The biggest problem with Dom III

[Xietor]

In Dom II if you want to play ulm or another race, you have a couple of options. In Dom III, you are limited to playing the race in a certain age. This is all well and good-except for one thing.

If you want a greater challenge, you should be able to select
ermor death mode in the middle age. Ermor is not nearly the challenge in the MA as they used to be with their death dominion. I happen to like playing Pangaea MA, but would like to play against neifel giants, death mode ermor, and no i should not have to mod it.

I think the base game should allow you to select any opponents you wish to fight, regardless of what age you play. If you put random, then ok it will default to a race of the same age, but if you want to manually select Ermor EA or LA, you should be able to do so.

It is all about choice, and I think many options are removed by the limitation of your opponents to the ones in your same era.

[Boron]

You can make a mod that accomplishes exactly that. You just need to change the era via modding command and then you can play a 7x nations game if you want to

[Xietor]

Modding is a nice addition, but less than 1 percent of Dom III players read these forums or mod. This change should be included in the basic package for all dom III players.

I played dom II for years, with friends, none of whom ever modded, or went to read forums. So not every change should be met with, "you can mod this." Most people have no desire to mod. They work. They come home from work and want to enjoy a game, not work to make the game better themselves.

Things like improving the AI and giving players more choices are not specialized requests, but would benefit all players and should be done by developers in a patch.

[Boron]

Good points Xietor. I have a similiar opinion.

The only difference is that i think easy to mod things that take not much time (= less than at maximum 1-2 hours) i prefer to mod myself to exactly my liking.

Xietor said:
Things like improving the AI and giving players more choices are not specialized requests, but would benefit all players and should be done by developers in a patch.

I would be very happy if especially the AI and the UI would get some additional improvements too .

If the AI would for example build somewhat useful SCs or pick decent blesses and use them would be great.
Or waypoints and other features that decrease the micromanagement.

[Edi]

Your idea of what should be done with patches and the developers' idea of what should be done with patches may differ significantly, Xietor.

The IW guys are not doing this out of some great monetary incentive, but because they wish to, so things are mostly going to get done their way or not at all. If their vision is a division to different ages, then you WILL be stuck with that division unless you can muster the effort to do something about it for yourself. If you want all nations in a single age, then make a mod to the effect of

#modname "Single Age"
#description "1 age, all nations"

#selectnation 1
#era 1
#end

Repeat for all nations and you're done. Using copy-paste for three rows is not beyond anybody's capabilities and making that particular mod takes less than 5 minutes. You do need to make sure to change names so that the various nations with the same names will differ somehow to get them all in, but that's not much more work.

Then you can pick whatever you want. You can even do three variants, one for each age, if you want some change in the types of indies.

You complain about work and limited free time, but did it ever occur to you that both Johan and Kristoffer have full time day jobs and they use THEIR SPARE TIME for making Dominions. Time they cold spend with their families, friends and significant others or just doing something else. Think very hard about that.

[Xietor]

Another game i play at times WOW, actually does a good job of reviewing forum suggestions, and implementing the good ones in patches. Obviously, with a game base that huge, there are numerous suggestions they disagree with and do not implement,
but the ones that they agree with, you see frequent patches tweaking the game.

WOW obviously has a bigger staff, and players pay a monthly fee, so their expectation to new content is a bit different.
Dom III players do not pay a monthly fee, so our expectations are rightly less, in terms of constant patches.

But the answer is, of course, you make the improvements, then sell an add on, so you can recoup some of your investment in time.

[Gandalf Parker]

Why hasnt anyone done the "play all nations at once" mod?
That way you can have a 1500 province map with 75 opponents.

[TirAsleen]

i see some of the early era races bit too powerful while middle era is more balanced, so many sacred units, high lvl mages and very powerful beasts in early age to recruit in home provinces and just take hellheim and vanheim. early age is a bit ridiculous so i wonder why mixing eras now. but i agree with making the game settings with AI more customizeable.

[Sombre]

That's a strange question to ask Gandalf. I mean Edi basically just explained how to make it and pointed out how easy it is. So my question is this: Why haven't YOU made it?

If it's because you don't actually have any interest in having all nations in one era, you've just answered your question as to why no-one has made the mod. No-one who can actually be bothered to get off their arse and mod wants to do it,.. so they haven't.

This reply could be given to any number of threads in this forum: You can spend a long time waiting for 'someone' to make the changes you want. Or you can just do it yourself in about 5 minutes.

[Xietor]

Well,

for the advanced player, you may want to play a MA race, and add some EA or LA empires to create more of a challenge. It would be an option, not a requirement.

So you play MA Pangaea, create a map and random opponents, and they will default be all MA races.

But, for those wishing more of a challenge, You can "select" empires from different eras to throw in as opponents for a greater challenge. So it would be completely optional. Also, you may have 1 player that is an "expert" and a friend who is a casual player, so you may want to let him/her play a tougher race to equalize things.

MOO2 had a race that was overpowered on large maps, that got to research every tree at once. Many times i would allow my friends to play this overpowered race, while I would play
a more limited race to balance out the game. There is nothing wrong in having some races be overpowered, as long
as it is intentional and everyone realizes that they exist to allow the more casual player to compete against more experienced players.

In Dom II, ermor was overpowered. And I often allowed a friend to play ermor while i played ulm or some other race.
It created an even game that would not have been possible if my friend would have played a race other than ermor.