Re: what about the future?
 

How much time is necessary for the program to evolve? It's been ten years.

That mean I get my 50 back?

Besides money, how can I motivate a change to the UI to make it less painful and more helpful?

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If they are not interested in evolving a D4, would they turn it over to another development group?

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That's an exaggeration. Mages would be more focused, but more effective in their specialty.

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How far is their office from the Paradox office?

Re: what about the future?
 

I don't think they have any offices.

50 bucks is because of Shrapnel, they are morons and know **** about doing business.

You don't have to motivate - Amhazair is right, not much can be done to dom3 without writing it from scratch. And tbh there are many things devs have no idea about and I've heard code is not documented and is quite chaotic.

And no, don't count on them parting with rights, so a community can make dom4 [even though it'd be great]. At least not any time soon.

Re: what about the future?
 

I think it evolved great. Your little personal gripes seem very minor compared to where it came from. Also keep in mind that it goes real job, family, self time, hobby work on little game thing. :)

Well they are giving away their first game for free now. Which isnt really a bad little time killer. But no I think that the cost of outsourcing limited pressings has the cost of Dom3 fairly frozen.

3rd party programs, macro recorders, etc.

Or if you mean getting Illwinter to break off of their latest fun project to drudge back into the Dom3 code, didnt your mommy ever teach you about please and thank you? Some people here have a knack for reviving the devs love for certain nations or game aspects and then casually mention a slight irritation while praising most of the game. Others have a habit of insulting the game, the developers, the publishers, and then whining about things dont ever get changed. Its not too hard to trace back thru the games progress page and compare it to the threads that got things done to see.

Im not sure why they would want to do that. Generally that creates a bad taste to the original developers or authors when they see what a new company does with it.

But we arent sure they arent interested in a D4. Maybe the new project is one (I personally doubt it) or maybe they will swing back that direction down the road.

Illwinters? No real "offices" but it operates mostly in Lund, Sweden

Re: what about the future?
 

No real need for that. Someone could just make a dom-like(but improved) game, change a few things here and there and call it something else. Just a thought.

Also could someone link me to the thread where that guy(who got banned) proved that "manual piracy"(whatever that is) exists?

Re: what about the future?
 

Actually, this seems quite fun to me. Maybe somewhat more than 10-20 mages, but not too much. I find that adding mages and troops adds to my enjoyment of the game up until somewhere in the midgame. At that point, each additional unit detracts from my enjoyment - more micromanagement, less fun. But I can see how some people would find this too small a scale: more like bickering petty kingdoms than vast empires battling to decide the next pantokrator.

But I think this touches on a key issue relating to micromanagement: that as the number of units and resources you need to manage grows, so does the micro. A good UI is of course very helpful (especially when it comes to streamlining how resources are handled) but I don't think you can get around this fact.

Ideally I'd like to see a system that reduced the escalation in the number of units in play. So instead of having a hundred times more units in the end game you'd have ten times more. And of course ideally this would be adjustable so that people who enjoy (or at least can tolerate) managing huge numbers of units would have that option.

Re: what about the future?
 

.... what?

Cost of the disc: <10 cents. Ok, its probably ~1 cent (a disc is a disc, they can buy in bulk and use them for multiple different titles) but we might assume they don't order enough discs total to get quite that good a price. But *I* can buy writeable discs for <10 cents, so a game publisher certainly can.

Which leaves the manual, which honestly, they could just put the pdf on the disc and reduce their materials cost/unit to the cost of the disc. However, the manual itself can't cost them more than a few bucks to print.

Most of a cost for a game is to account for development time. After a while (usually a year or less for computer games) the price starts dropping because the publisher understands that if more units move, then they'll see more total income and thus more profits, since the development cost/unit is not a fixed amount. (Rather, its a total that needs to be made up by all sales). Basic economics teaches us that reducing price increases sales.

That dom3's price hasn't moved is pure stupidity on Shrapnel's part.

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Re: "Dom 4". Now, IANAL, but, at least in the US, game mechanics aren't copyrightable or patentable. The description of the mechanics (in the manual or game help) is copyrightable, but not the mechanics themselves. So if someone wanted to make a Dominions 3 clone, they very well could. Of course, the creative content that is original to Dom3 is all copyrightable, so that couldn't be reproduced, but since much of the source material is mythological, factions derived from the same source material are perfectly permissible.

Of course, you wouldn't even want to use Dom3's exact mechanics, since that's where a lot of the problems are. So what you end up with is a game that's inspired by Dom3. What you lose is the factions that have the most creative work put into them - Abysia and Agartha (not the names, but the nature of the factions) for example. Other factions are pretty much straight up conversions of myth to faction, so while there would be changes, a Vanir inspired faction would still be recognizably Vanheim for example. And various gradations in-between.

The magic system's divisions are, for the most part, stolen straight from D+D (1st/2nd ed. AD+D specifically), so that's not a problem. The gem spending mechanic seems to be derivative of MoM in form (which would be the only arguably 'creative' aspect - function being the mechanic itself which is not copyrightable). The actual spells would need changing in many cases (although 'fireball' is certainly not intellectual property, some of them certainly are).

Not that Dom3 is without legal problems of its own... (Illithids and Aboleths are WotC's intellectual property, and used without permission afaict.)

Now, obviously it couldn't be *called* dom4...

Re: what about the future?
 

Yes, I've got to think that would be the point of purchasing the rights to Dominions, since it is always mentioned that the code will be rewritten. But I wonder how long it would be before TNN would be changed to elves, Ulm to dwarves, etc. I like traditional fantasy but one of the things I like about Dominions is that it takes a different approach. It seems to me you could make a good argument that you'd sell more copies if you changed nations to the archetypes most people would expect. And while that argument might not do much to sway IW (something I've always liked about them) I would expect for most developers that would, understandably, be a big factor. In short, I wonder if Dominions would retain its spirit with IW out of the picture.

I recall reading that Ars Magica, an RPG with a wonderfully realized medieval setting, was an influence on the magic system.

Re: what about the future?
 

TNN/Eriu *is* elves. Or at least one version of elves. (Arguably Vanheim is also elves). Its just that IW has retained the mythological rather than fantasy pop-cultural envisioning of them. (Also, we have dwarves. They're just called Svartalfar - literally 'dark elf', but elves and dwarves are kind of indistinguishable in norse mythology...).

Re: what about the future?
 

NO!

No bloody elves,
No blooming dwarves,
The game is so much richer for it.

Re: what about the future?
 

I think professional discs are a bit more expensive. Iirc you need to make a master disc, and make professional copies from that one. For both you need specialized equipment. Which tend to be expensive. Sure the costs of one disc is cheap. But the whole setup tends to have large costs up front. Sure, after a certain amound of games sold you get the expense back. But still.

(And lets not forget that when buying a game you normally not only pay for the physical disk, you also pay for development, tech support, shipping, housing, websites, shrapnel also wants to eat, etc). People tend to forget these costs, which usually amount to a lot.

And while I personally think 50$ is still a bit much. I doubt more sales would be made if the price is lower. (I think the specials do improve sales, but that has to do with buyers psychology). Dom3 isn't a real impulse buy kind of game. It is a niche game, those tend to be more expensive. (And tend to draw a more 'select' crowd).