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## Help me like Dominions 3

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Shatner
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### Help me like Dominions 3

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Post by Shatner » Sun Nov 15, 2009 6:51 am

I know some of you have played Dominions 3 and spoken well of it. Conceptually, this is a game well tailored to my tastes but a couple days ago I downloaded the demo and have played several games culminating in... disappointment.
My main complaint is micro-management. From what I have experienced, and what I have read in the forum and wiki, the way the game progresses from using your national armies to beat down the locals to using your ever increasing magical prowess to propel your nation to victory. However, doing this seems to require turn-by-turn micro of several dozen distinct units (both individual commanders and armies as a whole) as well as toggling several sliders concerning research, taxes and the unit-by-unit production in any of dozens of provinces, each of which may produce radically different troops (and of course, individual units of the same type may differ in key ways even before you take experience, afflictions, curses or equipped items into account). Use your casters to build items which buff their spell casting abilities so they can then summon magical entities which can cast even bigger, better spells and then give those summons equipment which make them some unstoppable force. Your mundane army may or may not be relegated to mop up duty while you pull the Magic Buff Shuffle of Real Ultimate Power. The main saving grace is that battles are resolved instantaneously by the computer (though I found I would spend plenty of time arranging unit layouts, scripting squad commands and hunting down all those soldiers that scattered across multiple provinces after the latest clash).
I want to point out that I am a long time, slow-paced strategy gamer. All the Civilization games, all the Heroes games, Age of Wonders, Galactic Civilization, Sword of the Stars... all games where individual turns can potentially require tens of minutes and many steps to complete. I've played and enjoyed them all but this one is proving difficult.
The game seems really rich and there is obviously a thriving community of people who play the heck out of it. How!? Is it merely that the demo represents an old version of the game and the subsequent patches helped streamline things? I really want to like this game so I am wondering if there is something, small or large, I am missing that can make my experience fall more in line with what others are reporting.
That and reading Frank's write up of the T'ien Ch'i made me want to play them but they aren't available in the demo and I want to make sure the whole package will be worth the $50 Amazon wants for it.
Last edited by Shatner on Sun Nov 15, 2009 7:03 am, edited 5 times in total.
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PhoneLobster
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###

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Post by PhoneLobster » Sun Nov 15, 2009 7:21 am

It's not really a very good game.
I can't really find anything good to say about it.
And I could say something bad about just about every aspect of it.
Also before my last computer got burnt out the commercial version wouldn't even run on it once it was updated and patched (which among other things significantly re-balances and adds a lot of material, apparently).
So it also has that going for it too.
Phonelobster's Self Proclaimed Greatest Hits Collection : (no really, they are awesome)
Phonelobster's Latest RPG Rule Set
The world's most definitive Star Wars Saga Edition Review
That Time I reviewed D20Modern Classes
Stories from Phonelobster's ridiculous life about local gaming stores, board game clubs and brothels
Australia is a horror setting thread
Phonelobster's totally legit history of the island of Malta
The utterly infamous Our Favourite Edition Is 2nd Edition thread
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Username17
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###

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Post by Username17 » Sun Nov 15, 2009 8:23 am

Your assessment isn't far off. The game has a cast of thousands and you arrange them into piles sometimes on at a time. However, the game creates a number of ways to get around the micromanagement that work surprisingly well.
By double clicking on a type of unit, you select everything of the same kind of unit in the stack.
You can select any number of units before assigning them to a leader in a group.
Your national troops tend to be much much better than independents, so you'll only be hiring indies when you're in a desperate situation and need units in a location - in which case you'll end up taking whatever is there.
Hot keys allow you to hire units ten at a time or select all units with wounds.
Your strategies will generally revolve around just a couple of troops, so you will rarely have to worry about how many of 8 different infantry types to produce.
But yes, the tactics get very deep. And when you start throwing magic into the mix and trying to out-maneuver your human player enemies, you'll be arranging complex uses of rarely seen troops. The point at which you make a flaming arrows / Iron Bane army your Mictlan forces will suddenly sprout hundreds of those naked dudes with slings that you normally never use.
But it is a game that has several learning curves. Getting to the point where you can put heavy infantry in front of archers and mop up indie provinces is a little daunting to start, but it works OK. Getting to the point where you're performing amphibious invasions of enemy capitals by ship and harnessing the retreat mechanics to reinforce with aquatic troops on the same turn is a much steeper learning curve.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Sun Nov 15, 2009 9:37 am

I wish more of these strategy games would start having a human readable AI language. So few have an AI language to begin with...
I love playing around with SEV, but the AI and bugs. Argh.
-Crissa
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Shatner
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Post by Shatner » Mon Nov 16, 2009 10:52 pm

I've done a little more looking around the official forum for "getting started" threads and found the site obtuse and daunting (this is an older game with an established fan base of hard core strategy players; not very new-player friendly). Does anyone have any tips or links to tips about getting off the ground in the early and mid game and, more helpfully, tips for making the game flow better.
I'm competent enough at the actual gameplay (I was playing as Kailasa and Arcoscephale to good effect before I gave up), I just found it tedious to keep track of what everyone was doing turn-after-turn-after-turn.
For example, during a fight some of your squads might rout resulting in some of your units fleeing to adjacent, friendly provinces where they will stay and do nothing until a commander comes along to re-consolidate them. Routing occurs pretty regularly, even if you win the combat in question. Any province-to-province movement requires one full season to complete meaning you need a handful of commands to collect the rabble, along with several turns for your head hunters to reach them and regroup with your main force(s).
I like this mechanic, in theory, but in practice it requires so much micro to hunt the arrow catchers down and reintegrate them into my main force that it really diminishes the game for me. There are many other issues like that, some big, some small, that sap my enjoyment of the game. However, I am very acclimated to obtuse and micro intensive games like this (Dwarf Fortress, for example) so my first reaction is to assume it is my approach, rather than the game, that is at fault.
Also, Frank, while I was looking around the Dominion 3 forum I found the thread where you were playing the T'ien Ch'i in a competitive multiplayer game but midway through all your posts said "Deleted". What happened there and what was the result of the game?
Last edited by Shatner on Mon Nov 16, 2009 11:00 pm, edited 5 times in total.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Tue Nov 17, 2009 12:17 am

Hum, is there no way-point system to have commanders visiting provinces regularly, or have a commander there to send people on?
There is in SEV...
-Crissa
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Orca
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Post by Orca » Tue Nov 17, 2009 12:21 am

I take it you're playing single-player? Multiplayer changes things a lot, I think.
On the collection of arrow-catchers; if it's a pain, only put 5 guys up front to block arrows & lug around some extras as bodyguards. When they die or rout, create replacements from the bodyguards & don't bother to go collecting any that rout off the screen.
Killing the enemy fast with good cavalry also reduces the chance that your routing units will actually escape. This works less well if at all in multiplayer.
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Tue Nov 17, 2009 7:44 am

The game functions on topologies and changes massively in 20 turns, so there is no waypoint system. I don't even really know how you could implement one. Every month you send your tiny men to a province that is adjacent to them or one that is up to their province movement in clear provinces that you currently control from their starting position. The computer doesn't know where you or your opponents are going to invade, so it does not know where the shortest route to anything is.
As for dealing with reinforcements, my suggestion is to quickly develop a churning supply line of indie commanders marching from your castles towards the fronts and back again. These guys can catch your strays and make it so you never have to spend more than a single month regrouping before moving on. But as Orca mentioned, if you murderate your enemies before they get off the board or meet them more than halfway, then the battle will be over before your guys route off the field. And if you use expendable micro squads as your first line, they'll die, but you won't care.

As for the Tien Chi game, I came in second. Vanheim was very strong and instead of joining up to put a stop to him, a lot of people went after number two (me) to try to drag themselves up. I crushed them one by one, but not at no cost. When Vanheim finally came for me, he did so with elaborately perfected armies backed up by shadow seers, enchantresses, and tartarian beasts. We had some great battles, but eventually I had to concede.
The posts got deleted because a moderator got really offended at me for reporting another player in a later game (Meglobob) for cheating. She got so offended at me that she started editing my posts, so I told her to fuck off and deleted all the posts of mine I could be bothered to find and refused to post there any more. I'm told that Mindy isn't around any more, but I'm a very uncompromising person and in any case I'm in school full time so I haven't been back.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Tue Nov 17, 2009 7:47 am

How do you cheat in a server-based game?
-Crissa
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Username17
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Post by Username17 » Tue Nov 17, 2009 8:10 am

> Crissa wrote:How do you cheat in a server-based game?
> -Crissa

Each game has a set of rules that people are expected to adhere to. Sometimes it's simply "anything allowed by the game is allowed in this game." Other times it's more arbitrary. So for example there are RP games where your pretenders have to have particular names. Or games where the runners of the game have decided that certain things in the game are bugs that haven't been patched yet and that using them constitutes cheating in that game.
Meglobob had a very cavalier attitude towards those, so he would join games that had restrictions and then just play as if the restrictions weren't there because he is a dick. So for example, at one point it was possible to have a stealthy leader ordered to sneak out of a sieged castle, then attach non-stealthy troops to the leader causing him to revert to normal non-stealthy movement. But not to "no movement allowed" as normal when you are under siege. So when that bug had been identified, many games said that using it constituted cheating until a patch fixed it (Dominions gets patched fairly frequently). Meglobob just did it anyway under the assumption that since people couldn't see his unit orders it would be hard to notice or prove. In another game there was a restriction that you had to come through with your deals. He made deals and broke them anyway under the theory that your diplomacy was secret so it was your word against his.
You know, because he's a dick.
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Crissa
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Post by Crissa » Tue Nov 17, 2009 8:37 am

Ugh, I know in SEV ends up with a copy of your past orders, (technically any server game does on the server anyhow) so cheating is something that's just stupid to do, you can't get away with it forever.
-Crissa
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