The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Vynd]

Here are my two (or three) bits:

It would be nice if AI nations would build forts. Better AI in general is always good, but to me this one has always stood out.

More and/or more distinctive choices of forts to select from.

Something to spend those annoying left-over Pretender creation points on. Like maybe allowing up to 20 points to be converted into extra starting cash.

Change the routing system for commanders. I especially dislike the "if only commanders are sent into battle, they all rout when one of them dies" feature. It should be possible to use squads of, say, Ulmish Black Knight commanders with magic items to try and take out an enemy army. Or a squad of Pythium mages to do the same. As it stands now to use teams of relatively fragile commanders like this you need to either load them up with chaff soldiers (which probably still rout and cause your commanders to rout with them), or the good old "lamed pikeman at the rear of the battlefield." Any system that encourages the use of a ridiculous ploy like that one must has something wrong with it.

Change the movement system so that it is possible (not guaranteed, just possible) to move your army into a location with enemy troops and intercept them before those enemy troops get to move elsewhere.

[Esben Mose Hansen]

THAT announcement lured me back here for a bit

A humble request from the server providers? Could the client be separated from the server?

Specifically I would like three programs:

1. A gameserver that calculates the new turns.
2. A client that displays the turns (and do all the other GUI stuff)
3. A TCP/IP netserver that listens to a port and accepts uploads of turns and pretenders. Ideally, this server would also allow clients to download mods and maps.

So the design becomes this
Code:

---

client ------- TCP/IP-----> netserver ---- turn/pretender-files --> gameserver

   |                                                                                          ^

  +--------------------------------- turn/pretender-file by email  ---------------+

---

Feel free to email me for any thoughts and suggestions on that one. Client/Server application is what I do professionally these days

(As for playing, I agree that making the battlefield mean something would increase the complexity (in a good way) tremendously. I suggest something liek a factor 2 or so.

[Argitoth]

I want only two things:

1. My SC not running away when his auto-summons die.
2. My prophet not going berserk due to a stray arrow.

And many others want this one thing:

1. The ability to tell a unit what not to cast.

[magnate]

Most of my "most important" ones have already been covered -

1. Little need for yet more races/units/spells/items - in hundreds of hours of play I've only explored a fraction of them. I know there will inevitably be more, but units/spells/items that nobody uses (because there's something better and cheaper) are a bit of a waste. That's not a criticism that can be levelled at much of the current content, but the more you have, the more likely it is to occur.

2. More sophisticated combat scripting - lots of people seem to want this, and I'm not an expert by any means but my personal bugbear is storming castles. I'd really love to see "get inside and melee defenders" and "stay outside and pelt defenders" orders. For some reason my troops always end up on the wrong side of the walls ...

3. UI improvements (definable shortcuts, global taxation orders, grouping troops by wounds or experience, selective pooling of gems, etc.). My top top single UI improvement is a screen for locating items - a scrolling list of every commander's inventory (name followed by icons would do, if hovering over the icon pops up the item name or something).

4. On (semi-)automating of tasks (like taxation, production, research etc.): all the games I've ever seen with "governors" or "advisers" to reduce micromanagement have suffered from the excruciating flaw of not making them user-definable! So I either have to do the micro and input the same build queue each time, or turn on the AI "governor" who won't build what I want. If you go down this route, please please please allow players to define and save recruitment queues, forge queues, ritual queues, tax heuristics etc. etc. Otherwise the "reduction" of micro becomes negligible if you can't tailor it to your own play style.

5. Allowing waypoints would be very handy for the later stages of long games. I often find I can't remember where a particular army was heading, especially if a game is only running once or twice a week.

6. I instinctively prefer SP so I'm in the "better and/or moddable AI" camp. I also share Gandalf's love of minor random SP experiences. I used to love finding "retorts" in MoM - if there was a way to include random events which adjusted your scales, or awarded (or took away) magic paths or items from a commander ... without making such things potentially unbalancing ... that would be fun. (Purists please remember that you can always switch such random events OFF ....)

7. (Sorry, I'm getting really carried away now) I think much more could be made of heroic abilities. Being able to choose them would be a bit potentially cheesy, but a little less randomness would be really good (eg. strength more likely on a melee commander or SC, precision more likely on an archer or spellcaster etc.). Perhaps do away with the somewhat artifical HoF mechanic and make heroic abilities the result of experience (meaning finer gradations of xp levels) ... or something. I do think heroes really add to the game (full marks to the person who suggested more national heroes, or randomly generated ones or whatever). Maybe if you got a heroic ability you really didn't want, you could eventually choose to start developing a 2nd one instead of continuing to improve the first one (so the 2nd one would be a much smaller boost, but better than yet more Valour ...)

8. More sophisticated squad arrangements, including routing conditions! Is there a reason why a commander respected by 300 troops can only have 5 squads? Being able to specify that your army will rout if your key HI squad at the front gets decimated (but not if the archers get mashed) would be really good. Not that I want to start another debate about routing of course ....

I'll stop there. Still, this is no criticism - Dom2 is right up in my top 5 games of all time (only MoM, Elite, Civ1 and maybe MoO1 have ever occupied more of my time) - if Dom3 never gets made I bet I will still be playing Dom2 in 5 years' time.

CC

[Gandalf Parker]

I agree that I do not feel I have played Dom2 to its death, nor will this next year let me accomplish that...
But keep in mind that this is mostly a 2 man team. Johan is the programmer, and Kristoffer does the themes/nations/units/items. I dont want to cubbyhole them incorrectly, there may be some overlap...
But the POINT I want to make is that it doesnt do alot of good to try and trade off "I dont want new nations etc etc" with "I would rather see more programming etc etc". If you are going to do tradeoffs then they would need to be programming for programming, or playing choices for playing choices.

[PrinceofLowLight]

Well, Rome: Total War graphics for battles, sentient AIs and a hoburg in every box!

What? It's a "Wish" list.

On the more realistic side...

D2's magic system in general is ridiculously awesome, but the handling of the more mundane aspects of empire building is..lacking, to say the least. Static populations without a growth scale? That's just silly.

Migration and population growth could be factors. Bad luck could cause migrations to less accident-prone areas. That could be a real balance to the luck scale.

The different racial and cultural populations could be a factor. Caelians displacing lizardmen? Neat! And each population would have its preferences. That may be a bit more work than it's worth, though.

Some more abilities for units, especially generals. Strategoi and similar units could give big bonuses to morale.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

magnate said:
2. More sophisticated combat scripting - lots of people seem to want this

Yes, and I must say I'm a bit worried by this. I'd like to see a new 'skirmish' order (or battle formation) implemented for light troops, but that's about it. I don't want an overcomplicated system with tons of choices or conditional options that would led to more MM. I think there's enough of it already.

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Almost forgot this old pet peeve of mine -

One thing I'd really like to see in Dom 3: balanced recruitment for national troops. Eg, Arco has hoplite infantry and light cavalry, everybody likes the former but nobody uses the cavalry. The game should track troop recruitment and make overused troop types more expensive over time (or underused ones less expensive) to give players an incentive to field more balanced armies.

[Kel]

I would like to see more detailed battle reports that tell me specifically which units died, with the summary that we have now at the top.

I would also like the second or third the idea of having some sort of tax manager button (not a really sucha problem unless you are playing a blood nation, I suppose).

- Kel

[Sedna]

Two things that haven't been mentioned (much) so far:

1) The ability to set a destination for troops, so I don't have to walk them by hand every single turn. It's okay if it gets broken if, say, your intermediary provinces are conquered, but it would still be an improvement.

2) Underwater provinces need to be more differentiated. I would love to see a variety of types of provinces: in addition to a standard open ocean, for example, there could be shallow coastal waters, deep sea trenches, perhaps areas of high underwater volcanism or subduction zones or other things for the geologically geeky. In addition to having a wider variety of inahbitants, I would also like to have the names means something the way "forest" and "plains" indicate what kind of province it is. Coastal waters could have more income but less magic sites, subduction zones have higher turmoil, troops from deep sea vent provinces tend to glow, etc.

-Sedna