StarDestroyer.Net BBS

... tell me about it. The website is worthless (since I already own D2, and I want to know actual changes) and I'm not interested in trawling the forums.

So, did they fix the UI? Is there more automation? Are the devs and the entire community still retards who want to make work for the player? Does it really look as EXACTLY THE SAME as Dominions 2 as the screenshots suggest?

I liked D2, but the almost total lack of automation or easily-processable information made it a pain in the ass to play over a network. I'm interested to see if this has changed, since the 'lolz it's for pbem you n00b play starcraft roffle' crowd on the forums is little help. So in short, is the excellence of the game still crippled by it's (apparently intentional) poor flow and clunky interface?

Look, it's time for you to quit bitching about this. You're stating fucking outright that you are too important and all-knowing to be bothered with actually reading the forums or looking up any of the info on the issue.

For your information, yes, the UI has been improved. There is far more information available straight from the main screen, so you won't have to go through all the menus you were complaining about in the earlier thread.

Taxes are automated to eliminate unrest. Site searching via radar spells like Auspex, Augury and Arcane Probing can be automated (Cast until no viable targets).

For the full list of what has been changed and how the thing has been developing can be found here, which you would know if you had bothered to do even cursory checking of the fucking sticky threads on the Dom3 forum at Shrapnel.

You got your ass handed to you in the last Dom3 thread where we discussed the interface and instead of responding to the points there, you just slunk away like a whipped jackal and now you're basically whining about the same thing all over again.

Either get a fucking life or stay the fuck away from the game so we won't have to listen to your mewling.

Edi

Yeah, asking for information instead of looking for myself is totally banned on this forum, right? Nobody ever posts request for information or assistance that could easily be answered by looking, is that correct?

Frankly, since you've accused me of stealing this game in the past, you can just fuck off. You even answered my question, (without showing where I was supposed to even FIND the information, which is simply a text list of revisions). But hey, I *love* that this game is your football team and you can't respond to criticism of it with anything other than vitriol. Sorry, a game coming out years later that appears to look ABSOLUTELY THE SAME is poor: even SEV looks good, and far better than clunky old SEIV. Guess what? They even improved the UI for SEV to allow casual gamers to play! Oh wait, anyone who wanted that should have just shut up am I right? It's not like by buying a niche game I'm allowed to say anything about it without big mean Edi sitting on my face or anything.

I probably stole it anyway.

Entirely predictable that you would do nothing but whine. Your main complaint used to be about the UI, and about sepcific aspects of it, having to go through menu after menu to find out what you wanted. A lot of that has been fixed, with far more info on the main screen. A lot of the earlier micro has been automated (e.g. taxes, site searching). These were your earlier pet peeves, but apparently fixing them and making all the spell menus sortable by path or other criteria (already mentioned in the earlier thread) doesn't count in your book. Additionally there should also be a new graphics engine or a complete layout revision to satisfy you, I suppose? At which point you'd just start whining about how it wasn't made specifically to your tastes.

You can also take your accusations of me being a Dom3 fanboi without any kind of critical thinking capability towards it and shove them up your arse along with a high voltage cattleprod. I've kept tabs on the development from time to time and I'm seeing a lot of improvement that is geared toward eliminating the micromanagement shit and UI usability that have been the source of many complaints. Given that there is a shitload of new content, improved sprites for most units and enhanced playability, I think the game is far from poor. But then, unlike you, I'm not a whiny snob who only ever looks at anything in order to find minor flaws to criticize and blow out of proportion so that he can fill the world with his whimpering.

I'm going to buy Dominions 3 and I'm going to evaluate it on the basis of how it plays and how things have improved since Dom2. Since you're apparently already so dissatisfied, just give the demo a spin to see if it is as bad as you have already judged.

The comments about pirating were also addressed in the previous thread, so you can also take those and shove them up your arse. But I'm not surprised that a dishonest little shit like you would try to bring it up again in order to look like he was being unjustly persecuted.

Just fuck off and die.

Edi

This is both funny and ridiculous.

It's funny, because despite all his rage, Edi is the most informative and helpful D2 fan I've ever met. He's actually shared more information about how to play the game effciently than anyone else. The D2 forums are absolutely full of people with his exact attitude.

It's ridiculous because my complaints centered around the automation, info synthesis and UI opacity. Edi gets his knickers in a knot because I dared to criticise his precious game. Later, D3 is finalised with improvements to automation, info synthesis and UI opacity.

So who's REALLY being unreasonable here? Am I REALLY that harsh on a game, when the flaws I mentioned are detected and mitigated in a later version? Or was it perfect the way it was? How is criticism unfair when the areas I mention obviously needed improvement?

Again however, Edi provides useful information: I checked the download area of the site, and it was empty (no demo). I'd be happy to give it a try, because it sounds like the very problems that kept me from enjoying the previous game have been addressed. Not that Edi will ever stop his apoplectic fit over my 'unfair' criticism.

There isn't a demo available as of yet, though the posted shipping date is October 2nd. I expect there will be a demo around then.

The thing is that, as you have said yourself, Dominions 2 is a very good game. It does have its flaws, which can be pretty fucking annoying at times (such as my personal favorites, the non-sortability of spell lists when scripting commanders and the research allocation interface), but which are not game breakers. You just happen to have a really goddamn irritating way of expressing criticisms, because you blow things so far out of proportion it's not even comical anymore. That's the reason why you often manage to piss people off. It's not enough to point out flaws, but you need to pound a wedge into the crack and wrench it from side to side until it looks like a horrible, gaping chasm even if it's not that bad. When you add your general dearth of positive comments, it makes you look like a total asshole, and people react accordingly.

The game is playable and it doesn't take a very long time to get familiar with the basics you need. After that and after you've learned the most important hotkeys, things speed up considerably. Maximally optimizing everything does get into the tedious micro territory, but I don't usually bother quite that much. certain amounts of inefficiency are tolerable. If you want to inspect all the minutiae in the game, that's a whole different undertaking, though.

The Dom3 wishlist thread in the Dom2 forum is somewere over 50 pages long with he 25 posts per page setting I use as my froum preferences, and an omproved UI and micromanagement elimination improvements were high on everyone's list. After that there was a lot of stuff, some workable, some not, and Johan and Kristoffer were following that one very closely. A lot of those suggestions made it into Dominions 3, so while the game does look very much the same UI and graphics wise, both have been improved. Quite a bit of the engine internals also got an overhaul, including the way units and their weapons and armor interact (the system in Dom2 was, from a modding and modularity point of view, completely retarded in certain respects) and how resistances and such work.

The magic site code has also, I expect, been optimized. I really hope they added site ID numbers. The old code was a mishmash where the availability of some things depended on where the actual code was located in the source files and that made compiling some portions of the Magic Site Database a real pain in the arse even when I had the actual code to look at.

I don't mind having a constructive conversation about Dominions, but I loathe having its flaws exaggerated. I've been critical of many things in it myself and I've had a reasonably good, at times even excellent, response to my comments. I suspect your attitude is what has gotten you a dismissive response from many of the Domions forumers, but there is a certain subset there whose posts I tend to autofilter just on principle because I know it's usually not worth the time it takes to read them.

Edi

It's actually the quality of the game itself that makes my criticism so aggressive: the game itself is good, but it fails on interface and that's frustrating. Having to manually move your stinking priests around to convert - a primary part of the ideological war - manually, every turn, and having to check manually with no 'province info screen' to show your conversion levels etc just makes me wonder what all the playtesters said. As I've said, the D2 forums simply repeat 'it's for pbem' and 'lol play starcraft' and such, instead of accepting that maybe the game is unnecessarily hobbled. It was impossible to get other people I knew into the game, because it's so damn fiddly.

I've been keeping an eye on D3, and I have to admit the fact that it appears to be the same game with tweaks is pretty disappointing. I don't know if there are more up-to-date screenshots elsewhere, but in the Shrapnel site all the images make it look just like D2, right down to screen elements. Reducing the amount of clicking required is always going to be good - but I'm surprised the release date is so far off. According to the Galciv2 guys, it's gold already. I bought my D2 on the internet, so is it preorder only at the moment?

I haven't been paying that much attention to the preorder/shipping issue, as the preorder price was high enough that I won't pay it. I'll wait until it comes out and order it for nearly €15 less and I'll still end up paying ~€50.

The reason it's graphically similar is that they have kept the same approach that way, just updated all (or almost all) of the sprites. The main improvements are in the engine, which as I understand it has managed to dump a lot of legacy Dominions - PPP holdovers that affected Dominions 2. Dom2 was basically Dom1 with a different approach to maps and three new nations plus limiting some summons to uniques. The changes under the hood are more substantial this time.

Then there's the problem of resources. Johan and Kristoffer both have day jobs and they program the game on their own spare time. They also make all of the graphics themselves or have Kristoffer's little brother and maybe a couple of friends help with it. Making sure the game is also crossplatform enough to work on Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris takes more time. This is not a large, full time development team doing it as their primary job, just two guys on their spare time.

Dominions will always be a niche game and it's certainly not moving into the mainstream soon. I'm not sure if the graphics engine gets an overhaul when (if) Illwinter makes a Dominions 4, but it's using more or less the same thing now as Dominions 2. Some of the components have been updated and the Dom3 screenshots do look more polished than Dom2.

That's the reality we have to live with. I'd like nothing better than to see Dominions done with the kind of graphics Rome Total War has while keeping the nature of the game essentially the same. But that kind of eye-candy costs shitloads of money, which is perhaps the reason why many graphics intensive strat games have been rather poor on the content side. So I'll take it with the less than spectacular graphics, because the gameplay and content more than make up for it for me. Other people's mileage may vary.

Edi

Stark wrote:Sorry, a game coming out years later that appears to look ABSOLUTELY THE SAME is poor: even SEV looks good, and far better than clunky old SEIV.

Why would I care about the opinions of a graphics fanwhore?

Stark wrote:Having to manually move your stinking priests around to convert - a primary part of the ideological war - manually, every turn, and having to check manually with no 'province info screen' to show your conversion levels etc just makes me wonder what all the playtesters said.

Those playtesters wouldn't be using priests to spread dominion because priests are actually an extremely minor part of the dominion spreading process.