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## Dominions 4 Teasers

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K
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Post by K » Fri Nov 10, 2017 9:21 pm

> Red_Rob wrote:I actually agree with a lot of your concerns Zine. However, given the 2 man Dev team and the fact they steadfastly refuse to hand even the boring donkey-work over to anyone else, I think we have to be resigned to incremental improvements rather than the ground-up redesign of the UI that is obviously needed at this point.
> I'd really like to see a Dominions that was redone from scratch, keeping almost all of the content but with a modern UI shell.

The UI does suck in a way that I really can't imagine is ever going to get better. I mean, to make UI that bad you need to have an actual learning disability for spatial reasoning.
The core ideas and conceits for Dominions seems very portable to something like Unity, and I expect that at some point one of the enthusiasts will realize that they can make something technically comparable and much more lovely over a long vacation break.
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Ikeren
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Post by Ikeren » Sat Nov 11, 2017 3:59 am

I mean, does the game actually need to get bigger? There is a large enough player pool at the moment that I can pick up almost any game style I want on the inside of a week?
The 1100 province game with 75 to all magic sites and crazy mods didn't get the 23 players it shot for, but is going decently with 12 on turn 70 (the first few players got eliminated). But normal style games fill up pretty fast.
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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata » Thu Nov 16, 2017 2:41 am

> Ikeren wrote:I mean, does the game actually need to get bigger? There is a large enough player pool at the moment that I can pick up almost any game style I want on the inside of a week?
> The 1100 province game with 75 to all magic sites and crazy mods didn't get the 23 players it shot for, but is going decently with 12 on turn 70 (the first few players got eliminated). But normal style games fill up pretty fast.

The issue here is that the "core" of the community - meaning the Dom3Mods people - are all currently very invested in supporting Dominions 5.
The problem is that they aren't the majority of the base by a very wide margin; only the most vocal and visible portion. The rest of the base are more casual players and are not as likely to be ready to migrate to a new game. Hence a new game might actually reduce the number of people available for pick-up games, because it results in a split between those who migrate to Dom5 and those who stick with Dom4.
That's really the big issue with a lot of modern games in general. Vocal minorities tend to widely distort what the majority of players actually want or need, because Devs fall into the trap of thinking that the vocal base is representative of the larger whole instead of the more time-consuming effort of actually seeking regular players (particularly those with negative feedback).
I saw the same situation play out during the release of Steel Division. The game had a really vocal and hostile base of players from the developer's previous games (Wargame) who were demanding all sorts of changes regarding "balance", adding special Wehrmacht obscure prototypes, or whatnot, so the devs spent the first couple of patches on these "issues".
However it turned out that less than 1/3 of Steel Division purchasers ever bought a Wargame title and less than one in twenty had even played Wargame in the past month (based on readily available stats). The real problem was that the majority of the game's purchasers were new blood - folks who have played Hearts of Iron or Total War - and were totally unfamiliar with how unforgiving a multiplayer RTS can be especially given the tutorials and single player missions were pretty bad.
By the time the Devs figured out they had to fix the tutorials and single player missions, it was pretty much too late. The game's sales had already stagnated and the playerbase pretty much collapsed.
Last edited by Zinegata on Thu Nov 16, 2017 2:42 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Ikeren
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Post by Ikeren » Sun Nov 26, 2017 6:10 pm

It's not just the Dom3Mods people; The Dom4 Subreddit channel, and the Clockwork Hounds people are all pretty gung-ho about Dom5.
Like...what's a community of players that is still playing Dom4 multiplayer, now, 4 years later, that won't shell out for the update to Dom5? SomethingAwful?
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GreatGreyShrike
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Post by GreatGreyShrike » Sun Nov 26, 2017 8:35 pm

I would be shocked if SomethingAwful didn't convert to Dom5 quicker than other communities, rather than slower. To a first approximation, the main feature that distinguishes the Goons from other Dom5 communities is that they're willing to pay out $10 for something as ephemeral and useless as membership of a forum. The sort of people willing to pay out $10 to use SomethingAwful are probably also going to be more willing to pay for a new videogame version, rather than less.
(Confession: I have a SA account, and I am also almost certainly going to buy Dom5 tomorrow. I have played three SA dom4 games, but organized and played many more games through Spacebattles, Reddit, and the Steam multiplayer forum).
Last edited by GreatGreyShrike on Sun Nov 26, 2017 8:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Zinegata
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Post by Zinegata » Mon Nov 27, 2017 7:08 am

> GreatGreyShrike wrote:I would be shocked if SomethingAwful didn't convert to Dom5 quicker than other communities, rather than slower. To a first approximation, the main feature that distinguishes the Goons from other Dom5 communities is that they're willing to pay out $10 for something as ephemeral and useless as membership of a forum. The sort of people willing to pay out $10 to use SomethingAwful are probably also going to be more willing to pay for a new videogame version, rather than less.
> (Confession: I have a SA account, and I am also almost certainly going to buy Dom5 tomorrow. I have played three SA dom4 games, but organized and played many more games through Spacebattles, Reddit, and the Steam multiplayer forum).

The SA Dom4 community will buy the new game, as will most people who are involved enough to be on a forum. The problem is that those are actually a small minority of the number of buyers of a game.
Note that Dom 4 actually sold 73,000 copies based on Steam's records. Dom3mods has less than 2,300 people who have ever registered. The folks who are on the forum are in fact an incredibly tiny fraction of the overall playerbase.
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Red_Rob
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Post by Red_Rob » Mon Nov 27, 2017 11:39 am

Dominions 5 is out! Also on 10% discount for the first month (at least on the UK storefront).
I'm at work for another 8 hours, but I'll be picking it up when I get home.
Simplified Tome Armor.
Tome item system and expanded Wish Economy rules.
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Korwin
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Post by Korwin » Mon Nov 27, 2017 12:44 pm

I bought it with the steam app

> Red_Rob wrote: I mean, I'm pretty sure the Mayans had a prophecy about what would happen if Frank and PL ever agreed on something. PL will argue with Frank that the sky is blue or grass is green, so when they both separately piss on your idea that is definitely something to think about.

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Ikeren
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Post by Ikeren » Sat Dec 02, 2017 5:51 am

73k sales?
It seems like the multiplayer communities collectively represent about 1000 players?
What are the 72k others doing? Enjoying singleplayer versus the AI?
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DSMatticus
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Post by DSMatticus » Sat Dec 02, 2017 5:58 am

Yes. If your game has any kind of singleplayer at all, the silent solo-going masses will dwarf your multiplayer community by an order of magnitude or several. This is a consistent observation across every instance I am aware of that such data has been made available. No matter how heavily oriented your game is towards multiplayer.
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Whipstitch
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Post by Whipstitch » Tue Dec 05, 2017 10:52 am

It's exaggerated for these kinds of games too because long turn based play and multiplayer with randos goes together about as well as orange juice and toothpaste. For example, I loved Civ 4 but virtually never played multiplayer. That's because casuals (rather understandably) were notorious for bailing out on games at the first sign of trouble rather than playing out the string for hours or days as a minor power and games among the hardcore crowd were super weird and bore little relation to what people think of as "normal" mid-to-low difficulty play--you went for military conquest and you liked it or else you got dog piled on the moment people spot you approaching one of the other win cons.
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