Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

I've been playing the demo lately and I find this game quite intriguing, but one thing I read today does not sit with me well at all. According to the FAQ at strategywiki.org, Curses and Horror Marks are permanent and cannot be removed by any means.
Permanent, irreparable "damage" is a pet peeve of mine in games. It just really irritates me.
Therefore before I even consider buying this game, I have to know - can you mod in a spell or effect or item to get rid of them? Or is it hard-"lol you're screwed, deal with it"-coded?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

No, you cannot remove them in any way. They are permanent. I do not think there is a spell effect that can remove either one and even if there was, you would need to mod one through trial and error. And spell modding is the most arcane, convoluted aspect of modding.

Curses and horror marks may be annoying, but they are in the end not dealbreakers. Not for me at least, but they may be for you if you indeed feel as strongly about it as your post indicates.

In any case, welcome to the forum and I hope you will buy the game and stay around. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Curses and horror marks are no big deal really.

I certainly would not let it put me off buying this great game.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

..jeez.

I can sort of understand odd game design decisions for something like Battle for Wesnoth with its deterministic combat system since it's a free game and it's made the way it was because the developers like it that way and hey, it's free. That being they case they can easily say "You don't like it, go make your own game!" For a commercial game, however.. it's um, rather odd to not only implement such a frustration, but to actually make it impossible for players to at least modify it. I'll say this, that's quite a hardcore commitment to insisting upon a rule. :O
For me, however, it is indeed a deal breaker. Too bad, the game has (Or rather had; after making the thread I saw the forum FAQ that showed that the devs refuse to budge on this point and therefore won't be changing it) a lot of potential. Maybe for Dominions 4 the developers can be persuaded/dragged kicking and screaming into the present, carebear times where you can save whenever you want at multiple points, you don't lose XP when you die, and there are no insta-death spike pits. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/tongue.gif (Oh wait, wrong genre..)
[rant](And a Level 1 spell no less - yeeeeesh! Even 2nd Edition AD&D wasn't THAT broken in its harshness.)[/rant]

*EDIT*

OK, one other avenue before I give up on this game - is it possible to mod the game so that all units, items, beings, events, and anything else that CAUSES these effects are REMOVED? You can't suffer from a permanent disability if it can't be created in the first place..

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

I am sorry that curse and horror mark have made you decide to not buy a game that IMO is one of the best strategy games ever made. Curse is annoying but having a character Horror Marked can be rather entertaining. The game has tremendous potential and updates/new mods that come out on a very regular basis keep it very new and exciting.

I do think that it would be cool to have a save game feature, but there is something to be said for not having one. It makes the decisions-making process much more important before you tell the game to run the next turn.

I think the reason many people have come to Dominions is because they are actually sick of the 'Carebear' mentality of many games and want the added challenge of a game that doesnt give you every opportunity to 'fix' any problems your choices may have caused.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

I don't know if it was changed in a patch, but one thing that really, really left me with a desire to reload was the first time I fiddled around with Alchemy and lost all but a single Astral Pearl. Oops. Forget the end turn button, I just want a "Mulligan" on that!

Other games have special "Iron Man" settings if the player wants to go that route - but it isn't forced on you. It's a shame Dominions doesn't give you a choice - for that, and for the unforgiving nature of some of its status ailments.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Hey. First, let me say that this game is really super and you should still get it even with curse and horror marks, which I have honestly never found any trouble.

A possible solution is this: mod the horrors into some stupid, weak dude. This way, even if they show up and attack, they will never cause any harm. I think this is a simple enough solution, and it requires only basic mod ability(I would say).

As for curses, I see a couple possible solutions: 1) you could equip a cursed commander unit with a luck granting item, this would not remove the curse but would lessen its effects in an indirect way(does not actually counter the curse, though). 2) use an item, mod, or healing commander to remove the harmful afflictions that a curse increases the chance of getting. This would not elimenate the curse, but it would keep it from causing trouble.

These are just a few I came up with now on the spot.

I hope any of that helps. Don't cheat yourself out of a totally cool game over this issue (I do not think it is that big a deal, but I respect your opinion). In my great length of time playing this game, horrors and curses have never been a problem for me. Anyway, think it over. I am sure there might be even more circumlocutions to these difficulties, by moding if nothing else. I will think some more about it, too.

By the way, welcome to this great forum.

Cya.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

You can mod the specific "Curse" and "Horror Mark" spells to cost 30 gems, and be research level 9 in all paths, if you really want to remove them from the game. You can copystat a militia onto all the units that have a horror mark attack. Or you can copystat a militia onto all the horror units. I'm not familiar with item modding but there may be something similar you can do there.

So while it's not possible to mod in a cure for these afflictions, it is possible to prevent them from occurring in the first place, if you really want to.

Personally, I think both curses and horror marking add to the game. "Curse" will make you think of a new use for a thug you've been using to slug it out on the front lines. "Horror Mark" makes you think of a strategy to keep a unit effective day to day, but also able to defend itself against a horror attack. Or for uber items which horror mark, you'll be more likely to use them with a disposable unit instead of putting them on a unit which you don't want to die.

But all units can die in this game anyway, insta-death (or effective insta-death) can occur to any unit. It's not Sim City http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Why only 30 gems? Why not 99999 or 255 or 65k (What was that upper limit..) or, if not a sum greater than the maximum number you can possess, something equal to it. I guess it would crash the game if you tried to make them "Level 10"?

Could you explain the "copystat"? I think I understand the process, (i.e., X-Lord Grand Daemon Prince Cross Bursting Machine Gun Punch now has 2 HP and will die when breathed on) but not how it will ensure that the units that possess the abilities will be totally prevented from using them (Even if it's a 0.0009% chance that they'll live long enough..)

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

30 gems because it's more than I've ever seen the AI carry, and I'm worried about breaking something by exceeding the carry-able amount.


Horror Marking is scary because it causes scary units to be summoned to attack your commanders.

You can change any unit in the game with a mod like this:

#selectmonster 649
#clear
#copystats 578
#copyspr 578
#descr "This used to be scary but now it is a Bog Beast"
#end

Do that to the lesser horror, horror, and the doom horror (instead of 649) and now horror marking is sadly not what it used to be.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

I think that the highest gem cost allowed is 327 (signed 16 bit divided by 100). You can disable the spells entirely by making them level -1.

The abilities of the unit are overwritten when you do a copystats.

As for the saved games - there are scripts that will automatically back up the save game as you play, and if you make a mistake with alchemy (or any other sort of mistake, actually), you can just start your turn over from the begining by "quitting without saving" and then reopening the game.

The reason the game does not have a conventional save-game feature is because it actually keeps track of the turns as individual files - if you look in the savegame directory you will see what I mean. This makes it easy to handle many different setups in multiplayer.

As for horrormarking and cursing being permanent - cursing doesn't actually *hurt* you, if you are reasonably capable of removing afflictions, you can just ignore it. If not, the game has a great many more incurable injuries and curses are the least of your concerns.

Horrormarking is basically a slow-and-inescapable-death. You can delay being killed by horrors but every time you fight one your horrormarks will get more severe, so more and more horrors will attack you, etc. etc. Personally I think this is cool. From a backstory standpoint, horrormarking means that the horrors are aware of you, and how you would "heal" this....

Neither of these features of the game is crucial, in any case; if you avoid using horrormarking or cursed items yourself, you can mostly ignore them.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Disable entirely sounds good.

So the "copystats" units look the same, they have the same name, but their stats are now garbage and they lack the old stats? Would it be possible, then, to create a new unit stat that is the same, except without their Horror Mark ability? Or do you have to use pre-existing ones?

D'oh! You're right! I completely forgot about the "Start the turn over from the beginning" thing.

As I said before, I just really hate incurable ailments. Stuff like that has always bugged me, be it Essence loss in Shadowrun or this. Regular afflictions bug me too, but knowing that they can be gotten rid of (Albeit with some difficulty in most cases) is "satisfactory." I'm obsessive, that way. I like to keep things in proper working order, maintain armies with nice round numbers of units, and no voices complaining about their backs. So something that increases the frequency of me having to "fix" my Perfect Order is a source of great vexation. Curious though, what are these other "incurable" injuries you speak of? I was not aware of any Afflictions that had no method of removal (Even the Old Age induced ones can be fought off..)

And Horror Marking.. well that really cheeses me off. Especially the idea of using it on a pretender god. From there on it's basically "rush rush rush" to end the game before you succumb to oblivion, and that's another annoyance of mine. I like to take my sweet time. Backstory wise, there's any number of ways, I would think, to justify removing it. A Global Enchantment that severs the link between the two worlds, for example. Even if dispelled, the horrors would have since lost track of their quarry. How's that?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Well, this is a war game, not an RPG. You have to approach it from the standpoint that everything you have is expendable, *especially* in multiplayer where your enemies will go to great lengths to cripple your stuff. So from a game standpoint, the fact that faerie queens are available to remove afflictions is almost irrelevant, because the cost involved is so high that it's almost always a better deal to just make new stuff to replace the injured.

I agree that they should add an effect code that lets you remove horrormarking and/or curses, even if they never use it themselves. But it's hardly a high priority because it just doesn't matter that much.

Losing your pretender is not that bad an outcome, actually. Especially in the late game. It's also likely to happen whether or not you get horrormarked, at least in multiplayer, because your opponents are going to be devoted to doing you in http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif.

You can also just raise pretenders from the dead repeatedly by prayer.

In multiplayer, curses and horrormarking are aspects of a strategy that would be unviable if they were easy to remove - and their effects are such that if there were ways to remove them that were very difficult, they'd almost never be worth it.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

I can actually save faster with this game (using WinRAR) than with most (if not all) other games. The only problem with the lack of a Save function for me, is the necessity to play in windowed mod.
As for Curse and Horror Mark I just stopped noticing them a long time ago. Negative events can kill your nation far easier than if all your units and commanders had one of each.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Well I had trouble getting used to the "permanent" stuff too.

Immortal pretenders r pretty neat in keeping those away. Heal afflictions, respawn if horrors manage to kill em etc.

Im slowly starting to like the permanent stuff alot. Mass horror mark ur enemies SCs http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif I almost laugh when i think about it.

Its truly a wargame in terms of having to really cope with losses instead of just clicking respawn button and losing 2 gold pieces. Or loading.

Only game I have ever played this much is warcraft 3.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

A curse is negligible. Slap an Amulet of Luck on the commander and balance it out. Horror marks can be nasty, yes, but until you get a bunch of them, the chance of a Horror showing up to kill you are pretty slim.

Almost all of my Pretenders end up getting cursed at some point. And Horror marked too. It doesn't take them out of the game. There's nothing more fun than a badass Pretender making hamburger out of every Horror that comes it's way.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Mmmm, Kurgiburgers! Looks yummy.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Zogundar, you can disable spells like Horror Mark, Curse, Doom and the one that gives several horror marks in a limited area by setting their research level as -1 or something, it takes them completely out of the game.

Then the only sources of curses and horror marks would be items and certain magical sites. The sites that do that are very rare compared to the total number of sites in the game and you unfortunately cannot mod out the curse/horror mark properties, but you can mod the entire sites out of the game by giving them a locmask of 0. For references, you need the Dom3 DBm which is linked in my sig, because I sure as hell don't remember them all, never mind the site numbers.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

It's a lot of effort to go to, especially as stuff will still die OH NOES.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

What about the B9 death curse? Doesn't it horror mark someone that is already cursed, or am I just insane?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

That would be an insanely nasty thing to do to SCs/thugs if it were the case.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

B9 death curse can give horror mark, yes. But it's still crap.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

To join the growing consensus ... curses and horror-marking are totally manageable.

Curses are pretty common, but they don't do any harm by themselves. All they do is encourage you to rack up afflictions. Therefore, if you can deal with the afflictions, you don't need to worry about being cursed. Try Gift of Health -- it's Enchantment-5 (reasonably simple) and available to all nations. Even if your nation has no Nature mages to cast it, you can easily find some indy mages with Nature or make sure that your pretender can cast it.

Horror marks do indeed suck, but they're not common at all. In fact, as long as you stay away from horror-marking items, you'll probably be able to finish an entire game without ever getting a horror mark. Unless you're playing MP, in which case you should count on it. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

When you're playing SP, Dominions 3 can effectively be played as if it were an RPG. Trot out Gift of Health, smashing SC designs, and all sorts of other goodies ... the AI hardly ever targets such things. Now, MP is a whole different game, or so I've heard....

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

They are manageable but flavorwise I thing a petty Lizard Shaman should not even be allowed to annoy an Arch Lich or Elder Dragon. This sounds more like the job for "The Arch Mage of the enemy kingdom, wielding the sacred crystal coin" ... or someone with an equally long title. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

That's another thing that bugs me.

I experienced Horror Marks for the first time yesterday. Is it normal for a caster, a pretender god in this case, to cast spells until they collapse from exhaustion and lose by default? Because that happened when they were attacked by a Horror. I've also seen it happen with some other 1v1 mage fights. They cast spells until they go over 100 Fatigue and then die.

Another thing: I came across an event that supposedly "Curses" your troops. The Priestess that was in the province had no troops and was not cursed herself, so I assume it only works if you have regular troops there. But since, if I were to purchase this game, I would want to get rid of ALL curse causing sources (Except maybe the items for which, I assume, you are under no obligation to create or equip), would be it be possible to remove this event?

One more question: Can you import save games from the demo into the full version and resume playing?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Mages with no other orders will cast spells, unless somebody in melee range prevents them from doing so (random chance).

Demo saved games should still be compatible with the full version.

And yes, curses are generally pretty manageable, especially for nations with lots of nature magic (regeneration to cut down affliction risk, GoH to heal them) or recuperating-units (like most Pangaean units).

Something like D9B9 would be an irritating dual-bless, in that you might not want to throw expensive melee SCs against hordes of cheap D9B9 flags, but that's sufficiently expensive that it -should- be at least a little mean. And those flags will still die en masse to archers or Blade Wind (granted, your Blade Winder might be horror-marked, but the cost might well be a fair trade).

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

The events that curse troops curse a random number of troops in the province and commanders may get cursed just like normal grunts. I'm not sure if it works on some percentage chance that is rolled for each unit separately. If it is, the priestess may have gotten lucky and avoided it and with no additional targets, no real consequences.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

LA Rlyeh and a few other things may also cause insanity, which is incurable afaik. It sort of sounds like this isn't the game for you.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

My opinion is that it's very strange to let this little part of the game be the thing to buy or nto buy.. I mean if you had a RPG playing with 1 char and that one get'd permanently nerfed by negative stats.. OK.. I'd not like that (but then those games allow saving usually) but in here you have 100's 1000's even 10000's of units.. what happens to one (even if it's your pretender) isn't that big of a deal.

On the saving part, the one thing why I like MP games (I think) in any game is because obviously it's more of a challange but also becuase I can't reload.. playing SP dominions is like most MP games you can't really say.. ow last 10 turns I made the wrong decision to war this nation.. you have to deal with it.. SP dominions isn't that hard.. if you could reload it'd just be no fun.

Aezeal

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

You can reload your single player game. To save just copy your savegame directory.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

yeah lol but that is a bit of a hassle, not having a button is enough for me (I mean .. as I said I'm actually prefering not being able to save.. without the button the temptation is gone http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/laugh.gif)

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Hi everyone,
I'm new on the boards, so, hello again ;>
Curses never bugged me, but I feel that horror marks are too easy to put on people, seems like every John the Astral Mage is able to do so.
Guess it would be better if HM would be astral 3, not 2. It would prevent many frustrating situations when your combat pretender gets marked by an indie mage or by cheap, mass produced national ones.
My question is, would someone be so nice to make a small mod which would put the "horror mark" spell a level higher in astral? Or tell me how can I do it myself?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Eh sure, why not.

Stick this into any mod you play with (or better still, make a personal preference mod for your SP games):

#selectspell "Horror Mark"
#pathlevel 0 3
#end

Modding the game is enjoyable, so I do recommend reading the modding.pdf and learning about modding, and (after you've gotten more comfortable with the game) examining other people's mods to learn what makes them tick.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

There's no way to see it, but Horror Marks vary in power. One Horror Mark cast at your pretender will send any horrors called to the battle against him, but won't call in any horrors. Or if it does, it's one of the Lesser Horrors which can die to one well-placed spell or one hit from a magic weapon. There's an Evocation spell, Astral Geyser, which causes more severe horror-marking, and takes Astral 3 IIRC.

You have every right not to like the Horror Mark spell, though, and if you make a mod of your own, put this line in:

#modname "test"

That's enough to make the mod work, and you can add any other commands into it afterwards. New mods only affect games created with the new mod active; changing mod on the fly makes the changes more or less immediately. It might take a turn until e.g. the research level of a spell changes, but most changes are instant.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

The lack of a savegame feature in single player gives the game too high of a learning curve in my opinion. The game would seem a lot more accessible to people playing the demo if they could make a mistake, play a few turns, realize the mistake, and start again from an earlier point, having learned from their error.

As it is, the game forces you to live with every mistake, which can cause many, many restarts, especially on smaller maps.

Also, in a single player game, who is offended if I re-load if my pretender dies a cheap death and loses one level of all their magic? I once had a Pretender die because my own longbowmen shot her in the back as the enemy armies were routed. That's just idiotic and the game had to be completely restarted.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

I feel it's more important to live with the mistakes you make and continue playing. For ANY multiplayer game where all your opponents are human there's no option for reloading a previous saved game either. I feel the ability to reload saved games originally became available so developers could easily investigate bugs and the feature remained so if bugs or computer crashes occurred the gamer would not lose as much time.
Reloading a saved game every time you make a mistake is choosing to live with a crutch so things will always be easier.

Simple solution... don't restart... live with the mistake and be stronger by fighting onwards even if your pretender and prophet died in the last battle.

If you absolute cannot stomach making mistakes while learning a game then save the specific folders via manually or download a tool.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Living with the mistakes you made is one thing, but living with bad luck that really hurts your strategy is quite another. While being good at both is nice, when you want to know how well your strategy can do you want to avoid the latter. It makes it easier to see if you had done any of the former.

It's a design choice that has been with the game from the very beginning of the series. Illwinter's other game, Conquest of Elysiun II, had save/load capability. I don't know why they chose not to include it, but they could have a mindset similar to NTJedi's.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

If the game contains a single player component, it should contain modern conventions on saving. Its that simple. To argue that people shouldn't be able to save and reload because they should have to live with their mistakes doesn't make sense. If you dont' want to save and reload your game, that's your decision. I respect people who have the patience (and, more importantly, the free time) to struggle through trial and error type mistakes and play games to their conclusion whatever the result.

I don't have that kind of time, plus I'm trying to learn the game and I don't want to put 40-50 turns into a game only to find out that a decision I made on turn 10 was disastrous. I have to restart enough because of silly pretender designs. I don't really think its necessary to force me to restart because my pretender dies on turn 15 after having been asleep and I'm hopelessly behind in expansion.

Again, I respect people who play the multiplayer and enjoy the great challenge offered by this game. I like the game as is. But I do think that the game could stand to offer the CHOICE to be a little less harsh and challenging. It would keep new players interested longer and allow them to appreciate the depth of the game. Everyone I've introduced the demo to so far has abandoned the game because of the steep learning curve and the difficulty of the game (random events that kill an early hero, deaths of pretenders in battle, things that a reload feature could minimize, are common complaints from people I know who have tried to play the game). There's just no reason for the game not to feature real saves and to limit its appeal to only the hardest of the hardcore strategy gamer.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

I'd argue that it isn't about living with mistakes, it's about realistically considering your choices. Playing fast and loose with a pretender (unless you're a very experienced player) tends to result in a quick death of that pretender. SP games vary significantly in difficulty based on the settings you use, and if the game is too difficult, simply tone down the AI.

I confess that at first I found the concept of not saving pretty discomforting and a little scary. So I manually copied and pasted saves for my games, for probably the first 3-4 months of playing. Eventually, I started saving less and less, and then finally stopped. I still used a crutch of playing with an immortal pretender for a while, but eventually got over that as well (I think I've played with a Lich more than 15 times).

Anyway, the reason I eventually stopped isn't because I mastered the game or something, it's because it's actually more fun to think things through, and feel like my choices have consequences even if I make a wrong one.

Obviously, I can't tell you what would be more fun to you, but I can advise you that turning down the difficulty or playing with an immortal, (and not getting too attached to prophets, who come and go) is preferable to the feeling of fearlessness & carelessness that you get with a save/load game.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

If you choose to save and reload your games, that's fine and your decision, but you'll need to download tools or manually copy the save folders. The game was designed without the save/reload crutch for a reason and won't change at this late phase.

The reason is because gamers use the save/reload as a crutch to avoid consequences of making bad choices. Poor computer opponents NEVER have a chance against the human opponents who NEED the let me always win save/reload option.
Your options...
1) manually save the required folders as backup and choose to give yourself an unfair advantage over the AI opponents.

2) use a tool to save the required folders as backup and choose to give yourself an unfair advantage over the AI opponents.

3) play another game which will have the save/reload option which will provide the cheating edge you desire.

4) toss in the towel and start a new game.

5) continue fighting to the bitter end... win or lose you keep fighting down to the last man/creature/thing.


** If you play any games with friends or family I guarantee they would all want their ally to be someone who chooses option #5 .

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Your arguments are incredibly far out of the mainstream.

I can rebut most of your points by simply saying that being a human player I have a massively unfair advantage over the AI opponents.

The game should feature a save/reload system. I know how to save and reload the game by copying the folders. I rarely use it, but I'm not going to lose a 70 turn game because of a bug (which happen all the time and have permanent consequences), a flukish event (pretender being killed by her own archers while pursuing routed enemies), or some other silly event.

I've just purchased Dominions 3 and played only three games deeper than 50 turns (none to completion, because a 100% victory is just tedious), and I've only been challenged by the AI very briefly and this was without any save or reloading.

And only people with abo****ely unlimited free time can afford to play a Dominions 3 game to the end when you are clearly going to lose. I don't have unlimited free time and I doubt my friends and family care how I play in single player.

Again, your response is bizarre and its hard for me to believe you were completely serious.

Edit: I also consider it very likely that the reason there is no save/reload feature in the game is because of the over-emphasis on PBEM and multiplayer. I find it hard to believe that a game that completely neglects its AI to the extent that Doms3 does is attempting to make some broader point about single player gamers being too soft because of excessive saving and reloading. I think the lack of this feature is more a result of lack of emphasis than some kind of ideological purity, but I'm sure the developers appreciate their fans ascribing this level of sophistication to their motives and results.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Meh... there are arguments in favour of saving being a faff. It's like ironman mode in an RPG - where once your character dies they never come back. Personally I like it, but I can see why people sometimes get annoyed about it. If it bothers you though, it's easy to either save manually occasionally (if you play in windowed mode - which I highly recommend - it's the job of a few seconds), or even write a little batch file/script to do it if you are inclined towards programming. If you are so inclined then I'm sure people here would be willing to give help or even write the thing if you really wanted.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

Also I don't really get many/any bugs (apart from quirks in the game like graphs disappearing for dead players etc) - what kind of thing do you get?

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

I've twice had my Prophet die in the winter and not be able to create another for many, many turns. I'll admit that I didn't reload on the second occasion (because replaying the 7 turns I let run hoping the bug wouldn't recur was less appealing to me than simply being without a prophet indefinetely), but that option should be present.

I've also noticed other tiny bugs related to random events that I would prefer to simply avoid by reloading the previous turn and avoiding the event altogether.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

The prophet bug comes from disease damage being applied twice in one spesific month, IIRC. You had very bad luck getting that bug twice while playing relatively little.

What kind of event bugs? Do you mean the way events don't take sieges into account? Or hailstorms/whatever inappopriate things in caves? The shortlist of known bugs only lists three event bugs, and the third is underwater-only so you probably didn't see that.

Re: Remove Curses and Horror Marks?
 

I don't know that this thread should become a bug discussion, especially when I could be confusing "bug" with "feature I don't understand", but the one event related bug I've seen focused on the event where a group of heroes arrive to liberate a province from my harsh rule. That event occurred in a province with an army moving out of it and the army disappeared. There was only a battle with the province defense and the army neither fought the heroes nor arrived at its destination. I don't have a savegame from that game to prove this, but I would have loved to have been able to reload the previous turn and avoid restarting because I lost an army early in the game on a smallish map.

Bugs & AI
 

I get bugs in virtually every game I play - and some days I quit playing for a few days or weeks because of it. I have had a few calls - but the number of times it has occurred has been truly annoying...

Whether this was the abysal, infernal furnaces, the armor of returning, blesses on area affect weapons, besieged by skeletons when I conquered a terrritory or whatever.. there are LOTS of bugs in the game.

As for AI being challenging - I find that you can do more to make a game challenging by the AI's you put in the games and the behaviours you ascribe to them.

So for example, choosing 6-8 strong nations and make them aggressive will give you a tougher fight than early age ermor, abysia, bandar log and making them impossible.
Increase starting strength to 9, decrease special occurence - I routinely get games that are enjoyable into 80 turns...

Re: Bugs & AI
 

I find bugs to be extremely rare. I've been playing since (a bit before) I registered on these forums (of course, I'm including dom2 play), and I've seen very very few bugs, and maybe once in my entire Dominions gaming "career" have I encountered a show-stopping bug.

As for a ingame saves... I don't think they are really needed. You can save on your own if you really want to, but there is almost no need for saves, and considering how things work right now, it will only make the interface more complicated and will waste developer time.

Last time this was discussed, someone nicely provided a way to autosave, so here it is:
Make a shortcut to the game that will run it with the --preexec command line argument, make it something like --preexec DomSave.bat (DomSave.bat will be the file that automagically saves for you, and preexec means it will be called everytime before hosting a turn.)
To make the DomSave.bat file simply create a new text file and write down something like:
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\*.2h" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak3\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\*.2h" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savedgames\GAMETOBESAVED\*.2h " "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\ftherlnd" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak3\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\ftherlnd" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savedgames\GAMETOBESAVED\fthe rlnd" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\*.trn" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak3\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\*.trn" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak2\"
copy "D:\games\dominions3\savedgames\GAMETOBESAVED\*.tr n" "D:\games\dominions3\savebak\bak1\"
Then save the file and change its extension to .bat instead of .txt.
Also, create a savebak directory and in it bak1 and bak2 and bak3.
What this will do is copy all save related files from the game you want to save into the savebake\bak1, the bak1 to bak2 and the bak2 to bak3, essentially giving you three backups that will continuously overwrite each other, so if you want to go back one turn you go to bak1, if you want two turns you go to bak2 and if you want three turns go to bak3.
Obviously, you will need to change the paths to whatever is right for your computer.

I didn't use it much, and I don't use it anymore, but I still had it on my computer, maybe it will help you http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Bugs & AI
 

I'm going to leave this discussion at this point alone. There's just no point in arguing that ingame saves are needed, when most of the people playing are willing to come online, concede there are bugs that can severely impact play, but then turn around and argue that ingame saves aren't necessary.

Nearly every game that comes out, in any genre, has an ingame saving feature. It certainly is in every strategy game (turn based or RTS, from Civilizations to Gal Civ to Europa Universalis to Starcraft to whatever you want to name).

It is not a crutch that allows people to play poorly.

It is not a cheat that allows human players to outwit the AI (frankly if you need a cheat to beat the AI in Dom 3, strategy games might not be your gaming genre).

It is a convenience that keeps a person from abandoning a very long game in progress (and Dominions is a very long, deep game) and having to restart because of a bug, a flukish event, or just because something happens you didn't want to happen (like forgetting to produce or a move a unit). This is single player, against the AI, and this condescending attitude that people here have for a feature that is incredibly basic in any PC (or even console game at this point) is unfathomable.

As for it being hard to implement, if it just takes me 1 second to do it on my own, then it can't possibly be very difficult to implement.

Re: Bugs & AI
 

I and llamabeast both agreed that we can see why some people would like to have it. NTJedi and Agrajag didn't agree, but told you how to do it yourself. The tone used wasn't the best possible, but I hope you see that it's overy defensive - not hostile.

Frankly, at this point, we couldn't get this changed or added in, even if the whole community was for it, unanimously. Not for Dominions 3 at least, and Dominions 4 isn't around the corner, and probably not at the end of the tunnel either, and even if it was the developers might be against the change for one reason or another. The do-it-yourself guides are the only good answer, and NT_Jedi gave you one. I think the next Illwinter game probably should focus on interface much more than Dominions series, because that's where Dominions fails, and depending a save/load system would probably be part of that.




As for bugs... There are lots of minor bugs, I agree. I didn't think they were common, but it could be I just don't notice them any more. However, the game is so complicated that it's hard to now if we have a bug, a misleading description or a misinterpreted ability/event. Lots of "well-known" mechanics have actually been hear-say, and been proven wrong, lately. It comes with the complexity.