Problem Saving Games

[PDF]

It'll be cool that some of the Net-nerds you're talking about (Huh hello Gandalf, did we call you ? ) make a simple java or whatever mini-app to manage savefiles...

[thejeff]

Note that when the developers are working on the game part-time around their real jobs, the developers having fun is a priority.
If they don't, they'll stop developing.

[dirtywick]

I agree that it is a little behind the times, but I think it's a conscious decision to add depth and strategy. In a weird way I think it's fun that an unlucky random event can knock off your unprepared pretender and you're forced to deal with it instead of reloading like the event never happened.

[thejeff]

I agree.
I think it does change the feel of the game. It's part of the game and shouldn't be changed lightly. While individuals could always ignore it, that being the accepted default would change both the game and the community around it.


The game does many things against the conventional wisdom. This is one of them. It's a niche game. It will always be by nature a niche game. It's also the largest pre-order Shrapnel's ever had. (Which will hopefully translate into the highest sales as well.) It must be doing something right.

[Ballbarian]

Sadly, I have no willpower. For example, Rome Total War has a save feature. I quit having fun because I became obsessed with saving & reloading between assassination attempts because I just couldn't bare the idea of losing my high level assassin. If a battle went poorly, I was immediately frustrated and would hit the reload button. For myself, the addition of a handy in-game save feature would be a bad thing.

Maybe a nice compromise would be a command line switch that would allow a user to enable/disable an in-game save feature... then if I could just resist the urge to enable it.

[Amos]

You would see pro-permanent death posts on every forum for every MMOG that ever proposed this idea. All of those games have failed. If we couldnt save in our backward sort of way like we do in Dom2-3, I dont think many people, that like playing SP games, would buy it. All I asked for and will continue to ask is that Save could be made an ingame option so that I dont have to go outside the game, and could even play in full screen mode. Flame away.

[Manuk]

Well mainly saving a game and reload does not make much of a difference due to the scale of choices you make in DOM. Consequences you pay in the current turn are of decitions made several turns ago.
And mainly you don´t loose a game just because you mismove 1 army. but saving last turn in backup could be useful for this cases of mismove or forgetting to give orders you already decided.

and for the save-reload mechanic or cheats like "research all" or "1 million bucks" are pointless and I don´t see why some people cheat. What point is to win a game that way?

If I cas Haruspex searching sites in a province and detects no sites I could reload and search elsewere. AI would not have a chance to this kind of cheating. Reload if a fire destroyed my lab. etc

[thejeff]

MMOG/TBS :: Apples/Oranges

I'm curious though. How do you usually use the save games? How often do you reload? What circumstances? Just to the last turn or farther back?

I tend to not use saves often in strategy games, even when they allow it, so I really am curious (I'm bad about remembering to save in games that rely on it, too.)

[Peter Ebbesen]

Manuk said:
and for the save-reload mechanic or cheats like "research all" or "1 million bucks" are pointless and I don´t see why some people cheat. What point is to win a game that way?

Some people have fun using saving/loading or using cheat codes, some people have not, the only thing that is certain is that having access to those things does not adversely affect the gaming experience of either of the two groups whereas not having access to them certainly hurts one of the two groups.

The whole "I don't see the fun in feature X, so I choose to believe that others would not, despite their protestations to the contrary, have fun in it either, so I argue against it on the basis of it having no point" is reminiscent of the worst of early 1980'ies game programming and has been abandoned by just about everybody: People have different ideas of fun and the only people who are not worth listening to as a developer are those who argue against features that others would find fun but which wouldn't affect the one arguing or worse, those who argue against it on the basis of others "not playing the game as it ought to be played" (there are always a certain amount of such deadwood in any forum of fans for a game but they really aren't worth listening to as a developer once they begin arguing for limiting other players' fun rather than enhancing their own).

If I cas Haruspex searching sites in a province and detects no sites I could reload and search elsewere. AI would not have a chance to this kind of cheating. Reload if a fire destroyed my lab. etc

If you had fun playing like that, great! The game would be more fun for you than if it lacked a load/save in-progress feature. If you did not have fun playing like that, great! The game wouldn't in any way, shape, or form force you to play like that even with the best load/save feature invented enabled.

And if you'd make a stable save every 5 or 10 rounds or as the fancy took you [or how about automatic autosaves with different nations every fixed N rounds to go even further ], just in case the not-particularly-bug-free game engine decided to corrupt a save, such that you could return to a previous save in case of corruption and keep playing on, instead of having to abandon a game in progress, GREAT!