Problem Saving Games

[Amos]

You could release a patch like addition. If people want to use Save they could download it, if they dont then they are not being tempted by Save in the game. That should satisfy most objectors.

[Potatoman]

Not supporting save/load punishes non-expert players and stretches the game's learning curve. The Wish situation I described happened in my first Dom3 game; it left me dissatisfied because I felt that I could not have avoided that situation unless forewarned. I also think that this is not a terribly rare occurrance in a vast vast game like dominions that gives you so many opportunities to make catastrophic mistakes. What exactly is ruined by having the option to go back and learn from those mistakes without spending several hours to restart a new game?

And as other posters have pointed out, saving and loading is an opt-in feature. Several people have objected on the grounds that they wouldn't be able to resist the siren song of "abusing" the save. I think that, in games, people do what they find most entertaining. If you find that you have more fun saving each turn and loading whenever anything goes wrong, I think maybe you should do that . And I don't look down on you if that's what you want to do. You're playing SP, you should be able to do what you want.

[Mortibus]

You are able to do what you want to do (save games at will), you just don't want to learn to shuffle the files around yourself.

The programmers apparently don't want a quick save feature in their game. Should they be forced to do something they don't want to do?

[PvK]

IW balanced the game with the idea that people would play it without frequently restoring to a saved position whenever their favorite wood elf died, even though they sent her into a situation where she had a 90% chance of dying.

Players coming from extensive experience with the craptastic ocean of games where players are expected to do things that should get them killed 90% of the time, and are expected to restore to a saved position tons of times as part of the gameplay, would tend to use that in Dominions too if it were an option easily at hand. The result is they might not even realize they weren't really supposed to do that, and would cheat themselves out of having a much better experience, and might even whine about how "easy" the game is, etc.

PvK

[Peter Ebbesen]

You are able to do what you want to do (save games at will), you just don't want to learn to shuffle the files around yourself.

Yeah, personally I don't see why the stats of units are shown when clicking on units in the game either. Players should learn the strengths and weaknesses of each unit by observing them in battle, but they just don't want to, the lazy bastards, and fall back on complete knowledge easily available at their fingertips.

Now in MY day we had to deduct, BY HAND (heads weren't invented yet), the properties of the soldiers we sent into battle, and as each of them were unique, we had to make generalised assumptions about their capabilities and send them off, by jingo, to show the enemy the taste of cold steel - or rather, we would have done, had steel been invented. As I grew older, sinister forces began introducing such information directly in the manual!!! This led to people actually KNOWING STUFF when they took the time to leave the game and read the manual.

But these days!? Pfah, everybody is too lazy, and the information is right in the game instead of being where it belongs, comfortably outside the game requiring players to divert their attention from what they are actually doing. That sucks. Why, I've heard that some people even - yes, I know it leaves a bad taste in the mouth even to discuss it - click on a stat to get EVEN MORE INFORMATION because they are not "satisfied" with the wealth of information provided to them gratis!

They claim it makes the game "funnier" and "more user friendly", but we all know what it is an excuse for, don't we? Communism, that's right, and the worshipping of idols, and they don't even had to look up the stats of THOSE in obscure places to be able to build them in the first place.

Players just don't want to learn to shuffle the brain cells around themselves, these days, lazy bastards that they are.

The programmers apparently don't want a quick save feature in their game. Should they be forced to do something they don't want to do?

Forced to? Ultimately, none of us have the ability to force them to do anything. We do have the ability to urge them to introduce something that is a common feature across most games across most platforms and which is, widely, considered a boon to players - the ability to save at any time and later recall that save.

As for the tools talking about "the time spent on coding GUI to load/save in windows/mac/linux"... FWIW, it is already there. You can already save/load games, it just happens at specific times with specific names.

If you REALLY don't want to have the complexity of an "enter filename here", it isn't a major reshuffle to take a game named FOO and save games by hitting CTRL+S (to make it hard enough to mistype for the hardcore oldtimers who despise anything that might, inadvertently, make them play differently from they've always done, heck, make it CTRL+X CTRL+S if you really want to cater to the crowd) as

FOO/turn%05d/<files>

And use the exact same nomenclature when saving at end of a session/uploading to host. Heck, you could have an "autosave every nth turn" that would save as
FOO/turn%05d_auto/<files>

[Anyone playing a game for more than 99999 turns need to be hospitalized anyway]

And, when loading (and it is quite OK if the only place to load a game is from the main menu so you don't have to code the major GUI changes in the game screen), you get a menu with
FOO1
FOO2
FOO3
...exactly as now, then, when selected,
you get a menu with the contents of the directory you selected in alphabetical order (and don't any of you dare claim that this is difficult, as it is already done with FOO1, FOO2...), with the bottom item selected as default (== highest numbered save)


Am I annoyed by this at the moment? Yes, I am. My current agitation is not just because it is simple to implement and something that has, over time, shown itself to be a great boon to players, it is also because a recent game played of Dominions 3 suffered from corruption and with the save game corrupted too, I had to abandon it on the spot. If I had had prior saves, I could have reverted to the last save that worked losing some time but not having to start all over. Had it happened in MP, that game would have eliminated me as a player with NOBODY of the participants or the host having anything they could possible to do about it. I'd hate that - and I'd hate it happening to others.

And yes, I could write a script to take care of copying saves outside the game, but I really, really, shouldn't have to - nor should other players, especially the less computer literate.

And for those who STILL think that "I learn more by not having the ability to save*/I would be tempted, I prefer to avoid temptation rather than confront it/I am oldschool and did a naked ascension in Nethack**, who would ever need a save" - that's why most games that provide 1-save-per-game provide it as an ironman**** mode you can CHOOSE to set at game creation (so you are bound by your choice throughout the game and cannot get "tempted" once you've made your choice).


* Note that the "YOU learn more by not having the ability to save" people are not worth listening to since they are acting against others, not for anybody.
** I actually did that many years ago.***
*** Do you believe me on that? I sure hope not, that would be masochistic beyond belief even for me, way too many random death factors to be fun - for me. Your sense of fun might rightfully differ.
**** Yes, it could be named "Classic Dominions: Only Wusses Don't Enable This Option" if that would make you feel better.

[PhilD]

I can completely understand people not wantint to use savegames and the like - and I've played a lot of roguelikes, probably even before some of the people in here were born (that was starting 1989 or 1990, for the record). Ironman can be fun, no problem with that.

But then, what I cannot understand is why anybody would actually argue against having the feature. Are they so weak-willed that the existence of a save button would keep them from playing, and enjoying, the game as if it were not present? (I'm not discussing the devs who would have to code the UI and actual file swapping - they may not want to do it, and prefer to code interesting stuff, and that's their total right as they're not exactly professional game developers)

Nobody is talking about forcing you to use a save/reload feature. Having it as an easy-to-use option would simply make life simpler for anyone who's not an expert PC/Mac user with whatever their OS is, and would help anyone who cannot (or doesn't want to) spend the time and effort to become an expert Dom3 player - and would remove exactly ZERO options from anybody else.

About 12-13 years ago, I started playing Angband (roguelike, derived from Moria). IIRC, Angband didn't have save games, and used tricks to prevent the player from simply copying saved characters, and I didn't have a hack for that - so I played Ironman Angband, and lost tens of characters to silly mistakes and bad luck. And I enjoyed it. But then, at the time I was 24 and had lots of free time on my hands (OK, I had a PhD to do at the time, but I wasn't exactly the hardest working PhD student in the world at the time). Now I still like to play games, mostly solo, but I simply don't have the amount of time that I had back then.

[Cainehill]

Eh, remember that Angband's Ironman mode wasn't a lack of save capability. It was originally a self-imposed style of play that usually said "No going back to town, no buying stuff, no going back up stairs and (often) taking every stair down ASAP." Later variants actually provided a programmed in Ironman mode that couldn't force you down the stairs, but locked all the stores (so you couldn't buy / sell) and removed stairs up.

Side note : We _have_ the ability to save at any time. Ain't yall noticed that if you hit "Esc", there's a "Save game and quit" command in the menu, so you _can_ go away and come back to your turn.

What some people seem to want is a "backup save file (and other critical files" ability, which as Peter notes would be very nice for hosted games, but actually isn't as simple as he makes it out to be. (Error checking for file permissions, directory paths, etc, all not just for Windoze but Linux and Macs as well.)

Frankly, I'd think that if some of the people who have created their own scripts (or even just pre/post exec command lines) would share them, that should suffice for 99% of the players who aren't too lazy to cut and paste. (Could be really simple - for example, pre-exec command to copy/zip files to one directory/zip file name, post-exec that does the same to a different file/directory.)

[freykin]

My view on this is that it's kind of like nethack and other roguelikes, where in those games when you die, you die, and have to start over. If I could have saved in those games, I would have finished them long ago and they wouldn't be nearly as much fun.

That said, while I would never use a save feature, in a game like this I think it should be included for those who would. The only downside to it being in that I can think of is getting used to relying on it, then going into an MP game and getting destroyed because of that reliance.

[Campy]

Kristoffer register me as a vote for a save game feature. Perhaps you could also have an ironman mode for those that don't want it and don't have the willpower to not use it if it is available. However, for newbie's and for trying different strategies at key points, it would make the game much more accessible. I vote for accessibility and fun over hardcore.

In the meantime, for those looking for something easier than doing it all manually, here is the batch file I use to keep three backup files:

copy "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\*.*" "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak3\"
copy "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\*.*" "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\"
copy "c:\games\dominions3\savedgames\Yomi\*.*" "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\"

I have this batch file in my Dom3 directory with a quicklink to it. I play in windows and then just have to click on the quicklink to backup to bak1 and simultaneously move the backup to bak2 and bak2 to bak3. Any of these three can be restored manually by copying the files back to your save file or by creating another batch program to do this for you. You of course will have to change the directory locations to where you have Dom3 saved and this will backup a game called Yomi. Each time I start a new game, I change that line to reflect the name of the new game. So to backup the tutorial, that line would have been:

copy "c:\games\dominions3\savedgames\Tutorial\*.*" "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\"

Hope some of you find this helpful. Would like to see better methods by others that may have spent more time on this than I did.

[Agrajag]

Campy said:
copy "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\*.*" "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak3\"
copy "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\*.*" "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\"
copy "c:\games\dominions3\savedgames\Yomi\*.*" "c:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\"

You'd probably be better off copying *.2h and ftherlnd, because currently you'd also be copying the game's random map, which could get quite big, and you'd be wasting lots of space.
EDIT: and *.trn