Game suggestion

[Folket]

Planing to have some spell cast after five turns is a sure way to loose the battles. Must battles are decided within three turns. If that SC does nothing for five turns there is no need to kill him. If he casts master enslave or something he will not wait five turns.

[thejeff]

Possibly true in end game, when Master Enslave and a few other spells rule the battle field, but not true throughout much of the game.
SCs buff. Reverse communions boost the slaves up to high path levels. Troops get buffed. Troops close into range of each other. Then the actual battle really starts.

That's really the rule for most of the game as far as I've seen.

[Loren]

How about a lesser version of this: There is an order "Cast Spells"--how about adding "Cast Attacks" and "Cast Buffs".

[Quitti]

Well, mages from my experience tend to favor doing damage over buffing if they are in range for any meaningful spell so it's not really needed. And five turns worth of spells is usually enough to turn the whole battle to needed direction (not always, though).

[thejeff]

In my experience, mages tend to favor summoning creatures who will never even reach the front lines over attack spells.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by thejeff

In my experience, mages tend to favor summoning creatures who will never even reach the front lines over attack spells.

I've noticed this too, and they will waste gems to do it, silly.

They WON'T spend gems to cast a spell you've hinged your strategy for the whole battle on, because by some evaluation algorithm it isn't worth the gem cost; then they proceed to spam summon lesser fire elemental through the entire battle, most of which don't reach the front lines, but do kill your other mages via their area effect heat.

[Gandalf Parker]

I research Evocation very early for at least a couple of levels. And put off researching Alteration for quite awhile. Usually until I have a definite problem with some race that has a special weakness. I find that helps to avoid lots of the mage errors.

[AdmiralZhao]

Or you could view it as a chess game where you allowed to play the first 5 moves, and then after that an AI takes over.

Seriously, it is frustrating, and I'm not sure that it becomes less so once you've mastered the combat and scripting system. The problem becomes even more galling with CBM, as you have dozens of viable combat spells to cast, but no way to get your mages to repeatedly cast them. Personally, I see it as the biggest flaw left in the game. If they were to fix this and call the resulting game Dominions 4, I would buy a copy.

[Quitti]

Originally Posted by AdmiralZhao

Or you could view it as a chess game where you allowed to play the first 5 moves, and then after that an AI takes over.

I'd like to add that with this game of "chess" you can have seven queens on the board at once. And over a hundred pawns. And dozens of knights. And ranged attacks. And... It's called dominions 3. No, seriously, comparing chess and dom3 is not useful. In chess you have very limited types and amounts of units, whereas in dom3 there are quite a few options. One "piece" on the "board" can kill hundreds of others or indirectly cause their deaths due routing or dying to fatigue or even converting them.

I still think that the 5 scripted spells + (cast spells) is enough. Though I agree that summon elementals/stuff should be set to lower priority. Skeleton spam is still an useful to have up there, since (d2) death mages either should be doing something like disintegrate or raise skeletons/dead in the combat to be very useful. Of course there are exceptions, but most of the time those few spells are pretty much what you need those low-path death mages for.

[Omnirizon]

Originally Posted by AdmiralZhao

Or you could view it as a chess game where you allowed to play the first 5 moves, and then after that an AI takes over.

Seriously, it is frustrating, and I'm not sure that it becomes less so once you've mastered the combat and scripting system. The problem becomes even more galling with CBM, as you have dozens of viable combat spells to cast, but no way to get your mages to repeatedly cast them. Personally, I see it as the biggest flaw left in the game. If they were to fix this and call the resulting game Dominions 4, I would buy a copy.

chess isn't a perfect comparison, but to the extent that it is: the comparison doesn't begin with the start of battle, but rather with the turns leading up to it. Scripting and placement constraints figure into the chess-like strategy in the decisions as to what armies/units to prepare and send into a battle, what spells to think about using with them, and how to equip them.

The probabilistic influences are the greatest difference between chess and dominions, but it is whims of the RNG and unpredictability of the AI that make dominions battles fun.

Originally Posted by Ironhawk

The 5-turn limit is frustrating but neccessary. First and foremost to reduce MicroManagement. If there wasnt a limit to what you could script, power players would spend HOURS on every script and everyone else would have to as well, just to keep up.

Also, it is a sort of buffer to prevent certain spells from becoming imbalanced. If players had perfect control over actions for the entire battle, entire new strategies would emerge in which certain (even fewer than now) spells would become extremely powerful due to some little trick they allowed. Currently, the unpredictable behavior helps to reduce any spell from being extremely powerful because the player can't really script exactly how it is used (at least until late-game when there are lots of battle-field wide spells that avoid most of the unpredictability in spell usage, assuming the AI decides to cast them

Another reason not to have more involved scripting is that perfect management of battles without interactive order giving would require lengthy if-then-else trees, and that mechanic is an entire game in and of itself (like robot battle games), and not what this game is supposed to be about. Thus really, the way it is currently done is -close- to the best way to do it given the aims of the game-play experience. Certainly there are minor additions that could be made and implemented that would improve battle resolution. But really, they wouldn't improve it that much: certainly not enough to justify the time needed to implement and play-test any additions to scripting.