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[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by AdmiralZhao

Or you could view it as a chess game where you allowed to play the first 5 moves, and then after that an AI takes over.

Seriously, it is frustrating, and I'm not sure that it becomes less so once you've mastered the combat and scripting system. The problem becomes even more galling with CBM, as you have dozens of viable combat spells to cast, but no way to get your mages to repeatedly cast them. Personally, I see it as the biggest flaw left in the game. If they were to fix this and call the resulting game Dominions 4, I would buy a copy.

chess isn't a perfect comparison, but to the extent that it is: the comparison doesn't begin with the start of battle, but rather with the turns leading up to it. Scripting and placement constraints figure into the chess-like strategy in the decisions as to what armies/units to prepare and send into a battle, what spells to think about using with them, and how to equip them.

The probabilistic influences are the greatest difference between chess and dominions, but it is whims of the RNG and unpredictability of the AI that make dominions battles fun.

Originally Posted by Ironhawk

The 5-turn limit is frustrating but neccessary. First and foremost to reduce MicroManagement. If there wasnt a limit to what you could script, power players would spend HOURS on every script and everyone else would have to as well, just to keep up.

Also, it is a sort of buffer to prevent certain spells from becoming imbalanced. If players had perfect control over actions for the entire battle, entire new strategies would emerge in which certain (even fewer than now) spells would become extremely powerful due to some little trick they allowed. Currently, the unpredictable behavior helps to reduce any spell from being extremely powerful because the player can't really script exactly how it is used (at least until late-game when there are lots of battle-field wide spells that avoid most of the unpredictability in spell usage, assuming the AI decides to cast them

Another reason not to have more involved scripting is that perfect management of battles without interactive order giving would require lengthy if-then-else trees, and that mechanic is an entire game in and of itself (like robot battle games), and not what this game is supposed to be about. Thus really, the way it is currently done is -close- to the best way to do it given the aims of the game-play experience. Certainly there are minor additions that could be made and implemented that would improve battle resolution. But really, they wouldn't improve it that much: certainly not enough to justify the time needed to implement and play-test any additions to scripting.