Solo scenarios, can someone make them ? ;)

PDF · #1 December 4th, 2003, 06:14 PM

After reading various threads about solo games "unbalance" (too easy) and Gandalf's proposals/ideas I think we have the recipe for good solo scenarios.

The main idea is to make the scenario/map with one "human" nation and all the rest AI.
The human will start as usual with 1 province, smallish army and no spells, but the AI could have
* several provinces right from the start
+ bigger income
+ some tough commanders/mages
+ bigger armies
+ more/better magic at start (possible ?)
+ AI alliances, either along the classic lines (goodies vs baddies) or more subtle.

Obviously those scenarios would be playable only SP but will make for a more interesting experience than "even" maps played solo.

[ December 04, 2003, 16:22: Message edited by: PDF ]

Gandalf Parker · #2 December 4th, 2003, 07:03 PM

I had a start on the subject.
http://www.techno-mage.com/~dominion/Dominions2/

Take the Abysia.map if you want to play Abysia. All you have to do is choose to play Abysia as a human player and start the game. It has randomly selected opponents at random levels which will kick in as AI opponents. The maps are rerolled every day. You actually can play them MP since it will let you select any race not already marked as AI by the map.

If there was interest I was going to increase their difficulty and set them up as daily re-rolled. All of what you say is quite possible if there is a map for each nation. It could also be setup to allow playing any combination of nations you want. If there is one map with extras added then any human player also so it would take a map for each nation to insure that nation is excluded from benefits.

Would we want these to re-use a map image from the demo (which I did for the ones that are up now)? Use one of the larger maps from the full game? Or can someone make us one we can use over and over?

The only hard part to do well would be if we wanted to go as far as randomly assigning extra units all over. For that to be done well involves a unit database to interface to terrain settings (something Im looking at now). So lets leave that possiblity off for now.

[ December 04, 2003, 17:06: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Gandalf Parker · #3 December 10th, 2003, 04:23 PM

Hmmm I had a thought for a really hard game. Most of the map is land. Up in the corner is an island with 10 provinces or so. The island is surrounded by all of the sea. 20 provinces or so, Maybe 2 seas with a really small land bridge.
The game has Ermor on the island by itself, the sea has both water nations. All 3 of them are allied and at high AI

If the random map generator worked Id do this for now the idea needs someone willing to make a map

[ December 10, 2003, 14:25: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Gandalf Parker · #4 December 11th, 2003, 05:07 PM

New thought. Or maybe this should go into the GIMP thread. Anyway, since Dom2 doesnt seem to actually USE the province lines for anything...

What if you made a map from something like one of the USGS satellite images? And didnt paint any borders on it at all. If the "white dots" 255/255/255 that mark the capitals were set as "transparent" in the TGA save, would the Dom2 game really care? Oh well, just a wild thought. A photorealistic map with no visible boundaries all over it and not even the white dots to give clues. Only the grey flags that appear when you are moving on the map.