Rating PD

[Blitz]

My vote is for MA Ermor. Jvelin heavy infantry, plus a nether darting H2 priest? Pure sex.

[HoneyBadger]

I'd just like to add that I'd really like to see a progressively stronger PD rather than just a numerical increase.
What I mean is, at PD 1-19 you get a few weak-type troops and a basic commander, and then when you hit 20 you get another commander and some better troop-types, and then...that's it-for the rest of the game, PD is just a small hole you toss money into, to make the hole a little deeper, hoping your enemy will fall in and not be able to climb out again before you shovel dirt over him.

That's how things stand now.

I think it would be a lot better-especially for nations that start out with weak PD-if they continued to get additional commanders and better troop types as PD increased.
One way to do this-and keep it balanced-is to push the second commander/better troops back to 30 PD, and then add another commander/better troop type at 60pd, 90pd, 120pd, and 150pd (increasing max PD in the process, in case you didn't notice, for those who might want to focus on it, and would now have a reason to.)

This means that, at the maximum 150PD, you'd be fielding 5 commanders and atleast 5 different types of troops, making the act of building strong PD a solid and interesting strategic choice (whereas now it's just a place to dump extra gold until someone comes along and wipes your province out anyway).

It would make castles and core-provinces more important, longer games more interesting, and also blunt the edge of sneaky-quick nations like Helheim. You could even design interesting infrastructure-nations specifically around their PD.

[mivayan]

150pd.... what's that... 10k gold?

[lch]

11325.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ArithmeticSeries.html
http://www.pen.k12.va.us/Div/Winches...gebra/sum.html

But the maximum PD is 125, not 150. Rest is left as an exercise to the reader...

[HoneyBadger]

11325 gold? that sounds about right to me.

[HoneyBadger]

Before anyone starts ranting and crying about how that's too much gold, too much PD, boo hoo hoo, I *like* playing big games with big limits and big objectives-that's one reason I don't post here very often anymore, aside from Gandalf Parker, too many people thinking small.

So, if you're going to reply along those lines, now you don't have to bother. I get it. It's not "practical". It would never work in multi-player, etc. etc. etc.

There, that saves you time and me a depressing read.

[Jack Simth]

What I would really find interesting is if PD was more of a "budget" than a set grouping of types of troops - it wouldn't exactly be a small change to the engine, but imagine being able to choose your PD leaders and chaff from your purchaseable national troops, each point of PD translates to a particular amount of gold/recources for the army, you set up a troop purchase order, and formation priority, and script them like you would an army. With, of course, some kind of translation for whenever a nation doesn't have any actual national troops.

[HoneyBadger]

I'd like that too-and it's a great idea-but I have a feeling it would be a nightmare not only to code, but in terms of computing/memory resources. Especially in multi-player.

[MaxWilson]

My programming experience leads me to believe the computing/memory resources required would be low. The game already has to generate PD for the defending side for each battle, and once they're generated they play just like any other units. If the troop purchase order is a build queue, it's trivial (computationally) to calculate which units get generated for each nation/battle. I'm not saying it would be trivial to code, because I have no idea how Dom3 is written internally, but CPU/memory resources aren't any kind of a bottleneck.

How would you "purchase" the second commander, Jack? Would it still happen at a set PD, or what?

-Max

[Jack Simth]

Honeybadger: I did say it wouldn't exactly be a small change.

MaxWilson:
I was honestly figuring on doing this at the national, not province, level - you have a purchase que much like normal for buying regular troops, but in this case, Commanders go in there too. Attached, you've got a battle map similar to the normal one for troop positioning; you hit the set/reset button, and start placing troops into the formations (in order - so Commander 1 (AKA "Unit 0" you must purchase at least 1 commander!) goes at the top, you assign units 1 through X to group 1, X+1 to Y to Group 2, and so on, then when you hit the next commander (position Z) in your que, units start being assigned to that commander based on your selection; so Z+1 through A are assigned to group 1, A+1 through B assigned to group 2, and so forth. And you get to script commanders, and such.

When you buy points of PD, it tracks how far along on the setup that puts you - so at the national level, Abyssa may have it set so that 50 PD is a Warlock (Cast Spells) with ten lava warrior bodyguards, and a Demonbred (Pheonix Power, Fire Shield, Cast Spells) with thirty humanbreds set to Hold and Attack (then it repeats itself completely if you have 100 PD, and halfway through again if you're up to 125 in a province - a looping purchase algorythm). If you only buy 30 PD in the province, you might end up with a Warlock with 10 lava warrior bodyguards and a demonbred with a single humanbred (they ran out of funds; you of course wouldn't set it up quite that way, because in the 30 PD province, one humanbred's death means everyone routes....). In a province with only 1 PD, you don't get anything (the Warlock might effectively cost 5 PD - they don't have the budget for him).

You don't set it up on a pure cash basis - recources need to come into play at some conversion factor; for nations with national summons, you'll need some kind of gem conversion - but essentially translate the amount of PD into a "budget" that's used to fill a national Province Defense template.

That's how I envision it working, anyway - you set your PD up once at the start of the game (possibly coming with a default), change it whenever your situation changes, and all your provinces where you assign province defense fill it out as they are able from their budget. Balance the PD the same way purchased troops balance.