The Gaming Den

PL, I'm a dom 3 fan. My last post wasn't exactly disagreeing with you about Elemental. It's pretty sad, especially where it's advertised as a multiplayer game and the multiplayer option is firmly switched off in the current version. I don't agree that dom 3 and Elemental have the same problems tho'.

Edit; to clarify, lack of documentation and lack of features/poorly implemented features are not the same thing.

PhoneLobster wrote:Actually something just came to mind.

Frank is choosing to tie his credibility not only to Dom 3 as being good (a bad idea) but also choosing to tie MY credibility on Elemental as being bad to my opinion of Dom 3 as being bad.

And in turn ultimately tying his credibility to me being wrong about Elemental being a bad game.

Fine. Frank and any Dom 3 fans out there (crickets chirp, tumble weed rolls by, someone says "Dom what now?")

Put your money where your mouth is. Buy Elemental. Buy the collectors edition. Buy it today. Buy it twice. Watch me laugh and laugh and laugh...

No. I am not doing that. I am saying that you undermining your credibility by making provably false statements about Dominions 3.

You just fucking went off about how there were no labels for site searching when there are. About how no one knows how they work when there are in fact online how-to guides on how they work, and how there was no documentation for them when this is a facet of the game that is in simple plain text in the manual and also in numerous FAQs that people have made.

Yes, Dominions 3 doesn't have a good in-game help interface. All it has is a list of hot keys and commands. But it's not like that information doesn't fucking exist. You can just look it up. When you do a review, a great deal of shit you say is going to be subjective. But it's super important to get facts right.

Now, Elemental is a game that is plagued with problems so huge that PC Gamer isn't even reviewing it and the CEO apologized to fans for "lashing out at them" on an internet message board. I have no doubt that the problems are titanic. But you mixing in tirades that are directly provably wrong doesn't do your credibility any favors either.

I've been a fan of Warlords and HOMM for a long time. I played Warlords 1 until I could remember what all the cities made without looking at them (Warlords 1 did not have a random map generator). And HOMM kicks Warlords' ass six ways from Sunday. Warlords army production is just not that interesting. The primary difference between a good unit and a bad unit in Warlords is that better units have a bigger "bigness" number. They mixed things up a bit with the ranged attack mods in later iterations, but it's still just a series of one-on-one fights that you have no control over save to send better units into the meat grinder in the first place. But sure, if you subjectively like simpler games with no tactical controls or economic decisions, that's fine. You are not wrong to say that Warlords 3 is better than HOMM 3. I disagree, but I'm willing to accept "different tastes" as a perfectly sufficient answer.

But I become leery of your review as a whole when you start going off on tirades about how various things in Dominions 3 that are factually documented in multiple places in a very convenient fashion are totally undocumented. That's just false. I'm not saying that you have to like Dominions 3, I'm saying that you've made statements about it that have truth values where the truth value is zero. That undermines other truth value statements you've been making whose truth value I cannot verify.

It doesn't make Elemental a good, or apparently even finished game, it just makes your declarative statements unreliable.

-Username17

Orca wrote:Edit; to clarify, lack of documentation and lack of features/poorly implemented features are not the same thing.

Except that one of the biggest problems with Elemental is ALSO lack of documentation and a poor interface.

And really "needlessly arcane" IS a poorly implemented feature. You don't get to defend Dom 3 by saying "It's features are needless arcane, which is not the same as poor". Because, you know, that IS a kind of poor.

Edit: and to summarize Frank, AGAIN. "Another hundred game hours, bitch, I promise it will get nice and you will like it, bitch, good money after bad, bitch."

"easily available" in a game is IN GAME PERIOD. Civilization has had civilopedia since the dawn of time itself. Complex derived fan written spreadsheets I have to go looking for is NOT "easily available" information.

Also your depiction of warlords strategy and mechanics is entirely false and your defense of HOM... doesn't actually address a single issue I raised with it's basic "Here is my one giant army blob" level of "strategy". Which is unsurprising since you simply hand wave the whole thing based on claims of "opinion".

That wasn't the main emphasis of your review of Elemental above. You painted it as BROKEN, not so much undocumented or with a poor interface. Which are arguably problems of dom3, I agree.

I kind of like the complexity of dom3. If I didn't, I wouldn't play it. I consider it complex, but not needlessly arcane.

Orca wrote:That wasn't the main emphasis of your review of Elemental above.

Yes. Oddly my review of Elemental was largely about the big problems with elemental. That it is ALSO undocumented AND arcane (to the limited degree it's limited content and options can be and good lord does it push that limit) AND has a poor interface (as much because it's interface is actually not just bad but also REALLY BUGGY) those are also problems and THOSE are the problems it shares with Dom 3.

But yes, I didn't want to talk about Dom 3 it's a shitty uninteresting game and I wanted to talk about an entirely separate game that had made claims it was going to be something significantly different to and better than that.

I mean discussing how Dom 3's MOUNTAIN of options are largely meaningless tedious shit is not particularly relevant to Elemental, in which options are actually just short of non-existent.

Really Elemental is specifically supposed to be a spiritual successor to MoM and more recently Age Of Wonders, and that's certainly where the cosmetics and the sales pitches fell.

Comparison of elemental to THOSE games would be far more relevant. But you know, Frank has a hardon for Dom 3. I suspect it's because he is an ass.

HoMM lacks high level on-map strategy?

That's simply not true. HoMM3 revolves around the efficient use of your limited number of heroes. Yes, there's one "mega stack of doom", but if you're not using your other heroes correctly as flaggers, item collectors, minor battle winners, logistical chain, and "bait" the game becomes exceedingly hard.

Tactical skill only really becomes paramount when you're at a massive numerical disadvantage for the "decisive battle", but otherwise tactical skill is really just a means of troop preservation (and you shouldn't be at a numerical disadvantage anyway if you use your secondary heroes right, so you always get to build a full set of troops every week).

And honestly, Warlords III isn't that different. It just revolves around making multiple stacks of doom with each going to a different axis of advance. But since there's no tech tree all you really need to do is to quickly capture a large number of towns, have them keep churning out your best unit (which you can build even at a newly-captured town with a minimal gold investment), and you will kill the enemy via attrition simply because you're producing only the truly good units while the AI tends to build a mix of good and bad.

And it's even easier in the Reign of Heroes campaign, because the humans get Pegasus. Which are flying, highly mobile, and have a bonus to attacking cities. So often you don't even need to hit the enemy army. Just send a Pegasus stack to his (often) weakly protected rear areas, and capture what you can keep while razing everything else.

Both are ultimately attrition games, and making sure your opponent suffers attrition faster than you do.

PhoneLobster wrote:Gal Civ 2 Was Fun
Not half as fun as MoO 2. Which is sad.

Main reason it wasn't as fun as MoO 2?

Same problem elemental and dominions have. Utterly unexplained and undecipherable mechanics.

I was reading an elemental review the other day. It was written by the guy who wrote the manual for Gal Civ 2.

He talked about the rather alarming process by which he wrote the Gal Civ 2 manual. The most telling bit?

The part where he admits that to this day he has no fucking idea how the Gal Civ 2 economy mechanics actually function.

Because the game doesn't tell him and even after working hand in hand with the programmers AND running tests to try and divine it's function both the programmers and the tests were incapable of actually explaining how or why the economy works the way it does (however the hell it works that is).

That's NOT a good thing.

And oddly the strange and often intractable economy is my primary issue with Gal Civ 2, which is otherwise a mildly acceptable if shallow game in it's genre.

That and the fact it really really fails to one up MoO 2 in any department whatsoever.

It's a bit hard to get past that last one. I mean damnit. MoO ONE was better.

Could you give me a link to that review? I'm interested to see what he said about Elemental.

And, yeah, MOO2 was more fun, undeniably. Not because of the economy ( which for me boiled down to: Build a lot of financial centers on high population worlds, industry goes on the medium population worlds ), but because MOO2 had Hotseat, tactical battles and it felt much more manageable ( and that is with all the micromanagment ). Of course it had its own fallacies, but it still is an evergreen.

But GalCiv2 also is quite fun. Unlike Elemental.

The problem with Gal Civ's economy is that it's not intuitive. There are no clear relationships between the various inputs and outputs.

In MoO, you know that food generates population, population works on stuff to produce more goods, hammers go to ships and infrastructure, etc... It's complicated, but you can literally trace how your unit of food eventually help build the Death Star.

With Gal Civ... it's a mess. Everything is paid for by taxes. Which are collected from the people. So as long as you have hundreds of billions of people and they're not revolting because of overcrowding, your economy keeps on humming. Nothing on resource shortages, the effect of technology (except to improve tax collection)... nada.

(And, apparently, overcrowding is the single biggest factor affecting population happiness. If you demolish farms, cause mass starvation, and kill of billions of people, your people will love you in the aftermath. To quote an AAR writer: "I could now see why dictators do it.")

Moreover, what's so retarded about the system is how government buildings (i.e. Research Labs) don't really every become more efficient. A version 1 lab eats up 100 credits to produce 100 research... while a version 2 lab eats up 120 credits to produce 120. WTF?

I mean, sure, if space is limited, then upgrading labs make sense if you want to ramp up research further. But the thing is: You can't EVER turn those labs off.

They just keep eating up money and keep producing. Which often results in the economy "overheating" when you build too many buildings, there are too few people paying taxes to pay for all the buildings, and your government enters a death spiral into bankruptcy unless you demolish some buildings.

OTOH, I heard the Stardock CEO is a raging libertarian who's big on small government (seriously). So this may be working as intended.

magnuskn wrote:Could you give me a link to that review? I'm interested to see what he said about Elemental.

He was here and there, said some interesting things, largely was critical of Elemental but did the whole "choose to forigive and cross my fingers hoping for better things" dealio.

The most arguably strange thing he says all article though is that he rather liked Sim City societies.

I guess that makes 1.

Hearts of Iron 2!

Just putting that out there.

Zinegata wrote: OTOH, I heard the Stardock CEO is a raging libertarian who's big on small government (seriously). So this may be working as intended.

Well, I can't speak to that. Only that he has a damn stick up his ass about multiplayer. ^^

PhoneLobster wrote: He was here and there, said some interesting things, largely was critical of Elemental but did the whole "choose to forigive and cross my fingers hoping for better things" dealio.

The most arguably strange thing he says all article though is that he rather liked Sim City societies.

I guess that makes 1.

Here's a thread that may interest. Go ahead and dig through Frogboy's posts.

http://forums.elementalgame.com/394855/page/2/#2753014

tl;dr "We fucked up."

Phone Lobster's review of Elemental being bad is accurate. I have shelled out the $60 for it yesterday. I'll just make several points of problems with the game.

1. The opening title and storyline feels very bland. Titans made regular folk their slaves while they fought each other but the little people learned how to use magic and magically later the titans left and now everyone has to figure out how to rebuild civilization again.

2. The starting races aren't that interesting. They're all just humans with funny skin colors. I'm biased with this, but it'd be nice to see some orcs or lizardmen or something less humany. Secondly if you're going to have Humans called Ironeers, Mancers, Amarians, Tarthans, Krax, and another Race called "Men" you probably should rename or remove the "Men" race. Cause those other "races" look pretty much like regular "men."

3. The game starts you out in kind of a silly mess unless you mess with making a Custom Sovereign (which you should). You have only 100 gold and have to find Materials and/or Metal to create your buildings, but you don't start out with any of that stuff so you have to walk around the map finding sacks of random treasure til you get enough materials and metal to actually start producing buildings to build an economy.

4. Just as you have an unnecessary delay in starting your economy, similarly, you can start researching spells or tech until you have an appropriate building, so until you find enough random sacks of stuff you can't research any offensive spells and since your starting sovereign is rather puny, you'll likely get attacked when you're on your sack-hunt to greatness, and since you don't start out with any offensive spells you can't attack or defend yourself properly

5. Apparently new cities can't be founded if they're too close to other cities, however if the borders from a nearby city expand, you'll suddenly find yourself unable to build anything there even with all the proper resources and money.

6. The Tech Tree is as boring as it was in Fall From Heaven. Yay, I'm a magical sorceror and my civilization learned how to build granaries and now I get +25% more food from a city which produces 5 food! Yay!

7. The general events and quests are more boring than it was in Fall From Heaven, at least there we had the possibility of summoning Demons into the world or Angels and had Orthus randomly popping up and attacking a city, but here it's fairly bland, and I could care less about the Nobleman's son who needs rescue or that house infested with rats. If you're going to label yourself as an epic game, I really need to feel connected to some story which I certainly don't here.

This elemental game sounds fun! Does it play on macs?

I already mentioned the bland races and story line but yeah, I think it is worth doing doing so again they were so bad.

Elemental the book. 1.5 stars on Amazon. The readers hate it.

And yes, the races really are the good continent hopey kingdoms of Man, Man, Man, Man and Man. And their enemies, Evil Empire Man, Purplish Man, Other Purplish Man, Other Other Purplish Man and Orange Man.

And the story is just... purile.

Really you are designing a fantasy setting for a game of some kind you have as I see it a limited range of options. The big ones being...

1) There are elves and dwarves and dragons and we have all heard it before but screw it it is what the market wants.

2) BAM! We are breaking out of the box, it's atypical fantasy. Humans are shooting magic mind arrows at psychic giant bees and pointy eared humans who claim they aren't a transparent elf rip off ride around in the nude on the backs of giant tree octopuses. You know. Crazy shit but totally different and possibly with exciting cool new imagery and themes at the very least.

3) Tiny Bam! It's atypical fantasy again. Only... this time things aren't especially weird. You took out the elves and the dwarfs and the dragons, but you neglected to put back in things like a race of ancient giant turtles that shoot lazer beams out of their eyes. The "exciting atypical cultures" you put into your setting are all reflavored cultureless humans that everyone just PRETENDS aren't all just the same culture of poorly imagined medieval peasants. The "magic" or what have is somewhat less impressive and exciting than having a hand gun. Effectively you remove the majority of the fantasy, leaving... not-fantasy.

Now option 3 might just work. You could have incredible drama, high quality writing, unexpected twists and brilliant political intrigue. You CAN tell exciting stories about an essentially homogeneous group of humans with powers no greater than the ability to shoot each other with hand guns.

But in removing all the flashy fancy eye catching crazyness and toning down the fantasy you put ALL of the burden on the quality of the story to carry the interest of your audience.

Elemental went with that option. Then had the story promptly trip over it's own feet and throw up on the audience's brand new pair of shoes.

Who the HELL thought that was a good idea? Especially in a game pushed as a "sooper doopper high magical fantasy" with exploding volcanoes and super wizards and apocalyptic voodoo wars and such. WHO?



Anyway as for the walk around and get resources thing before your economy can start. Here is a primer guide to getting started in Elemental, as of the last patch that worked for me. Which it no longer even does.

1) DO NOT PLAY THE CAMPAIGN
It is horrifically bad, it is NOT an intro or tutorial to the game in the slightest. It doesn't even do a good job of telling it's "story" which isn't a big deal because even if it told it well it's a really shit story largely about knee high barriers and how defeating peasants with sticks and talking to the races of Men unblocks them over a period of hundreds of turns. Also half the limited content of the game is locked out in campaign mode, so really DON'T play the campaign.

The direction-less "sand box" mode actually has more direction and indeed more content. Oh. And a more coherent story.

2) Customize your Leader
It's a good idea. Just pick SOME magic schools. One or two elements is enough, Fire and Water seem to have some nice stuff. Air is OK, but hell they are all the same, so if you don't mind your super magic powers LITERALLY being throwing rocks at people, go ahead pick earth.

Also. If your patch number allows it. Pick Conjuration. It's the best school of all! Spell-That-Summons-A-Single-Magic-Regular-Bear RULES THE WORLD. Later on some of the elemental giants and such are nice too, the Lord Of Ice or whatever they call one of the pallet swapped stone elemental water summons is quite ridiculous.

Anyway Your stats look like this. Max Int (for spell damage). Max Wis (for mana). Nothing else matters. Leave it, lower it for points, whatever.

Your Race should probably be the Officially Recognized One True "Men" race of all the Men-like races of the game. Apparently either the monarch or the civilization race selection (or both) unlocks the Travelling Boots Option in the shop in game. AND YOU WANT TRAVELING BOOTS! (for the movement)

Anyway. Then you want your background slot to be Adventurer (for the movement) Then you take the Organized talent (for the movement).

Also get Tracker. (for the movement).

And hell. Nothing else matters. Don't get any equipement. It's a mugs game.

Yes. You CAN'T get like 2 or 3 schools of magic available to non-custom monarchs when doing this. No I don't care. Yes enchantment school has spells that let you mildly circumvent aspects of the game's broken economy, but no, it really doesn't matter that much compared to "Summon-Perfectly-Normal-Bear".

3) Make A Custom Faction/Race
IF your patch number is high enough you can use the game editing tools to write your own custom faction up then use it in game!

You want to do this because custom factions get given about 3x the points in actual abilities that non-custom factions have. No really.

Mind you if you don't have the LATEST patch one of the non-custom factions regenerates 50x the mana they (and everyone else) are supposed to regenerate every turn...

Anyway. Faction ability options actually have some choice of fairly cool things. Unfortunately many of the abilities don't actually function at all depending on your patch version. So say, the elite warriors thing or whatever it was called only gives you bonus combat actions as of the latest patch.

The "Elite Archers" ability can make you win the universe with remarkable ease since having longbows in your shops and potential army equipment from turn zero is STUPIDLY good.

"Egalitarian" lets you have female troops! And yes. That ability costs you points you could spend on an ability that made you kill things more or research tech faster...

Anyway. It doesn't matter too much what powers you take, just that you net yourself the bonuses that the core factions inexplicably gimp themselves out of.

Don't take weaknesess. It probably doesn't matter but many aspects of the game and the economy barely function as is, taking a 20% hit on tech research could magically drop you out of the functional range of mechanics entirely...

4) The Game begins
You want to be near at least one of the following for your start city. Gold or a Lost Library. If not restart. But quit the game first, because starting a game again in game makes the Elemental universe tie into a gordion knot for reasons that I, as a programmer cannot even BEGIN to grasp. (I mean really it's like they went out of their way to create some sort of mobius strip of multiple game data colliding).

Once you have one of those resources you have the ability to either A) Have a functioning gold economy. Or B) Have a functioning tech economy. Because Lost Libraries research things seriously 5 times faster than you do other wise, and, well, basically a similar deal with gold from cities vs gold mines.

If you HAVEN'T upgraded to the latest patch DON'T ever actually "absorb" resources into the city itself. It makes them count against how many other funtional buildings you have. If you instead upgrade the resource but DON'T build tiles of city up to it's base you DO get the resources and DON'T lose buildable tiles. (yes that IS stupid).

Now resources aren't the ONLY bit of early game that is ludicrously swingy.

"Goody huts" Also are. They can range from 10 gold or 2 minerals to hundreds of gold or tens of metal or something.

And the "or something" is REALLY something. It's sand golems. ONE sand golem in your pocket can win you the game then and there. as many as THREE (which certainly happens from time to time) will make you an unstoppable horde of things that aren't peasants with clubs.

Anyway. With your custom Men race and Men sovereign with Tracker, Adventurer and Organized you move around the map really fast. You buy travelling boots and a dull stick with a movement bonus and you move faster. This lets you loot goody huts FAST, do some stupid quests FAST and kick your economy into action FAST. And maybe even get some sand golems FAST.

Research cavalry and buy yourself a riding dog to do all that faster! Yes you need the "dog" or "pony show" resources to equip regular troops with them. But NO you don't need those resources to give them to champions.

If you DO have any cash recruit every single champion you meet. Having a champion standing on a city, no matter how weak or ill equipped is ALL you need to prevent early wolves and peasants with sticks from sacking your foundling empire. Not because they are an effective defense, but because they make the poor AI decide to not attack for some reason. Also heroes give you small incremental bonuses to your economy. One dumb level 0 hero with a blunt stick contributes as much to your research as one regular city with the tech building! Mind you he doesn't scale up, but he is cheap as dirt SO BUY HIM.

Buy pioneers. Build new cities. Build them everywhere. City spam is not punished, (they talk about it but I don't think the mechanic has made it in yet) just make sure to give enough space so they will grow to only just touch, or you end up with the "oh my big city expanded and now it's neighbours can't build anymore" thing. (And yes that is a MECHANIC and NOT a bug! And yes that is stupid) Remember if YOU don't city spam the AI WILL, just to annoy you with all those annoying cities no one really wants or needs.

You want every resource you can get. Except probably elemental shards which last I checked did nothing, but hey I didn't make it to the end of the latest patch notes (and the latest patch won't work for me) so who the hell knows.

If you want to boost your economy... DO NOT RESEARCH THE ECONOMY TECH TREES. Research all the shit in the Explore/Adventure/Whatever the Evil Guys Call It tech tree. Revealing (and then, groan, separately UNLOCKING) new goody huts, quests and things to kill and loot the corpses of (spiders carry a lot of cash, bandits may use wooden clubs, but like all wild beasts ONLY carry cash...) anyway more of those things is great for the economy. Then the rest of the adventure tree gives you actual new resources conveniently appearing near your already existing cities, and again, resources are better than city upgrades so...

5) Dealing with the computer
The AI has been getting increasingly likely to not stand absolutely still doing nothing with each patch (though it's never entirely certain it won't try that tactic).

So largely what it will do is annoyingly spam cities you can't easily raze all over the place.

When you meet the computer you will be in one of two states.
A) You have Bear, or Sand Golem, or Bear and Sand Golem and Friends. You kill every city you meet you roll over the enemy monarch. You win. Remember there is some weird mechanic about killing a monarch in your territory that kills his whole faction. So conquer his city first (which he usually stands just outside of like he doesn't give a shit). Then kill him after and bring down his whole empire just like that! (don't worry, he won't counter attack, he will usually wait for you while you conquer his city and click the next turn button and maybe even do some renovating).

B) You don't have those things. And for some reason he has armies of MULTIPLE peasants with blunt sticks and you are in trouble. You are mostly screwed until you can get some semblance of bear and friends. Don't expect your gaming of the broken economy with non-merged resources and explore tree stuff to save you. Odds are good you can't churn out the matching peasants with blunt sticks. Largely more because the economy and unit production barely works at all than because you lack the resources.

6) Late Game and Victory
The numerous memory leaks, AI loops a general mounting frustration and massive micro management due to you and the computer players spamming cities endlessly for no good reason WILL lead to late game being slow, clunky and generally nightmarish.

The good news is Bear and Friends and some reasonable monarch speed lets you just skip this and win early.

If you otherwise get to this stage you probably still can win with your mastery of the Explore tree by doing the win the game quest, using Bear and Friends.

But the better tactic is to give up because if EARLY game is a barely unplayable mess then LATE game is... well, an UN-playable vomit inducing merry go round.


And there is a guide to quick and easy "success" in Elemental.

And I have no idea if it works on macs. It is debatable that it actually works on PCs.

I have to agree with PL that the interface for Dominions 3 is so bad that it's a pretty valid reason to not play the game.

Sure, there is a great game if you can get past the interface, and sure you can look stuff up all the time, but the UI is like being kicked in the cock every time you fire it up. It's sort of okay once you can trade on 'expert' knowledge to know what to do next, but the first couple of times you have to do anything you're like "What the fuck is this shit" and have to read the manual. I have the same problem with incredibly overcomplicated flight simulators. You end up holding your joystick and sitting on the runway trying to work out how the fuck to start the engine and it's just annoying.

The game doesn't help by having a learning curve that is, indeed, like running into a brick wall, which means that even once you know how the fuck you do stuff, you're still getting ridden like a pony because you have absolutely no idea what the fuck to do. Atleast in a flight simulator once you master the controls the core gameplay is 'use missiles on the other dude' and THATs pretty easy to figure out.

cthulhu wrote:I have to agree with PL that the interface for Dominions 3 is so bad that it's a pretty valid reason to not play the game.

Yeah, I'd agree with him on that too.

If that was his argument that is. His actual argument was retarded and made no sense, though:

PL wrote:dominions lacks transparency, depth, observable immediate goals and indeed sensible interactive strategic decision making in general.

Yeah, the interface takes a lot of getting used to and the documentation is thicker than the bible, but saying it has no depth or strategic decision making is laughable.

I learned how to play from going through the in-game tutorial and reading threads about people playing the game that helpfully explain a lot of the tactical nuances. I would accept complaints about the learning curve, interface, graphics and complexity of the game, but claiming it lacks depth or observable goals is just counter to everything I have seen of the game.

It'd be like complaining 3.5 didn't have enough spells and was broken at low levels. You're stating strengths and claiming they're weaknesses.

Now your just quote mining me and ignoring the actual nature of my criticisms.

Dominions lacks strategic depth because it is almost impossible to make strategic decisions, or observe their effects.

It has any amount of messy muddled up sandbox depth. Because it has piles of choices. They are just almost all bad choices presented in an INCREDIBLY bad way.

If you like dominions 3 as a game at all you are NOT someone to trust as a game reviewer in general, it's sins against the user are unforgivable. Only someone wearing the thickest of deliberate blinders can like it. One objective look and it is a fucking total piece of shit. A piece of shit SO BAD I can barely believe I have to point that out.

PhoneLobster wrote:If you like dominions 3 as a game at all you are NOT someone to trust as a game reviewer in general, it's sins against the user are unforgivable. Only someone wearing the thickest of deliberate blinders can like it. One objective look and it is a fucking total piece of shit. A piece of shit SO BAD I can barely believe I have to point that out.

So, I guess the fact it has a Metacritic rating of 82 means that most professional game critics can't be trusted to review games either. And the fact the series has got to game 3 means everyone who bought it and its previous incarnations doesn't know shit about games. So I guess there's noone in the world that can be trusted to provide accurate reviews except you PL.

Or you could just not like a fairly good game.

PhoneLobster wrote:Dominions lacks strategic depth because it is almost impossible to make strategic decisions, or observe their effects.

Not true. There are some good, simple strategies that come from very obvious interactions. Noticing that a particular enemy is using a lot of bows, and that there is a spell and an item which hamper bow fire, for example, is not rocket science.

Dom3 could badly use a civopedia, its true. This does not mean it is impossible to see whether spell combinations or strategies work or don't work in the game.

My read of PLs complaint is that he thinks the lack of user interface feedback makes it hard to have a fuctional decision loop unless you are an expert user

Red_Rob wrote:means that most professional game critics can't be trusted to review games either.

So... you didn't know that the PC game review industry is arguably one of the most notoriously incompetent and corrupt review industries in the world?

You didn't know that?

You seriously are going to take the angle "Most professional game critics MUST be right!"?

OK.

You do that while I feel really smug for a bit m'kay.

Edit: I can even find favorable "professional" reviews of elemental if I want to.

I share PL's dislike of Dom3, from my very few playthroughs. If I can play Hearts of Iron 2 and generally enjoy any Paradox game, not to mention cheerfully play Advanced Third Reich (WITH CHITS FOR GOD'S SAKE) or Republic of Rome, but still find Dominions 3 unnecessarily obtuse, then the game is probably some combination of two things:

1. Too niche to be considered a good game
2. Not worth the effort

I've seen shit like this before in wargaming, where someone makes the MOST ACCURATE GAME EVAR (I'm thinking of Advanced Squad Leader at the moment but this is a list I and probably Zinegate could easily populate further) that, in the end, is just full of needlessly arcane bullshit. It's actually that similar exposure that made me read through Dom3's manual and online instructions and halfway through, suddenly realize the beast I was surveying. Sure, climb up that steep-ass learning curve and survey... what? Maybe it's a game you enjoy playing, but I think it fails the test of what makes a "good" game. I'd rather just go play Diplomacy online. It's intricate and diplomatically heavy. Ping! Done.

People enjoy poor games all the time. Bless them for it since they keep the industry afloat: I'm certainly not going to tell them to stop playing. However, when they say "no no no, it's a GREAT game despite all that", that's where I think they're objectively incorrect.

mean_liar wrote:Advanced Third Reich (WITH CHITS FOR GOD'S SAKE) or Republic of Rome

My God, you've played Republic of Rome? Well, if someone who can tolerate Republic of Rome thinks Dom 3 is obtuse to the point of unplayability, then they're definitely doing something wrong with Dom 3.

(And just how complex is Republic of Rome? Well, let's just say that the game tries to simulate every aspect of the Roman Republic's electoral system - right down to all sorts of corruption, and evil factions pressing for war because they control the armaments industry. And all the while Hannibal is at the gates and threatening to kill you all.

Seriously, after playing that game it'll make the present-day American democratic system - even with Sarah Palin in the mix - seem straightforward and sane.)

I've seen shit like this before in wargaming, where someone makes the MOST ACCURATE GAME EVAR (I'm thinking of Advanced Squad Leader at the moment but this is a list I and probably Zinegate could easily populate further) that, in the end, is just full of needlessly arcane bullshit.

Wargamers tend to call that "chrome", and it's not always a good thing. I know quite a few people who've sworn off several designers (i.e. Berg) who create massively needlessly complex games.

In Berg's game on the Napoleonic Wars (published by GMT) for instance, players have to roll a morale check for every individual unit just to see if they can muster enough courage to launch an attack.

This is supposedly more accurate, but in my game it created a situation where a single Austrian regiment charged an entire French Division, won, drove them back, only to be surrounded by a second French Division. Problem is, half of the second French Division chickened out when they were going to launch the attack on the surrounded Austrians, and this half was the one attacking the Austrians from behind. The result? The Austrian regiment beat off the attack, then turned around and routed the guys who chickened out.

In short, due to this one mechanic (and terrible morale check rolling on the French player's part) a single Austrian regiment (3000 dudes) defeated an entire French Corps (25,000 dudes). While spending half of that time surrounded. Realistic my ass.

Ironically, ASL was supposed to be the Hollywood version of squad-level combat. Instead, they added so many modules and add-ons that it turned into a needlessly complex monster where it's easier to learn how to drive a tank in real life than it is to drive one in ASL.

The Elemental saga continues:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi ... -Black-Eye

It looks like a new Elemental game is coming out. It is supposed to be better.

Heroes of Might and Magic... was that the one (possibly HOMAM 2 or 3) where you had the Warlocks who could make 4 colours of dragon, the Necromancers who could take skeleton legions which improved based on how many dudes you murdered on the field, a fairly simple but decent map maker and all that? I think I played the hell out of that, years ago.

And I *think* I played a demo of Warlords 3 once and loved it. You get heroes who, upon completing quests or exploring ruins, can get special allies (squads of air elementals) and half the pictures of heroines/female units included partial nudity?

Yeah, I know nothing about modern PC games. At least let me get on the same page with the ancient ones.