'combat' simulator' possiblities in Dom3?

[AMF]

Noobie question here (I was a noobie to Dom2, and I eagerly anticipate being just as new -- and bad at -- Dom3)

I just realized, however, that a large part of my noobie-screwiness and general incompetence was due to the fact that I never had a good instinct for the relative strengths and combat abilities of the units, and how they all interacted. I never figured out the various little powers and strategies when it came down to the fighting.

So, here's what I was wondering: in Space Empires IV, there is a 'combat simulator' where you can set up a combat and watch it run to see how the two sides do. Being a slow learner and not very detailed oriented, this was very educational for me.

Is there likely to be any way to easily do this in Dom3? I would love to be able to pick and chose units, set up two sides, and then step-through the combat to see how it goes and, thereby, get smarter. Any recommendations out there?

Of course, I do realize that half the fun of the game is figuring these things out over time, but, still, I was curious about this...

Thanks,

AMF

[PDF]

Funnily, there was a combat simulator in Dom1, but the feature disappeared with Dom2 (and is not in Dom3 neither).

Still it's rather easy to make a "battle map", and setup an army in a map/scenario. What is difficult is to setup the research level determining which spells can be used...

[Boron]

PDF said:
Funnily, there was a combat simulator in Dom1, but the feature disappeared with Dom2 (and is not in Dom3 neither).

Still it's rather easy to make a "battle map", and setup an army in a map/scenario. What is difficult is to setup the research level determining which spells can be used...

Hm but at least you can mod in a super researcher and gem generator and thus research any spell you want to test in 1 turn on your testmap .

Unfortunately i never owned dom1, only played the demo, because i discovered the series only when dom2 was already out. How flexible was the dom1 combat simulator?
Could you simulate complex things there too?
Like several AQs with custom equipment and scripts vs. e.g. a 300 devil army with buffs?

[Gandalf Parker]

For Dom2 one combat simulator was a small map of about 6 provinces where all of the provinces were connected. With map commands you could do things like:
Pangaea starts in province #1
Pythium starts in province #6

Pangaea starts with minotaur leader named Psuedo
Psuedo starts with X number of centaurs

Pythium starts with commander
commander starts with X number of

Anyway you get the picture. You just start the game with that map and both Pangaea and Pythium as human players. Then have the two armies attack each other. You can setup any combat you want. Even assign abilities and equipment. Just start new games to get a new combat. After starting the game a dozen times or so then you should have a pretty good idea of how things work out. Edit the numbers slightly and try again.

Magic is abit more difficult to test. But you can assign starting magics with a simple mod I think.

Someone could probably write a program that accepts the players desires and writes out a .map/.dm file to achieve it.

[PDF]

@Boron
Dom1 simulator was rather basic IIRC and let you only pit 2 opposing nations against each other, without ability to equip the leaders.