Of course.

Agree with Tridus re: having the option to disable in multi.  That said, there's still room for some options as far as how the auto-resolve works.  Personally, I like the script capability (though I don't particularly want to WATCH the battles if they're autoresolved, the way you do in Dominions.

Same here, as much as I love Sword of the Stars, when you're playing a 4+ player games, it's just not reasonable to wait for 5 minutes between turns while others resolve their tactical battles.

 

I guess my issue with the script capability is the issue some people had with the complex economic models: it's not non-hardcore friendly.

Scripting a fight will go horribly wrong if you script it badly. If you don't know what you're doing, are you going to dig in and figure out how to script better against opponent X, or are you going to say "wow this sucks"? Hell, would a newbie even realize *why* they're doing so badly in auto-resolve as compared to someone else?

Everybody is playing with the same auto-resolve AI, so at least that one is consistent.

Well, the scripting option is... well... optional, so it would not be TOO bad, and there's always TC.

Hmm... I've given some thought to handle battles using auto-resolve if a bunch of modders manage to add some weird stuff the game. Perhaps the best approach is to allow the part of the game that handles the auto-resolve battles should also be modable (which the dev posts I've read seem to imply).

Mind you, this might make things difficult for many modders to make auto battles balanced, but I think its the course of action most likely to get a balanced mod game, assuming modders can really muddle things up. Simply put, I don't know if its possible for the devs to foresee every possible thing a modder might try to put in. They are more likely to make things balanced for everything they plan to use, and try their best to keep things balanced for the foreseeable mods while not getting too distracted to work on other projects.

Quoting Houlio, reply 8
Quoting Climber, reply 6I’ve suggested something similar to below a while back:

On the strategic map, whenever gamer highlight an attacking stack, hover the mouse pointers over an enemy stack, the game will shows the % chance of winning.   This Win% is determined by running a few AI Auto-resolves behind the scene.  It will also show the average # of unit lost and % of HP lost for both sides.  If your computer is slow, the game uses a formula to calculate all these instead, using their relative stack strength.

If the gamer like the odds, he can choose to attack; and he has the choice of either using TC or Auto-resolve.

If I remember correctly, HoMM V used a system like this where the computer would tell you if a battle with a stack of creatures/hero/town would be easy, normal, or hard.  I think it was only based unit numbers but I'm not entirely sure about that.  I dont know if I like the idea of seeing # of units lost and % of health lost by mousing over another stack, it seems ripe for some abuse to me at least.  I would say it should be made into a skill for heroes to use, like "scouting" or something.  I also think that the victory % should only reflect the auto-resolve battle, but the scouting ability should show you the enemy army composition (numbers, stats, equipment) to help with deciding on tactical battles.

Da?n!  Quoting is so broken!!

I’ll say this feature of Homm5 is great too.   It’s quite different from the system I’ve suggested.  Compared to our friends suggesting re-fight here, my suggestion is a bit of like giving the hint how good/bad the AI goner be, do you want to accept “somewhat similar result” if u auto-resolve?  If not, you have to TC.  My suggestion is in some way similar to the re-fight suggestion.  I’ve a slight preference of my suggestion because it work in Multi, and feels like war requires a bit more commitment.

Rgds to AI scripting, I’ll suggest when SD/modder custom makes units in the Beastiary, they also assign/design default AI script unit by unit.   During Auto-Resolve, gamer can pause their turn and fine-tune units AI script, if they want.    For TC, it'll be same as Auto-Resolve, except gamer can also manually “command” all units step-by-step.  This method  should satisfy soft-core & hardcore players.

For a bit more hard-core gamer, I’ll suspect they will like the inability to change script during Auto-Resolve.  So when you see your opponent stack, you assign appropriate AI Script for all of your units, then AutoResolve.  You just watch the fight & accept the result.  It is more like a general who only interested in the grand strategy, after recon is done.

Well, one can always include both, can't one? A percentage system is less reliable than a re-fight system, but it WOULD work in multi..... but then again it would probably take a LOT more time to code...

Dominions 3 system is too hard for new players. I think MoO3 does it the right way - it's possible to autoresolve combat but you can give a general order to your fleet - for example, stay on long range, close to point-blank etc. Also, each ship belongs to a specific ship type with it's own AI - say, carriers launch fighters etc.

Without getting involved in yet another Tactical Combat vs. Auto-Resolve, I do have to ask myself - Dominions 3 system is too hard for new players how?

Dominions 3 suffers from an extremely cumbersom UI, but apart from that, you have 5 formations per Hero. You put any number of units in each formation, tell them where to stand when a battle begins and you give them a general order. Hero units can be given more specific orders. I just don't see how that is hard at all, unless you're 7 years old or don't know english.

I know it sounds like a "you're a goddamn noob"-question, but I do have to ask - have you actually played Dominions 3? There's a bunch of comments like this, but so far I've only heard them from people that admittedly haven't played the game, thinking that 'giving orders' are some code-phrase for 'programming code'.

Yes, i played Dominions 3 a little. You can give up to three orders per unit, not one (so who didn't play it? i played it at least a year ago and i still remember it), that may be an attack order, cast a spell etc.

It's relatively easy to give some orders. However, for new players it's difficult to give good orders because you need to know how AI works and experiment a lot so to use that system effectively.

Well, Dominions 3 system is ok too but i think it's too tactical and not as fun as a direct control.It may be nessesary for a PBEM 4X game (as it gives more control than just an autoresolve), but it's a bad choice for a primarily singleplayer game like Elemental (tactical battle with a direct player control is more fun and much easier to manage) or online multiplayer in Elemental (it takes too much time to give such complicated orders like in Dom3, simple autoresolve is better for online multiplayer).

However, MoO 3 system is too simple and a good tactical AI can do such decisions itself.

So, i prefer either autoresolve where AI calculates results of the battle by playing for both sides, or just a normal tactical fight where AI plays for itself and player manages his own units, like in MoM.

You're being way too literal with the interpretation of 'a' general order. Regardless, for the average troop, it's still just "select default order for this squad" and then, if you chose an attack move, select preferred target. Unless you know some secret UI access that aren't documented, more specific orders are still restricted to heroes, like I said, where you can stack a variety of actions. I checked it just now, just to make sure that I wasn't pulling memory fluffs out of my arse.

I can go with that, definately. But I maintain that it's no harder than most other games, and definately not something that couldn't be helped by a good UI and explenations(sp?). While I can understand that it may take some time for the first niblets to learn, every system has it's quirks and learning curve.

As for it taking too much time to give such "complicated" orders in multiplayer in Elemental - if it's so quick even in Dominions 3, why would it take more time in Elemental? This is all theoretical, of course, since Elemental isn't going to have this system. But apart from the extremely cumbersome UI in Dominions 3, it is marginally slower than pure auto-resolve, since you don't need to set it up after/before every fight.

I think you can also make a flanking maneuvers by giving orders like forward-forward-forward-attack or something like that. So it's not as easy as just one general order. And i made a mistake, it's limited to 5 orders, not 3.

I think Dominions 3 MP game was never intended to be finished in one hour, and Elemental MP game may be finished that fast (IIRC devs said that in some post in Dev Journals). I guess that's with some specific settings for a fast game, but still. So, something that's ok for Dominions 3 may be too slow for Elemental.

Yeah. For commanders.

Of course. Dominions 3 is an extremely slow game, but not because of the combat (in case you don't want to sit through every combat scene). It's not like "scripting" adds ten minutes, five minutes, or two minutes. Even in a huge army, it's fairly easy.

What takes time in my case is making it symmetric or sorting out the various troops from the various groups piece-by-piece, but that's, again, a UI problem that permates the entire game.

I realized another pro for auto-resolve it is that it can help in playing the game with children, who might not actually be able to put up a fight in tactical combat.   Also, it makes it easier to implement a handicap for those who actually do that sort of thing.   If a heavy battle handicap is present on a tactical level, its fairly obvious what is happening.  But in auto-resolve, the lines become a little more blurry and doesn't feel like the game is broken.

(I used to hate handicap with great fury, but then I became old enough to play with children 10+ years younger than me, and obviously unable to keep up with me due to lack of experiance.  I also started using games to pick up girls, and the few less hardcore gamer ladies I've tried to court also responded well to handicaps when they did not really understand exactly what I was doing on the pre-game screen for them.  So I now support the *option* of handicaps)