Wish-List for Dominions 4

[Xietor]

I do not think we need new races, pretenders, or items for dom IV.

There are a multitude of combinations available now. I would like to see some love on some of the pretenders available now that are rarely used.

The Lord of Fertility has been mentioned. Lord of the forest could have some type of animal awe or charm as an innate ability. well, you get the picture. Vampire queen needs to have her cost lowered to 125, give her dom III, 3d, but remove her immortal status. The issue before was she was hard to kill, flies, and you would have to kill her a dozen times on the way to her capital. remove her immortal status and issue is fixed.

[Sombre]

The problem is that for the Devs making new units and races and spells and whatnot is /fun/. Fixing bugs and improving the GUI is less so.

But I agree, Dominions doesn't really need more content. It mostly needs interface and AI improvements and more modding options (such as ability to mod AI etc).

[Horst F. JENS]

I like to have a way of scripting the Tactic and Strategic AI with a mod. Preferable in Python :-)

[Reay]

I think the most important thing to add is: when hitting Y to see which troops are moving to the selected province, it properly displays the troops that are STAYING in the province and remove the troops moving out.

It would be better if we could get an idea of what troops will be fighting the battle in the province next round with out all the other exiting troops complicating the screen. (I guess if there was a castle in the province, it should also exclude other troops that are not patrolling.)

Also, there is another bug with Y where we can not edit or see the position of the existing troops. Hopefully this is the Y bug fix that the dom 3 progress page is showing.

[Baalz]

More in the vein of reducing gem micromanagement:

Blood sacrificers should automatically use slaves from the lab if there is one and blood hunters should automatically place captured slaves there - again if available.

Automatic non-spell site searching - give an order such that a mage repeatedly moves to the closest unsearched (by his magic paths) province and searches it.

It'd be nice if when scripting specific gem using spells you specify how many gems to use. It's kinda frustrating when your second scripted spell doesn't go off because the AI decided to use more than the minimum gems on the first spell to reduce fatigue.

Monthly forging like the monthly ritual casting. Somebody mentioned some more ambitious suggestion which included this, but I'm guessing this would be pretty easy to implement.

[Jazzepi]

Sombre said:
The problem is that for the Devs making new units and races and spells and whatnot is /fun/. Fixing bugs and improving the GUI is less so.

But I agree, Dominions doesn't really need more content. It mostly needs interface and AI improvements and more modding options (such as ability to mod AI etc).

I did pay $50 for the game.

Jazzepi

[thejeff]

Jazzepi said:

I did pay $50 for the game.

Jazzepi

That's great. And you got a good game for it.
If you don't think Dom4 will be worth the price when it comes out, don't buy it.

Obviously, comment and suggest here. The devs do pay attention and some suggestions will be implemented.

But, they do this part time. They have real jobs and work on dominions on the side, mostly for fun. They're not making enough to work on it full-time and given the size of the niche market for games like this, never will.
If they stop having fun working on it, they'll stop working on it.

[Sombre]

Yep. You have to accept the reality of the situation. They're motivated to do what is enjoyable for them, because this isn't their full time job.

[HoneyBadger]

Feel perfectly free to rehash old ideas here, MaxWilson, et all. That's one of the reasons I started the thread-to collect and preserve the ideas that have come before in other threads.

I'd like more dynamic Pretenders.

I'd like the ability to "build my Pretender from the ground up". The ability to choose a chassis (hoburg, jotun, wyrm, obelisk, horror, etc.) and then add abilities and stengths/weaknesses to it, including extra hit points, magical ability and dominion, immobility (almost anything can be in the form of a statue), special abilities (for instance, you can choose the "great dragon" chassis and then fire breath/heat resistance, if you want a red dragon) based on a point-system, rather than choosing the Pretenders that are available, but which might not fit your playing style. So, I could have a mighty SC Pretender that I've designed around my own playing style, and little or no points to spend on my Nation, or, I could have an elderly hoburg midwife who's worshipped just because she keeps more babies and mothers alive during births than not, and a nation that starts out with good dominion, extra gold and gems, and whatnot.

Ofcourse, customization doesn't have to be *that* dramatic, but I think it has a place and an appeal, when it comes to your Pretender. It could simply be the optional ability to choose, in-game, between different sets of graphics.

I'd also ideally like to see Pretenders having their own line of experience, and gaining said experience from doing "Pretendery" things, like casting mighty spells, leading large armies, coming back from the dead, and just surviving (people tend to feel their gods should be immortal). Immobile Pretenders currently suffer from the handicap of a greatly-reduced ability to gather experience, for no really good reason-even though they kill a lot of their "enemies", I don't think mass-murderers are great examples of "personal growth", do you?. I'd then like to see Pretenders able to add directly to their abilities over time, based on that experience-maybe your Pretender *starts out* immobile, but he wouldn't have to stay that way. This would represent the real-world incarnations of gods, which tend to change form and power over time and culture (Example, Odin, the God of the Norse, wasn't always the chief god of that pantheon).

Along those same lines, I'd like the ability to customize my starting nation-make them more or less magical, technologically advanced, add or take away troop types and national summons, etc. Basically, adding back Themes, only in a pay(points)-to-play basis.

[Belcarl]

I'd like some units that grow in power with age, and sometimes with a disadvantage too this. Like a vampire lord, slowly eating your population but growing in power about one upgrade every 4th turn or so perhaps...

Kind of like the eater of the dead, but less expensive, and more useful I guess