What about interactive Tactical Combat ?

[Taqwus]

It's also true that there are behaviors that would be known to an actual commander, but are nowhere documented and thus can only be found by experimentation.

Behaviors such as a half-dozen mage-priests ALL completely neglecting to cast Bless when there are a few dozen sacred units in range, for instance, in favor of skellispamming; archers firing into a melee; troops cheerfully running through the left-behind cold/poison auras of their fellow monsters and dying because of it; mages casting Touch of Madness on their own side's archers and mages, thus stupidly ruining an otherwise perfectly valid deployment... and since the AI is perfectly incapable of avoiding much of what can go wrong, the only way to deal with this is to be aware of all this nonsense beforehand. That's the "unfair advantage" waiting to be discovered. Knowing one's own army is required for any commander.

ALL of that should, in fact, would be perfectly reasonable to know before battle. A simulator would NOT grant any additional information in pinpointing an opponent's disposition, tactics or use of resources. It WOULD grant information about what behavior they might have so people don't have to GUESS about such things as, say, "what happens if I mix units with different speeds in a squad with attack orders" or so forth.

[curtadams]

A big advantage of a simulator is that it would improve our ability to balance the units, nations, and PD. I'm playing Pythium MA solo right now and I'm pretty shocked how strong its PD is compared to other nations I've played. The AI is clearly underestimating it. Is the Pythium PD too strong for the cost? It's hard to say without a more rigorous test and that's not too practical at present.

[Endoperez]

curtadams said:
A big advantage of a simulator is that it would improve our ability to balance the units, nations, and PD. I'm playing Pythium MA solo right now and I'm pretty shocked how strong its PD is compared to other nations I've played. The AI is clearly underestimating it. Is the Pythium PD too strong for the cost? It's hard to say without a more rigorous test and that's not too practical at present.

The manual lists it as Velites, 2xAlae Legionnaires, and Hastati after PD 20+. Do they have something else in addition? Slingers?

I think any third types of units received in PD under 20 aren't included.

It doesn't sound that powerful, though. Lots of chaff, albeit with a slightly better morale than is usual, and some good infantry as well. Tien Chi gets 3 Footmen and 1 Imperial Footman after 20+, but that isn't good either. Marignon gets Pikeneers and Crossbowmans, and Halberdiers after PD 20+; that's much better IMO. They get ranged units AND infantry. Then there's Mictlan, which gets Jaguar Warriors!

[Gandalf Parker]

Hmmm PD could be tested on the Mini map also. I can set the nation that owns a province, and the PD of it. Then I can attack it to see what I come up against. Attacking it with the same army each time would be an interesting benchmark. That would probably be worth doing.

[curtadams]

Endoperez said:
The manual lists it as Velites, 2xAlae Legionnaires, and Hastati after PD 20+. Do they have something else in addition? Slingers?

I think any third types of units received in PD under 20 aren't included.

It doesn't sound that powerful, though. Lots of chaff, albeit with a slightly better morale than is usual, and some good infantry as well. Tien Chi gets 3 Footmen and 1 Imperial Footman after 20+, but that isn't good either. Marignon gets Pikeneers and Crossbowmans, and Halberdiers after PD 20+; that's much better IMO. They get ranged units AND infantry. Then there's Mictlan, which gets Jaguar Warriors!

No, the Pythium PD doesn't sound strong at all. That's part of why I was puzzled at the result. Some slingers do show up so they are part of it. Mostly it's just that the defense is mostly shielded medium infantry, which is hard to kill, and they're not breaking. It could be that my opponents (Caelum, Mictlan, and Ermor) have fairly light units (Ermor already has lots of undead).

With AI positioning, an almost-all-ground force might be an advantage. The armies will normally meet in the middle and most archers have pretty mediocre aim at that distance. The Caelum archers are probably hurting their own force almost as much as mine, and I have a lot more infantry.

Incidentally, it's not that the forces are totally unbeatable by what the computer has. It's more that the computer now tries to send the minimum force to do the job and it's not sending enough. On more than one occaision the computer has split its force and what could easily have taken one province has gotten beaten attacking two. Even so, though, several times I'd given up a province for lost and then the computer failed even with a respectable force. Maybe I just got lucky on the morale checks. It would be nice to be able to test it.

[UninspiredName]

I like the idea of a Battle Simulator, personally. It's hard to abuse it for multi-player reasons, considering how many unknowns you need to consider when looking at an enemy army, even with scouts. Scouting doesn't mention the four Magi the enemy has with the army, that one of them was (For some reason) empowered to cast Blade Wind, and that the Archers have experience 3. Even if you attack with that scout to get some more information you still can't predict Morale checks, projectile deviation, Magic Resistance saves, etc. And even after that attack, you still don't know the scripts for later turns, if the foe will add more units, if a Global Enchantment will be cast, or many other things.

I can't imagine it would be that hard to program in either, since it's basically lettting the player punch in variables for something the program's already doing.

[Sindai]

I think a battle simulator would be really cool.

If nothing else to try out all of the really expensive summons and spells that you rarely get to use in a full game.

[Hullu]

One more comment on the information people.

Wouldn't it then be cool that you could simulate all the battlers before you submit your turn.

"If there enemy doesn't bring reinforcements, do I win?"

I think it would utterly ruin the game. But it's more information, so the people who want information would definitely want the game to just tell you if you win or lose even before you fight? It'd be fun playing then when you'd know all you'd be losing in every fight (unless conditions change, they don't always change). And against indeps they never change, what fun would taking indies be after that! "Hmm, if I move this squad two suares to the north, I reduce my losses from 2 units to 0, whee!".

Too much information is bad. Enough information is good, and enough is a personal preference.

I think Dominions is pretty well around the 'enough' for me right now, there's some details I'd like to know, but definitely I don't want to be able to check my battles before I fight them.