Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith

That’s me!

I’m a 2.

I don’t think I’ve been in a SP or MP game long enough to learn late game stuff. I’ve fared well in MP for the early turns, and did well against human opponents up until they start pulling out all their dirty tricks. Hell, I usually play Late Age SP, because I mostly like playing general, and am really sloppy about magic and diving into the 100s of spells this game has.

Indeed, Domions UI is quite bad, but there are very few other simultaneous asynchrnous turn based games in the first place, and none with the same depth, so it’s a real shame.

I’ve had the same issues with the single player game as everyone else, the interface, all the clicking and all the headaches that come with the game and the turn to turn monotony makes it rough (I find it OK graphically). This ALL disappears on a multiplayer game. Knowing that you are only doing it once every day or two, the anticipation of the email, opening and running it with the unknown unpredictable results vs human players is wonderful. All Dominion players should experience it at least once, then shelve it if you still don’t like it

Honestly, the game itself is oriented to micromanagement. It could have a much better UI, and still that fact would remain. It’s a game where you have to put 1-6 magical items not to a handful of heroes like in a party based RPG, but to >60 units. Your dozens rat labs need that micro (research boosters, magic boosters for forging/casting, hammers), your thugs and SC need it, your battlemage corps need it, even your mundane commanders need it (morale/leadership items, some helmets and crossbows are a good idea too).
And that’s a single aspect of the game, there are more than even if improvements could be made, the entire design is oriented to micro.

You made me tired just reading that. :)

The problem I have with a lot of what you describe is not much of that involves “interesting decisions”, IMO (I’m not saying there’s not any taking place and I’m sure you have to prioritize gem usage etc). Training and equipping dozens of researchers is tedious. If you should be equipping dozens of them, there should be better ways to automate the creation and distribution of those items for instance. For me, I’d prefer to get away from the idea of crapping out dozens of researchers throughout the game and instead have a smaller number that you can invest in to "level up’ and become more effective. This would make all the other stuff like equipping them immediately less of a burden.

Well, let’s not get carried away. There is almost no training in the entire game(unless you happen to find some special sites, and even then, you must decide what to do and if its worth it). For the most part you don’t need to equip dozens of researchers, and if you do happen to equip your researchers at all, it’s typically once per game. Researchers can be set to auto-research so you don’t even need to worry about that, and so the game gets closer to what you’re suggesting - which is you invest time and effort in the handful of thugs that you have.

I’m not saying there isn’t micro-management, but lets not invent faults for the game out of whole cloth now ;)

I do check for horrormarks on my lantern researchers. Although I don’t have more then 6 or so lantern researchers.

For me, items are for thugs/Super combatants, and boosters for mages.

One of the things that I really like about Dominions is no waiting for someone else’s turn. You just turn in your turn when you are done. And then you wait for everyone or for the timer. So, if 10 people are slow on the turn, you aren’t combining the times (like you would in Age of Wonders). Instead, its as slow as the slowest player. No compounding the issues.

I would be willing to participate in this.
Like Kelan, I was a 4 at one point, but that was a couple of revisions ago.

I would be a 3 or 4.

Put me at 0.

So, right now, I have a list of 10 players.
@Strato - 3 or 4
@dfs - 3 or 4
@Kelan - 3 or 4
@wahoo - 3 or 4 (I think, he hasn’t mentioned it yet)
@legowarrior - 3 or 4
@belouski - 2
@Galdred - 1 or 2
@Valambrian - 1 (although, seeing as how he wiped the floor with us in AoW, I doubt that will last)
@Mellified - 1
@jaygittings - 1 (I assume, but let me know if you are a 2)

If I can 2 more players, we can do 4 teams of 3, and I think we can split up pretty well.

Yep, played about 1/2 a dozen games in single player, so 1 is spot on.

Yea you’re basically my spirit animal right now. I don’t mind micromanagement, but all the decisions have to be interesting. If I’m forging 3 research items per round, they need to be set to be automatically distributed as well. The interesting micromanagement is how many mages should you devote to crafting items that will ramp up research. There’s nothing interesting about re-distributing them every turn, just like there’s nothing interesting about re-assigning all your mages to research if you just needed them to cast a one-off spell or forge a one-off item.

It’s the wrong kind of micromanagement. I’ll happily tell 20 mages what to cast in a turn, that’s the game! It’s the fact that I have to go through so many extra little steps that I don’t love. I don’t mind giving army orders to all your forces, especially since you can CTRL group the orders and assign lists rapidly. Doing that, choosing how to spend your gold, deciding where your main armies are moving, and deciding what to use your mages for each turn is interesting.

Ferrying a million troops from a bunch of forts to the front line isn’t interesting. But it’s a solvable problem, have troop construction at each city be able to associate with an army as a toggle and then divide the move distance by their speed and have them show up X turns later with those forces. These kinds of solutions aren’t novel or probably close to the best someone could come up with if they considered it for more than five minutes.

Anyways I can clearly go on and on about this topic, but I’ll restrain myself and let the people who love it get back to it.

So, there is a small bug with the twice Born Aboleths, so I would avoid that nation in the up coming game.

Anyway, is there anyone from the list that I am missing. I want to get to 12 players.

Okay, so it looks like we will be going into the game with 10 players.

We can do 5 teams of 2, or we can do 2 teams of 3, and 1 team of 4. What are people in favor of? Keep in mind, with 2 teams of 5, one team will experienced player will get @belouski, who is not that inexperienced, so might make the teams slightly uneven

Seems like we are up for a slight imbalance either way. I think the larger teams (3 and 4 size) would be interesting but happy to defer to the rest of the group.

My last Dominions 5 experience was the MP session hosted here about 2 or 3 years ago? If you all don’t mind a noob in relative to yours Dominions experience, I can sign up if the dozen headcount can be met.

Why not 2 teams of 5 then? Experience imbalance doesn’t seem as bad as unbalanced player count to me.

Nope, you are exactly the type of person that we are looking for.

Its possible, but 2 teams of 5 becomes hard to plan. You need to create 1 pretender with paths that will help 5 nations.

Anyway, now we are up to 11 players. Just need one more by tomorrow.