Gandalf's Crazy Solo Games

[Gandalf Parker]

Since some people have shown an interest....
Here is one of the ways I like to play Dominions.
http://www.Dom3Minions.com/RandomMaps/MegaMap.zip

It has 1495 provinces, 3 large oceans and 3 large land areas. You can play with all the other nations in your era and still have wilderness between you making scouting for them an effort. And there lots of impassable mountains creating chokepoints. It also has various surprises scattered around the map so be sure to SCOUT CAREFULLY before attacking a province.

I also added a short script that shows how I generated the additions that are scattered on the map. The "interesting.yab" isnt needed to play the map but if you have a YaBasic or some other basic then you might use it to generate surprises for other maps also. Or re-generate the surprises on this one if you play it enough to get to know whats there.

Warning: generating the world at the beginning of the game can take awhile

Gandalf Parker

[aku666]

Wow, now that's a huge map. It's very tempting to try it but I'm afraid, that the turn generation time would leap to at least 10-15 minutes...

[Gandalf Parker]

On my machine it takes 3 minutes to create the game, and about a minute to process the turns. But it is a nice new windows machine. The hosting time is just long enough for me to stop waiting and realize I should probably try to accomplish at least one other thing than playing Dominions all day.

I wasnt really sure if anyone would want to play it but I like it. It feels more strategic to me to be able to do any tactic I want. Small maps tend to force too many issues.

[Wish]

man my machine was top of the line a couple years ago, and it takes like 10 minutes to creat 5 minutes per turn

it really does have a large wilderness feel to it though.

[NTJedi]

Gandalf Parker said:
On my machine it takes 3 minutes to create the game, and about a minute to process the turns.

How long does it take to process turns on large maps during late game??

[Gandalf Parker]

My game is on turn 39.

The only really large game I have numbers on is on my server. If you look at
http://www.dom3minions.com/games/PvK-e-Oceania/
Its on turn 74, started with 79 nations, and is up to 17 minutes to process a turn

[Loren]

Just don't play with LA Ermor on a map like that. Turn generation could be utterly insane.

[Zarkon]

Ha ha! This map was so mighty it killed my computer! OK, it was actually bad ram, but the coincidence was pretty funny.

[Gandalf Parker]

Yeah playing with the extremes of this game has let me find out I had bad ram on one of my machines also. Kindof funny. It reminds me of something I came up with a long time ago.

Hey Boss, look at this.....
"Diagnostic software designed to maximumly test the limits of
memory, disc read/write access, keyboard and mouse inputs, the highest
video settings and sound quality all concurrently. If used on a regular
basis any changes in system performance would be instantly noticed
before degrading to the point of affecting other softwares."
It's called insert-name-of-favorite-game-here

Gandalf Parker

[Wish]

what are the specs on your machine gandalf, knowing how its supposed to perform under those conditions might help us find our own bad ram or other bottlenecks