Just some thoughts from a Noob

jimkehn · #1 March 13th, 2007, 10:35 AM

Had the Demo just over a week now. Hard to get excited playing anything else, although I am having fun PBEM'ing BoA.

The DIII game I am playing now is solitaire vs AI in the Demo. I am Arco. Having some hellish battles with Ulm. I thought for sure he was going to swallow me up. I beefed up provincial defenses in our two adjacent provinces. One province up to 100. I have read on here that PD is not worth the money. I would have to argue that in some circumstances......such as mine. I was able to get quite a little cav, a few elephants and about 60-70 grunts of various denominations in the province. Ulm had 180 units next door. Including Cave Drakes and his God, Sigerus (or something similar...a giant of a man). Killed him in a subsequent battle. Had it not been for the PD's the province would surely have been lost. It was pretty close, anyway. The beauty of those are....that if you DO hang on to the province, they all regenerate again, so they will be there next month.

Just thinking.....some of these huge battles are awesome. In the Demo there is no way to save the battle for later viewing. In the full blown game, can you save the battles for later viewing like in Total War?

Think the game would be great MP, but haven't tried it yet. Have my name on a list. Hope some of you out there will join Gandalf's Demo game so I can get baptized.

Edi · #2 March 13th, 2007, 10:55 AM

No, you can't save battles. You can, however, make a backup copy of the entire game folder, in which case you can go back to view it later by loading that one as a game.

Gandalf Parker · #3 March 13th, 2007, 11:58 AM

There are some 3rd party programs that you can run which will take video of your screen. That will allow you to record battles and save them to a common format.

Advantage of saving the full game directory:
being able to view it again inside the game to do things you didnt do before such as check a units stats, or zoom in one something.

Advantage of video save:
being able to share with people who dont have Dominions

Edi · #4 March 13th, 2007, 12:51 PM

Another advantage of savegame backup: You can create a video of it anytime if you decide you want one.

Jazzepi · #5 March 13th, 2007, 01:27 PM

http://www.fraps.com/

Jazzepi

Ironhawk · #6 March 13th, 2007, 02:26 PM

Quote:

jimkehn said:
One province up to 100. I have read on here that PD is not worth the money. I would have to argue that in some circumstances......such as mine.

PD is far more valuable against the AI since it will mindlessly impale itself on a high PD bottleneck province forever.

But even that said, 100 pd is really just excessive. For example, the amount of money you spent going from 50->100 PD is 3,750gp! You could buy almost 20 mages for that price. And if the war shifts away from the province in question, a 3.7k investment in mages can move with it. Whereas your 3.7k PD investment is rendered useless.

Gandalf Parker · #7 March 13th, 2007, 04:16 PM

Im surprised that there arent more youtube movies on Dominions. I only found one Dom2 and one Dom3

jimkehn · #8 March 13th, 2007, 07:26 PM

Ironhawk. Point taken. The problem was that the turn before, Ulm had decimated my real army, and there was no way I was going to be able to hold the province (or the next 5 or 6) without the PD. Yes, I could have just let him have the province and hopefully taken it back at a later time, but until then, it is hard telling how many more provinces I would have lost (and the fortresses, temples, etc) until I could muster a force to face him.....if ever. I had a large treasury and a good number already there. By adding that many, I had an instant army where I needed it, when I needed it. But, generally, I would agree with you.

Taqwus · #9 March 14th, 2007, 12:28 AM

I've thought on more than one occasion that a battle recording playable in a stand-alone viewer would be good for marketing. Might be that YouTube's obsoleted the concept.

On huge battles... heh, I had a Seraph leading an army of summons (fewer than two hundred, I think) successfully defend against an AI army of approximately one thousand units, IIRC. Late game so lots of splashy Astral Fires and so forth.

LA Ermor vs LA R'lyeh could lead to some extremely large battles. Not necessarily *long* ones if there's Rigor Mortis, Astral Tempest, or other fun battlefield enchantments, but large ones, yes.

llamabeast · #10 March 14th, 2007, 09:06 AM

Hey jimkehn, if you want people to join your demo, I'd do the following. Make a thread on the Multiplayer forum called something like "Anyone for a demo game? (open)", and explain in it how people can join your game. One thing to emphasise is that people shouldn't hit the "start game" button unless you reckon there's enough of you already. Good luck finding an opponent!