Dominions 3 and micromanagement

[Gandalf Parker]

Are you playing solo? mp blitz? mp with a daily turn?

[alexti]

I've tried those idea only in SP and in the blitz. Long MP would obviously take some time and willing guinea pigs.

[HoneyBadger]

I usually play SP at 50 gold, resources, and supply, and very difficult magic research. This means that the spells I have and the spells the computer has, are around for a longer time, and empowerment becomes a much more valid choice, which means by mid or end game I can use most spells, and since I like to play against 18 or more opponents, it means that the computer is using more spells too-perhaps not very well, but they are using them. I'd like to see low-level spells become more useful too. It seems logical to me that the easier a spell is to cast, the more times it would have had to have been cast in the past, and therefore there should be more uses for that spell, if only through the power of creativity.

[curtadams]

Improving low-level magic would make the early game more varied, but it would make micromanagement *worse*. You're going to have almost as many squads but now also a bunch of mages with separate and even more complex scripts you have to frequently piddle with for similar reasons.

The army micro that really drives me batty is placing squads on the battleground and in particular *moving* them when I switch my army's stance from, say, hold-and-attack to ambush cavalry or forward attack. The solution would be HTML-esque scripting or a real GUI interface (e.g. dragging squads) but those are of course major changes.

[Gandalf Parker]

The game was more designed toward MP with day turns. Blitzes were figured into Dom2 abit more. And Solo play was looked at for support in Dom3.

It does appear that suggestions for lessening micromanagement will be looked at if it doesnt change the game into something different. IMHO

[alexti]

Gandalf Parker said:
The game was more designed toward MP with day turns. Blitzes were figured into Dom2 abit more. And Solo play was looked at for support in Dom3.

It does appear that suggestions for lessening micromanagement will be looked at if it doesnt change the game into something different. IMHO

In my experience long MPs in Dom2 were often getting abandoned around turn 80-100 due to too much micromanagement. In vanilla Dom3 it seems more like turn 40. Spending an hour a day to do mostly mechanical work is not much fun. I was used to give Dom2 as an example of elegant gameplay in other groups and forums (for example comparing it to micromanagement hell of Civ4), but now I'm not so sure that Dom3 (vanilla settings) has retained this quality. Of course, different people have different levels of micromanagement tolerance and I probably have rather low threshold. On a good side, it seems one can sidestep all those issues by choosing appropriate settings - no changes to the game are required at all.

I remember that during Dom2 times there were frequent discussions about making Dominions more accessible to the new players and in Dom3 we saw some of such changes. I wonder if default settings were actually chosen to provide simpler gameplay more accessible to newbies? It's probably reasonable to assume that experienced players will figure out how to change few options in the game creation interface...

[alexti]

curtadams said:
Improving low-level magic would make the early game more varied, but it would make micromanagement *worse*. You're going to have almost as many squads but now also a bunch of mages with separate and even more complex scripts you have to frequently piddle with for similar reasons.

In the settings I've mentioned as my current favourite that doesn't happen. Amount of micromanagement is reduced maybe by 3-4 times, if not more. I think that one reason that there're shortcuts for mage scripts and another reasons is that with low-level magic being more efficient overly complicated squad management becomes unnecessary. Besides, it's becoming more practical to spend (now reduced amount gold) on mages instead of massing up the troops. So generally I'm using much fewer squads.

curtadams said:
The army micro that really drives me batty is placing squads on the battleground and in particular *moving* them when I switch my army's stance from, say, hold-and-attack to ambush cavalry or forward attack. The solution would be HTML-esque scripting or a real GUI interface (e.g. dragging squads) but those are of course major changes.

I agree that's one of the major headaches. I can't see any GUI that would solve all those problems. While general rules of what one does are pretty straightforward they're kind of hard to express in terse form. Some scripting language could solve it, but that's probably a big change in the code and I'm not sure how many players would be enthusiastic about using it either...