The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Nerfix]

There aren't much of way to make the weapons without decimalization or damage types. There are only so much values the weapons can differ by plus some special effects which are more often than not magical. Maybe if there would be somekind of equipment durability or something... If you have ideas then please do tell us.

Most of the diffrent strategies of nations seem to come from magic.

[Endoperez]

Well, there are also strategies that work around cheap archers (Marignon's crossbowmen, Man's longbowmen, Machaka's dirt cheap archers...), especially if they can somehow be increased in power with spells (Flaming Arrows, Wind Guide).

As long as supercombatants can easily kill off hundreds of conventional non-undead units, and there is no easy way to get rid of them without more work than is needed to make one, buying national units is not good in the long run. IMO giving more choices to fight SCs is better than nerfing them (lifedrain is good, but only to regain hits/fatique - other items can give either one, not both, but work against undead etc). If there were more ways to overcome ridiculous stats, like cheapish armor-neg. weapon with moderately high attack, armies could have special anti-SC units and thugs.

IMHO, this would make national armies more useable until the lategame where artillery spells come into play, and if there were more armies to survive until that time then all of them couldn't be just blasted away.


What about giving normal units experience faster? Very few units benefit enough from Gift of Reason to make it reasonable to scum for lots of five-star units-made-commanders. This would also make mindless and undead units less useful.

[FrankTrollman]

Decimal Combat doesn't in any way help against powerful SCs, nor does it make the game any more or less random. The only thing it does is make it harder to evaluate the differences between items for the human players - especially the new ones.

Now that would make there be "more to discover", which in a way would make the game have more replayability for some people. But honestly, I can't understand how anyone could think that turning some equipment into being +1.1 could be a good thing.

It's exactly the same as multiplying the numbers by 10. That's a dreadful idea on every level.

If you want Ulm to have a chance, you should probably make their troops better (especially with better magic resistance, low MR troops just don't matter in the late game) and give Smiths a random pick.

If you want Lifedraining to be less of a concern, you should probably make it MR dependent. Then you should probably jack up the stats on Lamias and Ghosts, because you just heavily nerfed some standard sorcery-driven troops that weren't especially broken or over-powering.

-Frank

[ioticus]

As usual, I agree with Frank. Decimalization of combat would be a bad idea, IMHO. The game would merely become less intuitive, for little or no benefit. I like the "board game" feel the game already has.

[Molog]

I'd like it if units with healing/regeneration spells would use them outside of combat to heal accompagnying units.

[Endoperez]

Defining stats on decimal level would, in effect, add more possible values of stats to the game. It would allow units to have better stats and also allow smaller differences. The overall effect would be a difference of about two points in any and possibly all stats of any two items or units, in maximum. Looking at it from that direction, it is too little to have a big enough difference.

However, I can't think of anything else that would make Ulm better without making it magically more powerful/flexible, if we count over-human stats magical. Even reinvigoration would only make Ulmish soldiers last longer, as enemy gets less armor-piercing hits through. Any SCs/mages who can get through their armor (and there are many ways for that) would still kill them just as easily.

[The_Paladin]

I agree with a few of the comments from the anti-decimalization camp.

1) Yes it may make the learning curve for new / casual players a little steeper.

2) Yes I agree it will not help with SCs much, if any, but I would say that's an entirely different issue that could be solved with a minimum hit chance, capping resistances, a minimum fatigue of 1 a round that cannot be regained beyond that level a round no matter what (i.e. 30 fatigue on turn 30 is the minimum a unit can have), or many other reasonable approaches.

3) Also the unmentioned argument that is often forgotten with CPU speeds these days: floating point / decimal calculations are quite expensive compared to their integral counterparts. For older computers this may result in quite the performance hit... even the low graphics environment of Dominions should consider this when battles can take place with thousands of units (and thus require 100000+ floating point calculations)!

However that isn't to say decimal calculations do not have their merits. For example, standard morale for a unit is 10. Many players, however, consider a unit to have elite morale when they have merely 11 and further consider units with 9 morale are quite a bit worse than 10. The same is true for other stats. When dealing with small integers changing even by one step will result in large (in this case 10%) percentage change in overall ability, which often times is more than is desired. Allowing for smaller, more precise steps, would allow more variation amongst units, items, spells, etc.

In fact this problem has been seen in another TBS game - Age of Wonders. In AOW 1, the stats varied as integers between 1 - 10. One of the big complaints was this limited stat range issue. When trying to make an elite defender, for example, a single point increase in the defence is quite significant - a unit with 5 defence is too good but with 4 that unit is no better than the rest of his comrades.

So what was their solution? In Age of Wonders 2 they allowed the stats to vary between 1 - 20 and, in a large way, this problem was resolved. This solution also has the merits of not increasing the computation requirements by not switching to decimal calculations.

With all due respect to Frank Trollman, I would argue that if an increased precision in stats is desirable (and in many cases I would say it is, IMHO) that the solution is in fact to multiply all stats in the game by some number - the easiest being 10. I don't quite understand how this would hurt the game. Say for example, Dom2, was released without any changes save that all stats were multiplied by 10 (and the dice rolls scaled appropriately as well). The game would still be the same, the units still have the same effectiveness, weaknesses, abilities, strengths, etc. The stats would just have a 0 at the end. Therefore it would still be the same great game it is now and would require nothing new be learned... yet it would allow for higher precision changes for the modders should they wish to use it. If you want an increase in morale of 10% go ahead but if you want 5% now, well with this change that's possible too!

Maybe I'm missing something (its quite possible ) but at the moment I can't see the drawback save for having to consider larger numbers in my head when thinking about a unit .

Anyway just my 2 cents.

[ioticus]

I think there is enough variation in probabilities without expanding the scale. You are rolling two dice, in most cases the dice are open ended, so you can get vary large variation without going to a larger scale. I don't see how the present system is broken.

[Sandman]

Nerfix said:
There aren't much of way to make the weapons without decimalization or damage types. There are only so much values the weapons can differ by plus some special effects which are more often than not magical. Maybe if there would be somekind of equipment durability or something... If you have ideas then please do tell us.

I had one idea about making hammers and similar weapons derive more benefit from strength than standard weapons... sort of the inverse of non-strength added weapons.

As for decimalisation, I really don't get this idea that it makes things more 'precise' - the numbers are more or less arbitary anyway. Or is there a compelling argument as to why broadswords should be 5.7 damage, 0.2 attack, 1.1 defence and 1.8 length?

[kimmitt]

My three suggestions have to do with gameplay and micromanagement.

The first is the addition of a "skirmishing" command for Cavalry to make it more fun and useful in battle.

The second is a series of micromanagement helpers:
1) Allow us to sort our provinces by any measure on the Empire Overview screen.

2) Have a little icon on the map which shows up when a given province is currently in the process of constructing units (so I know I don't have to go back there and tell it what to do).

3) One of my hotkeys should bring up the spaces with Fortresses in them because that's where I do most of my work. Realistically, sorting my spaces by Resources would probably solve this one.

4) Give me a message when my mercenaries' contracts are about to come up so I remember to rebid.

5) When I'm in a hotkey screen, leave the hotkeys still active so I can switch around quickly and easily.

These little changes will help the micromanagement a lot.

My third suggestion is to have little vignettes, a la SMAC, which trigger when you do things. You don't have to have an overall plot, but if the vignettes would vary by Empire (or even have 4 or so sets, 1 Good, 2 Regular, and 1 Evil), that'd be really sweet. Also, the ending screen is tremendously lame. Gimme SOMETHING to celebrate my success.

To be honest, these really aren't all for Dominions III; the sorting mechanism could come out in a patch.