combat

[Gandalf Parker]

Thematically, the best I could see would be a more direct (but still not perfect) control of the action IF you send your pretender into the combat. But even then Im not sure how it might be done in a play-by-turns game (and I REALLY do NOT want the game to be changed from PbEM). Maybe if the pretender could do more than 5 commands to reflect his "on the battlefield" position

[Morkilus]

I'm parroting what's been said in previous threads on tactical control... but the more control you have over tactics, the more difficult it becomes for the AI to compete. I'm assuming that the players that demand more individual control could care less for multiplayer since simultaneous turns are inherent to what makes this game work, so...

[DominionsFan]

snake said:
I played the DOM 2 demo and was quite intrigued enough to consider purchasing DOM 3.
My question is: Do you have any control over combat? I mean, I would love to have some control of the tactical battle like Age of Wonders.
In DOM 2 I could only replay a battle and watch which, to me, is rather lame - why waste the time after a few viewings.

Age of Wonders style tactical combat is impossible in Dominions. Why? Because in AoW you had a couple of units in a battle. I think the max size of an army stack was 8? You can attack from multiple hexes there, but that means, that there was like 9x8 = 72 units on the battlefield maximum if Im correct, but it was hella rare. Typical AoW battle had like ~32-40 units.
In Dominions there are hundreds of units in the battlefield, sometime 1000+, it would be impossible to control a tactical battle. Also tactical battles are giving a hard time for the AI again. ["exploits"] This is why theres no tactical combat in GalCiv 2. AFAIK for example.

[NakedLunch]

Well, that could be fixed by simply controlling large groups and not just single units, but I feel that making combat manual would shift the focus away from the rest of the game and as a result it'd feel less "Dominions-y" to me.

[Archonsod]

The only addition to the combat I would like to see is the possibility of direct control on characters, especially priests and mages. Kind of makes sense that you could tell your prophet what to do
As it is, as soon as your spellcasters revert to AI control you get something of a mixed bag. Sometimes they'll cast some useful spells, other times you'll end up with a level 10 mage, full fatigue and plenty of gems wasting his time casting some low level missile spell or similar ad naseum, or casting various shield spells despite the fact that they are nowhere near the fight.
It might just be me though If not direct control, I'd like to see some kind of targetting for scripted spells. It would be nice to tell your mage to target the big beasties with the uber damage spell, rather than going for the nearest militia.

[NTJedi]

Archonsod said:
As it is, as soon as your spellcasters revert to AI control you get something of a mixed bag. Sometimes they'll cast some useful spells, other times you'll end up with a level 10 mage, full fatigue and plenty of gems wasting his time casting some low level missile spell or similar ad naseum, or casting various shield spells despite the fact that they are nowhere near the fight.

The biggest annoyance I see are the weak 10 hitpoint mages casting fire shield or astral shield. Such a waste considering the mage will die 99% of the time from one strike anyways.
It would be nice if we could tell our mages ahead of time what battle spells they are banned from casting.