Some thoughts on improvements to the game

[Loren]

1) I think buildings in the capital should be immune to random event destruction.

2) I think any mage left idle and capable of doing research should research.

3) Communions in the lab: Select a group of mages, hit a key for communion and then, cast/cast monthly/forge. The whole group can only produce one spell or item but they do so as a communion, thus permitting you to reach levels you otherwise couldn't. I think the other mages should only contribute to paths they actually have a level in.

3) Siege should be considered an activity as far as the Next command is concerned.

[Gregstrom]

Originally Posted by Loren

1) I think buildings in the capital should be immune to random event destruction.

Misfortune is already popular enough as a design choice, why make it easier to take?

Originally Posted by Loren

2) I think any mage left idle and capable of doing research should research.

That could work, but I guess it would be complicated to implement. Thus it's unlikely to happen.

Originally Posted by Loren

3) Communions in the lab: Select a group of mages, hit a key for communion and then, cast/cast monthly/forge. The whole group can only produce one spell or item but they do so as a communion, thus permitting you to reach levels you otherwise couldn't. I think the other mages should only contribute to paths they actually have a level in.

That would be a major rebalancing of gameplay... interesting, but possibly horrible. It's also a big enough change that it's vanishingly unlikely to occur.

Originally Posted by Loren

3) Siege should be considered an activity as far as the Next command is concerned.

That seems sort of reasonable.

[Edi]

#3 goes pretty much against the idea of communions, which is to provide a temporary boost to the master for the duration of a battle. Would be the same as a mage with E2 casting Summon Earthpower and then forging an E3 item without actual path boosters.

One turn is one month, and the item crafting process is complicated, involved and spread out over the month, which is way longer than a temporary communion could be maintained.

In my opinion, such permanent communions as the idea entails run counter to the way of how magic is supposed to work in the Dominions universe. Your mileage may vary.

[vladikus]

Well, while this suggestions are being proposed I'll go ahead and make mine despite its preposterousness and triteness. When I beat the game, as far as I can remember, I only really received a message saying I had become a God and then was shot back to the main menu screen. How anticlimactic after a long grueling campaign!

Why not make the ending different based on how many enemies you killed or provinces you conquered or turns you took to beat the game. Think of it like Tetris: based on your performance you would have a different ending. I know, it's likely not possible for anyone here to do, but I'd like to see it nonetheless.

Come on... don't lie and say you wouldn't like to to see your pretender do a little dance across the screen upon victory.

[lch]

Originally, you never were supposed to finish the game. The anticlimatic end is more of a "Uh, you won. Sorry."

[Gregstrom]

Yes, something like the victory screenshot from the Amiga version of Nuclear War would be sort of appropriate.

[Squirrelloid]

As long as we're tossing out suggestions...

Use the terms 'heavy' and 'light' appropriately. (Seriously, 'light' means a primary ranged weapon, not that they're wearing lighter armor - although historically these tended to go hand-in-hand because light infantry/cavalry were more cost effective without the heavier armor, its not what the terms mean). And when I use these terms below I intend them in their actual military sense.

More historical unit performance and army performance. For example:
*Sufficiently long weapons receive first strikes when charged (enemy moves up to them). Ie, pikes vs. cavalry.
*Heavy cavalry 'trample' and penetrate into units of troops they charge.
*Heavy cavalry 'cause fear' against infantry. (Undisciplined units should break and run in the face of a heavy cavalry charge, especially light infantry).
*light cavalry actually uses historical light cavalry tactics (shoot while falling back) - this may require larger battle maps. The muslim armies during the first crusade lured crusader armies into ambushes by harassing with light cavalry and then leading them in apparent retreat, often for over a mile or more - all the while firing back at the pursuers - until the pursuing crusaders were surrounded and overwhelmed by ambushing forces.
*Armies which are defending a territory entrench themselves. Archers put down archer stakes in front of their position. Units construct earthen ramparts, etc... Similarly, sieging armies of at least some nations should be able to practice circumvallation (building an earthen rampart all around the sieged city). Notably the Rome themed nations, since this was Rome's historical siege tactic.
*Cities which are starved long enough surrender.
*light infantry attempt to fall back and regroup when melee units get too close.
*light infantry receive the ability to 'Fire Rearmost'.
*Units behave more like units and less like loosely aligned mobs. In particular, they should hold formation when at all possible. (melee will necessarily involve breaks in the line and whatnot, but they should move together as a unit even if some individuals are faster than others).
*Armies should be allowed to pillage in the turn they conquer a province (seriously, its a month between turns). Ie, a 'move and pillage' command. The hundred years war was mostly a conflict of armies pillaging the countryside with the opposing side trying to chase them down and make them fight. (Ideally, moving and pillaging should not cause the territory to change hands, but it produces nothing for the owner, cannot produce units while occupied, and the pillager gains gold and gems at some % of the territories normal rate. Pillaging armies with a map speed higher than 1 should be able to ignore PD (PD is too slow to assemble to deal with an army that doesn't intend to actually fight).
*Mounted units require appropriate amounts of food. If people are size 2 and horses are size 3, each mounted person should require food for a size 2 and a size 3 individual. Similarly, they should consume air (from air producing items) appropriately. The way the game currently handles it the rider should starve, and also suffocate when brought underwater via an item which produces a fixed quantity of air.
*Ability to provide logistics for your armies without magic. Living off the local province is not the only way to feed an army without magic.

[Humakty]

@squirrelloid : I thought about modding in supply chariots for every faction, but it would completely imbalance the game, as the gluttony characteristic would be completely neutered, as well as armies of big size troops ...etc

[Wrana]

To squirrellord:
Unfortunately, these require writing a new game engine. Except the first one about heavy cavalry - but then, it's not particularly needed: they already can kill 1-2 infantry a turn, which is not worse than with Size 3 trample.
The last one is actually present: your troops gain supplies from your nearby forts, which decline with more distance from fort. And some nations do get supplies-producing units.
And, of course, fire-and-flee order is present - it's just mostly useless. If you are going to try and make a new engine... well, then we can discuss this. This game was made by 2 people, after all!

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Wrana

To squirrellord:
Unfortunately, these require writing a new game engine. Except the first one about heavy cavalry - but then, it's not particularly needed: they already can kill 1-2 infantry a turn, which is not worse than with Size 3 trample.
The last one is actually present: your troops gain supplies from your nearby forts, which decline with more distance from fort. And some nations do get supplies-producing units.
And, of course, fire-and-flee order is present - it's just mostly useless. If you are going to try and make a new engine... well, then we can discuss this. This game was made by 2 people, after all!

Cavalry and trample:
I suppose what I mean by trample is the horses trample - the rider should still get his normal attacks. But 'trampling' into the enemy unit would allow more cavalry to take their attacks (again, mimicing historical behavior). For a late example of the continued importance to shock cavalry of breaking into the enemy ranks, consider the ~17th century pistol and saber cavalry, who used their pistols to open holes in the enemy formation so they could interpenetrate. The lance helped achieve a similar effect before professional pikemen became common (ie, before ~1350).

Infantry units who have their ranks broken should also take a morale penalty, fwiw.

Supplies:
Local supply by a fort isn't what I'm talking about. The crusaders during the first crusade managed to supply an army in the holy land far from any local supply centers. This seems like an emminently reasonable thing for at least organized civilizations to be able to do.

Fire and Flee:
Except flee actually involves running away, not just withdrawal to a prepared position or merely keeping the opponent at arm's length. There's no 'ambush', no 'turn and fight after fleeing so long'. And no real disadvantage to the pursuing army in pursuit. (The actual history of medieval warfare shows that unrestrained pursuit is a failure of troop discipline, and generally leads to disaster. I'm reminded of the triple alliance of the Khan of Persia, the Crusader states, and the Georgian christians against the muslim armies. The Crusader states defeated the rearguard (left flank of their enemy) and pursued them for miles. While they were busy chasing beaten enemies, their allies were defeated decisively and lost the battle, whereas if they'd regrouped and flanked the muslim armies it would have been a decisive allied victory).

I find tactical flight of the nature i'm talking about distinct from retreat, which is what the fire and flee seems to represent (since it actually cedes control of something the size of a province). You might also consider the experience of the Romans (infantry) agains the Parthians (primarily light cavalry). The Romans couldn't bring the Parthians to melee, the Parthians rode circles around them and annihilated every legion ever sent to fight them.

I suppose there are two problems here: 1) the battlefield is so small that rather little force is sufficient to compel a foe to melee. A cavalry unit should be able to keep out of range of a melee unit indefinitely if it so desires. 2) ranged units do not attempt to keep out of range of shock units. Given that classical light infantry (slingers especially) and all light cavalry routinely used their improved mobility to deny shock combat to the enemy, this is a failure of modelling.

New - army strategic choices
Speaking of bizarre. Anyone who knows anything of pre-Napoleonic military combat knows that the hardest thing to do was to compel an opponent to fight. Generals should be able to be given strategic settings that tell them when to engage and when to refuse to engage when challenged by another army. The only way to force an army to fight when its determined to flee should be when every route of escape leads to an entanglement with military forces (in which case the initially encountered army should be fought, potentially in combination with whichever military units it tried to withdraw into. And I don't mean go to battle map and have every unit start withdrawing, I mean no battle occurs (the enemy army never gets that close) unless the retreating army is cut off.

New engine:
Most of this is really just tweaking the engine a bit - I'm sure given access to the code base I could figure out how to implement all of that. Honestly, some of it (handling units as entities instead of individual people) would probably make things easier in the long run.

So, for example:
-Starved fortresses surrender: Implement a counter during the phase where you check to see if the walls are breached that counts down until fortress surrender. (trivial)

-light infantry attempt to fall back when shock troops get too close: Each light infantry unit would need a metric of too close, although you could just make it 'is within movement range of an enemy shock unit'. Unit then moves backwards until it reaches a 'safe' distance and reforms. This is a quick If/Then check at the start of the units action. (easy)

-Units behave more like units and less like mobs: This is the most profound change I proposed, actually. Its also the most desirable. So, there are two ways you can go about this: (1) define a unit entity which has a depth and facing size, and move that unit entity instead of moving individual guys (this substantially decreases the processor work because it aggregates decisions). Or (2) have individual models know where in the unit they are and check stay in the same position relative to other models in the unit. This is aided by doing things like checking the slowest speed in the unit and capping all model speeds at that speed. I'd vastly prefer #1 for a number of reasons, such as because you can have individual sub-entities which take damage and make attacks, but you don't need to make many AI decisions below the unit level (substantially increasing game performance). I'd need some help implementing this because I'm not used to working with graphical applications, but given a week and someone to ask questions of I could probably figure it out. (Moderate)