OT - Dominions: Preists, Prophets & Pretenders

[Nerfix]

There is no tactical combat for two simple reasons:
1)Up to 1.000 or even more untis to control. Doesn't sound so good to me.
2)Insta-Kill spells, Magic Duel and Soul Slay more specificaly. If we have tactical combat, we can aim spells and we can Sould Slay enemy commanders and make the actual 500+ units army to rout...
When i started playing Dominions, i thougt that the auto-combat sucked until i realised those issues...

[Alneyan]

The first point would be quite a problem, and your second point is why you cannot ask your Spellcasters to target a specific kind of units. ( Mages would also target Mages, leading in an artillery battle) There is also a third point, tactical combat would be impossible in PBEM against other players.

I admit I would rather see a working auto-combat feature without tactical combat instead of tactical combat but virtually no Fast Combat/Strategic Combat or other names. (Like in AOW for instance)

As I wrote in my earliest (below I believe) post, I would like to see improvements to the combat replay feature though. I have a lot of problems to see what is going on, but according to the screenshots, the representation of the battles has changed quite a lot.

Edited because of my silliness.

[ September 11, 2003, 17:27: Message edited by: Alneyan ]

[Nerfix]

BTW, looking at the screenshots, Dominions II looks like fantasy Version of Total War...

Quite bit of things have changed in Dominions II.
Micromanagement has been reduced, National Themes that allow you to customise your nation and Dominions effects...

[PvK]

Actually, you can order units to target types of enemy units - IIRC the categories are:

closest
missile units
commanders
magic Users

So you can have your assassins, cavalry, flyers, heroes with deadly enchanted missile attacks, etc., try to assassinate the enemy leaders and wizards. You can also assign Groups of bodyguards to each leader.

This was how I dealt with Esaglia the Golden Naga when she kept sending armies against me which we could defeat, but then my men would surround her but mostly fall victim to the Soul Vortex spell she'd cast (very deadly to human-sized mortal melee attackers). So I sent my pretender in dragon form with Attack Commanders orders, and finished her off.

It might tend to be more effective under human tactical control against the AI, of course.

I think my main criticism is the lack of a good way to tell ranged-attack units to not endanger their own men when firing. Far too often, archers (and fireball- or boulder-hurlers, etc.) are taking out their own men unless I have them just "fire and flee" (or often, fire at enemy commanders, since they usually hang back).

Another nice thing would be to be able to authorize one's heroes and Groups to withdraw when heavily beat up, and/or to order other Groups to stand in reserve (engage only after another group retreats). You can fudge this by having them "hold, then attack" and starting them out further to the rear, but it's not quite the same thing.

PvK

[PvK]

oh, and one can also choose:

cavalry
fliers

as targets, and a good thing too, because my leaders were getting wiped out by the AI's fliers until I made sure my troops started around them and set to attack fliers first.

PvK

[Pocus]

Alneyan :
About auto-combat :

Actually the main point about auto-combat is that Dominions is designed strongly to be played in parallel turn processing, like the simultaneous mode in SE IV, so direct combat control is impossible. You can argue that SE IV sports also a tac engine in which you can controls directly your units in solo play. I would counter-argue saying that Malfador spent time to devise this dual system, whereas Illwinter spent time to allows precise scripting in auto-combat mode

I must says that I was rather frustrated by auto-combat in SE IV. Direct command in solo play is really funny, but in the other hand having your ships behave correctly in pbem is quite a problem (most of the people dont know how not to glass a planet and capture it instead in pbem). Well I'm not very experienced in pbeming with SE IV, but what held me a bit was that (and the fact that the game is darn too slow).

Dominions in pbem is fast paced enough, and this is a boon for the pbem community. Generally speaking a very mature and old empire is an empire which Last 50 turns (and games can hit the 100th turns if opponents are the resources to recovers from the blows).

As Nerfix said also, Dominions games are geared toward the control of several hundreds units. It is not rare to have formations of 200 pikeneers for example. Imagine the mess of having precise control of that bunch in solo play

About lack of control when reviewing the battle :
Can it be that you dont use the pause key (space bar). When the game is paused, you can see to your heart's content the current values of your troops. And this is where SE IV lack : in recorded battles, SE IV ships only shows the nominal statistics, not the current ones. In Dominions VCR, you see the actual values of each units, round after round !

I'm dont want to start a silly comparison SE IV versus doms. This is not my point. I just want to point out that Dominions can stand proud in the little pool of turn based pbem with simultaenous turn processing (which is the only mode IMO that enables true multiplayer).

Last one about tac combat : there is 10 speed at dominions. 9 is very very fast, 1 is the default, and 0 is the step by step. You should be able to view correctly the doms battle with these infos. Frankly I never had a problem understanding what happened in a recorded battle. Perhaps you feel lost because the game is incredibly rich when it comes to spell effects and combat parameters. It really beat AOW 2 to the ground with that.

just an example for the ones which never played dominions : you can cast an overland spell against a province which reduce drastically the temperature. If you engage in battle, you will see that your cold blooded foe (lizardmen for examples) fatigue much faster. On the other hand, winter wolves spirits are stronger, and their frost aura is deadlier.
Just one example amongst perhaps 200, about the richness of this game.

Pocus - dominions addict.

[ September 12, 2003, 08:07: Message edited by: Pocus ]

[Alneyan]

Thanks a lot Pocus, I didn't know about the space bar, I guess I will have to try. As if this complain was only due to my silliness, I remove this grief. (Don't ask me how I didn't spot this feature, but that seems to be usual as I also overlook the Combat Replay for two months in SE:IV)

You could manage a thousand units with a few tricks, but tactical combat would be 1) Time-consumming to develop 2) Time-consumming to use, especially if you spend a lot of time to give orders to your units.

PvK, I spoke about the inability to target specific units with spells only. I do know you can order your other units to do almost all you want, and this system is much better than in SE:IV, which in turn is so much better than AOW with regards to auto-battle. As I wrote earlier, the problem with being able to aim the spells at a specific kind of units is linked to balance and fun, as it used (or would have? I am not sure if that feature was in the game at some point) to make most battles into a duel of battery fire of spellcasters.

Finally, for the trouble with archers, don't shields help against arrows? I seem to recall this was working fine with me. Of course, spells are much more dangerous, but maybe that's because Arcana cannot be controlled by mere human beings.