I’ve never played Dom games, only seen some screenshots, read a features list.
Somebody tell me what I’m missing.
I assume the MP game is PBEM? How long have your past games taken?
Is there an AAR or something similar one could point me to, so I can get an idea of how it actually plays out?
If I play a demo, is that going to give me a fair impression, or does MP elevate it to a higher plane?
If you go to the following forums, you can click on the Multiplayer forum and they have a few AAR’s up for Dom 3.
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/threads/postlist.php?Cat=&Board=dom3
The demo, when it’s out, should give you a good idea of the basic gameplay.
The MP is PBEM and TCP/IP
MP, if it is possible, both elevates it to a higher plane and leads to frustrations in itself. Within a very short period of time, the very good players will have “cheese” tactics that will basically require you to use the accepted counter tactics in order to survive at all. Of course, whether the tactics are cheese or not will be open to interpretation, but there will be frantic battles about things like clam hording, junk single unit tactics that use combination spells (recalling something with grey skies and calling lightning) to destroy entire armies of valuable units, etc.
Also, like Diplomacy and other multiplayer games of its nature, you will be playing with and competing with other players. Some will be smarter than the AI. Some will be considerably dumber than the AI. Both can be terrible or great, depending on your perspective for such things. If you really get into it, expect to both win and lose games because someone gave away half of their empire in the beginning of the game across the map (or gave it away to you), someone got an irrational grudge, someone did something stupid and did not understand why there was a rational grudge, etc.
Which is precisely why I prefer single player. I’m still hoping the game is worth it for solo play and that the “improved” AI does the job.
I was looking at the game’s site yesterday. It appears that the maps are hand-drawn. If so, how does the game know where cities, mountains, forests, etc. are?
That is a very silly question :)
This Shrapnel thread has links to several AARs, including my AARs for two Qt3 games (Pampelmousse, and Lutes 1). Eternal thanks to Bruce Geryk for formatting and hosting those.
(Edited to fix link)
The MP game is either PBEM or else hosted by a dedicated server that clients connect to. I must prefer a dedicated server just to avoid the nuisance of always exchanging turns as email attachments.
The Demo is a good way to get a feel for what the game’s about, so I recommend trying that. I have no idea how good the Dom3 AI is, since I’ve only had the game for a day now, but the Dom2 AI was decent enough to at least make a new player scale part of the learning curve to win.
What’s that? A degree mill? A spyware op masquerading as a degree mill?
You draw your map (or take any pre-existing image), then make sure there is no pure white (255/255/255) anywhere on it. Then, you place single pure white pixels wherever you want the centers of territories to be located. When you open your file in the game’s map editor, it ignores everything but the white dots, marking each as a territory. You then assign all of the qualities to a territory that you want it to have – name, terrain type, magic site frequency, etc. – and specify “adjacent” territories so the game knows which white dots the players can legally move between.
The map editor makes the data editing really easy for those of us who don’t like editing text files. Creating decent-looking, original maps is what takes a while :/
lol – sorry about that, folks. I was emailing that link to a colleague and apparently mixed things up. The post now has the correct link edited in (also here.)