Moving Through Multiple Provinces

[Ironlord]

Is there a way to set a final destination target province for any army? For example, say I completely fill up two army's, and want to march them to my front, which is 10 provinces away. On average, depending on the nation and army, it would take about 5-7 turns to arrive, with me having to choose the route along the way and moving them each turn. Is there something that you can do to set up a final destination and have the army automatically march to it, with the ability to stop them on a turn if you need to detour them due to a rear attack or something similar?

This would be a nice change in game mechanics, especially in single player games. It would ease up micromanagement issues alot. Thanks.

[lch]

No, there's no such facility in the game. And it probably won't be added, too. While it of course would help with boring reinforcement marches, far too much can happen within one turn.

[Ironlord]

Thanks. I was playing around with LA Ermor, and the drudgery of moving so many armies takes most of the turn.

[licker]

No, there's no such facility in the game. And it probably won't be added, too. While it of course would help with boring reinforcement marches, far too much can happen within one turn.

And yet there's no reason why you couldn't go in on any given turn and change a long march order if you need to.

I really don't understand the resistance to this, as there are ONLY positives to doing it.

[JimMorrison]

No, there's no such facility in the game. And it probably won't be added, too. While it of course would help with boring reinforcement marches, far too much can happen within one turn.

And yet there's no reason why you couldn't go in on any given turn and change a long march order if you need to.

I really don't understand the resistance to this, as there are ONLY positives to doing it.


Maybe only positives to you. There is a rather enormous negative, however - the dev time required to code in the capability for pathfinding and/or waypoints.

Sorry?

[Dragar]

Is that really so onerous? Pathfinding has been around forever, surely it wouldn't be such a big deal? Removing micromanagement in the game for things like multi turn travel, repeat forgings and recruits, etc, would make it a lot faster and more enjoyable to play. Its unusual for a modern game not to have these features

[licker]

Maybe only positives to you. There is a rather enormous negative, however - the dev time required to code in the capability for pathfinding and/or waypoints.

Sorry?

Sorry for what?

I'm talking about the players obviously, while I appreciate the effort the devs put in, this is something that has been a request since FOREVER, so yeah, I don't get it, how hard can it be to do a waypoint check and notify you if your path is broken?

I dunno, maybe there is some bizarre reason why commanders cannot save orders from one turn to the next, other than that they actually already do it, so uhh, you got me.

Why?

And spare the 'time on this is time not on something else', while true, its completely beside the point. Mods can do alot, this would be actual assistance to the micro hell which does exist in this game. Same for adding a quick way to dump gems from commanders ala blood slaves...

The tools seem to exist in the game for some of these features to be implemented, so why not just do it?

[JimMorrison]

And spare the 'time on this is time not on something else', while true, its completely beside the point. Mods can do alot, this would be actual assistance to the micro hell which does exist in this game. Same for adding a quick way to dump gems from commanders ala blood slaves...

The gem dump fix is an entirely different concept. That IS something that theoretically could be implemented with relatively minor tweaking of the code.

However, the entire module relating to strategy map movement would likely have to be rewritten from scratch, in order to move it from a "1 turn at a time, period" system, to a system that deals with multiple turn movement. There are too many factors to be looked at: terrain, flight, map move speed, stealth, ownership, etc. So it's nothing that can just be simply tacked on to the current system, and thus will not be seen in Dom3. Pray for it in Dom4, but seriously, with basically 1 person doing almost all of the actual coding of the game engine, there are other things I'd much rather see him work on, myself. ;)

[Dragar]

I personally can't think of anything I'd want more than improved interface and reduced micromanagement. The game already has wonderful depth, there are plenty of mods out to improve balance, and that can be done by the community. There are very few bugs really interfering with game play.

Reducing boring tasks should be priority number one in my opinion. In particular for SP games, it would make the game a lot more enjoyable.

[Alderanas]

haha your leading an empire you have to deal with the boring as well as the exciting. I bet every ruler has felt as you do now and besides you have it easier than they did. They had to rely on messengers all you have to rely upon is a good mouse click. Just take it in stride and go with it. It may be annoying but if it goes away there will just be a different annoying thing you find.

[Dragar]

No, I'm not leading an empire. Either I'm playing a game or I'm an ascendant god making important decisions while my followers handle the details. I'm also not someone who is never satisfied, so I won't just find something else annoying. I love this game. The content and strategy rocks. It would just be great to clear out some unnecessary clicking

[vfb]

Ironlord, are you using the keyboard shortcuts? It's more of a pain to move armies around if you don't use the 'n' key. You should be able to do something like:

n - select the next commander

If your commander can lead more troops:
t - army setup screen
(left click one of the new zombies in province)
a - select all unassigned zombies
stick as many fit on your commander
escape

left-click province to move to

click 'n' again, etc.

If you're not bothering to pick up new undead along the way, it's even faster just to 'n', left-click, 'n', left-click. You don't need to wait for the arrow to finish drawing.

I wouldn't even bother trying to get the armies into formation until they get to the front lines.

[Endoperez]

The suggested feature would be great, but it won't happen. It was suggested before Dom3 was released, and it'd have been nice to get it then. We didn't, though, and such a huge change after release would be expansion pack -stuff, while new nations, units and such are relatively simple and can be added in patches. Well, at least for this game. :p


In addition, every once in a while there's a mention of a non-Dominions project underway.

I have other ideas for Yomi, but they are a bit mechanics-heavy, meaning I must convince JK to make them, meaning he must shift focus from other projects. Thus I need to be quite clear on what I want. So for the time being I will work on coolifying Jomon. The coolifying is coming along quite nicely I'd say.

Hmmm?

[Tifone]

Also, the .trn files would become pretty bigger to memorize all the waypoints and pathfinding etc., requiring more time and bandwith from the servers to send in pbem. Not a thing to overlook.

The only thing I feel the need of, to reduce micro, is really the forge monthly command. :smirk:

[Endoperez]

The only thing I feel the need of, to reduce micro, is really the forge monthly command. :smirk:

This would be great, and since we already have a similar mechanic (for casting rituals monthly), it might be possible to implement without too much hassle.

[lch]

I see this "getting reinforcements to the front line is boring" as a non-issue because mostly it's only a specific setup which requires this: single player games against a losing AI and/or playing freespawn nations like LA Ermor. In the first case, you usually can just ignore that some crappy troops are waiting for you in some of your provinces and instead focus on your advance. If you're in a competitive game, you'll have far more to worry about than having somebody collect your crappy troops all the time. Most of your turn time will be spent on setting orders and scripts for your mages. If you don't want a micromanagement heavy game, don't use LA Ermor. You knew what you signed up for. You don't pick a blood nation if you don't like micromanagement either. If you don't want to spend too much time on armies, use mages or SCs. :P

In my opinion, there are too many variables about moving armies that you really can't let the AI do this for you. Some of those just include:
- which way to move, depending on terrain
- what to do about enemy provinces and/or enemy attacks along the way
- adding units encountered in provinces along the way
- how to handle supply problems when moving with multiple big armies

In general, I think that even a sophisticated solution for this, which would take an immense amount of work to set up, would be inadequate and require constant fine-tuning all the time anyway. Shortcuts to pool gems and so on that are already present in the game are usually pretty simple stuff, and as soon as it gets a little more complex (e.g. remote site searching) people are not too impressed with the results. Something like army movement is decidedly non-trivial to me.

[Edratman]

VFB,

"I wouldn't even bother trying to get the armies into formation until they get to the front lines."

Tried this plan myself. Three problems:
1. Forgot to to put army into formation.
2. Got attacked unexpectedly.
3. I script my mages when I put armies into formation. Got attacked unexpectedly.

Your plan probably only works for people smarter than me. So for me and the two others not in that exclusive club, we will have problems waiting to put armies into formation.

[capnq]

I can't think of a single game I own that has pathfinding that I'd describe as "good". Apparently it's more difficult to code than it looks.

I can't remember ever using the monthly ritual hotkey, for that matter. Micromanagement FTW.

[vfb]

VFB,

"I wouldn't even bother trying to get the armies into formation until they get to the front lines."

Tried this plan myself. Three problems:
1. Forgot to to put army into formation.
2. Got attacked unexpectedly.
3. I script my mages when I put armies into formation. Got attacked unexpectedly.

Your plan probably only works for people smarter than me. So for me and the two others not in that exclusive club, we will have problems waiting to put armies into formation.


Ha ha ha :) I like your sense of humour.

But I'm specifically talking about LA Ermor here, not in general. Would not dream of doing that with other nations.

[SlipperyJim]

I can't think of a single game I own that has pathfinding that I'd describe as "good". Apparently it's more difficult to code than it looks.
I cannot tell you how much I agree with your observation. The pathfinding problem is particularly onerous in many RTS games. I'll frequently click a group of units, click a destination, and then go on to another task. Several minutes later, I go to check on my wandering units, and I discover that half of them have gotten stuck on some sort of obstacle. The other half of my troops went straight to their destination and got slaughtered because they didn't have enough support. :doh:

Actually, I can think of one game with a decent pathfinding engine: Civ4. But that's the only one.

I can't remember ever using the monthly ritual hotkey, for that matter. Micromanagement FTW.
I use the monthly ritual commands for remote site searching and some summonings. Put a couple of necromancers in a lab, set them to summon Wights every month, and you can have quite a respectable force in short order.

That said, I totally agree with lch's point about the drawbacks in the automated remote site-searching. I use it gladly, but there are a few shortcomings in the way it determines which sites to search. On the one hand, I really don't want to waste gems and mage-turns to search captured enemy capitals. I already know which site will be in Niefel's capital -- it's Niefelheim, thanks -- and I don't need to search for it. On the other hand, it would also be good if my remote site searchers would be willing to search a province that had already been searched by a level-1 or level-2 mage, because that first search could have missed a site or two. I gladly use the automated remote site-searching, and I consider it to be a huge boon to the gamer, but it's definitely not perfect.

[thejeff]

At one point I threw together a mod that added a capital site to every nation that only had one. Did nothing except keep the automated site searching from targeting capitals. It should be somewhere on the mod page.

[Ironlord]

Thanks to all for the advice. I am new to the game, though I have lurked a bit. I play Civ4 alot, so that is what I was thinking when I decided to give Ermor a try and discovered the massive numbers of spawn this nation gets.

[SlipperyJim]

Thanks to all for the advice. I am new to the game, though I have lurked a bit. I play Civ4 alot, so that is what I was thinking when I decided to give Ermor a try and discovered the massive numbers of spawn this nation gets.
Free piece of advice (and worth as much as you paid for it): LA Ermor plays very differently from just about any other nation in Dom3. Try playing a few games as some of the other nations first. That will enable you get a better feel for how Dom3 works, and then you can jump back into directing massive hordes of the undead....

There are many suggestions for new Dom3 players. Personally, I like MA Marignon. You get powerful priests, fun Fire magic, spies, and assassins. Your troops are decent but not outstanding, except for the Knights of the Chalice, which are quite good. And you get some amazing late-game summons to pimp out with all of the cool gear.

MA Ulm is another classic choice for new players. Your troops are excellent. However, your magic is very weak, so this choice won't allow you to experience much of the magic part of Dom3. And the magic part of Dom3 is most of the game, so.... :dk:

[licker]

I must say the bulk of you completely miss the point.

It does not have to be pathfinding afterall. You can set up your movement however you like, and the file can simply store the movement command to the next province# in your chain. Is this massive bloat? Seems doubtful to me, unless you intentionally make huge move chains, but even there you could cap the length of the chain at 5 or some other arbitrary number.

This is not rocket science, this is not reinventing anything, this is really really simple, and even if you would never use it, others obviously would use it.

I get the whole the devs don't give a crap about the SP game (and if that sounds harsh, its also basically true), but this is an ease to micro which would be used frequently, even if it was only to add one extra province move as you are ferrying move 1 troops 2 provinces.

I'm not talking about linking moves and actions to create some kind of search or pickup automation (though that would also be cool), I'm talking about an ability to chain move commands via some kind of way point system. Scrap any notion of path finding, that's not needed.

Sometimes I think that Dom IV would be better served by not trying to expand the content, but rather to simply refine what there already is by making the turns flow more smoothly, and a huge part of that would be reducing the amount of needless micro, as well as improving certain other aspects such as equiping commanders, setting up the tactical battles, ...

All that aside though, that's not germane to anything added to Dom3. Add the shortcut to move gems (like blood slaves), add a monthly forging command, add a monthly move command (set a destination, and every turn the commander moves towards it in the shortest path possible, hell this is even easier than waypoints or pathfinding since nothing is stored in the file other than a Move to provinceX, and if provinceX becomes unreachable just pop up a message and cancel the order, this already happens when you run out of gems for monthly rituals, though not the message...).

Seriously, I don't see the resistance to this, until a dev says its too hard to code. I won't pretend to know what it would take to add it, and I don't really think any of you should pretend that either.

[vfb]

I'm sure if this is ever implemented, the first time I try it, I'll get bogged down in a swamp, spend a couple months starving in the deserts, and then leave the entire regiment of troops in Inkpot End as my water-breathing commander passes through a water province, only to end up getting killed as he attacks the enemy all by himself. Charge!

[Gandalf Parker]

Careful attention to the movement abilities and terrain abilities of individual units can help. Grouping units under commanders who have the same move abilities. Often you can create armies which can move 2 or 3 provinces at a time if you dont just get in the habit of grouping everyone together in one army.

I do understand why its unlikely that we will get this fix.
The waypoint code that "has been around forever" has not been around long enough to easily merge with the code for THIS game. It would probably take a few days of very unfun labor to incorporate this.

[Meursy]

Ho ho licker!

I wouldn't pretend to know what everyone else does or does not know! :)

And who knows, maybe the developers do care at least a little bit about SP, somewhere down in the deep and mysterious seats of their beings!

(btw I am one of those people who has no idea how hard things are to code...and I second vfb on the negatives of implemented waypointed movement!)

[Kristoffer O]

> Seriously, I don't see the resistance to this, until a dev says its too hard to code. I won't pretend to know what it would take to add it, and I don't really think any of you should pretend that either.

I don't code much so I have no idea. I think there are a few obstacles.
1. It is more rewarding for us to work on a new game, which we do.
2. It is boring to make a change that is mainly UI. The results are unrewarding for us as devs :)
3. The change is big enough to introduce a new range of possibly severe bugs, meaning we would likely spend additional time (extremely boring time) and patches to find and squash bugs, while the MP community shouts 'exploit', 'my army disappeared', 'my game is ruined', etc. At this stage dom3 is working quite smoothly, without bugs. We are not particulary interested in introducing new ones. Therefore most new content is based on old mechanics or slight changes.

In short: we prefer a clunky, but working movement system, to spending unfun time to have an even longer unfun period of bugs, while we can't work on stuff we like and are good at.

It would probably be nice especially for the SP community, but the opportunity cost for our sake is unfortunately too high.

[thejeff]

Well, obviously the code should not detach troops to let a commander enter the water. That would be dumb.

And if licker's first suggestion is used, you would set your own path so starving in deserts would be your own fault.

[Meursy]

There you go! Some people here do know something about coding!

[licker]

Thank you Kristoffer.

I knew this already, but its nice to hear it again from time to time.

I'm not disappointed or surprised by your answer, its what you've said all along.

I don't see the real issues with bugs or other problems as some have been suggesting if this is implemented intelligently, however, I really don't understand it in terms of if you don't want to use it you won't have to, and if your forces get stuck you will find them anyway by hitting 'n', commanders cannot be issued an illegal movement command as it is, how this changes that I don't know, or see.

Think about it, set a move order to a distant province, and each turn the commander will issue a *legal* (obviously) movement order to get closer to that province. There might be some fudging on that, but already there is a kind of path finding for non flying move 3 units, this is just expanding that to more than move 3.

Each new turn the move order is checked against the saved destination province and if it fails (due to the province being enemy, or no longer having a clear path) then the unit default to defend like basically every other failed command defaults to. So at the end of your turn if you hit 'n' relilgiously, as imagine most serious people do, you find all your stray commanders without orders and can adjust as needed.

I don't know how this results in lots of bugs, or even anything remotely unintended. Unless its implemented badly, but well, I assume there is at least some QC process you all have...

[Gandalf Parker]

I do know enough about coding to agree that..
A) it would not be fun to code and insert at this point
B) it would have bugs which would take awhile to iron out
C) its not impossible but probably more trouble than its worth

Maybe in the early birth of Dom3 when it was first considered. But now that the devs have moved on to a new project this would definetly not fit into a fun and simple patch thing which might get tossed in during a break from their real jobs and other projects.

[Kristoffer O]

> I knew this already, but its nice to hear it again from time to time.

> I'm not disappointed or surprised by your answer, its what you've said all along.

> I don't see the real issues with bugs or other problems as some have been suggesting if this is implemented intelligently, however, I really don't understand it in terms of if you don't want to use it you won't have to, and if your forces get stuck you will find them anyway by hitting 'n', commanders cannot be issued an illegal movement command as it is, how this changes that I don't know, or see.

> Think about it, set a move order to a distant province, and each turn the commander will issue a *legal* (obviously) movement order to get closer to that province. There might be some fudging on that, but already there is a kind of path finding for non flying move 3 units, this is just expanding that to more than move 3.

> Each new turn the move order is checked against the saved destination province and if it fails (due to the province being enemy, or no longer having a clear path) then the unit default to defend like basically every other failed command defaults to. So at the end of your turn if you hit 'n' relilgiously, as imagine most serious people do, you find all your stray commanders without orders and can adjust as needed.

> I don't know how this results in lots of bugs, or even anything remotely unintended. Unless its implemented badly, but well, I assume there is at least some QC process you all have...

It is more like residual orders I'm afraid of. If orders are not cleared properly there is a chance that orders get transfered from one dying commander to another etc. THis could result in strange movement on AI units or other players orders. Not sure how likely it is, but this is one type of bug I can imagine right now.

Other possible bugs might include strange movement behaviour of stealthy troops when waypoints switch ownership.

Other not movement related bugs might also be introduced. Since move is just another order the mechanic would involve an order after order mechanic. It is possible that the AI decided to use the system or that commanders got strange orders turns from now. I'm not sure if this is possible, but I guess it might happen.

QC is by far more boring than actual coding. THe less QC we do the better we feel. If we do too little QC we will release a buggy patch and players will feel as if we use them as testers. We will also be forced to release new bug-fix-patches with little meaningful content. If we test a lot we will feel sick. :)

[lch]

I must say the bulk of you completely miss the point.

It does not have to be pathfinding afterall. You can set up your movement however you like, and the file can simply store the movement command to the next province# in your chain. Is this massive bloat? Seems doubtful to me, unless you intentionally make huge move chains, but even there you could cap the length of the chain at 5 or some other arbitrary number.

[...]

Seriously, I don't see the resistance to this, until a dev says its too hard to code. I won't pretend to know what it would take to add it, and I don't really think any of you should pretend that either.
I didn't miss your point, my argument was "it's going to be too much work for too little gain, and buggish" from the start. You're right, a chain of provinces to move to, set by the player by hand, would be the easiest approach and would eliminate a number of problems by making the player responsible for the route that he chose. But as I said, this is still decidedly non-trivial. Consider the following:

First, you need to be aware of your armies potential when moving. Because as you are aware, units may have Forest survival and similar skills, hence moving faster or slower through specific terrain. No problem you say, just walk as far as you can each turn. Give them 1 map move orders for the entire chain and then try to travel as far as possible along that chain as you can every turn. Very well, but what if that chain is getting broken by enemies taking a province that was once yours in the meantime? If it was the end point in a 2 map move or 3 map move movement, then you'll have to travel to the province before that, and then take the province back. You'll probably want to address that enemy army first and move somewhere where you're better defended. Things get tricky. All in all, vfb already summed up nicely a couple of points that I have against a feature like this.

Regarding site searching: It is my impression that the game so far just isn't aware about what provinces are capitals. Thus capitals are being sitesearched just like every other province. It would of course be problematic to include the info what all the capitals are in the turn files, because people could then extract that information and abuse it. But it might be a good idea to add a new flag (as in a bit in the province bitmask) for capitals, so that the mages can skip this province even if the site searching order was given during the client's turn preparation.

[Edi]

I'd also like to add that even fairly innocuous changes can result in big headaches. In patch 3.20, move order validation was improved. This means that sneaking out of sieges and force marching were eliminated.

What is not generally known is that it introduced a MAJOR bug that would have had everyone on the forum screaming bloody murder and it would have ruined or at least severely hindered all ongoing MP games on hosting. And the implemented change was FAR less than adding a waypoint system that allows sequential movement from one turn to another. Fortunately that one was caught and squashed, which is also the reason for so many versions in such a short order.

So just take Kristoffer's word for it when he says it's a no go. If he can imagine the kind of consequences he enumerated right off the bat, I don't want to know what kind of exotics it might introduce into the game. We still have the immortality weirdness that has not been hunted down, the F9 and D9 bless bugs plus some other stuff. Like Kristoffer, I prefer the current system even if it's not the smoothest possible, because it works without major problems.

[licker]

Fair enough, I will continue to request it for Dom4 then.

I am in the QC field myself, though not limited to software QC, which is it's own beast.

QC is only boring if you get it all right the first time ;)


No problem you say, just walk as far as you can each turn. Give them 1 map move orders for the entire chain and then try to travel as far as possible along that chain as you can every turn. Very well, but what if that chain is getting broken by enemies taking a province that was once yours in the meantime?


Asked and answered... seriously with the tinyist amount of intelligence built into the system none of the so far proposed issues (other than the potential bugs, which are of a different nature) are even possible.

If the chain is broken the move order is canceled, and the commander is defaulted to defend. This works for monthly rituals, if there are not enough gems (or targets) the commander is reset to defend.

[Gandalf Parker]

To add to KO's reference to passed orders..
For many things the game does not keep track of units by nation. It tracks them by ID number. The commander you create is "in line" with other peoples commanders and the AIs and the Independents. This has popped up before where a commanders was taken out by spell or event but their actions were passed down to the unit next in queue. It was mostly caught and fixed during beta-group testing but it did hold things up sometimes. It is not simple since much of the game is not modular.

Also, when discussing present waypoint code, keep in mind that this game was created on an Atari long ago and the base code is mostly converted code. Those of you with coding backgrounds saying that waypoints are easy might realize what a bear it is to insert new code routines into ancient spaghetti and cross-platform converted code. I have no idea how much of the game is that way but since we are talking about some of the first portions of the game to be written Im thinking this might be part of the problem. Building on such pre-packaged algorithms was waypoints is much easier than inserting them later. Johan is an excellent programmer but seeing this game develop from infancy to now I suspect that answers of "its not that simple" is probably realistic and cannot be easily compared to other programming projects.

I am hopeful that the new project might have waypoint code in it along with some of the other desires we had that we didnt get because it would involve rewriting the game from scratch.

[lch]

Asked and answered... seriously with the tinyist amount of intelligence built into the system none of the so far proposed issues (other than the potential bugs, which are of a different nature) are even possible.

If the chain is broken the move order is canceled, and the commander is defaulted to defend. This works for monthly rituals, if there are not enough gems (or targets) the commander is reset to defend.
Is the whole move order canceled as soon as one of the provinces in the path are no longer passable without trouble? Because if that's the case, then it might be hardly usable in some games, as you'll end up reacting to how the map looks around the battlefront all the time. If you only stop until it directly poses a problem, not in some turns later, you'll have the unwanted effect that your reinforcement armies may run into the hands of your powerful enemy without you knowing. I always hated Wesnoth for that. You set a unit to auto-move somewhere. On the beginning of your turn, new enemies are spotted in front of the Shroud of Darkness. But your lone units still happily end their movement one hex in front of the enemy, as long as that enemy doesn't block their path they're trying to move through, even if that gives an abysmal defense bonus. And in Wesnoth it is extremely important to have a good defense modifier, as is hitting first.

As I said, the feature request would definitely be "nice to have". But given the problems, and that in development feature requests are considered last concerning implementation, I can hardly see it appear in the future.

[licker]

I would break the move command as soon as any province from the chain is missing.

clearly you still need to be aware of the situation, and not blindly leave your armies on some automarch which no longer makes sense due to other conditions, but that in no way makes haveing the option to set an automarch a bad idea, just one you don't want to use blindly.

Then again what do you do blindly in Dom3?

Probably not much, so you may decide to never use it, others may decide it helps them cut down on the micro, others may use it, and get screwed by it by not reacting to changes, but honestly, those in the latter group are screwed anyway if they aren't paying attention.

Might as well complain about forgetting to set some scripts to mages or units because you didn't realize they were going to get attacked.

There's always lots of little things you should do when you have a big nation to manage, makeing some of those little things less tedious is a good thing, getting rid of those little things would be ideal, but probably not in the realm of play style for dom3.

I'm channeling MoO3 there, but that's a different game design concept entirely. Though it could work in a dom type setting/game. Think Majesty or RotK if you prefer those, but basically one leader setting policy, but not actually dirtying their hands with the nitty gritty.

Sure the nitty gritty appeals to some people, and that's fine, I'm talking about completely different games, though I see the advantages in empolying some of those game mechanics to all TBSs which suffer from mid to late game micro management hell.

[SlipperyJim]

There's always lots of little things you should do when you have a big nation to manage, makeing some of those little things less tedious is a good thing, getting rid of those little things would be ideal, but probably not in the realm of play style for dom3.

I'm channeling MoO3 there, but that's a different game design concept entirely. Though it could work in a dom type setting/game. Think Majesty or RotK if you prefer those, but basically one leader setting policy, but not actually dirtying their hands with the nitty gritty.

Sure the nitty gritty appeals to some people, and that's fine, I'm talking about completely different games, though I see the advantages in empolying some of those game mechanics to all TBSs which suffer from mid to late game micro management hell.
Ever played the original Dominions? Dominions: Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders ... aka Dom:PPP?

No re-usable commander scripts. No automated site searching. No monthly spell-casting commands. No automated pooling of gems and blood slaves.

I feel like one of those cranky old men who's always telling the kids, "When I was your age, we had to WALK to school! Uphill! Both ways! In nine feet of snow!"

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is this: Dominions 3 has seriously reduced the amount of micromanagement that we used to have. Can they go farther? Sure, there's always going to be room for improvement. But they've come a long way. :up:

[MaxWilson]

By the time your empire is big enough for logistics to become onerous, it's probably better to build troops in "factories" on the back lines and Gateway/Stygian Paths/Forest Trod them to the front lines. (Or else just build troops in front-line castles.) If you have cap-only mages that you need to shuffle to the front lines, they are probably too scarce and valuable for you to let an AI handle their transit anyway.

-Max

[licker]

Ever played the original Dominions? Dominions: Priests, Prophets, and Pretenders ... aka Dom:PPP?

No re-usable commander scripts. No automated site searching. No monthly spell-casting commands. No automated pooling of gems and blood slaves.

I feel like one of those cranky old men who's always telling the kids, "When I was your age, we had to WALK to school! Uphill! Both ways! In nine feet of snow!"

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is this: Dominions 3 has seriously reduced the amount of micromanagement that we used to have. Can they go farther? Sure, there's always going to be room for improvement. But they've come a long way. :up:

Actually, yes I did, and I held off on Dom3 for a couple of years because I simply felt the micromanagement still had not been addressed enough. I finally caved in a year ago or so because I had extra money, and wanted to support the franchise anyway, but there are still issues.

Frankly my feeling is at this point there is not really much need for massive amounts of new content in a new Dom game. There is a pressing need to clean up the UI further, fix some of these persistent micro issues, and actually make the SP game meaningful.

I understand that these things are simply not priorities, nor are they 'fun' to work on, but meh, dom will always remain in the little niche it's carved out because the overall polish is so poor.

I can live with it, most people in the community can live with it, so it may just never happen, Illwinter is a small team with limited resources. They do the best they can, and they do what keeps them interested in continuing the game. There's nothing wrong with that, just as there's nothing wrong with fans making requests, no matter how unlikely they are to actually be incorporated.

[licker]

By the time your empire is big enough for logistics to become onerous, it's probably better to build troops in "factories" on the back lines and Gateway/Stygian Paths/Forest Trod them to the front lines. (Or else just build troops in front-line castles.) If you have cap-only mages that you need to shuffle to the front lines, they are probably too scarce and valuable for you to let an AI handle their transit anyway.

-Max

This is an entirely personal opinion.

As far as I'm concerned the logistic become onerous as soon as I have capitol only troops which need to go somewhere further than I can move them in one turn. This likely happens before turn 25 in most games.

Yes yes, I can and do accept it, and deal with it, but meh, I'd just as soon not have to bother with the extra routine crap, since there's already enough of that in the game.

I also dislike not being able to set up a repeating forging order, and I dislike the way tactics are scripted, and units are generally moved around to commanders.

I get that the code base is apparently old and cranky, but I don't see that as an excuse.

[Gandalf Parker]

I get that the code base is apparently old and cranky, but I don't see that as an excuse.

That wasnt the excuse. The excuse was that it would be no fun. The devs only do it for fun and no one here is fixing that.

The reference to the code base being old and cranky was only an explanation vs any reference to the idea that it might be a quick and easy fix because its already been done and the code for it is readily available. Quick and easy changes we might be able to get. Fun additions we might be able to get (particularly if they are flavor vs coding). But since the devs have already moved on to another project then any heavy changes are unlikely and most efforts to motivate tend to be way off course (if not downright anti-motivating).

[MaxWilson]

This is an entirely personal opinion.

Why, yes. Yes it is.

-Max

[licker]

This is an entirely personal opinion.

Why, yes. Yes it is.

-Max

Then you shouldn't have said 'your empire' should you?

;)

[lch]

Actually, me writing that it won't be implemented wasn't me disapproving of your suggestions at all. It was just my educated guess about what will happen or not. ;)

[Meursy]

This is an entirely personal opinion.

Why, yes. Yes it is.

-Max

Then you shouldn't have said 'your empire' should you?

;)

Yeah Max what were you thinking! Using 'your' as a generic pronoun to express an opinion!

The cheek! :D

[licker]

Why, yes. Yes it is.

-Max

Then you shouldn't have said 'your empire' should you?

;)

Yeah Max what were you thinking! Using 'your' as a generic pronoun to express an opinion!

The cheek! :D

A generic pronoun is 'ones' or 'an' not necessarily your. :p

[Meursy]

Then you shouldn't have said 'your empire' should you?

;)

Yeah Max what were you thinking! Using 'your' as a generic pronoun to express an opinion!

The cheek! :D

A generic pronoun is 'ones' or 'an' not necessarily your. :p


Would you accept a generic possessive pronoun then? :)

[Meursy]

Doh! Darn English grammar....

[Meursy]

Yeah Max what were you thinking! Using 'your' as a generic pronoun to express an opinion!

The cheek! :D

A generic pronoun is 'ones' or 'an' not necessarily your. :p


Would you accept a generic possessive pronoun then? :)

Well, generic in the sense that most people would use it without thinking, expecting a reasonable person reading it to understand they just meant a given person's empire


>By the time your empire is big enough for logistics to become onerous...

So, this sentence of Max's could also read: "By the time one's empire is big enough to become onerous..."

And there we have a generic possessive pronoun! :)

[licker]

My point exactly!

;)

He was clearly replying to me, so the use of 'your' in that instance was easily taken as a statement regarding how I would run (or should run) an empire.

Anyway, enough of this ;) fest, we all know we're all just kidding right?

:)

[Meursy]

Oh no! I'm not kidding at all! This is possibly the most serious discussion I'll have all afternoon! No more smilies from me! Or exclams.

Even as we speak teams of ninjas armed with nazis are rappelling out of helicopters in a convergence pattern on your current location.

Woe betide the one who wished to end the smilieing.

[lch]

Ninjas armed with Nazis? I'm willing to see that spectacle.

[Ironlord]

Huzzah! My first thread has generated 6 pages of reply! There are some nicely thought out comments here. I understand that it would be tough and not fun to code for this game. I was merely posting this as a kind of wish. Maybe in the next game.

Also, I took the other poster's advice to try another nation. I chose R'yleh. Going to have to read up on that nation now.

[rdonj]

If you chose LA R'lyeh... it's going to be just as bad. Except that you're a water nation, so you either have to teleport your mages or spend many turns moving them to get them out of the water and where you need.

[Gandalf Parker]

Who has the best movements?
Personally for this I like Arcos since their cap-only mages can cheaply travel (air trapeze) to where I need them.

[rdonj]

Probably someone with forest and or mountain survival, like pangaea or ulm (ea). It's a little trickier if you want teleporting mages I suppose. Marverni would work if you only recruited carnutes and boar warriors.

[Alderanas]

No, I'm not leading an empire. Either I'm playing a game or I'm an ascendant god making important decisions while my followers handle the details. I'm also not someone who is never satisfied, so I won't just find something else annoying. I love this game. The content and strategy rocks. It would just be great to clear out some unnecessary clicking

no sorry i didnt mean to make it sound like you would nitpick the game i was just making a general statement.

[lch]

Also, I took the other poster's advice to try another nation. I chose R'yleh. Going to have to read up on that nation now.
But you didn't really take LA R'lyeh next, did you? Did you?

[Endoperez]

LA Ermor: gets freespawn units, must summon all its commanders, all population is killed in their dominion rather quickly.

LA R'lyeh: gets freespawn units, can also recruit commanders, but lots of population is killed in their dominion automatically

Everyone else except PERHAPS EA R'lyeh: recruit all their units and commanders with gold (they gather from population), conquer more provinces, growth/death scale taken during pretender creation doesn't have noticeable effects before a province has been under your dominion for 30 or so turns. After some research and site-searching, may start replacing their normal armies with summons and supporting their normal mages with summons.

[Gandalf Parker]

You might also avoid the Maenads spawning version of Pangaea.

[Ironlord]

But you didn't really take LA R'lyeh next, did you? Did you?

No. early Age. I have enough water and air to outfit my mages with air breathing items. Interesting nation. I am going to try MA Ulm next, to see what develpoing a land army is like, and play withthe item creation options.

[Loren]

Also, the .trn files would become pretty bigger to memorize all the waypoints and pathfinding etc., requiring more time and bandwith from the servers to send in pbem. Not a thing to overlook.

The only thing I feel the need of, to reduce micro, is really the forge monthly command. :smirk:

I got to thinking about this. A simple move-to-<x> command would not need to alter the saved game format at all.

If <x> could not be directly reached you take the best move to head towards <x> with the provision that if <x> is friendly it will not attack an enemy to do so and if <x> is not friendly it will always prefer friendly provinces.

If <x> can't be reached you'll get a message in the results.

"The army heading for <x> stopped in <y> because no acceptable path could be found."
"The army heading for <x> stopped in <y> because we no longer control <x>."
"The army heading for <x> stopped in <y> because ownership of <y> changed."

By doing the pathfinding calculations each turn there is nothing that needs to be saved and it will react better to changes.

This would *NOT* cover fancier things like picking up the troops on the way or the like but it avoids the headaches of changing the file format.

[Loren]

In my opinion, there are too many variables about moving armies that you really can't let the AI do this for you. Some of those just include:
- which way to move, depending on terrain

Non-issue. Algorithm (I hope the line wrapper leaves this alone!):

Data structures: An array with one cell per province. Each cell holds a turn count and a pointer to a province. Queue of provinces and turns used. Inner queue of provinces & movement remaining.
Load the stating province into the queue.
Repeat
Read province from queue, add to inner queue.
Repeat
Read province from queue.
Iterate across neighbors, add them to the inner queue along with remaining movement.
If the province in the map is empty, fill it with the turns used and the origin of the current move segment. Add the province to the outer queue.
Until inner queue is empty.
Until the target province has data or the outer queue is empty.
If the target has data:
Current = Target.
While Map[Current].ComesFrom <> Origin do
Current = Map[Current].ComesFrom
Move the army to current.

Runtime: This is linearly dependent on the number of provinces * the average number of provinces you can reach in one turn.

- what to do about enemy provinces and/or enemy attacks along the way

Recalculate every turn.

- adding units encountered in provinces along the way

The simple answer, albeit with a file format change wouldbe to add two movement modes:
Gather like--the commander attempts to add any units that match what he's already got. They are added to the same groups.
Gather any--the commander picks up any troops he can.

- how to handle supply problems when moving with multiple big armies

See my previous approach. Run the calculation as above twice. Once normally, once rejecting a province if adding the current army to the already-planned contents of the province would result in starvation. If the second run is no more than one turn longer simply use it. If it's more than one turn longer look at what's eating the supply--if it's armies on move orders then wait, otherwise take the longer route. (Actually, internally you would do both calculations at the same time.)

This handles almost all cases. It will fail in a case where you need to distribute the armies through multiple bottlenecks--they'll all queue up for the shorter one and won't optimize the food use (Say, A needs 100, B needs 80 and C needs 60. The province feeds 160. This approach makes A go first, B & C wait.) It will also fail if two armies are trying to pass each other in opposite directions through a two-province bottleneck where neither province will feed both armies (This case will be detected, though, and you'll get a message.) Such bottlenecks are rare and armies crossing like that is also rare.

In general, I think that even a sophisticated solution for this, which would take an immense amount of work to set up, would be inadequate and require constant fine-tuning all the time anyway. Shortcuts to pool gems and so on that are already present in the game are usually pretty simple stuff, and as soon as it gets a little more complex (e.g. remote site searching) people are not too impressed with the results. Something like army movement is decidedly non-trivial to me.

In a situation like this an exhaustive search is a realistic option. The only time I've seen pathfinding problems in a game that could use such an approach involved fog of war issues or improper handling of an impossible route. The army came along and found the path blocked. It turned back to take another route, once it got far enough away that the blocker was lost in the fog it turned around to take the short route again. (The real culprit here was mishandled fog of war--stationary items in the fog should be as you last saw them, not vanish.)

[Loren]

That said, I totally agree with lch's point about the drawbacks in the automated remote site-searching. I use it gladly, but there are a few shortcomings in the way it determines which sites to search. On the one hand, I really don't want to waste gems and mage-turns to search captured enemy capitals. I already know which site will be in Niefel's capital -- it's Niefelheim, thanks -- and I don't need to search for it. On the other hand, it would also be good if my remote site searchers would be willing to search a province that had already been searched by a level-1 or level-2 mage, because that first search could have missed a site or two. I gladly use the automated remote site-searching, and I consider it to be a huge boon to the gamer, but it's definitely not perfect.

The basic problem is that it doesn't attempt to rank targets, it's using too simplistic an approach.

It shouldn't be too hard to build a table of precalculated odds: Current search level, terrain type and path being searched. The mage should consider each province and cast at the one with the highest probability. Terrain type capital would have a zero probability.

[lch]

Loren, that's very cute, but I'm afraid it still won't make this feature be implemented any sooner.

You'd probably have a better chance of convincing JK to make the AI scriptable and then implement the exhaustive province movement algorithm yourself. Which still is a very dim chance, if any at all.

[Gandalf Parker]

Nice pseudo coding Loren.
It might have stood a chance in the early days. But it does show that a change would not be fast and simple as the other things we have been getting in patches.

[MaxWilson]

Yeah Max what were you thinking! Using 'your' as a generic pronoun to express an opinion!

The cheek! :D

Mea culpa. :)

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Who has the best movements?
Personally for this I like Arcos since their cap-only mages can cheaply travel (air trapeze) to where I need them.

Helheim is kind of cool that way too. Also, you can use Stygian Paths to shuttle armies around. With high-MR, stealthy troops, Helheim is tailor-made for Stygian Paths now that the bug is fixed (yahoo!).

Astral nations with tough troops and/or battlemages, like Ashdod and R'lyeh, have access to Teleport/Gateway/Astral Travel. Ashdod can drop in thugged-out, blessable Adonim using Crystal Coin + Teleport. (You might think LA Agartha could pull similar tricks w/ their access to astral + death, but in practice I've found that they need too many boosters for it to feel worth it.)

-Max

[MaxWilson]

Also, I took the other poster's advice to try another nation. I chose R'yleh. Going to have to read up on that nation now.
But you didn't really take LA R'lyeh next, did you? Did you?

[Laughter]

-Max