Moving Through Multiple Provinces

[thejeff]

At one point I threw together a mod that added a capital site to every nation that only had one. Did nothing except keep the automated site searching from targeting capitals. It should be somewhere on the mod page.

[Ironlord]

Thanks to all for the advice. I am new to the game, though I have lurked a bit. I play Civ4 alot, so that is what I was thinking when I decided to give Ermor a try and discovered the massive numbers of spawn this nation gets.

[SlipperyJim]

Originally Posted by Ironlord

Thanks to all for the advice. I am new to the game, though I have lurked a bit. I play Civ4 alot, so that is what I was thinking when I decided to give Ermor a try and discovered the massive numbers of spawn this nation gets.

Free piece of advice (and worth as much as you paid for it): LA Ermor plays very differently from just about any other nation in Dom3. Try playing a few games as some of the other nations first. That will enable you get a better feel for how Dom3 works, and then you can jump back into directing massive hordes of the undead....

There are many suggestions for new Dom3 players. Personally, I like MA Marignon. You get powerful priests, fun Fire magic, spies, and assassins. Your troops are decent but not outstanding, except for the Knights of the Chalice, which are quite good. And you get some amazing late-game summons to pimp out with all of the cool gear.

MA Ulm is another classic choice for new players. Your troops are excellent. However, your magic is very weak, so this choice won't allow you to experience much of the magic part of Dom3. And the magic part of Dom3 is most of the game, so....

[licker]

I must say the bulk of you completely miss the point.

It does not have to be pathfinding afterall. You can set up your movement however you like, and the file can simply store the movement command to the next province# in your chain. Is this massive bloat? Seems doubtful to me, unless you intentionally make huge move chains, but even there you could cap the length of the chain at 5 or some other arbitrary number.

This is not rocket science, this is not reinventing anything, this is really really simple, and even if you would never use it, others obviously would use it.

I get the whole the devs don't give a crap about the SP game (and if that sounds harsh, its also basically true), but this is an ease to micro which would be used frequently, even if it was only to add one extra province move as you are ferrying move 1 troops 2 provinces.

I'm not talking about linking moves and actions to create some kind of search or pickup automation (though that would also be cool), I'm talking about an ability to chain move commands via some kind of way point system. Scrap any notion of path finding, that's not needed.

Sometimes I think that Dom IV would be better served by not trying to expand the content, but rather to simply refine what there already is by making the turns flow more smoothly, and a huge part of that would be reducing the amount of needless micro, as well as improving certain other aspects such as equiping commanders, setting up the tactical battles, ...

All that aside though, that's not germane to anything added to Dom3. Add the shortcut to move gems (like blood slaves), add a monthly forging command, add a monthly move command (set a destination, and every turn the commander moves towards it in the shortest path possible, hell this is even easier than waypoints or pathfinding since nothing is stored in the file other than a Move to provinceX, and if provinceX becomes unreachable just pop up a message and cancel the order, this already happens when you run out of gems for monthly rituals, though not the message...).

Seriously, I don't see the resistance to this, until a dev says its too hard to code. I won't pretend to know what it would take to add it, and I don't really think any of you should pretend that either.

[vfb]

I'm sure if this is ever implemented, the first time I try it, I'll get bogged down in a swamp, spend a couple months starving in the deserts, and then leave the entire regiment of troops in Inkpot End as my water-breathing commander passes through a water province, only to end up getting killed as he attacks the enemy all by himself. Charge!

[Gandalf Parker]

Careful attention to the movement abilities and terrain abilities of individual units can help. Grouping units under commanders who have the same move abilities. Often you can create armies which can move 2 or 3 provinces at a time if you dont just get in the habit of grouping everyone together in one army.

I do understand why its unlikely that we will get this fix.
The waypoint code that "has been around forever" has not been around long enough to easily merge with the code for THIS game. It would probably take a few days of very unfun labor to incorporate this.

[Meursy]

Ho ho licker!

I wouldn't pretend to know what everyone else does or does not know!

And who knows, maybe the developers do care at least a little bit about SP, somewhere down in the deep and mysterious seats of their beings!

(btw I am one of those people who has no idea how hard things are to code...and I second vfb on the negatives of implemented waypointed movement!)

[Kristoffer O]

> Seriously, I don't see the resistance to this, until a dev says its too hard to code. I won't pretend to know what it would take to add it, and I don't really think any of you should pretend that either.

I don't code much so I have no idea. I think there are a few obstacles.
1. It is more rewarding for us to work on a new game, which we do.
2. It is boring to make a change that is mainly UI. The results are unrewarding for us as devs
3. The change is big enough to introduce a new range of possibly severe bugs, meaning we would likely spend additional time (extremely boring time) and patches to find and squash bugs, while the MP community shouts 'exploit', 'my army disappeared', 'my game is ruined', etc. At this stage dom3 is working quite smoothly, without bugs. We are not particulary interested in introducing new ones. Therefore most new content is based on old mechanics or slight changes.

In short: we prefer a clunky, but working movement system, to spending unfun time to have an even longer unfun period of bugs, while we can't work on stuff we like and are good at.

It would probably be nice especially for the SP community, but the opportunity cost for our sake is unfortunately too high.

[thejeff]

Well, obviously the code should not detach troops to let a commander enter the water. That would be dumb.

And if licker's first suggestion is used, you would set your own path so starving in deserts would be your own fault.

[Meursy]

There you go! Some people here do know something about coding!