Classic turn-based ?

[Secours]

Hi guys,

I'm just playing the game (which is really cool), but i was wondering if there was an option to turn into "normal" turn based, i mean not simultaneous turns, or maybe a mod ?
The game will be perfect to me with this option.

[Gandalf Parker]

Sorry,
the game is built on a PbEM system (play by email) where all of the turns are delivered from the players, then the host processes them and gives back the result files for you to view. PbEM has alot of pros and cons.

[MaxWilson]

Out of curiosity, what is it about simultaneous turns that turns you off? I'll readily admit that it certainly has a big impact on play (imagine simultaneous-turn chess vs. classic chess), and I wonder if you're annoyed by e.g. the army shuffle, where every time you try to cut off an invading army it moves somewhere you didn't think it would.

-Max

[Secours]

MaxWilson said:
and I wonder if you're annoyed by e.g. the army shuffle, where every time you try to cut off an invading army it moves somewhere you didn't think it would.

That's it.

I'm not programmer, but to me, to have both option available (simultaneous / not simultaneous) would not be a big deal technically.
In fact, it would be very interesting if someone could develop a mod like this. Il could be done "easily" by playing a "fake" neutral phase between every player phase.

Btw, thank you for your answer.

[Hadrian_II]

i think there would be other methods to end the "army shuffle" like the army in the province with less unrest moves first (as when you invade, there is some unrest in the conquered province) so you could fix this problem without loosing multiplayer capability.

[MaxWilson]

You'd have to do a little bit more than just add a neutral phase. You'd need to make sure that income doesn't get collected twice, disease don't happen twice, decide when healing gets applied (end of my turn? Proportionately while my enemies are taking their turns?), and work out some rules for who gets the income of a province that trades hands multiple times during a megaturn (=all players' turns).

Unfortunately mods can't do this, or at least the modding that's built into the game can't. It's more designed to add new content than change rules--for instance, I have a homemade race based on a favorite book series that I play against. Adding that race into my games took maybe thirty minutes (mostly thinking about what abilities they should have) and required essentially zero programming on my part, which is what Dom3 modding is good at. But AFAIK changing the basic rules of the game the way you're suggesting would require hacking the .exe, and that's much, much harder.

I actually rather like the "army shuffle." It certainly does avoid a lot of the illogical things that happen in classic turn-based games (in Axis and Allies, the same country gives 500% of normal income if it's captured frequently enough by different countries). Against the AI, the thing I find it teaches is patience--first block his moves to cut off his advance, and do it in such a way that next turn you can keep blocking while attacking and cutting off his retreat. Example:

A -> B
+_-^
C

That's supposed to be a funny arrow indicating that C is also connected to B as well as A. If the enemy army is in B and you have an army in C, instead of trying to stomp him in B (he might have moved by then), move a part of your army to A to block his advance. The next turn, attack B from both A and C. If he attacks either A or C at the same time, you'll have a 50% chance of fighting in his province and a 50% chance of fighting in yours. If it happens in his province, yay!, you get to use your full army and take fewer casualties. If it happens in your province, you get to use your PD, and if he loses the battle (assuming you take B) his units will have nowhere to retreat to and will all die. It does take an extra turn to set up, but IMHO simultaneous turns lend to the feel of the strongest position being tactical defense and strategic offense, which is realistic. But yeah, it's harder.

-Max

P.S. With classic turns, many tactics would go out the window. Raiding would just be impossible, because as soon as you took a province the enemy would stomp right on you. He can stomp on you now anyway with magic spells (because spells happen before the movement phase), but he could stop you with his regular army because they wouldn't have used up their move. Caelum and Vanheim would both be very unhappy. Using your pretender would also become a lot riskier, and in fact attacking would be risky in general, because any time you took a province you'd never know what was waiting to hit your (depleted) armies on the other side. Scouting would assume even more importance, and you'd probably evolve the same notion of "kill zones" that you get in Axis and Allies, defending by threatening a counterstrike. Might still be fun, but it would be a very different game.

[Ironhawk]

Secours said:
I'm not programmer, but to me, to have both option available (simultaneous / not simultaneous) would not be a big deal technically.
In fact, it would be very interesting if someone could develop a mod like this. Il could be done "easily" by playing a "fake" neutral phase between every player phase.

Actually it would be a ton of work to go back into a game and redesign it like this. It is possible to design a game from the ground up to play both serial and parallel turns. But thats not how Dom3 was written.

And personally, I didnt like the simultaneous turns when I started playing either. But over time I've actually come to really enjoy them. As others have posted many interesting tactics availabe in dom3 would disappear. But moreso, I find that simultaneous turns force you to outwit your opponent, rather than just out-click them. Once I came to that realization, dominions went to a whole new level of strategic complexity for me.

[Edi]

To echo Ironhawk, it would be a massive workload and then some to rewrite everything from scratch to support classic turns as well as simultaneous turns.

I love the simultaneous turns aspect of Dom3. For a game that uses both simultaneous and turn-based systems, take a look at the Age of Wonders series. In that game, the simultaneous turn structure is far more like RTS, where the quickest click gets the prize more often than not. I hated that, always played it in classic turn-based mode. With Dominions, even if the option were there, I would not, because Dom3 has true simultaneity.

[PvK]

Thinking about the wicked tactics possible in a classic turn-based version of Dominions, it sounds like it would be a nightmare of gamey exploitations. By "classic" I don't mean a click-fest, but where everyone does all their moves one at a time and views the results of each before deciding what to do next, with everyone paralysed until he is done.

"First, I send a scout with retreat orders into all provinces I might want to attack.
Then, I re-do all my scripts and send in tailored attack forces against the enemies I know are there.
If any important enemies survived those attacks, I start casting assassination spells one at a time until I get them."

etc... sounds dreadful to me, and is why I tend not to like such games.

[MaxWilson]

Well let's be fair--you'd probably have a "declare" phase where you declare all combat-related movement, a "resolve" phase where battles actually get run, and a non-combat-related movement phase. So you'd probably not get exploits at quite that level of granularity.

I agree that simultaneous turns have better versimilitude.

-Max