What it will take for me to purchase Dom III

[quantum_mechani]

Cainehill said:
I also doubt if many reasonable, intelligent people would say that a game was a life-changing experience, while people do sometimes feel that way about movies.

Dominions has been a life changing experience. Before, I was was depressed. I wondered what was the meaning of it all. I stepped on plants.

But I realized the error of my ways, I invited the Carrion Dragon into my life. Suddenly, it made sense. I knew I was doing the right thing.

[Zen]

Cainehill said:
And again - I'm not unhappy with Dominions. I'm not unhappy with J & K. Quite the opposite. What I'm unhappy with is the knee-jerk response of calling someone's reply "close minded" just because they're not nearly as happy with Dominions as you are (or for that matter, as I am). People can have legitimate complaints, regardless of how wonderful a _MP_ game Dominions is. After all - it's designed and meant to be a MP (and PBEM at that) game.

Let me bold it for you since apparently it's knee jerk:

Arralen said:


What gets me back to the topic:
I don't like that. As I don't like the fact that the AI still cannot build castles and commanders from sites, chooses heavy death scale to often and has no clue about supplies - therefore crippling itself very effectivly. What I don't like even more is the fact, that the devs know about this very well but are not willing to fix it ...

If you have already decided what the Dev's are going to do about something why are you waiting around for them to make the game? You should be Nostradamus and get a cult together with such prognostication abilities.

Or maybe that is being open minded.

And let me say for the record I agree with most of Arralen's points, reasoning, cause for concern, and desire for change. What I don't agree with is a blatent lie about something that someone has no clue about as far as IW's intentions. They have even changed their minds about things throughout the course of Dom2 so even if some grand statement that gave a certain impression it might only applicable to Dom2 and not Dom3 in terms of being able to change it.

I'm sure we would all like a patch right now for alot of things for Dom2 (morale, etc) but if the choice is between continued support of Dom2 or the development of Dom3, at this point in Dom2's life I would probably lean towards Dom3.

Especially if alot of the things that were to be patched would be much easier to do under a Dom3 framework thus allowing IW to further push the game in whatever direction they are going with it.

[Zen]

Cainehill said:
When we go to a movie, we expect at most around 2 hours entertainment. There's totally different expectations between the two entertainment choices / commodities, so please, just stop comparing the two. I doubt if many people would argue that (most) games are a better value, weighed in terms of money divided by time. I also doubt if many reasonable, intelligent people would say that a game was a life-changing experience, while people do sometimes feel that way about movies.

No, when you buy a game you are basically saying it is going to entertain you for X hours before you consider it a reasonable purchase. Some people might put that number at 1000 hours, others might put it at 200. It depends on the person and type of gamer they are.

Games are entertainment, luxury, non-neccessary consumables.

[Endoperez]

I'd like to add few obsevations into these recent "is Dominions worth playing Single-Player" and "Dominions vs all the others" posts:

Dominions' AI cheats. It knows where you are. However, it doesn't become blatant except in few exceptional circumstances, e.g. FOUR PLAYERS ON THE WORLD MAP! In most games I would play, versus AI or humans, there would be much less distance between enemies. And I think it's better that every AI player knows the location of all other nations (NB: this also includes other AIs!), because they can't communicate with each other and share information like humans could.

Re: AI starting wars against humans without reason: AFAIK, AI considers the threat of a nation before going into war against it. E.g. AI doesn't attack nation which has strong armies next to its own provinces, or even player who has lots of PD in his provinces. However, I think AI also follows the graphs, and starts war against someone who is in the lead. And I know that AIs war between each other, so I think this isn't limited to human players. I think that the only reason for AIs to pick out humans is because they are designed to attack the nation in the position humans most often acquire: the leading one, or in the case of a new player: weakly defended lands.

Re: other games giving more enjoyment than Dominions:
Roguelike games and their ilk (including Diablo and its clones) are games based very much on luck. Good equipment is critical for survival in hardcore roguelikes, and for enjoyment in low-risk games like Diablo (from this on, D&Co). I don't know if D&Co games give tactical options like roguelikes do, but I doubt it. From what I have seen, the AI in D&Co is very stupid. The AI in driving games was also quite stupid the last time I played one, but that was in year '97 or so. I'd say that it's easy to do a game where the player can challenge himself. The other drivers are there just to get him interested in the first place. After that, he competes against his own records, and to improve his skills. I don't know if D&Co work like slot machines, where players continue playing in the hope of better items, or if it's more like roguelikes, where the player's skill is needed to overcome all the obstacles until something the player OR character isn't able to cope with comes up and the player can start again, having learned something.
In Dominions, the players' skill should be the biggest variable. If AI could just get lucky, and its army of 300 militia, light infantry and longdead could defeat the 200-strong army of summons and sacreed units lead by the Fire 9 Moloch, protected, boosted and supported by dozen mages, there would be no reason to play. And it's not possible to make a "ghost driver" of your own strategy. An AI that scriptable would be awesome, of course, especially if it could "learn" your playstyle (research priority: Enchantment 1, Evocation 3, Alteration 2, Evocation 5, Construction 4, Conjuration 5, etc) from just observing your choices few times. But in driving games the "ghost" doesn't need to avoid other cars. You can't tackle the ghost. Similarly, the "ghost" in strategy games is more often a score list, where you get points for speed and might, for luck and skill, and you can see your improvement.
They are listening. Writing a good AI is very challenging, and it's hard, impossible to copy the ways with which games of other genres achieve replayability (?), or in some cases it makes the game less fulfilling. I have enojyed DomII in singple-player. The best memories are often from those times I lost. Try playing Mictlan, with non-SC pretender, in a map too small and with too many enemies. It's like insta-death roguelike converted into strategy game.

[Chazar]

Zen said:
What I don't agree with is a blatent lie about something that someone has no clue about as far as IW's intentions.

Right, but (I don't know either, but it could be that) Arralen may have just worded it that way to provoke a response from the devs?! Since we're left without a dev's diary, a patch or something else for quite some time, people are getting more anxious to know how Dom3 is going to be. We all made wishes, but we dont know whether they might come true. And provoking some responses worked before (e.g. I recall a part in the original Zen's Balance Mod-Thread about life drainers in DomIII...) and seems like it worked here too. So I would really hate if DomIII would not implement my wish for...

[Wick]

Endoperez said:
And I think it's better that every AI player knows the location of all other nations (NB: this also includes other AIs!), because they can't communicate with each other and share information like humans could.

I disagree. Not so much because cheating is annoying as because they don't seem to benefit from it. How is casting the occasional Fires from Afar halfway across the map anything but a waste of gems? How does declaring war preferentially on the strongest player lead toward victory? They should concentrate on eating their neighbors, weakest first. That way they might amount to a challenge by the time I get to them.

[ioticus]

JK mentioned in a previous post that there were further patches in the works for Dom II. I hope they'll see the light of day.

[Zen]

Chazar said:Right, but (I don't know either, but it could be that) Arralen may have just worded it that way to provoke a response from the devs?! Since we're left without a dev's diary, a patch or something else for quite some time, people are getting more anxious to know how Dom3 is going to be. We all made wishes, but we dont know whether they might come true. And provoking some responses worked before (e.g. I recall a part in the original Zen's Balance Mod-Thread about life drainers in DomIII...) and seems like it worked here too. So I would really hate if DomIII would not implement my wish for...

Being close-minded for a purpose doesn't make much of a difference and my response was as far as Cainehill's objection to me calling someone close-minded willy nilly or without proof.

But perhaps you are right. Some people may be very anxious for any news on Dom2 or Dom3 and resort to whatever kind of tactics they think might work no matter how low. I don't have an opinion either way, I myself might have been anxious enough for a game or two in my time to try something like that too.

I certainly wouldn't feel bad about adding my own elbow to the nudge for another Dev Diary release.

[RedRover]

Thought I'd throw in another word here.

I find, as I discover various game exploits and work-arounds, that the vanilla SP game does tend to fade with time. At these times, a break from play, fiddling with mods, cranking the difficulty in various ways, and occasionally using self-imposed house rules that rely on personal discipline all work to freshen things up for me.

I've also been advancing myself slowly enough that I have barely scratched the surface of Impossible level play, and extremely low-magic play with nonstandard victory conditions. Perhaps Forum-based cooperation would be another avenue for investigation.

I have great expectations for Dom 3, especially when receiving news like the fact the AI will definitely build forts in the new edition. I have full confidence that the devs will be giving us significant advances and greatly extended play in the product to come.

As for this particular thread, perhaps we might shift to a new thread titled:

"What it will take for me to continue playing Dom II."

Perhaps the ball might be started rolling by Arralen, who voiced specific concerns here, or by Zen, who has taken one of the most significant steps toward addressing this issue with the Conceptual Balance mod.

Takers?

[boltcutter]

A suggestion on Dom III:

If my guy with the 2-handed flail loses an arm, could he have a backup dagger for when I throw him into the maw of battle again? Because seeing a guy in Ulm's finest platemail attacking with "Fist" is just pathetic.