[Saxon]

I got the game two days ago and took some time off from Dominions to give it a whirl. I thought I would put down some of my thoughts here, as some of them may make their way to a patch.

To start out with, I installed at lunch time, planning just to have a look at the game. I ended up getting back to work late, so I was pulled into the game. When I got home I fired it up and played another couple of hours. I had a positive experience and like the game. As such, I wanted to say thanks for all the hard work that went into it and throw in some ideas to make things stronger.

When the match is over, you have to click to exit. You then have to immediately click again. There is no reason to click twice. If it can not be avoided, the button you press should not require you to move the mouse up the screen and hit a windows style button.

The game buttons are graphically nice. However, a few times you get a windows style button which is ugly and makes you remember you are playing a computer game. Notably, damage from potions is very ugly and the disease button could be nicer.

The graphics generally beat the other Shrapnel products hands down. Nice work.

The season is very long, a shorter one would build the pace of things. Right now, I put one old, good stats guy to fight and leave a young guy to train. I do not even remember who the young one is or worry about him. I played for about three hours Last night on the standard settings and did not finish a second season. I eventually moved to one second delay, but it still takes a long time to get anywhere.

May I suggest that you have one more option for the fights? Allow me to sim my match just as fast as the computer ones.

There is no reason to win! I am serious and this is the thing that had me playing Dominions before the night ended. You fight all these matches and get nothing. As far as I can tell from the documentation and experience, your warrior does not gain a thing from fighting, other than the risk of injury. You gain nothing if you win or lose. As far as it goes, the only in game rewards are from advertising and betting. Those are nice, but it is a fighter management game! Sure, you have the championship at the end of a very long season, but even that does not give you cash or skills. There need to be more in game reasons to fight to win. Right now I could get the worst warrior, run him in fights, then make my money on betting and ads. If I ran the best warrior around, I would still make my money on betting and ads, it feels exactly the same.

One of the text that come when you lose a match states something to the effect of “Your man slumps down, all out of power. He has won the match.” If Derek could check his list of winning texts, I am sure it would show up and he could change “won” to “lost.”

My next point is a personal style thing, so take it as you will. Too much is hidden. I like the idea of having some intangibles, but I found there to be too little feedback to work with this. Only a couple of stats matter in a fight, a few more would have been nice. Similarly, the only guidance I can give a warrior in the fight is one of three levels. I just do not feel that involved, the managing is almost as simple as the advertising.

I used to play Duelmasters, a very similar PBM game. It included a skills system for the warriors. They had different styles and could learn a set of skills such as Parry, Feint, Lunge and so forth. This was on top of their base statistics. I think that the Coliseum stats system is much better, but think that the additional depth created by a skills system would be welcome.

In summary, I have had fun with the game, but as it stands right now, I do not know how long it will hold me. Perhaps it is too subtle and I am to impatient, but I seem to have limited control over things and my warriors performance seems to have little impact on the game.