Frustrated...
Howdy, I've been playing Dom2 on and off for ... maybe a year? Long time. Its a great game, and theres something about it that keeps me coming back again and again.
I tend to play on sorta hard settings against the AI. I tend to stick to the inland map using all the land based civs, I usually do something like 4 easy, 4 normal, 3 impossible AI, as this gives some weak 'feeder' civs to the AI, and gives the impossible AIs some additional forts - I modded the resources/gold/supply to be considerably higher - as I think the AI performs better under these conditions. I also use the recruitable rebalance, and the conceptual pretender mod. So introductions aside...
It seems like dominions 2 vs the ai ends up being this awful war of slow attrition. Again and again, I've found in my D2 games, that even though I win all the fights, I inevitably lose the war.
In my current game, at around turn 80 I simply cannot field enough armies to secure any kind of sensible border. I only have about 14 armies, although these win every fight with very low casualties (they're almost all wraiths/trolls/vine ogres/sea trolls), I still can't secure my empire.
Thankfully, my enemy put out Burden of Time...him being Pangea means he's getting punished to all hell for it, while meanwhile my 'desert tomb' c'tis is having a field day. Anyway, there is a chance I'm gonna win. Thats cool and all, but the very, very slow war of attrition required to make it work will be grueling, time consuming and dull.
Am I the only one who thinks that the best part of dominions 2 is the rare occurance when two truly powerhouse armies collide - or putting together the right balance of troops for a really kick *** army. Even putting together the right set of commanders with the right equipment and the right troops.
I don't want to put together 35 crappy armies each with one or two interesting elements that makes them not suck. I want each of my armies to have character, personality, and basically... to be fun.
I hope that Dominions 3 streamlines gameplay just a little bit - encouraging the clasing of fewer larger armies. Even just something like having to briefly 'siege' a province for a couple turns before taking it over would be a huge improvement - as it would force you to actually be able to HOLD enemy ground, and therefore actually.... win fights against other armies.
The Dominions games have such tremendous potential, its frustrating to all hell that seemingly minor gameplay mechanisms can take so much away from it.
|
Threaded Mode