Dominions 3 kicks ass

[mondblut]

Also the game is actually 'meant' (whatever that means) to be played in epic scales..

I'd dispute that. Half of the original maps are in 60 provinces range, of the rest there are only two that top 200 and just one really big 600-province one. Making it fairly clearly 'meant' to be played low-scale, more or less. So the next time somebody downloads a 2000-province map, installs a "single age" mod, adds a bunch of modded nations and starts a 100-nation game only to complain he has too much micromanagement to fight against, perhaps he's doing it wrong.

 

[DakaSha]

Eh, I'm judging by the way the many forum games are setup but I can see your point.
Still kinda besides the point because it's easy as hell to get enough players together (although they are of course strangers in that case)

The game IS to micro heavy though.. no matter how you play. Ive played 1vs1 on any size of map (except huge) and even then it kinda pisses me off. One almost always makes at least one boneheaded mistake later in the game because there are just so many things to pay attention to. The game could really use some streamlining.

But having said that the games were still incredibly fun so meh. Thats what its about

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

I wont dispute that but the point of my post was to make clear that its actually a quite successful franchise

Also the game is actually 'meant' (whatever that means) to be played in epic scales.. so really if you want the 'true' Dom experience you need to play with strangers off the net anyways.. and the forum is freaking FULL of people to play with. its extremely easy to get a 18+ player game going..

Yes, I meant that a lower price tag could help the success of the game. But I suppose that's a bit late now.

I don't see the advantage of an epic game. Too much player timetable management. With six or so friends you can just agree on a day to play, progresses much faster that way.

EDIT : How is it too micro heavy? I thought it's pretty light on micro.

 

[DakaSha]

when you get the game better and realize how one must play in order to actually win against a skilled opponent youll see what i mean
The game is an indisputably high micro game and its a huge issue in veteran player circles.
The most played mod for instance has taken drastic measures to reduce micro.

If you wan to witness true micro assfuckery then play as a blood heavy nation Again if you are playing against other newbs and/or dont care about winning you can play as you wish.. if you are playing a veteran you will be spending up to hours on a single turn starting mid game. and youll still make mistakes

Gathering blood slaves with multiple blood mages spread out over your whole empire while paying attention to unrest/taxes and swapping items around for maximum effect can ruin the game.

Its not just blood nations either.. they are just the most extreme example. Another great one is non CBM machaka and swapping fever fetishes between leaders.

even research/ item construction management becomes tedious when you have more then 25 mages (which you will need in order to be even remotly competitive)

Having to set up battle plans every turn (if you want to actually win against somebody who does) and creating spell chains while swapping gems around is also fun. Ive spent over an hour in a 1vs1 game just planning a battle.

Dont forget there are some shortcuts though.. you can save orders for instance for later use

edit: ah paying attention to supply lines and the amount of supply is also a dickpain.. have fun when your huge army you thought was gonna wreck havoc starts to starve on the turn you were going to attack because you moved it into the wrong province (or not even that.. maybe you just miscalculated the supply and if its enough) because there isnt an advisor warning you. Maye there is a way to test if there is enough supply.. if there is it isnt obvious.. so basically i have to resort to literally counting up my total army size (as in add the size of all units) then see if the province has enough.. taking other factors into account

 

[DakaSha]

Completely different. there isnt any comparison. Both are good. dominions is cooler in my opinion but its a thin line

 

[coldcrow]

25 Mages ??!!

Haha, I'd love to use only that few. Usually I got 3 main castle sites with each cranking out a mage per turn in midgame. That will quickly add up to >100. Not mentioning all the independent scouts/mages/troop transporters. Also not mentioning your actual armies. :'(

 

[DakaSha]

Yes I was trying not to sound like im making shit up

When playing against a friend with EA Arco i was cranking out those oreads and would destroy him with literal armies of mages xD (sadly only home province for the oreads though ^^

Any fairly unnoobish player will soon realize how much micro is involved ^^

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

I can sort of see what you mean, man there's lot of shit going on with Mictlan. But still I don't consider it all that much, even touch I'd like some UI shortcuts and ability to save some templates for unit ordering. Well if it has that, I'm a jerk. Just a while ago I was manually transferring blood slaves from every blood hunter and then somebody told me you can do it from the magic resources screen. Cranking out 200+ blood slaves a turn, it seemed like an issue... And managing the undead spawning in several provinces... I like it though, I don't like games where you just click turn over and over and wait for something to do.

 

[Yeesh]

I can sort of see what you mean, man there's lot of shit going on with Mictlan. But still I don't consider it all that much, even touch I'd like some UI shortcuts and ability to save some templates for unit ordering. Well if it has that, I'm a jerk. Just a while ago I was manually transferring blood slaves from every blood hunter and then somebody told me you can do it from the magic resources screen. Cranking out 200+ blood slaves a turn, it seemed like an issue... And managing the undead spawning in several provinces... I like it though, I don't like games where you just click turn over and over and wait for something to do.

You can pool gems or slave, but specific to slaves you have the problem that this will also swipe them out of your blood sacrificin' priests inventory, so you have to manually go back to each of those and add them back in. Also, of course it only works in provinces where you have a lab, which costs 500 smackers and guess what you don't have so much of when you're letting so many provinces live tax free so they don't get pissed about your stealing their virginal daughters? My last game with a blood nation, I was running a pair of scouts for each bloodhunt province, constantly moving between the hunters and a lab. And that's a lot of micro.

 

[Phelot]

Late age Ermor is crazy with all the dead popping up. Pretty cool, but at the same time it gets to be overwhelming.

You can sort of get the same result with having a lot of Pans and their crazed women that spawn. Imagine a horde of horny, vicious, starving women as an army... ugh.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

I can sort of see what you mean, man there's lot of shit going on with Mictlan. But still I don't consider it all that much, even touch I'd like some UI shortcuts and ability to save some templates for unit ordering. Well if it has that, I'm a jerk. Just a while ago I was manually transferring blood slaves from every blood hunter and then somebody told me you can do it from the magic resources screen. Cranking out 200+ blood slaves a turn, it seemed like an issue... And managing the undead spawning in several provinces... I like it though, I don't like games where you just click turn over and over and wait for something to do.

You can pool gems or slave, but specific to slaves you have the problem that this will also swipe them out of your blood sacrificin' priests inventory, so you have to manually go back to each of those and add them back in. Also, of course it only works in provinces where you have a lab, which costs 500 smackers and guess what you don't have so much of when you're letting so many provinces live tax free so they don't get pissed about your stealing their virginal daughters? My last game with a blood nation, I was running a pair of scouts for each bloodhunt province, constantly moving between the hunters and a lab. And that's a lot of micro.

Don't the sacrifice priest automatically replenish their stock, though?

Maybe the labs could be a problem, I just had something set on patrol so I could get fresh corpses the Civateteo can raise so I took full tax. Die more, damn population!

 

[Johannes]

If this doesn't have all that much micro from your perspective, what game does then?

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

For example Space Empires.

 

[DakaSha]

that is worse lol

I do count dom3 in the top tier of micro heavy games though .I cant name many games that are much worse (Not including some obscure simulation games that nobody plays maybe)

 

[DakaSha]

And you can save unit ordering ^^

CTRL-#
Then press the number to paste

 

[Topher]

So I "acquired" this game, it's sweet, so now I've bought the game and I'm playing Early Age Ulm (Conan the Barbarian) and Late Age Ermor (armies of the dead). The AI pretty much shuts me down... though I seem to be doing better as Ermor then as Ulm.

 

[DakaSha]

lol we'll see what you have to say about the AI when you understand it better xD

Dominions is also top tier for "Most pathetic strategy AI"

 

[Topher]

Quick question... can an army contain more then one leader unit or do I need to treat each such unit like a single squad and just move several of them around the map in a group? Is there no way to combine several champions into a single force?

 

[Yeesh]

Don't the sacrifice priest automatically replenish their stock, though?
Maybe the labs could be a problem, I just had something set on patrol so I could get fresh corpses the Civateteo can raise so I took full tax. Die more, damn population!

Sacrificing priests replenish their stock (via labs) during turn resolution, but if you pool slaves then you've just undone that replenishing. My understanding is that if they go INTO turn resolution empty (as they will be if you pool without manually adding their slaves back), then they won't have anything to sacrifice.

The effectiveness of blood hunting does go down with unrest, but patrolling can certainly help with that (at the cost, or BONUS!, of dead population).

Quick question... can an army contain more then one leader unit or do I need to treat each such unit like a single squad and just move several of them around the map in a group? Is there no way to combine several champions into a single force?

No, every single leader is its own little unit.

EDIT: But you can clump them all together and copy and paste orders. Mouse over any unit's orders and press ctrl+1,2,3,etc, then press 1,2,3,etc. to paste the orders to another. Regular units and leaders have different kinds of orders so you can only go troop to troop and leader to leader.

EDIT EDIT: Oh yeah, DakaSha just wrote that a few posts ago.

 

[DakaSha]

You can move leaders as a group by using windows commands like CTRL while selecting. You can select multiple leaders this way and move them as a group.

This reminds me of another fun dominions 'feature' sneaking when you dont want to and vice versa. have LOTS of fun with that one ^^

 

[Topher]

You can move leaders as a group by using windows commands like CTRL while selecting. You can select multiple leaders this way and move them as a group.

This reminds me of another fun dominions 'feature' sneaking when you dont want to and vice versa. have LOTS of fun with that one ^^

Yeah, I accidentally grouped several commanders together once but wasn't sure how I did it, so thanks, I'll have to play around with that. Are there any other useful commands like that the manual doesn't go into much detail regarding shortcuts?

 

[DakaSha]

Well when selecting a move destination you can hold CTRL (i think.. one of those keys) to move (as opposed to sneak) I am in the habit of ALWAYS pressing the key when moving except when i do in fact want to sneak.

hmm what else.. 'N' is super important to cycle through commanders who dont have any orders.

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

Shit, the game I'm playing now uses CBM balance mod and it has moved Sanguine Dowsing Rods and Jade Daggers to unique. That would have been nice to know, but I couldn't find a full change list anywhere and didn't have time to test that. Now I just have to hope nobody pounces on me for a good while.

The first game with four players kinda ground into halt, as while I conquered everything (as Ulm) from Caelum except two castles and now they also have my capital, with this 30 mage army spamming some kinda lightning attack. I didn't realize it would be that effective, so I don't have a bunch of lightning-resisting items yet. Now I could start pumping them out but meanwhile Abysia just clobbered the fourth player to pieces and has free reign to research and do whatever. Since the fourth player just collapsed instantly there's suddenly no time at all to finish my work and prepare to fight Abysia. Heh.

Well there's a lot of learning to be done here. Next time I'm going to go MA C'tis.

 

[DakaSha]

Those changes are PART of the changes i mentioned weeks ago to reduce micro (edit: well actually they are bad examples.. gem generators are a better one.. and moving hammer sto unique was the BEST DESCISIION YET.. fuck im drunk bye)

CBM is the only way to play btw. If you dont agree suck a dick

 

[Demnogonis Saastuttaja]

Maybe so, but I would have liked to have an updated item list for example before designing my pretender and certainly before researching construction of greater magical items and finding out that I actually need to pump out some High Priests of the Sun for stuff I previously used Mictlan Priests for.

Micro isn't that much of an issue now that the pace is turn/day.