[quote who="bpalczewski" reply="211" id="2954813"]can you recommend any AI mod that makes real improvement as in comparison to vanilla one?[/quote] Mods? There arent nearly as many mods for it as there should be. Most of the suggestions are in the other areas of boosting. Server scenarios, settings, maps, and 3rd party programs. But there are a couple of mods. The Better Indepents mod and the AI Opponent Balance mod. Here is a thread about it all... http://forum.shrapnelgames.
[short answer] Yes, and Yes (usually). [longer answer] Some will go thru the trouble of making a "proper" wrapped map which wraps east to west but not north to south. Like a globe does. And some are like the Tower maps wrap top to bottom but not on the sides. Tower maps are really tall and thin to force nations to stack. This makes for less micromanagement and better use of menus such as F1. It also stops the ability to gang up until about late mid-game. Good for newbie games.
Most people have only played with vanilla AIs. They can be improved and made surprising. And assign it the Eater of the Dead as a pretender. That will really make it a troublesome grenade
Patch has been released by the devs but is still in beta testing. Its expected soon. Patching can shake up a game. The host WILL patch (only a couple offer continuing to run a game on old versions) and all players will then have to rush to patch before the next turn. That means every active Dom3 MP player is in a rush to get the patch from the little Shrapnel servers (your desktop machine is probably bigger). Also some players tend to disappear with each patch since it "fixes" torrent download
That doesnt work as well. The game has terrain preferences for many nations. Sometimes it assigns the only opwn swamp then needs another. Reding the game.log if one was created using -dd would explain what happened. Dom3 really does try to space them apart. Closing off most of the provinces then leaving some open just tends to mess it up. Specially assigning a start works better but its not done in the map editor (like marking nostart can be) its done by editing the .map file. #specst
[quote who="shadowtongue" reply="157" id="2953729"] As to the 'split'... [/quote] I only brought up mods because the other guy asked how the best modders could get banned when they were adding to the value of the game. But I agree that nation mods dont mean much. They dont tend to sell games. Banning rude people from the sales forum probably does.And those people now have a forum with no nicety-nice rules so Im sure they are happier also. <p
If all they did was add value then they wouldnt be banned :) Obviously it was a balance decision, how much harm balances out good. A few of them lost, and then others volunteered to join them. They have their own forum now which is a better thing for both groups. Im also not sure how "main modders" would be defined. They arent the ones with the most popular mods. But they did mod alot and test some extremes in the mod commands which made them good for any answer
That channel is good for hard modding questions if you can take the sarcasm. But for server, or mapping, or 3rd party stuff, not so much. And for general game Q&A you are better off creating your own IMHO. And for a single game for diplomacy and such, definitely make your own room. For ease with people who have no IRC you can use the Shrapnel CHAT button for that since its just webbased The other thing about patches is that players tend to fall off the play lists if
WOW Shrapnel still hasnt updated that FAQ? Shrapnel got their own Chat, and that IRC channel is almost entirely run by people banned from Shrapnel. There are other IRC channels for Dom3 but each forum tends to create their own. Doesnt StarDock have its own favorite irc server for channels? Quakenet would work
I wasnt blaming him. He does seem to have more problems than the other servers but considering how many games and using a pbem system of almost entirely his own design its not a record deserving to be bashed. Its a great service to the community. And I think he is the only server that prefers the games as pbem
Does LLamaServer allow the person to get full backups like the other servers? If LL has more problems you could move the game over to one of the others to continue it
Part of the Pros and Cons of the method. With PbEM LLamabeast doesnt have to keep a separate copy of Dom3 running for each game. He can use only one running copy to host each game as it comes up to be hosted. So he can run many more games. But the drawback is that if one of the games gets stuck, they all are stuck until that one is fixed. It happens fairly often and LLama can take a couple of days to get to it
Its also very helpful (and RPG) to rename your prophet. But be sure to rename him BEFORE you make him a prophet. Once he is propheted (or in the Hall of Fame) rename wont work
The game gen doesnt do too bad with that. I like to change the colors though (I like my plains to be green) and I like less water and more mountains (more chokepoints) http://www.dom3minions.com/RandomizedMaps.htm
The game started balanced but nations added later were just kindof tossed in for fun. Hinnom was added very late. However, like LA Ermor and LA Rlyeh it doesnt cause as much of a problem as it would seem. Taking the nation in a multiplayer game tends to signal a pile-on by the other nations. The same is said for some of the global (map-wide) enchantments. Casting them would seem to be a game buster and rushing to the spell would seem to be a winning strategy. But if you do it too soon the other
Dont be too bothered. Games fill up slowly on Shrapnel. in some forums a Dom3 game is filled in 15 minutes with 8-15 players. But on Shrapnel it has slowed down.
I generally say 3 games and dont start them at the same time. People dont realize that toward late game a turn can take one or two hours to properly turn in Good game writeup MartialDoc. I love EA. But I prefer not to do pbem. Let me know if that changes. edit: Oh, CBm. Never mind.
[quote who="MichaelCook" reply="46" id="2949603"]If you go direct server, remember to add a password to your pretender [/quote] Thats not a bad suggestion no matter what method is used. Altho, on the more "official" servers they can take steps to insure that no one plays you but you, it is best to password your gods.
No a pbem passing around files like that would be a real hassle. Someone has to be a server. It can be one of you, or one of the online servers for Dominions 3. Once thats been decided then you have two choices: PBEM like www.LLamaServer.net uses. Or some variation for manually sending in turns like FTP, or Web Uploads, or a shared file space like DropBox. DIRECT like <a href="http://www.Dom3Minions
There are many map editors for Dom3 depending on your operating system and programming language of preference. Here is an online one that might do for you. http://users.on.net/ ~dfidge/cgi-bin/dom3map.pl Open the results with notepad and save to create a small file. Open it with wordpad for a more readable version but be sure to save it as an ascii (text) file and not a word .doc But the
