Wish List

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by izaqyos:
Is there a central place for the wish list?

This one seems pretty good. St. Patrick was updating the list for awhile (scroll back thru this to see it) and was doing a good job of shortening, classifying, and marking complete on the various requests.

[Vicious Love]

Here's a minor and relatively feasible wish, for a change:
I'm a big fan of toying with site frequency, research speed and world richness. Just a few minor changes in any of those scales is enough to drastically change the nature of the game. I've noticed, however, that even in Ulm-friendly, low magic games, blood magic is still almost as powerful as ever(Blood slaves are just as easy to come by, and there's only one school to research).
The ability to change a scenario's "blood slave frequency", default 100, to 200(Twice as many blood slaves per slave captured), 0(Blood slaves extinct) and anything in between would be nice.
Of course, I imagine this could be tricky, as the smallest possible unit of a blood slave is a blood slave. Rather than messing with quantum slavery, I suppose we could make blood magic cost more slaves, though this leads to even more problems... did I say this was feasible? My bad.
Then again, some players might be happy with a simple percentile reduction of the number of blood slaves captured, rounded down, so that scouts/low level mages without SDRs would not even be capable of blood hunting in low-blood eras. That seems doable to me.
Of course, this might be missing the essential stylistic quality of blood mojo. If Vampire: the Masquerade has taught us anything, it's that blood is the only magic that never wanes, and that trenchcoats are the greatest thing since sunglasses-by-night.

[st.patrik]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:

quote:

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Originally posted by izaqyos:
Is there a central place for the wish list?

This one seems pretty good. St. Patrick was updating the list for awhile (scroll back thru this to see it) and was doing a good job of shortening, classifying, and marking complete on the various requests.

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erm...yes I kinda stopped updating the list, since it was getting so incredibly long.

[Ice_Sickle]

I'll limit my list (for emphasis). This has already been mentioned but a pretender management system is needed, badly. The current system allows only one pretender per race and is completely blind. Without entering a game you can't view the pretender. I started a multiplayer game a little while ago and I wanted to use the pretender I had created but add a password. In order to do that I had to recreate him. So I fire up a game and inspect my pretender and write down his magic levels, the nature of my dominion and the castle I'm using, exit and then recreate the same thing with a password. That's insane. I'm sitting in front of a 2.5Ghz information management machine and I'm writing stuff down to enter elsewhere!

There should be a screen for managing pretenders -- up to 20 pretenders per race --that allows me to view all races and all pretenders on a screen. By right clicking on a pretender it shows me all the attributes and my notes I wrote that describe why I set up what I did and some basic strategy notes. I should be able to copy pretenders, change attibutes and do either a "save" or "save as..." When I am looking at joining/starting a game I should be able to access the pretender management screen to select not only the race but which pretender I want to use.

The only other thing that really drives me nuts is the network host screen. On my machine (Radeon 9600) the graphics for the flags only works the first time. After an alt-tab it goes to blocks and letters instead of flags with and without "X's". Half the time when I try and maximize it, it changes my screen res, turns black for a second, back to desktop and reduced res, back to black back to desktop and regular res -- the screen never gets up. There should be a simple text based server screen that gives me the information the current screen does.

It would be great if I could hover the mouse over the entry in the taskbar and it would give me a text window that describes what turn it is and who has and who has not completed their turn.


Ice

[Gandalf Parker]

There is a third party program which handles most of your god requests. It runs in java but does offer multiple god saves and multiple game saves. I dont use it, I think its on Arryns web page. Ido the same thing with manual copy commands or using the --preexec switch.

The text going back to letters can be avoided by not left-clicking it when its on the bar. Right-click and choose restore

And there is a text server mode.

[LintMan]

My (rather large) wish list, broken into a few categories:

Battle viewer wishlist:
- The f and n keys are a big improvement to speed up battles (thanks!), but I'd still love to see an r key to "rewind" the battle 1 turn at a time.
- I've love some options to turn on more verbose text play by play of what is happenning in the battle. Ie: instead of just "Luigi casts Fireball", the next line would be "2 militia killed, 1 damaged". I'd even like to see text play-by-play for missile fire and melee attacks; it wouldn't have to be for every unit, but just per group. ie: maybe "Archers fire shortbows at heavy cavalry" and "Wolves attack light infantry".
- It'd be nice to be able to look at a unit and have some idea what its group morale status was, perhaps a small bar that shrinks as its group morale drops.
- How about a toggle to display their health/fatigue bars above units heads (like in RTS games)? This would beat the heck out of having to click on each unit to know all their health status.
- Another nice RTS-ism would be if little numbers floated over the heads of units as they took damage.
- A lot of the negative effects that a unit can get in combat don't show seem to up in the unit information window (I'm thinking stuff like cold effect, on fire, entangled/netted, etc)
- It'd be nice if there was a way to highlight all the commanders (both sides). Some of them completely blend into the crowd so you have to hunt for them, particularly if you're new to the game or just unfamiliar with the race.

Monthly Messages list wishlist:
- fix the "Goto Province" bug, where it is broken for certain events (such as assasinations)
- Assasination and Castle battle notices should give battle result reports in the same way as regular battles. (ie: who won, and how many units lost on each side)
- Some Messages are very, very generic; more detail would be helpful: Say how many gems were found in the gem finding events, which global enchantment was cast (I don't think it says in some cases), and which global enchantment got bumped, if one did.
- It'd be interesting to see in the battle result reports how many provincial defense units were killed (listed separatedly from non-pd).
- It'd be very nice if the battle reports listed the number of units that fled the battle on both sides, and if those units on either side died while fleeing.
- It'd be awesome if the battle results report was able to show which commanders/units were lost (in a clickable fashion to bring up their info), rather than just numbers. Not as nice, but still good would be if the report could provide a text list of commander names and which/how many units were killed.

UI wishlist:
- Show a unit's upkeep cost in its unit info window.
- Add a 'disband' button to the unit info window (or somewhere else) to dismiss units you no longer want to pay for.
- It'd be nice to have a window with an upkeep cost breakdown: per province: the cost of every mage/commander, and every group of non-commanders.
- Scrollable windows should all support the PgUp/PgDn keys, as well as the cursor keys to scroll them.
- It'd be nice if things like the exit button and your gem totals (on the spell ritual lists) were part of the window frame and did not scroll with the rest of the window contents, so you don't have to scroll around to find them.
- In the army setup screen, it'd be nice if you could (optionally) have all wounded/afflicted units show a little "w" (or a heart) under them, so it'd be easier to find and group them. I know that the w key selects wounded, but it only works for the current group, not for the whole army screen, and it leaves the originally selected unit highlighted even if it isn't wounded.
- I'd love to see map icons (like the temple/castle ones) for laboratories, and for scouts/spys/assasins in enemy territory.
- It'd be nice if province name and assorted info (ie: population, ownership), gotten from scouting/spying was remembered after the scout/spy leaves the area. Maybe it could be "ghosted", to indicate the information might have changed since you no longer have a direct observer.
- If you select a ritual spell that you cannot afford, or which your mage cannot cast, the window closes without any warning that your selection was invalid. I believe this is also true for magic items you can't afford to forge. It'd be nice if there was a little popup warning you about this.
- If you let your magic item treasury fill up, further forged items get lost without warning. It's be nice if the treasury couldn't fill up, or if you got a warning about this. (Yes, this isn't a common problem, but late game if you're forging tons of stuff, it can happen).

Gameplay stuff:
- It'd be nice if routed units on the victor's side "came back", rather than getting scattered. Or at least, if it worked that way for units ordered to fire and retreat or cast spells and retreat.
- It'd be cool if units "with their backs up against the wall" in a surrounded province knew that routing means certain doom, and had a slight "we'll go down fighting" morale boost.
- It'd prefer to see "auto death after 40 rounds of combat" be changed to auto retreat, and the round limit increased, especially for castle battles, which can drag on.
- It'd be nice if archers and mages became more conservative about potential friendly fire when they are going after already-routed targets. It seems the friendly fire deaths to my melee units get worse at that point than any other time, which seems senseless.
- I've seen Groups of units blithely chase a routed group right past a crowd of non-routed archers that were drilling it ruthlessly. It'd be nice that if a group's target routes, it would reprioritize its targets to go after non-routed enemies first to minimize casualties. (I can see cases where "keep them from fleeing at any cost" would be preferable, but I think the generally preferable case would be to minimize your own casualties.)
- more flexible game creation options: change pretenter starting point amount (via mod?), split out "rich" map setting to a separate resources and gold, and have a few levels of setting ie: .75x/1x/1.5x/2x for gold/resource availability. Allow the max number of global enchantments to be set to any number (including "unlimited")
- allow the path cost multiplier for pretender creation to be modded (ie: instead of 8 per level, allow modding it to 6, or 10).
- allow the individual scale costs to be modded. (Ie, make, say, "order" cost more, or "luck" cost less, or possibly even allow negative scales to pay more or less than the positive side does).
- it might be interesting if province defense that successfully flees to another province either became part of the player's regular army, or increased the pd of that province, rather than just disappearing. (Not sure if that'd be unbalancing, though).
- I know Dom2 is PBEM and all, but how about throwing us single-player-only people a bone and adding save/reload functionality for SP only? The third-party domsaver tool is very nice, but I hate alt-tabbing out every turn to use it to save my game, and I prefer not to play in a window, either. Even just having a fixed number of, say, 10 save-game "slots" would be better than nothing.

AI wishlist:
- The AI's need to build castles!
- It'd be nice to have AI "personalities" and/or customizable/moddable behavior
- Any other general improvements to the AI would be nice - I do SP only, so the AI's all I got!
- It'd be nice to be able to toggle between AI and human control of any player, at any time (at least for SP games).

[Aetius]

I would like to see provinces that produce units which are costly in terms of resources have enough resources to produce at least one unit per two turns. There are few things more frustrating in the early game then conquering a feudal province which normally results in half of your army being anhilated to find that you can build one knight in oh ten turns.

[ May 10, 2004, 10:51: Message edited by: Aetius ]

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally posted by Aetius:
I would like to see provinces that produce units which are costly in terms of resources have enough resources to produce at least one unit per two turns. There are few things more frustrating in the early game then conquering a feudal province which normally results in half of your army being anhilated to find that you can build one knight in oh ten turns.

But the advantage of some of the nations is their spys or information granting dominion which allows them to make better choices in that area

[Chris Byler]

Originally posted by Aetius:
I would like to see provinces that produce units which are costly in terms of resources have enough resources to produce at least one unit per two turns. There are few things more frustrating in the early game then conquering a feudal province which normally results in half of your army being anhilated to find that you can build one knight in oh ten turns.

Well, build a fortress there. That'll improve resource production. You can't build much of any independent unit if you don't have a fortress to improve production (except for commanders/mages).

Feudal provinces, in my experience, at least reliably have plenty of population, which makes them good for gold and supply even if they are resource poor.

You can also estimate the resource richness of a province by its terrain. Forests and mountains have more resources than farmlands or plains.

[wombatsSAR]

One of the things I see lacking with the stealthy armies is some equivalence to an ambush. Sure, one can try to sneak some army around behind enemy lines and then pop-up and attack, but the attack is just another set piece attack as any other. This is not how a stealthy army would attack. I would like to see would be some level of "ambush" capability. Basically, it would be similar to the "wolves from the woods" sort of attack that the ***** queen gets or it could be some number of moves during which the enemy army doesn't get to attack or maybe some combination of the two. This is not to say that it would be an automatic attack in this manner - the level of surprise should be moderated by ... the number of scouts with the army, the number of light troops/light cav - historically, that was one of their big jobs: being the screening force. For a prepared force, the ambushing army ends up in a setpiece battle - or maybe even counterambushed, or it just cuts down on the turns of inactivity by the prepared force.

For the more typical ICU/UC me battles, a stealthy force could be added either from the side, or again, a couple of turns of combat with no response (rather, in this case, I think I prefer the side attack option). If the stealthy army is spotted, it is either just shoved in with the other army or it gets attacked separately.

For a "pie-in-the-sky" implementation, the stealthy army could have an option to "raid" as an order, with a corresponding "brigands or raiders in province X" report on the message screen. Another additional order would be "Harass" wherein the stealthy army tries to pick-off stragglers from the opposition. This could be literally losing some troops or it could mean loss of supplies in a province. As a balance to these orders, I'd suggest the stealthy army be easier to counter attack when executing these orders - they have a higher profile.