Remove Curses and Horror Marks?

[Gregstrom]

That would be an insanely nasty thing to do to SCs/thugs if it were the case.

[Sombre]

B9 death curse can give horror mark, yes. But it's still crap.

[SlipperyJim]

To join the growing consensus ... curses and horror-marking are totally manageable.

Curses are pretty common, but they don't do any harm by themselves. All they do is encourage you to rack up afflictions. Therefore, if you can deal with the afflictions, you don't need to worry about being cursed. Try Gift of Health -- it's Enchantment-5 (reasonably simple) and available to all nations. Even if your nation has no Nature mages to cast it, you can easily find some indy mages with Nature or make sure that your pretender can cast it.

Horror marks do indeed suck, but they're not common at all. In fact, as long as you stay away from horror-marking items, you'll probably be able to finish an entire game without ever getting a horror mark. Unless you're playing MP, in which case you should count on it.

When you're playing SP, Dominions 3 can effectively be played as if it were an RPG. Trot out Gift of Health, smashing SC designs, and all sorts of other goodies ... the AI hardly ever targets such things. Now, MP is a whole different game, or so I've heard....

[Maraxus]

They are manageable but flavorwise I thing a petty Lizard Shaman should not even be allowed to annoy an Arch Lich or Elder Dragon. This sounds more like the job for "The Arch Mage of the enemy kingdom, wielding the sacred crystal coin" ... or someone with an equally long title.

[Zogundar]

Maraxus said:
They are manageable but flavorwise I thing a petty Lizard Shaman should not even be allowed to annoy an Arch Lich or Elder Dragon. This sounds more like the job for "The Arch Mage of the enemy kingdom, wielding the sacred crystal coin" ... or someone with an equally long title.

That's another thing that bugs me.

I experienced Horror Marks for the first time yesterday. Is it normal for a caster, a pretender god in this case, to cast spells until they collapse from exhaustion and lose by default? Because that happened when they were attacked by a Horror. I've also seen it happen with some other 1v1 mage fights. They cast spells until they go over 100 Fatigue and then die.

Another thing: I came across an event that supposedly "Curses" your troops. The Priestess that was in the province had no troops and was not cursed herself, so I assume it only works if you have regular troops there. But since, if I were to purchase this game, I would want to get rid of ALL curse causing sources (Except maybe the items for which, I assume, you are under no obligation to create or equip), would be it be possible to remove this event?

One more question: Can you import save games from the demo into the full version and resume playing?

[Taqwus]

Mages with no other orders will cast spells, unless somebody in melee range prevents them from doing so (random chance).

Demo saved games should still be compatible with the full version.

And yes, curses are generally pretty manageable, especially for nations with lots of nature magic (regeneration to cut down affliction risk, GoH to heal them) or recuperating-units (like most Pangaean units).

Something like D9B9 would be an irritating dual-bless, in that you might not want to throw expensive melee SCs against hordes of cheap D9B9 flags, but that's sufficiently expensive that it -should- be at least a little mean. And those flags will still die en masse to archers or Blade Wind (granted, your Blade Winder might be horror-marked, but the cost might well be a fair trade).

[Edi]

The events that curse troops curse a random number of troops in the province and commanders may get cursed just like normal grunts. I'm not sure if it works on some percentage chance that is rolled for each unit separately. If it is, the priestess may have gotten lucky and avoided it and with no additional targets, no real consequences.

[Sombre]

LA Rlyeh and a few other things may also cause insanity, which is incurable afaik. It sort of sounds like this isn't the game for you.

[Aezeal]

My opinion is that it's very strange to let this little part of the game be the thing to buy or nto buy.. I mean if you had a RPG playing with 1 char and that one get'd permanently nerfed by negative stats.. OK.. I'd not like that (but then those games allow saving usually) but in here you have 100's 1000's even 10000's of units.. what happens to one (even if it's your pretender) isn't that big of a deal.

On the saving part, the one thing why I like MP games (I think) in any game is because obviously it's more of a challange but also becuase I can't reload.. playing SP dominions is like most MP games you can't really say.. ow last 10 turns I made the wrong decision to war this nation.. you have to deal with it.. SP dominions isn't that hard.. if you could reload it'd just be no fun.

Aezeal

[Maraxus]

You can reload your single player game. To save just copy your savegame directory.