Re: Sitting on the fence
 

Not mentioned yet are a couple of games (hosted by Ironhowk I think) that had all players start out with 9? provinces, and a stack of sages in their capitol, so the early game is pretty much skipped. I had the impression those playing it found it refreshing and fun.

Re: Sitting on the fence
 

Yeah I ran a couple of Accelerated Games as I've been calling them. VPs, 9 Starting provs, Easy Research, high gems, small map w/ only 1-2 indy provs per nation. The wars start almost immediately and rapidly proceed to late game mega-magic. Quite fun!

Think of it as the middle-ground b/w a Blitz and a 3-4month Long Term game.

Re: Sitting on the fence
 

Giving you the beating of the year, for starters.

Gandalf & QM: I was mostly looking for the new craziness offered by Dominions 3, like the titanic game or the civil war. Are there other such ideas floating around that could not have appeared in Dominions 2?

Well, I have two weeks to make up my mind about Dominions 3, so I'll be lurking now.

Re: Sitting on the fence
 

The "Musical Chairs" one has some admining quirks to try and automate it which I havent messed with very far. You still have an account if you want to test one.

And one that has come up is a "Spoils to the Conqueror" idea which I havent tested. People sometimes mention that they wish they could recruit the other guys units when they get his castle. If a map is created with #specstarts for each nation, #killfeature, then use #knownfeature to reassign the national sites....
A) do they still work
B) if captured, do they still work?
C) if the above doesnt work then can they be assigned to a neighboring province and will that work? (yes everyone would start with double sites but it would still be even)

Hmmm that brings up another. Something along the line of IronHawks Accelerated Games. Start everyone with two or 3 castles with duplicates of their national sites.

(again, this is all untested hacks so I have no idea if they are possible)

Re: Sitting on the fence
 

Disclaimer: I have no idea if any of these are possible. Ones clearly possible are exceptions to the rules.
Aside from the last one, are any of these remotely possible and worth me looking into?

Crazy game idea? I have no reason to suspect its possible, but ... an epic map. Many fantasy novels have an event where the world was sundered in twain. Or stuff like that. If at all possible, I'd suspect that the players would have to agree to replace their game map all at the same time. And the game hoster would have to mod the old data into the new map.

But ideas... Take for instance, Paraganos. Imagine that the two land masses come together (Sea -> Farmland) at one or two of the lakes, around year five. Then, one of the other lakes opens up a bit, or one of the provinces sinks below. The gamehoster would act as kind of a GM, and the gameplayers wouldn't know whats happening until maybe a year before the event. If anything was horribly unfair, they'd figure out some bone to throw someone on the short end of the stick.

I am fascinated by the "Other person's Pretenders concept". If you design the winning person's Pretender (and don't get it yourself) you get a bonus in the next game (choose start site, maybe?, pick a magic site), or at least an honorable mention?

Games with humans having a typical start, but one AI starts out as a small empire the rest have to overcome before turning upon each other. You could backstab someone before-hand, but then you'd have to watch your back.

Games with 100% sites, 30% resources, 80% gold. Summons for all.

Aside from the last one, are any of these remotely possible and worth me looking into?

Re: Sitting on the fence
 

The changing map one isn't I'm afraid. The map is fixed once the game starts. Well, you could change the picture, but not any of its actual properties or connections.

What you can change mid-game is mods. So you could have new units become available during the game or something. You could probably have everyone gradually change from the EA to the LA version of their nation through the game! But that would take a lot of work.

Re: Sitting on the fence
 

That's nice to hear. But w/regards to that last paragraph, there may be an easier, though less accurate way to do that which would avoid the complication of removing units from the game.(though some nations such as Ctis would complicate things). If you can combine all three eras into one nation, say EA, MA, LA ulm into Single Era Ulm, and have three different mod versions of SE Ulm with all units available. In one version, you'd have the resource costs for EA normal, but the other two eras ridiculously high. The next version, you'd have MA normal, and so on. In theory, this would allow you to keep some of your heroes and commanders throughout the ages and offer up some real interesting strategies, since they'd no longer be recruitable later on. And if you wanted to force obsolescence you could invite glitchs by lowering max ages.

That'd still take a lot of work, but hopefully less on the part of gameplayers. If I find the time, I'll look into that. But I've got other things on my plate, ATM, namely, my first Dom3 MP game, server courtesy of the llamabeast, and finishing my godawfully large MA Agartha guide.

Re: Sitting on the fence
 

I like that idea. It also would make the game abit more RPG since you would get very protective about early era champions that have made it thru the ages. And on a really large map that would breath new life into the game as it progresses thru the eras. I even think that this might be a good thing for Illwinter to look into. Adding a progressive game option.

I had an idea to do a big campaign scenario with 3 maps and try go with the feel of moving from era to era with carryover benefits but I could only simulate it. I couldnt really base the growth on previous actions. I really like the concept with a mod moving it along. You might actually have found my motivation to mod.

Re: Sitting on the fence
 

I found an old "half an idea" writeup.

---------------------
Ive been leary of mentioning the "change game on the fly" since it adds to the concenr of trusting your host. Its a problem that we had in Dom2. Also, I suspect that use of it, might cause Johan to fix it (Ive personally had problems along that line http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif )

However, it does hold some wonderful possibilities.
Here are some tidbits for you:

A) it is possible for an external program to programmically make changes to the mod during the game. For best results the game should be brought down and rebooted after the change is made.

B) it is possible for an external program to "see" and react to:
1) what turn it is
2) what season it is
3) certain nations failing to upload turn files, or failing to upload a turn for X number of hostings
4) how many nations have dropped out
5) how many are owned by a nation or by all nations:
1a) provinces
2a) forts
3a) income
4a) gem income
5a) research
6a) dominion
7a) army size
8a) victory points
6) all of the above as it applies to Independents to gauge the progression of the game. Such as when there are less than 10% provinces held by indepts.
7) largest change in any of the above
8) how many of something has entered the game:
1b) assassins
2b) horrors
3b) global spells
9) certain specific provinces being attacked (when the home of xxxx is attacked then)
10) certain spells being cast (meaning a way to check if a certain research level has been reached, or to know that AI Ermor is now capable of xxxxx)
11) what random events have run
12) specific items gotten from combats
13) overkills (such as a 2000 army killing a 200 army)
14) more than one nation playing with the same serial (one person playing as two and

Such as....
a game with a better planned Early Age Ermor as an AI. Well designed god, well chosen scales, tweaked to play well as an AI. And then an outside program can watch the logs. When Ermors castle comes under siege then "Ermor casts a massive revenge spell" and suddely goes total undead with tweaks to be a big problem trying to take them out.

Or a "sacred forest" stretching across numerous provinces and when they are attacked then Pangaea erupts everywhere.

Re: Sitting on the fence
 

Glad to know I've helped to motivate you just as someone helped motivate me to finish my Golem Cult guide. I'd be willing to help you with such a mod, as long as someone knowledgeable was in a leadership role.

I'm not yet willing to decipher the inner working of the mod files and save game formats, though coding a small program in Python or C++ to adjust what I'm told, would be within my field of interest.

And if some grunt work needed doing, I'd be willing to adjust everything needing change, as long as someone else did the thinking for me. "Here's this information, it looks like this, change all 100 of these values. Here's how you open it." I'm willing to do that, I've got the downtime with my job. "Here's what I want to do, how do I do it, where do I do it, and what is it called?" That requires brain cycles used by my job and guide write up- at the moment, that's tapped out. Though that will change for the better.