Dominions 3 News!

[Endoperez]

PrinzMegaherz said:

If the manual is as helpful as the manual of Dom2, you should just drop it, save the money, lower the price and include a good tutorial / launch a Dominions 3 wikipedia as Stardock is doing for GC2. Maybe you could offer a cheaper download only version, saving people the shipping cost.

They are adding 60 pages. If they leave out the things we had in DomII, that's a 200 page manual, not for listing in-game stuff, but for telling how to play the game. With 60 nations, that would be 3 pages of strategy/tactics for each one, and 20 pages for the general mechanics...

I DON'T believe they'll do that radical change, though. I think the 70 extra pages are going to be in addition to the item/spell lists. As I doubt there are enough new items and spells to last for 70 pages, most of that will have to be something else. What else? Explanation of game mechanics can't take that much, maybe 50 pages, at maximum. Currently, they take 30 pages, so there'd still be about 50 pages left for non-mechanics, non-spell-list, non-item-list stuff. That is probably this part:
"A comprehensive manual written by veteran computer game scribe Bruce Geryk will also ease players into the third installment."
I don't really know who he is, but Google tells me that he has done some kind of Dom2 tutorial already. It's a .pdf in Shrapnel Games' DomII downloads page, so I have probably went through it, but I don't remember what it actually says. If you are worried, read through that and see if 50 pages of that would be worth the 5$.

I find this whole price discussion absurd, BTW. If we are waiting for a game this much, we are going to buy it. Of course, we would be much happier to pay only half price for it, but that wouldn't make us buy two of them. Shrapnel Games knows we are hooked, and won't let us just get away with less. They also know what they are doing. Their blog covered this over a year ago.
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/blo...mes-dont-work/

[Agrajag]

Isn't Bruce Geryk a writer for Computer Gaming World?
If I'm not mistaken he's also the one that reviewed Dom2 and fell in love with it.

[Ironhawk]

Endoperez said:
If the manual is as helpful as the manual of Dom2, you should just drop it, save the money, lower the price and include a good tutorial / launch a Dominions 3 wikipedia as Stardock is doing for GC2. Maybe you could offer a cheaper download only version, saving people the shipping cost.

Yeah I'm with ya. I looked at the dom2 manual once and then never again. All the pages devoted to spells and items I never even bothered to look at. 1) it's easier to do that in-game and 2) its more accurate (espeically when you consider modding). In fact I think I would actually prefer an online manual/wikipedia to a physical manual that will just gather dust on my desk.

I find this whole price discussion absurd, BTW. If we are waiting for a game this much, we are going to buy it.

That was never the point I was arguing. Clearly all the hardcore dom2 people like ourselves are going to buy the game unless the price is astronomical. I believe that the point being made was that the pricetag is too high to grant additional incentive to new players to purchase the game and thus increase the player-base.

[Endoperez]

Ironhawk said:

Actually, that was Prince Megahertz who said that. I argued against him. The comment on the absurdity of this discussion was mine, though.