Dominions 3 and micromanagement

[alexti]

I was anticipated Dom3 a lot hoping that it would solve Dom2 micromanagement problems in the late game. As everybody probably knows, late game in Dom2 was bogging down becoming a chore due to micromanagement.

I think that UI improvements in Dom3 (gems and items visible on the main screen, sorted spells, combined squad management etc) have a promise, but after playing for a couple of months I believe that micromanagement reduction has failed to materialize. Worse than that, in Dom3 the game already bogs down in the early game! Part of the problem is that I like to play efficiently and when not micromanaging leads to suboptimal performance leaves me unsatisfied

The way I see the issue is that in the early-mid game it became efficient to recruit multiple armies of all kind of troops (national and indies), carefully script tactical combat and optimize strategic map movement. In practice it leads to explosion of micromanagement involved. Because for most nations it's virtually impossible to avoid some attrition, every turn one has to update the scripts, move units between squads (to get the right numbers, to assign new recruits, to move badly injured into the arrow catcher squads etc), plan which commander goes where to pick up troops that will flee in the next turn (and to collect new recruits). Besides, the limited leadership adds a headaches trying to optimally assign squads to leaders and foresee how much leadership capacity you'll need in every province on the next turn. Besides it's not much fun in SP, because AI keeps throwing the same (cluelessly scripted troops) at you, so essentially you can just use exactly the same army composition (it somewhat differs when you countering different AI nations, but much less than I'd like to) and scripting to efficiently destroy AI armies. It feels pretty boring to me.

Also the effects of strategy in the early game were significantly reduced (in comparison to Dom2). I think that one of the issues is that a lot of low level combat spells in Dom3 became useless. Early on one can't hire many mages (because it the fort+lab+(maybe)temple became much more expensive and construction time has grown as well) and small number of mages can't make much difference when there're so many units in the armies.

Unfortunately, I don't have much hope for UI solving those micromanagement issues. Neither of issues has any apparent solution. So I've started to experiment with various settings trying to get micromanagement reduced in different ways. My idea is essentially to make obvious and micromanagement-heavy plans inefficient They key I think is to make low-level magic more workable - it immediately leads to multiple possible strategies, certainly different for different nations (due to different magic paths on national mages if not for anything else). It's not really my idea - Illwinter has done it in Dom2, so essentially I'm trying to combine positive aspects of Dom2 and Dom3. So I've tried few games with easy research and 50% income (I had to reduce resources to 50% too, otherwise anything but heavily armored troops was becoming pretty much useless) and I really liked the resulting gameplay. Early game plays very much like Dom2 - quickly and creatively. But by mid-game the gameplay deviates from Dom2 - by the time in Dom2 one would typically use more or less the same summons, in Dom3 that's not working (part to due to difficulty of accessing different magic paths, part due to some changes in spells). That's I think is a positive thing because in Dom2 late mid-game and further tended to play very similarly every time. Late game still becomes same-ish I think, but on a good side UI improvement in Dom3 really cut down the micromanagement issues that existed in Dom2.

Anybody wants to share ideas and suggestions in this area?

P.S. I'm intentionally ignoring uber-bless strategies here - AI doesn't use them anyway and human players can agree on not using them.

[Gandalf Parker]

Are you playing solo? mp blitz? mp with a daily turn?

[alexti]

I've tried those idea only in SP and in the blitz. Long MP would obviously take some time and willing guinea pigs.

[HoneyBadger]

I usually play SP at 50 gold, resources, and supply, and very difficult magic research. This means that the spells I have and the spells the computer has, are around for a longer time, and empowerment becomes a much more valid choice, which means by mid or end game I can use most spells, and since I like to play against 18 or more opponents, it means that the computer is using more spells too-perhaps not very well, but they are using them. I'd like to see low-level spells become more useful too. It seems logical to me that the easier a spell is to cast, the more times it would have had to have been cast in the past, and therefore there should be more uses for that spell, if only through the power of creativity.

[curtadams]

Improving low-level magic would make the early game more varied, but it would make micromanagement *worse*. You're going to have almost as many squads but now also a bunch of mages with separate and even more complex scripts you have to frequently piddle with for similar reasons.

The army micro that really drives me batty is placing squads on the battleground and in particular *moving* them when I switch my army's stance from, say, hold-and-attack to ambush cavalry or forward attack. The solution would be HTML-esque scripting or a real GUI interface (e.g. dragging squads) but those are of course major changes.

[Gandalf Parker]

The game was more designed toward MP with day turns. Blitzes were figured into Dom2 abit more. And Solo play was looked at for support in Dom3.

It does appear that suggestions for lessening micromanagement will be looked at if it doesnt change the game into something different. IMHO

[alexti]

curtadams said:
Improving low-level magic would make the early game more varied, but it would make micromanagement *worse*. You're going to have almost as many squads but now also a bunch of mages with separate and even more complex scripts you have to frequently piddle with for similar reasons.

In the settings I've mentioned as my current favourite that doesn't happen. Amount of micromanagement is reduced maybe by 3-4 times, if not more. I think that one reason that there're shortcuts for mage scripts and another reasons is that with low-level magic being more efficient overly complicated squad management becomes unnecessary. Besides, it's becoming more practical to spend (now reduced amount gold) on mages instead of massing up the troops. So generally I'm using much fewer squads.

curtadams said:
The army micro that really drives me batty is placing squads on the battleground and in particular *moving* them when I switch my army's stance from, say, hold-and-attack to ambush cavalry or forward attack. The solution would be HTML-esque scripting or a real GUI interface (e.g. dragging squads) but those are of course major changes.

I agree that's one of the major headaches. I can't see any GUI that would solve all those problems. While general rules of what one does are pretty straightforward they're kind of hard to express in terse form. Some scripting language could solve it, but that's probably a big change in the code and I'm not sure how many players would be enthusiastic about using it either...

[alexti]

Gandalf Parker said:
The game was more designed toward MP with day turns. Blitzes were figured into Dom2 abit more. And Solo play was looked at for support in Dom3.

It does appear that suggestions for lessening micromanagement will be looked at if it doesnt change the game into something different. IMHO

In my experience long MPs in Dom2 were often getting abandoned around turn 80-100 due to too much micromanagement. In vanilla Dom3 it seems more like turn 40. Spending an hour a day to do mostly mechanical work is not much fun. I was used to give Dom2 as an example of elegant gameplay in other groups and forums (for example comparing it to micromanagement hell of Civ4), but now I'm not so sure that Dom3 (vanilla settings) has retained this quality. Of course, different people have different levels of micromanagement tolerance and I probably have rather low threshold. On a good side, it seems one can sidestep all those issues by choosing appropriate settings - no changes to the game are required at all.

I remember that during Dom2 times there were frequent discussions about making Dominions more accessible to the new players and in Dom3 we saw some of such changes. I wonder if default settings were actually chosen to provide simpler gameplay more accessible to newbies? It's probably reasonable to assume that experienced players will figure out how to change few options in the game creation interface...

[quantum_mechani]

alexti said:
The way I see the issue is that in the early-mid game it became efficient to recruit multiple armies of all kind of troops (national and indies), carefully script tactical combat and optimize strategic map movement. In practice it leads to explosion of micromanagement involved. Because for most nations it's virtually impossible to avoid some attrition, every turn one has to update the scripts, move units between squads (to get the right numbers, to assign new recruits, to move badly injured into the arrow catcher squads etc), plan which commander goes where to pick up troops that will flee in the next turn (and to collect new recruits). Besides, the limited leadership adds a headaches trying to optimally assign squads to leaders and foresee how much leadership capacity you'll need in every province on the next turn. Besides it's not much fun in SP, because AI keeps throwing the same (cluelessly scripted troops) at you, so essentially you can just use exactly the same army composition (it somewhat differs when you countering different AI nations, but much less than I'd like to) and scripting to efficiently destroy AI armies. It feels pretty boring to me.

Also the effects of strategy in the early game were significantly reduced (in comparison to Dom2). I think that one of the issues is that a lot of low level combat spells in Dom3 became useless. Early on one can't hire many mages (because it the fort+lab+(maybe)temple became much more expensive and construction time has grown as well) and small number of mages can't make much difference when there're so many units in the armies.

I tend to optimize as much possible as well (recruit indy x-bows etc.) but I can't say I've noticed an overall increase in micro management. I also don't really agree that the early spells were made useless. Those that were useful in dom 2 still are. It's true they don't make as big of a dent in enemy troops, but when you are in an early war you need the added firepower of your mages just as much.

I do agree though that early game strategies do tend to be more limited. Easy research a mod somewhat nerfing blesses seems to help a lot though.

[alexti]

quantum_mechani said:
I tend to optimize as much possible as well (recruit indy x-bows etc.) but I can't say I've noticed an overall increase in micro management. I also don't really agree that the early spells were made useless.

I don't think that doing something like recruiting couple of indy units here and couple there was useful in Dom2 and I never did it (but maybe I was wrong about that). In Dom3 vanilla it seems quite helpful.

Not all early spell are useless, but a large part of them (if you ask me, some early spells - like blade wind or flaming arrows are *too* useful ). But in Dom2 it was often useful to have few mages casting one person damage spells (or single square ones). Not that they were causing that much damage, but they helped to demoralize the enemy before it came to contact with your melee troops thus helping you to route the opposition quickly without suffering too many losses. In Dom3, large squads seems to be pretty resistant to the minor damage mages can inflict and having 10-20 regular units instead of a mage tends to be more efficient. It's a bit of generalization, in some cases (like facing uber-blessed helherdings) mages are still better. Spammer mages are useful as well.

Do you know anybody playing long MPs with settings similar to mine (less gold, easier research)?