruiting/bulding alghorithm).
Pretender design might be a bit trickier, but the easy solution would be to restrict death scale to certain nations/pretender combos.
I agree that the supply issue might be unsolvalbe in Dom2. I'm not sure though, but I think it worked in DomPPP. As the castle building did, btw.

But the point is - if they arent't willing to even try to fix this, and even if it's (e.g.) with some randomly issued build order for the castles, how can't I assume that it will be the same with Dom3 ?

And that it's a MP game is no excuse. Actually, it's sold with the tag "1-17 players". So it should work correctly in SP as well. And Dom2 still sells well. But there aren't hundreds of players here. So I guess Dom2 is actually played SP by 60-70% of it's owners.

[RedRover]

Arralen: I remember your thread. It inspired me to do a little experimenting with a castle-building algorithm of my own awhile back (all general theory, my actual knowledge of coding is rudimentary).

If I can dig out my notes, I'll post them as a new thread next week, and we can talk more about AI castle-building there.

Thanks very much for your work on this.

[Endoperez]

Arralen said:
.. oh, great, forum ate a lengthy post of mine again.. so I'll keep it short this time:

Large Farmland: av. 18782pop, max 21.5k pop
Normal Farmland: av. 121250 pop, max. 14.4k pop
Small Farmland: av. 5557 pop, max. 7.2k pop

Wow, I just realized that provinces can be neither Small or Large... Thanks for the enlightement.

What would be better option, then, than the current cumulative multipliers? Would multiplying only the biggest and the smallest multipliers work better? And what about the multipliers themselves, how much better than Plains should Farmlands be?

I'd like to get different opinions on this as well.

[Kristoffer O]

> @Zen
> Sorry, but I don't get the "close-minded" part. Could you please elaborate ?


He happens to know that the AI in dom3 builds castles and that you get more gold in dom3. Now you know as well and may want buy dom3 when it comes out

[Reverend Zombie]

Kristoffer O said:
> @Zen
> Sorry, but I don't get the "close-minded" part. Could you please elaborate ?


He happens to know that the AI in dom3 builds castles and that you get more gold in dom3. Now you know as well and may want buy dom3 when it comes out

So Arralen was wrong on that score, but I am not sure that gets us to "close-minded."

Will the viscous ad hominem never end???

[Ygorl]

Yeah, I like the runny ad hominem a lot better. Easier to digest, too...

[Psitticine]

It's great on crackers, especially those little baked ones with seasame seeds on them. Mmmmmm!

[Zen]

I think any broad statements saying that the "Dev's are not going to do X" are pretty close-minded. Because as far as I know there are only 2 devs that would know whether or not they are going to do any particular desire that anyone may have. Also they may have any number of reasons that you may or may not feel are reasonable for doing or not doing what it is you don't like.

I just think it's very close-minded to get into wailing and gnashing of teeth that you have no idea is or is not going to be changed.

Obviously this thread is to talk about why people would or wouldn't purchase Dom3, but making up reasoning for the Developers that you have no idea are true or not is giving IW almost no credit. And I think they do deserve some, obviously they want to make as good a game as they can with the resources they have availiable.

[Sammas]

I agree that Dom2 is pretty poor for single player, and it would be nice if this could be fixed somehow.

Allowing for some form of scripted AI might be nice, in that people could create scenarios and AIs that were fairly challenging for the average player.