What it will take for me to purchase Dom III

[Arralen]

cost & supply

Was unaware of the Dom1 connection. At this point, I'm out of my depth--I never had the opportunity to play Dom1. I think a continuation of this part of the discussion by those who have might be instructive. Did reducing the gold of Dom1 improve Dom2--or did it just push the pendulum from ground troops to magic troops?

Do the math yourself:
- the sites didn't change (much)
- gold 'production' was halved
- ... and seemingly no-one really noticed: the province sizes where heavily reduced; while pop range was 5k-50k in DomPPP, now we have 500..15k pop

And taking away a strategic/tactical option is never good IMHO...

[Endoperez]

What kind of population randomization would be better? As the whole province/terrain system was changed for DomII, that changing of population numbers might have been accidental. Now provinces can be Small or Large, and (Plains or Underwater) or any combination of Forest/Farmlands/Mountain/Swamp/Waste. Large Farmlands could be up to 50 000 range, but what about Small Farmlands? Or Large Forest/Swamps? Would each terrain hold a multiplier (e.g., being a Farm gives 2.0 times the population, being a Swmap gives 0.5 times the population, Farm/Swamp has (2.0*0.5= 1) about the same population a plains would have.

[Arralen]

.. oh, great, forum ate a lengthy post of mine again.. so I'll keep it short this time:

Large Farmland: av. 18782pop, max 21.5k pop
Normal Farmland: av. 121250 pop, max. 14.4k pop
Small Farmland: av. 5557 pop, max. 7.2k pop

=> "Large" is +50% pop, "Small" is -50%

Normal Plains: av. 7921 pop, max. 9.1k pop

=> "Farm" is +50% pop

I'll add more numbers as I get to it ... .


And if that was a question, Endo, ye, those modifiers are cumulative. So with a small swamp/waste province you can get really ridiculous low pop levels..

What we can see from the above is - there's no way to get near the pop numbers of DomPPP, and something like that should only occure deliberatly .. should have been very obvious in the very first test game at the latest.

And check the maps which come with the game - lots of 'normal plains' and worse provinces. No, I don't think the devs ruined the gold economy by accident. Very much like they didn't overlook that there are no events which generate pop, but many which kill it. It's their/the games attitude.

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 ... .
What that tells about me purchasing DOM3? Oh well, guess yourself ...

edit: typo

[Zen]

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 ... .
What that tells about me purchasing DOM3? Oh well, guess yourself ...

edit: typo

Interesting and incredibly close-minded thought.

[Ironhawk]

Zen said:

Interesting and incredibly close-minded thought.

Now, now, boys

While I think we can all agree with Arralen that the AI in dom2 is quite poor, saying that the devs are unwilling to fix it is unfair. In programming, sometimes problems which appear very simple on the face of it, are actually exceptionally difficult to make a program do properly. That could be the case here. Or the devs may just feel that the real meat of dom2 is in the MP aspects. So when they look at the list of issues to fix in a patch, MP issues trump all the SP/AI ones and the AI just ends up never getting fixed by default.

[Arralen]

@Zen
Sorry, but I don't get the "close-minded" part. Could you please elaborate ?

@Ironhawk
It's a stated fact from the devs that they want the endgame to be heavily focused on (summond) magic creatures, that it's not a bug that you'll end up with less than starting pop if you go with turmoil-3, growth-3, luck-3. They say it's a big war, and the pop will have to suffer. That the national units get superflous is just a side-effect of diminishing pop and ridiculous powerful LvL 8+9 magic.

And I don't say the AI is bad. In fact, I've seen lots worse AIs in games with 100x the budged for sure.
But the AI not building castles or commanders from (found) sites .. hey, even I could program that. (check my old thread about the suggested very easy recruiting/bulding alghorithm).
Pretender design might be a bit trickier, but the easy solution would be to restrict death scale to certain nations/pretender combos.
I agree that the supply issue might be unsolvalbe in Dom2. I'm not sure though, but I think it worked in DomPPP. As the castle building did, btw.

But the point is - if they arent't willing to even try to fix this, and even if it's (e.g.) with some randomly issued build order for the castles, how can't I assume that it will be the same with Dom3 ?

And that it's a MP game is no excuse. Actually, it's sold with the tag "1-17 players". So it should work correctly in SP as well. And Dom2 still sells well. But there aren't hundreds of players here. So I guess Dom2 is actually played SP by 60-70% of it's owners.

[RedRover]

Arralen: I remember your thread. It inspired me to do a little experimenting with a castle-building algorithm of my own awhile back (all general theory, my actual knowledge of coding is rudimentary).

If I can dig out my notes, I'll post them as a new thread next week, and we can talk more about AI castle-building there.

Thanks very much for your work on this.

[Endoperez]

Arralen said:
.. oh, great, forum ate a lengthy post of mine again.. so I'll keep it short this time:

Large Farmland: av. 18782pop, max 21.5k pop
Normal Farmland: av. 121250 pop, max. 14.4k pop
Small Farmland: av. 5557 pop, max. 7.2k pop

Wow, I just realized that provinces can be neither Small or Large... Thanks for the enlightement.

What would be better option, then, than the current cumulative multipliers? Would multiplying only the biggest and the smallest multipliers work better? And what about the multipliers themselves, how much better than Plains should Farmlands be?

I'd like to get different opinions on this as well.

[Kristoffer O]

> @Zen
> Sorry, but I don't get the "close-minded" part. Could you please elaborate ?


He happens to know that the AI in dom3 builds castles and that you get more gold in dom3. Now you know as well and may want buy dom3 when it comes out

[Reverend Zombie]

Kristoffer O said:
> @Zen
> Sorry, but I don't get the "close-minded" part. Could you please elaborate ?


He happens to know that the AI in dom3 builds castles and that you get more gold in dom3. Now you know as well and may want buy dom3 when it comes out

So Arralen was wrong on that score, but I am not sure that gets us to "close-minded."

Will the viscous ad hominem never end???