What it will take for me to purchase Dom III

[Cainehill]

Zen said:
And I would like to add finally the great truism of the Internet.

Even if you give people what they want, they still feel the need to complain. Kristoffer just told you that 2 of your list of X were already fixed. While that may not mean they are doing everything you want, it certainly does mean that you are being heard and implementing changes they feel are appropriate and within their ability/resources to change.

Of course, outside the software world, when you're sold a car that turns out that only the wheels on the right spin, people don't get surprised and upset when you're not willing to simply buy next years model because "it'll be fixed in the next (model/version/release)".

Don't get me wrong - I like Dom2, and will almost certainly get Dom3. But if I hadn't been able to play lots of MP games, I probably would've shelved the game among all the others that I've bought and been dissatisfied with over the years. The SP game has immense flaws, which would be almost impossible to ascertain simply from playing the demo. (Players would be extremely unlikely to figure out that the AI never builds castles and has no clue about starvation. It'd also take someone willing to play the demo an awful lots for them to figure out the diplomatic blundering and blatant cheating going on.)

And, outside the software world, yes, people probably would have reasonable expectations that their car would work with or without passengers or whatnot. Only with games and other software (and possibly real estate development) can the seller consistently get away with a WYGIWYG (What You Got Is What You Got) attitude. Intel had to replace people's faulty Pentiums, even though the flaw was a lot less noticeable. Car manufacturers do recalls all the time - not just for exploding gas tanks, but for things arguably more trivial than the flaws in Dominions2. People don't have to suck it up and buy the next model to get the flaws fixed.

J and K have done a lot in supporting the game - I'm not saying they're guilty of that. But I can see how people are frustrated and disappointed in never getting a viable single player game out of their purchase.

[Zen]

Does not what just happened mean anything?

This isn't a car, this is an extended movie. You get your entertainment value out of it as well as everything else involved. You may like it for different qualities that other people do or do not enjoy. However, there are themes in the good movies just like there are themes in the 'good' games of a genre.

At the end of a particular movie you may like the movie but it indubidably it has flaws. In Dom2 (which is not what we're talking about in this thread, we're talking about Dom3) those flaws might have been bad ending and some shaky performances by actors.

Does that mean the sequel could be a stinker? Sure. Does it mean a sequel can be a hit? Yeah. But you can't determine that yet because there is no real information except what we've seen. If IW is addressing concerns in the production of the next Dominions, why are you bashing them for Dom2? Even to the point of idiocy to say "and they have no intention of changing this issue" which OBVIOUSLY is not the case by admission.

Maybe since I've played Dom2 from when it was released and know and agree with a big number of flaws. I have a different perception. Any improvements are good and if they can make a great game including as many really good ideas from the wishlist as well as correcting major flaws in Dom2 that they are aware of (micromanagement, UI, tutorial, balance, SP, etc) then why spit in the face of progress?

I'm glad this thread was started with by a newcomer who just threw his opinion out there and gave IW some perspective of people who are fresh to Dom2. Something they didn't have since it was released a few years ago and is a niche title.

Edit:

I may have not clearly expressed my point Cainehill. My point is you can't unwatch a movie. You spent the time and the money (or the bandwith) that you can never get back because you are enjoying a recreation.

That is why this is more akin to games. While they have the benefit of being modified while they are being watched (and is expected in this day and age of seeming incompleteness, bugs, hardware crap, etc) this particular movie is made like the any lowbudget B movie. You might have a Bruce Campbell who is the God of B-Movie actors but you can't spend much money on the set or special effects.

Also any movie that can keep my interest for more than 2 years I count it a pretty good movie, maybe not for everyone out there. I count the same for games. If a game can keep me for more than two years enjoying playing it (however limited) then I think it's a pretty good game by the standard of early 2000's.

[Graeme Dice]

Cainehill said:
J and K have done a lot in supporting the game - I'm not saying they're guilty of that. But I can see how people are frustrated and disappointed in never getting a viable single player game out of their purchase.

I fail to see how people didn't get a viable single player game. The game functions properly, and the AI will beat a new player most of the time. What I've seen so far is complaints that the AI is inferior to a human player and can't give a human a challenge without cheating. That's no surprise since there is no single stretegy game more complicated than Chess where that statement isn't true. I can't think of any complex strategy game where the AI isn't a pushover without massive cheating once the player has learned the game rules.

As an aside, even if you only played the single player game for 20 hours you got more than your money's worth out of the game considering that any non-strategy game has about that much actual gameplay.

[Cainehill]

Graeme Dice said:

As an aside, even if you only played the single player game for 20 hours you got more than your money's worth out of the game considering that any non-strategy game has about that much actual gameplay.

When I'm more wide awake I may address the first part of what you wrote, but for now : "Any non-strategy game has about ... 20 hours of gameplay"??? I'd love to be able to say, "Ad hominem!" or whatever ( ) but I'll have to settle for saying, patently untrue. Diablo and its clones certainly aren't strategy games, agreed? Not true RPGs, but hack-and-slash beer-and-bloodshed games aren't strategy titles.

Yet lots of people have gotten hundreds or thousands of hours of gaming experience out of them. Similarly, a game genre I don't play but whose players seem to manage to get hundreds or thousands of hours out of : First Person Shooters - okay, admittedly that's because of the MP thrills, but still - that's more than 20 hours.

Any numbers of RPGs have given players hundreds of hours of gameplay, as they restart with a different party, a different alignment choice, a 3 member party vice 6, etc. Hades - how many hours have people gotten out of driving games, golf games, or (gag) Dance Dance Revolution? More than 20.

You and Zen are comparing the game to movies - sorry, but that's comparing .... *shrug* Whiskey to milk. We drink both - but we don't expect milk to last as long as whiskey, and we don't expect as much fun out of it.

When we go to a movie, we expect at most around 2 hours entertainment. There's totally different expectations between the two entertainment choices / commodities, so please, just stop comparing the two. I doubt if many people would argue that (most) games are a better value, weighed in terms of money divided by time. I also doubt if many reasonable, intelligent people would say that a game was a life-changing experience, while people do sometimes feel that way about movies.

Even more pointedly : saying, "You got more gameplay for your dollar than you would've for a non-strategy title" is crap. Know anyone in recent years who ever bought a strategy game expecting 20 hours of play? How about a chess game that, because the AI is bad, occasionally removes one of your pieces from the board? That's what the Seeking Arrow from 30 provinces away on turn 12 is. "But they both make the game more challenging in the absence of better AI!" Gee - thanks!

And yes, I can think of a number of strategy games that had a much more solid, satisfying SP gameplay, without blatant cheating (sometimes without cheating, period) than Dominions 2. The original Warlords - just one map, 100s of hours of play. Sword of Aragon - not exactly scripted, but early battles were easy; to win the later battles you really had to improve your game, to the point of replaying once you'd improved, in order to build up your armies / cities better through the course of the game. Again - 100s of hours of play. Stars! ( The one by Stardock.) Master of Orion. Master of Magic. Anacreon, even.

(Note : Moo / MoM gave huge bonuses to the computer players. That isn't "blatant cheating", just as the AI getting huge bonuses in pretender creation isn't in Dominions.)

And again - I'm not unhappy with Dominions. I'm not unhappy with J & K. Quite the opposite. What I'm unhappy with is the knee-jerk response of calling someone's reply "close minded" just because they're not nearly as happy with Dominions as you are (or for that matter, as I am). People can have legitimate complaints, regardless of how wonderful a _MP_ game Dominions is. After all - it's designed and meant to be a MP (and PBEM at that) game.

But it wasn't really marketed that way. Not that it was particularly marketed in the modern sense but - Shrapnel never put a blurb out, "By PBEM gamers, for PBEM gamers - if you're not womanly enough for MP, you're not woman enough for this game", nor anything like it.

[quantum_mechani]

Cainehill said:
I also doubt if many reasonable, intelligent people would say that a game was a life-changing experience, while people do sometimes feel that way about movies.

Dominions has been a life changing experience. Before, I was was depressed. I wondered what was the meaning of it all. I stepped on plants.

But I realized the error of my ways, I invited the Carrion Dragon into my life. Suddenly, it made sense. I knew I was doing the right thing.

[Zen]

Cainehill said:
And again - I'm not unhappy with Dominions. I'm not unhappy with J & K. Quite the opposite. What I'm unhappy with is the knee-jerk response of calling someone's reply "close minded" just because they're not nearly as happy with Dominions as you are (or for that matter, as I am). People can have legitimate complaints, regardless of how wonderful a _MP_ game Dominions is. After all - it's designed and meant to be a MP (and PBEM at that) game.

Let me bold it for you since apparently it's knee jerk:

Arralen said:


What gets me back to the topic:
I don't like that. As I don't like the fact that the AI still cannot build castles and commanders from sites, chooses heavy death scale to often and has no clue about supplies - therefore crippling itself very effectivly. What I don't like even more is the fact, that the devs know about this very well but are not willing to fix it ...

If you have already decided what the Dev's are going to do about something why are you waiting around for them to make the game? You should be Nostradamus and get a cult together with such prognostication abilities.

Or maybe that is being open minded.

And let me say for the record I agree with most of Arralen's points, reasoning, cause for concern, and desire for change. What I don't agree with is a blatent lie about something that someone has no clue about as far as IW's intentions. They have even changed their minds about things throughout the course of Dom2 so even if some grand statement that gave a certain impression it might only applicable to Dom2 and not Dom3 in terms of being able to change it.

I'm sure we would all like a patch right now for alot of things for Dom2 (morale, etc) but if the choice is between continued support of Dom2 or the development of Dom3, at this point in Dom2's life I would probably lean towards Dom3.

Especially if alot of the things that were to be patched would be much easier to do under a Dom3 framework thus allowing IW to further push the game in whatever direction they are going with it.

[Endoperez]

I'd like to add few obsevations into these recent "is Dominions worth playing Single-Player" and "Dominions vs all the others" posts:

Dominions' AI cheats. It knows where you are. However, it doesn't become blatant except in few exceptional circumstances, e.g. FOUR PLAYERS ON THE WORLD MAP! In most games I would play, versus AI or humans, there would be much less distance between enemies. And I think it's better that every AI player knows the location of all other nations (NB: this also includes other AIs!), because they can't communicate with each other and share information like humans could.

Re: AI starting wars against humans without reason: AFAIK, AI considers the threat of a nation before going into war against it. E.g. AI doesn't attack nation which has strong armies next to its own provinces, or even player who has lots of PD in his provinces. However, I think AI also follows the graphs, and starts war against someone who is in the lead. And I know that AIs war between each other, so I think this isn't limited to human players. I think that the only reason for AIs to pick out humans is because they are designed to attack the nation in the position humans most often acquire: the leading one, or in the case of a new player: weakly defended lands.

Re: other games giving more enjoyment than Dominions:
Roguelike games and their ilk (including Diablo and its clones) are games based very much on luck. Good equipment is critical for survival in hardcore roguelikes, and for enjoyment in low-risk games like Diablo (from this on, D&Co). I don't know if D&Co games give tactical options like roguelikes do, but I doubt it. From what I have seen, the AI in D&Co is very stupid. The AI in driving games was also quite stupid the last time I played one, but that was in year '97 or so. I'd say that it's easy to do a game where the player can challenge himself. The other drivers are there just to get him interested in the first place. After that, he competes against his own records, and to improve his skills. I don't know if D&Co work like slot machines, where players continue playing in the hope of better items, or if it's more like roguelikes, where the player's skill is needed to overcome all the obstacles until something the player OR character isn't able to cope with comes up and the player can start again, having learned something.
In Dominions, the players' skill should be the biggest variable. If AI could just get lucky, and its army of 300 militia, light infantry and longdead could defeat the 200-strong army of summons and sacreed units lead by the Fire 9 Moloch, protected, boosted and supported by dozen mages, there would be no reason to play. And it's not possible to make a "ghost driver" of your own strategy. An AI that scriptable would be awesome, of course, especially if it could "learn" your playstyle (research priority: Enchantment 1, Evocation 3, Alteration 2, Evocation 5, Construction 4, Conjuration 5, etc) from just observing your choices few times. But in driving games the "ghost" doesn't need to avoid other cars. You can't tackle the ghost. Similarly, the "ghost" in strategy games is more often a score list, where you get points for speed and might, for luck and skill, and you can see your improvement.
They are listening. Writing a good AI is very challenging, and it's hard, impossible to copy the ways with which games of other genres achieve replayability (?), or in some cases it makes the game less fulfilling. I have enojyed DomII in singple-player. The best memories are often from those times I lost. Try playing Mictlan, with non-SC pretender, in a map too small and with too many enemies. It's like insta-death roguelike converted into strategy game.

[Wick]

Endoperez said:
And I think it's better that every AI player knows the location of all other nations (NB: this also includes other AIs!), because they can't communicate with each other and share information like humans could.

I disagree. Not so much because cheating is annoying as because they don't seem to benefit from it. How is casting the occasional Fires from Afar halfway across the map anything but a waste of gems? How does declaring war preferentially on the strongest player lead toward victory? They should concentrate on eating their neighbors, weakest first. That way they might amount to a challenge by the time I get to them.

[ioticus]

JK mentioned in a previous post that there were further patches in the works for Dom II. I hope they'll see the light of day.

[Chazar]

Zen said:
What I don't agree with is a blatent lie about something that someone has no clue about as far as IW's intentions.

Right, but (I don't know either, but it could be that) Arralen may have just worded it that way to provoke a response from the devs?! Since we're left without a dev's diary, a patch or something else for quite some time, people are getting more anxious to know how Dom3 is going to be. We all made wishes, but we dont know whether they might come true. And provoking some responses worked before (e.g. I recall a part in the original Zen's Balance Mod-Thread about life drainers in DomIII...) and seems like it worked here too. So I would really hate if DomIII would not implement my wish for...