Game suggestion
 

People are always placing their troops at the rear of the battlefield, escpecially SC's. So If you want to cast a spell on them, you have to run forward 3 turns just to get in range. Then you cast Phoenix power, or whatever, so you will be able to cast the spell you want. Then in the fifth turn you cast the spell.

But most of the time, you will want to cast that spell over and over, but you can't. Because on the 6th turn the computer will cast sermon of courage or some ridiculous spell like that.

So my suggestion is to have a repeat button. If you click on the repeat button, your mage will keep casting whatever spell you casted on turn 5.

Re: Game suggestion
 

haha!

game suggestion?

hahahahaha!


no just kidding. but really. game suggestions rarely get implemented at this point in time. and every swinging d*ck on this forum will jump at you and tell you how little you know about coding if you possibly think your suggestion has any possibility of getting added because "do you know how hard it is to add that? it is really really hard to add that one little thing" also, dominions code is, well, mature? I guess it is hard to modify and add things. plus, it is just two guys doing this game, and they are working on another one right now. "and we would much rather they work on this new thing then add any thing else to this game"

tl;dr
your suggestion has a snowball's chance in hell. plus, five turns of scripting is part of the fun and dynamics of the game.

Re: Game suggestion
 

Dominions 4?

Re: Game suggestion
 

Probably not.

Re: Game suggestion
 

Your suggestion is an interesting one, and lot of people would probably like that kind of feature. I would on occasion, even though I am unsure whether it would make the game better, since like Omni said, the 5 turn scripting makes for interesting choices.

But, like the others said, it is very unlikely that any change like that is implemented, if not impossible. If we ever see Dominions 4 perhaps..

Re: Game suggestion
 

Heretic! Burn the unbeliever.

Re: Game suggestion
 

I don't really mind, they playing field is equal for everyone and the AI is smart enough to do pretty good decisions.

You can also exercise some control by placing your mages at the right range, in the back mages will cast long-range spells like thunderstrike or soul slay, or they will just summon. With the enemy closer up they might instead try stellar cascade or something like banishment.

A repeat order would sometimes be counterintuitive, as the enemy could run out of range or the choice could be suboptimal as the enemy gets closer.

Re: Game suggestion
 

Personally I rather like the RPG "realism" of the game. As a Pretender God I tell my mages what I would like them to cast in combat. Sometimes they do, sometimes they decide that another course is better. Sometimes they are even right.

There is a "slave collar" which can be handy for combat commanders in avoiding panics but it feebleminds mages. To bad we dont have something like that for mages. I guess that mindlessness isnt compatible with strict following of the scripted orders.

Or maybe the scripting could be more strictly followed and even allow for instructions past 5 combat rounds if the pretender himself is present on the battlefield casting a harsh eye on his commanders.

Re: Game suggestion
 

Planing to have some spell cast after five turns is a sure way to loose the battles. Must battles are decided within three turns. If that SC does nothing for five turns there is no need to kill him. If he casts master enslave or something he will not wait five turns.

Re: Game suggestion
 

Possibly true in end game, when Master Enslave and a few other spells rule the battle field, but not true throughout much of the game.
SCs buff. Reverse communions boost the slaves up to high path levels. Troops get buffed. Troops close into range of each other. Then the actual battle really starts.

That's really the rule for most of the game as far as I've seen.

Re: Game suggestion
 

How about a lesser version of this: There is an order "Cast Spells"--how about adding "Cast Attacks" and "Cast Buffs".

Re: Game suggestion
 

Well, mages from my experience tend to favor doing damage over buffing if they are in range for any meaningful spell so it's not really needed. And five turns worth of spells is usually enough to turn the whole battle to needed direction (not always, though).

Re: Game suggestion
 

In my experience, mages tend to favor summoning creatures who will never even reach the front lines over attack spells.

Re: Game suggestion
 

I've noticed this too, and they will waste gems to do it, silly.

They WON'T spend gems to cast a spell you've hinged your strategy for the whole battle on, because by some evaluation algorithm it isn't worth the gem cost; then they proceed to spam summon lesser fire elemental through the entire battle, most of which don't reach the front lines, but do kill your other mages via their area effect heat.

Re: Game suggestion
 

I research Evocation very early for at least a couple of levels. And put off researching Alteration for quite awhile. Usually until I have a definite problem with some race that has a special weakness. I find that helps to avoid lots of the mage errors.

Re: Game suggestion
 

I beg to differ on two points: 1) The hardest part isn't coding it, it's being allowed to code it. Dom3 is very closed source. 2) I also would like better battle scripting options. Include here longer scripts, do exactly as I say, and more targets/options.

Well, if you only ever played checkers, could you really say that chess wouldn't be fun?

Re: Game suggestion
 

Actually it is the simplicity and constraints of options combined with the nearly innumerable configurations and interactions possible between the pieces that make chess such a grand strategy game, not its degree of realism. Such it is with Dominions scripting.

Re: Game suggestion
 

Or you could view it as a chess game where you allowed to play the first 5 moves, and then after that an AI takes over. :)

Seriously, it is frustrating, and I'm not sure that it becomes less so once you've mastered the combat and scripting system. The problem becomes even more galling with CBM, as you have dozens of viable combat spells to cast, but no way to get your mages to repeatedly cast them. Personally, I see it as the biggest flaw left in the game. If they were to fix this and call the resulting game Dominions 4, I would buy a copy.

Re: Game suggestion
 

I'd like to add that with this game of "chess" you can have seven queens on the board at once. And over a hundred pawns. And dozens of knights. And ranged attacks. And... It's called dominions 3. No, seriously, comparing chess and dom3 is not useful. In chess you have very limited types and amounts of units, whereas in dom3 there are quite a few options. One "piece" on the "board" can kill hundreds of others or indirectly cause their deaths due routing or dying to fatigue or even converting them.

I still think that the 5 scripted spells + (cast spells) is enough. Though I agree that summon elementals/stuff should be set to lower priority. Skeleton spam is still an useful to have up there, since (d2) death mages either should be doing something like disintegrate or raise skeletons/dead in the combat to be very useful. Of course there are exceptions, but most of the time those few spells are pretty much what you need those low-path death mages for.

Re: Game suggestion
 

I rather think this is a feature, as opposed to a problem. As in battle, plans tend not to last.

Re: Game suggestion
 

It would be nice if spells had subcategories, like damage, summon, buff, debuff and such. Besides the obvious, it'd allow some mages to be better (fatigue reduction) at damage spells and buffs, but poor at others kinds of magic.

It would also be nice if I didn't remember seeing this discussion about once a year for a long time. I'm sure if I dug deep enough, I could find someone saying Dominions: Priests, Prophets & Pretenders (Dom1) would be better if the scripting options included "repeat this spell". It probably wouldn't have suggested that the "attack magic users" and "fire commanders" battle orders are removed. I not going to check, though, because more likely than not it was me making the suggestion. :P

Re: Game suggestion
 

That plans do not last is reflected by the impossibility to know what you are up against.
5 actions only scriptable just means that a working plan cannot be executed.

Re: Game suggestion
 

The 5-turn limit is frustrating but neccessary. First and foremost to reduce MicroManagement. If there wasnt a limit to what you could script, power players would spend HOURS on every script and everyone else would have to as well, just to keep up.

Re: Game suggestion
 

chess isn't a perfect comparison, but to the extent that it is: the comparison doesn't begin with the start of battle, but rather with the turns leading up to it. Scripting and placement constraints figure into the chess-like strategy in the decisions as to what armies/units to prepare and send into a battle, what spells to think about using with them, and how to equip them.

The probabilistic influences are the greatest difference between chess and dominions, but it is whims of the RNG and unpredictability of the AI that make dominions battles fun.

Also, it is a sort of buffer to prevent certain spells from becoming imbalanced. If players had perfect control over actions for the entire battle, entire new strategies would emerge in which certain (even fewer than now) spells would become extremely powerful due to some little trick they allowed. Currently, the unpredictable behavior helps to reduce any spell from being extremely powerful because the player can't really script exactly how it is used (at least until late-game when there are lots of battle-field wide spells that avoid most of the unpredictability in spell usage, assuming the AI decides to cast them :)

Another reason not to have more involved scripting is that perfect management of battles without interactive order giving would require lengthy if-then-else trees, and that mechanic is an entire game in and of itself (like robot battle games), and not what this game is supposed to be about. Thus really, the way it is currently done is -close- to the best way to do it given the aims of the game-play experience. Certainly there are minor additions that could be made and implemented that would improve battle resolution. But really, they wouldn't improve it that much: certainly not enough to justify the time needed to implement and play-test any additions to scripting.

Re: Game suggestion
 

I understand that a 50 spell limit would be quite mad.
But just adding a (repeat last spell) option would not increase MM the slightest.

Well, for example I tried the following strategy - earth mages spam destruction and earth meld on the front line where cheap troops then kill the defenseless enemy elites.
Perfectly viable from a thematic view, perfectly workable from what's inside the manual. With a catch, though - the AI won't do it.
Balance is no concern since it is much more easily countered than Air Magic for example.

Re: Game suggestion
 

SC's are currently overpowered because all they have to do is sit in the back row for 5 turns. Then they come out and one 10 hit point SC can slaughter all 100 mages, cus the mages aren't smart enough to cast the correct spell to kill the SC.

SC's usually have only one weakness. So there is only one spell that will work on them. And the computer is too dumb to know this.

Re: Game suggestion
 

Now, I'm of the opinion that the 'sitting in the back 5 turns' technique is widely underestimated, but that analysis is pretty flawed.

First off, there are very good reasons 10 hp commanders are almost never SCs, any significant battle and they are likely to run into a bit of bad luck and die.

Also, almost any SC has a number of weaknesses (though MR is usually the easiest to go for). Getting all elemental resists plus high mr and everything else a SC needs is almost impossible. Further, while there are usually better ways of going about it, but you can order your mages to move forward for a few turns before casting.

... however, if your point is SCs in SP are ridiculous I have to agree. Changing human scripting options doesn't change that though.