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[nenjin]

Yeah, that's a fairly legitimate complaint for the game. Of course, those worthless units are backed up with story and lore to make them fit into the culture's schema. So while your naked slave conscripts may suck balls, it's thematic to use them.

And if you take the time to study strategies, there are plenty of ways to turn those inexpensive, cheap units into a horde of blessed, magically enhanced killers.

[LoSboccacc]

 Don't mind a weak unit here and there to fit a race lore; what really pisses me of instead are those recent games where all factions have all similar units, playing in the similar roles, just with stat slightly different (usually one cheaper and one more effective)

You don't see a game with, say, a faction without air unit and with super weak aa unit because in their lore they never had to face an air threat. Sucks to be them? Surely. You can still balance them in other ways, abd it would leep the faction weird and interesting

In the old total annihilation kingoms every week there was someone complaining about the unbeatable build of the week, to be promptly beaten off by the next week weird combo from some other random guy: in my book, that is a seriously balanced and interesting game.

[ductape]

Don't mind a weak unit here and there to fit a race lore; what really pisses me of instead are those recent games where all factions have all similar units, playing in the similar roles, just with stat slightly different (usually one cheaper and one more effective)

You don't see a game with, say, a faction without air unit and with super weak aa unit because in their lore they never had to face an air threat. Sucks to be them? Surely. You can still balance them in other ways, abd it would leep the faction weird and interesting

In the old total annihilation kingoms every week there was someone complaining about the unbeatable build of the week, to be promptly beaten off by the next week weird combo from some other random guy: in my book, that is a seriously balanced and interesting game.

I think this is what wild happen f we had lots of multiplayer MoM going on. Its the sheer combinations and tricky stuff you can do to counter a build that would lead to emergent gameplay (did i just go there?, yup). No way three races is going to get that feeling of MoM, for me anyways.

[Microcline]

I'll have to wait and see what players say about it. One thing a game like Dominions 3 shines in is variety and options from variety. Sure, races can be a little too similar to each other at times, but they make up for it with special units, special spells and traits that encourage you to use Dominion in different ways.

But yeah. MoM offers a lot of replay that other TBS/4x games don't get close enough to, because the upper level benefits offered by races boil down to essentially the same things. And they're often lacking in flavor too, which is kind of the biggest sin to me. I'll play a race I don't even like in Dom 3 just to see what the back story is on their sacred units.

Plus it isn't like Dominions doesn't have its own faults.

I once heard someone describe Dominion 3's largest fault is that it tried to trick you into creating/purchasing uttarly useless units. Mind you a lot of these units that are useless are doing it just to show how useless they are.

Dominions is one of those "Boobytrap" strategy games where a lot of learning how to play is to ignore large swaths of the content only made to distract you.

I think the big problem with the balance of Dominions is that even veteran players only have personal theories on what units are valuable.  The long playing time means that it's difficult to become good at more than a few civilizations, and even then you only have experience with a few very specific match-ups.  Looking at strategy guides in the forums feels like reading Ph.D. dissertations in that each player generally has experience and theories on a specific build of a civilization that they adapted over a small sample of matches.  If very fast, heavily deterministic games with large playerbases like Street Fighter and Starcraft can have things that are sleeper OP, I shudder to think what balancing a game like Dominions is like.  It'd probably be difficult to make Dominions balance-able (within a timeframe that is reasonable to a human) without removing what most of what makes it fun.

I'd agree with Nenjin that the big difference between MoM and Dominions is the single player.  Even disregarding things like how the micro seriously hurts the addictiveness of Dominions when not played over a long period of time with other people, the city/dungeon/Myrror mechanics made for a much more rewarding single-player experience.  Also, Dominions doesn't have an awesome opening cutscene.

[ductape]

interesting...so basicaly what we are saying is that if you provide enough options and variables maybe balance isnt actually that important. Maybe its ok to just get kinda close and maybe squash out a few really bad OP builds during testing. If there is enough options, players will come up with counters to nearly any build.

Think about TCG's like Magic the gathering. How the hell do you balance that? You dont, You just provide so many options and variables that eventually players will spot certain OP builds and then counter them. At least thats my theory here.

Also, add in the long game play time and your right that nobody will become a master at the whole thing.

I think we have in this thread some real good elements that made MoM great, and we can begin to see why nobody has made a replacement for MoM, mainly because they arent doing these elements! They might do one, but nobody does them all.

[LoSboccacc]

Well, to s it up strategy alwais is about options. If you can conbine the units only in the way designers choosen for you, then you're playng rock paper scissors, at best.

That's way ruse came so close, but ultimately failed.

[ThtblovesDF]

All units in dominion 3 have some role, some are even so good at being bad that you can just use them to keep enemy mind-controllers busy or to level his eater of the dead to max level quicker then he expected so he loses control of it and you have a overpowered monster blocking the enemy assault. Maybe the unit is bad in combat, but a great patroller - maybe it simply is made to flank - maybe it counters ethernal/magic units? Maybe it's moral makes it good to team up with other low moral fellas  - maybe it has so many shity attacks that it will fatigue the enemy - maybe it's small and can share a square with your real fighters for great glory and reducing the enemy defences. Maybe it can be used to give your enemy a sense of false security "oh I beat that 100 unit army of nation X, i bet i can beat this 100 unit army, too!".

[dreiche2]

Question: I'm thinking of picking up the game again, and saw there are a couple of fan-made patches around, any recommendations?

This one, Insecticide 1.40m, seems to be most popular one, but then again it seems to introduce new bugs as well (see complaints in that thread about not finding any good items or enemy wizards getting too strong units early on). Does anyone have any opinion on what the best version to play would be?

[RedKing]

Oh man....I've probably collectively lost weeks of my life to this game.

I think the reason it holds up so well is that there are varying strategies which can all work. You can go army-heavy and magic-weak, you can go magic-heavy and army-weak, you can play as an artificer and try to bling out your heroes. You can go Myrran and Node Mastery and try to use your spells to win those tough node fights early, so you can take advantage of all that mana.

There's also that feeling you get when you've kitted out Torin the Chosen with enough ubergear and spells that he can solo a chaos node with eight Fire Dragons.

And yes, I would weep tears of pure crystallized joy if someone were to make an update of the game (not a remake, not a spiritual successor, an update. Don't screw around with the core play system, just clean up the GUI and update the graphics and sound. And make it run without DOSbox.

[nenjin]

MoM 2 really needs to get a Kickstarer project. Hopefully it'd be run by someone who knows what they're doing.

[EuchreJack]

I just remembered that the races and magic user are seperated in MoM.  So you can have Life Magic Orcs, Death Magic Halflings, or even ... Nature Magic Dwarves, the HORROR!

Anyone have some cool stories about seemingly mis-matched race and magic combos, and how they worked out for you?

[Sartain]

I just remembered that the races and magic user are seperated in MoM.  So you can have Life Magic Orcs, Death Magic Halflings, or even ... Nature Magic Dwarves, the HORROR!

Anyone have some cool stories about seemingly mis-matched race and magic combos, and how they worked out for you?

I once played a straight all-Life High Men warrior nation setup with Horus as my wizard, except near the endgame I picked up several chaos books and suddenly corruption started profilerating in my nation. I imagine it was a story of how the temptation of power corrupted the nation

[Kestrel]

Oh man I lurve MoM.  Warlock isn't half bad actually, but it's far too simplistic.  Definitely worth a few tries though if you're a MoM fan.

[Neonivek]

Well there are several problems with Dominions when it comes to gameplay versus immersion.

Namely Dominions goes for the immersion and storytelling route over gameplay. There are units in factions whos only purpose is to be intentionally terrible so you know that "This is the faction where this unit is terrible" but where someone who didn't know that might actually purchase them.

Then there is magic with spells that are intentionally there just to fluff up the fact that higher level spells are outright better in everyway. They serve no purpose EXCEPT to make the next level better, and because of how Diminions is structured they arn't "Good for now" like most other strategy games.

I am not exactly sure how to describe it... my first instinct was to call it "A game that thinks it is much smarter then it really is" but that isn't exactly what I want to say.

All units in dominion 3 have some role

Exactly and some of their roles are to INTENTIONALLY be useless... or INTENTIONALLY be wasteful. In order to bolster the story.

Mind you it is only a problem in that it seems rather unfair to a new player. An experienced player already knows every single intentionally useless unit and spell on sight.

[EuchreJack]

You should try the CBM mod.  It tries to balance that all out.  I can't say it does it perfectly, but at least the modders are actually trying to balancing things.