Re: Wish List
 

Hey, all I know is what I was told when I was editing the darn things. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif

Re: Wish List
 

I'd like to see the resource-sucking effect of fortress admin only apply to unused resources. So you could still build units in provinces with two adjacent fortified cities.

Re: Wish List
 

Here's a completely fluffy http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/tongue.gif suggestion: I would love to see moddable "skins" for the UI...perhaps one for each nation. For instance, Man's default UI skin might be a stony grey, outlined by Celtic knotwork...Arcosephale's might be a white/grey marble. And so on.

Re: Wish List
 

What about... when you capture the home province of another god, the...(arg, I don't remember the true name for this) trouble is 200. So you need to pacify the city or/and be nice with the population for a while before starting to hire troops from there.

Re: Wish List
 

I know I have fought and fought the "there is no game saves because its PBEM" but I had a thought.

Maybe at the menu where you hit HOST to have it actually process the turn, we could get 2 more buttons. Save backup, restore backup. All the game would need to do is save another 2h but name it something like bak. The restore just copies a bak over the 2h.

Hmmm I wonder if that would be confusing to any gamers who multiplay. Do you think it might cause "yeah I know but after I saw that I hit restore and sent a new turn for that round" arguments? Hmmmm might be better to leave it as an outside-of-the-game function.

[ February 23, 2004, 20:36: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: Wish List
 

Here are two features that I would like with spell casting:

1) When scripting spells for a mage to cast the UI does not take into account the previous spells to determine which spells are available.

Ok that was complicated. Perhaps an example I have a caster with 1 in fire magic and 1 in astral. My 1st spell is Power of the spheres, I want my 2nd spell to be fire ball however it is not on the list since the game knows that I am only level 1 and does not take the pervious level into account.

Now clearly the game can not figure out all possibilities since communion can cause variable additions to a caster's level. So how about adding a UI element that allows you to set how many extra levels you want to add to your caster (for filter purposes only). A simple addition to the UI, but it would give much more control over combat.

2) I would really like to be able to script more than 5 spells. But I could see people complaining that this could cause balance problems (not that I agree!!!).

Re: Wish List
 

AFAIK your first point is already done in the game. You just have to have the ability researched.

If you have at least 1 in a path (Like Fire) and have the spell researched, it will allow you to script spells that are outside of their range to cast.

On point 2. I would like more spaces to cast (if only 1) but I understand why they might not want to implement this - because there are instances where you could buff yourself to invulnerability then attack. So it's a toss up.

Re: Wish List
 

I would like to see the color bars from Dom1 returned. Im finding that new players are not noticing that the commanders they maxxed out assigning troops to, can again receive more troops later. I liked the green bar showing how many troops and that it turned red when full. Also the same bars on the province view showing troops waiting to be assigned

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">The only reason this would cause a "balance" problem is because of crappy AI spellcasting. If the AI's spellcasting didn't suck, it would have cast those spells anyway. Imbalance simply wouldn't occur either way, since anything given to both sides is automatically balanced. Besides, the AI is already allowed an unlimited-length spell queue that he can actually alter in combat. The human player doesn't get this at all.

[ March 05, 2004, 00:22: Message edited by: Norfleet ]

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I have no idea what you are talking about here. A human player gets exactly the same spellcasting choices as the AI does by just selecting the "Cast Spells" order. And yes, it would be wuite unbalancing. Take a physically strong, magically power pretender, say a titan with AE Ermor. Give it 2 fire, 3 air, 3 water, 6 astral, 4 death, 4 nature. Give it a script of quickness, summon earthpower, invulnerability, breath of winter, fire shield, phoenix pyre, body ethereal, personal luck, astral weapon, astral shield, iron will, resist magic, personal regeneration, elemental fortitude, etc. That's only 7 rounds of buffing, and with cheap equipment you end up with a SC monster with MR around 34.

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Well dang you are right. I always assumed that since they were grayed out you could not click on them.

Well that's great news! Back to my game then!

One more thing ... my only concern left is SuperCombatants. They seem to be pretty gosh darn powerful. If they (SC's) are supposed to be the focus of the game then it's all good. However if the focus of the game is supposed to be armies crashing into each other where the pretenders have an effect on combat yet do not by themselves determine it then it seems that there is a problem.

Re: Wish List
 

There are many, many ways to deal with SC's. It's important in my mind for Pretenders, or high magic/items/creature to have a great impact on a battle. There are two lines of the debate. But I believe a good balance has been found with the SC's and their counters. Though they still are a factor; they are much more killable than they were.

Re: Wish List
 

Perhaps when in the lab with an item selected, and choosing which commander it should go on, commanders which would get no use out of it (not enough free slots of the right type, already has same item which has only non-stacking abilities, does not have C'tissian lizard head, does not have the magic path which would be boosted when path boosting is the only effect, etc) could be greyed-out.
Repeat-forging would be nice, especially if there were a way to select a research booster and have the game dump it on a random researcher who did not already have that booster.
Repeat-recruitment, especially with a default order ('research', say) would be good.
Speaking of research, researchers should probably go on Defend in the odd eventuality that all magic has been researched. Not much point in staying in the pool, except for being ignored with 'n'-type idle commander iteration.
Messages regarding commanders being arrowed, et al, should mention not only commander name, but province and possibly task.

Re: Wish List
 

The #1 feature for me would be "HOLD AND FIRE" YOU STUPID ARCHERS, don't stupidly run up to firing range, wait for them to come to you, for goodness sakes, why are archers so stupid? Someone tell me please before I go on an archer killing spree. Oh wait, I don't need to. They die enough as it is.

Re: Wish List
 

Hi all, I'm a noob who has been playing the demo for a litle over a week now (boy is my wife starting to get irritated http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif ) My copy is set to arrive tomorow! Yay! I'd just like to say that this is the game I've been waiting to play for years now. Man, where was I for Dom 1? Boy did I miss out...

Anyway I do have a major suggestion (which stems from playing Stars! oh so long ago). I do realize that this would probably constitute major changes to the game, but what the heck... I'll throw it out for your amusement anyway:

The ability to set orders for X# of years in advance. It would be nice to be able to set some long term plans that would not need to be messed with (unless the circumstances warented it) and just let the game run its course. This would alleviate the need to micromanage so many things on a per turn basis, and free me up to soak in the overal scope of my campaign.

Several things would need to be implemented in order for this to happen:

1) A production queue for both normal units and heroes. Additional information might be needed when generating heroes such as "Have all casters produced here set to research," or "send this hero to X's army"

2) The ability to script an army's movement for several turns in advance. Even if an army can only move one strategic space per turn I'd like to be able to plot its course over several turns. Assuming that all goes well, then I'd just let the army continue on its way. If something goes bad, well then the player can step in and change orders.

2B) Related to the above it might be interesting if armies that could move more than one strategic space per turn would actually be able to move through multiple enemy territories (conquering as they go). A fast strong army might be able to inflict vast amounts of damage through undefended enemy territory.

3) The ability to script a hero's movement and actions in a dynamic way. What do I mean by this? Say you have a main army out in the field somewhere that you want to keep supplied with fresh troops. Script a hero to goto your fortress, pick up troops, and then goto the army (wherever that might be) and drop them off.


That's all for now. In addition to reducing micromanagement, I think that these types of changes would also make MP campaigns a little friendlier/more forgiving. Say for instance that for some reason you weren't able to make your turn before DomII auto generates. Well, you might be ok if you had scripted your dominion for several turns in advance. This could also help to jump start a game. Players could plan for several years in advance and then quickly host through the first X# of months.

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That's awfully strange. I don't tend to have much problem with archers dying, nor routing. Where do you place them in the squad?

Re: Wish List
 

Wish #1: Changing Tactical Orders Should Never Cancel Strategic Movement Orders*

* Though adding new troops with shorter move/different movement abilities is allowed to do so, if, and only if, the new troop composition is unable to obey the old order.


Occasionally, when I set new tactical orders for a commander (e.g. spells, attack, hold & attack &etc), the game cancels any current movement order for the commander and his army on the strategic map.

The two areas of functinality have NOTHING to do with each other. There is no possible change in a commander's tactical orders that can influence its strategic movement orders, so it makes absolutely no sense to cancel the strategic movement order. The current functionality has no benefits whatsoever, but does increase the number of errors made (armies not participating in a planned fight because of Last-minute changes to the tactical orders being the most common cause) http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon8.gif

It may be that it is simply a case of click-through - i.e. the click on the exit-button when closing the army setup screen counting as an additional click on the game screen, as this problem does not arise all the time - but it is incredibly frustrating when it happens.

[ March 10, 2004, 22:47: Message edited by: Peter Ebbesen ]

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">That's awfully strange. I don't tend to have much problem with archers dying, nor routing. Where do you place them in the squad? </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I actually don't have much of a problem with it either, but I still badly want it. Instead of Hold and Attack for my spear/javelin infantry, I'd like Hold and Fire. It would make them more effective. That way they fire if they can and they don't attack the enemy if they still have javelins left (like in Hold and Attack)

Re: Wish List
 

I'd also like to see combat orders like "Retreat if outnumbered 2-1" or "retreat if outnumbered 3-1", etc...

A commander should know when to leave the field.

Re: Wish List
 

Is there a central place for the wish list?

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">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.

Re: Wish List
 

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.

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">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. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">erm...yes I kinda stopped updating the list, since it was getting so incredibly long.

Re: Wish List
 

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

Re: Wish List
 

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.

Re: Wish List
 

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).

Re: Wish List
 

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. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon8.gif

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

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">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

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">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.

Re: Wish List
 

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.

Re: Wish List
 

Lintman summed up just about everything I would like to see in Dom2 - nothing wacky or too far out, just a bunch of UI improvements and mod/option functions. I suggest the devs print that list he made and put it under their pillow, so all those things seep into their minds. It's a whole bunch of little irritations that do add up eventually.

As for this..: "
- 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."

Just be glad you can directly target a province with a ritual now. I cant say how many times in Dom 1 I went to cast Seeking Arrow or something at a province, realized I forget to get the province number, exited and checked it, saw some army I had forgotten to move or something, went back to cast the spell, realized I'd forgetten the number, and so on..

Just to add my own bit to the wishlist, a "Forge Monthly Item" command would help me out a lot.

[ May 10, 2004, 21:51: Message edited by: Slygar ]

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'd also like to be able to use the province number as well as directly clicking, since there are times when you want to send multiple spells at a province that will take a long time to scroll to.

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Not completely true. For example, Pollux the Arch Theurg with 3A1W3S4H attempted to cast Ritual Spell "The Wraith of God" (5S3A), which he obviously doesn't have the level for. A screen pops up when clicking on the ritual, saying "The ritual is too complex for this mage".

What is true is that no error is given if you don't have enough gem but have enough path. This applies to Item Forging as well.

On the other hand, if you do not have the level to forge an item, that item simply won't appear in the "Forge Magic Item" window even if you have the Construction level needed. E.g. you won't see "Boots of Quickness", a Construction 6 item, despite having Cons 6 researched, if you use the Forge command with a Mage without path in Water. The exception is with "The Forge of Ancient" global enchantment, where you can see and forge items that have requirement at most 1 level above the forging mage in each path.

So not having the path either gives an error message, or in the case of magic items, th\at said item won't appear in the list of forgeable items. No error is given, however, in both cases if insufficient gems are present.

-Gateway103

[ May 10, 2004, 22:14: Message edited by: Gateway103 ]

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I was aware of that and I suspect that it may be part of the problem since it seems that most of the Feudal provinces are on grasslands, thus low resources. Of course this is only based upon my observations I have not tested this hypothesis.

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Good advice. However my intent was to express that I think it is logical that provinces that are capable of producing resource costly units have adequate resources to do so. Not necessarily on a 1-1 unit per turn ratio but 1-2 or even 1-3 would be reasonable. What I object to are situations were you have 1-6 or greater ratio of units per turn to build a knight.

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I'd also like to be able to use the province number as well as directly clicking, since there are times when you want to send multiple spells at a province that will take a long time to scroll to. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Ok. In the meantime, how about just zooming out the map so the target doesn't require scrolling?

PvK

Re: Wish List
 

Some people may accuse me of beating a dead horse, but hey, I have a fresh dead horse to beat - the one that was just shot dead along with my elite heavy cavalry while they were pursuing ONE LIMPING MILITIA MAN, by their own men.

Enemy losses: 3 leaders, 45 men
Own losses: 0 leaders, 2 men DUE TO FRIENDLY FIRE

Argh!

Wish: AI does use Accuracy <100 ranged attacks on targets that have friendly units near them that have any appreciable chance of getting hit by accident!

PvK

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I was aware of that and I suspect that it may be part of the problem since it seems that most of the Feudal provinces are on grasslands, thus low resources. Of course this is only based upon my observations I have not tested this hypothesis.

Quote:

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker: 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

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Good advice. However my intent was to express that I think it is logical that provinces that are capable of producing resource costly units have adequate resources to do so. Not necessarily on a 1-1 unit per turn ratio but 1-2 or even 1-3 would be reasonable. What I object to are situations were you have 1-6 or greater ratio of units per turn to build a knight. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">However if you build a proper fortress there, then they are generally able to produce at least one knight per turn, especially if you own the surrounding provinces. To me, it seems reasonable and interesting that you can't just easily create knights from farmland as soon as you've taken over a province with no military infrastructure.

PvK

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Good advice. However my intent was to express that I think it is logical that provinces that are capable of producing resource costly units have adequate resources to do so. Not necessarily on a 1-1 unit per turn ratio but 1-2 or even 1-3 would be reasonable. What I object to are situations were you have 1-6 or greater ratio of units per turn to build a knight. </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I understand that. Im not sure of the logic. Rarely is a province not able to create a unit. They just arent able to do it as fast as you would like. Since the indepts have been there awhile I dont see illogic in them having made those troops. And I think there is a resource switch on making the game that you can turn up.

But what to you is an irritation, to me is a tactic. If it has low return (low resources, low gold, no strategic advantage, not next to my castle) and has high cost (dangerous troops guarding it, cant seem to get my dominion pushed into it) then I would leave it there to be a problem for my enemys.

A great strategic chokepoint is to find a province that is worth taking, sandwiched between two that are not worth taking. Leave them there and buildup the chokepoint until later in the game when you have pushed well past that point. Make the indepts the easier route to you. Force the other guy to hit them then strike when he is weakened and sitting in a province he cant rebuild army in.

[ May 11, 2004, 20:28: Message edited by: Gandalf Parker ]

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I think we will have to agree to disagree and leave it at that. The title of the thread was wishlist, this is my wish. I seem to be in the minority so I will respect the opinion of the majority and not bring this up again.

To PvK call it luck of the draw but in most of the games that I play I end up with a feudal province next to my capital. Regarding the advice of building a castle to ensure high resource output that would depend upon the race I was playing. If cavalry poor then I probably would. The majority of the time I tend to place castles on resource rich areas to maximize national troop building capacity.

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">My apologies. You are quite right. Your fine and Im out of place. This is the wishlist thread and you posted quite nicely. Im afraid others of late have put me into a debate mode.

Re: Wish List
 

On the select nations screen, I have to click 5 times on a nation to set it to impossible AI. It would be nice if right clicking did the opposite of left clicking so I could right click once to chanege a player from inactive to impossbile AI.

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">Im surprised no one ever bothered to write a "default" game starter. It would be easy to do. Something with a config file so I can say who I usually play against, their settings the map, everything. Then if I want to start a new game I can just click. The initial settings when its downloaded could be set for a newbie learning game which would make it handy to recommend for the people who ask about recommended newbie settings also.

Re: Wish List
 

A way to automatically set tax rates based on unrest would cut down a fair bit of micro perhaps.

Re: Wish List
 

I want to see all races with an ability to dispel magic.

Instead of it requiring 3 astral levels, maybe just three levels of anyone ONE path, or even, say, 5 levels of any paths.

And/or, dispel can use any type of gem and blood slaves.

Re: Wish List
 

Considering how much it will cost to dispel anything, the cost of empowering somebody to do it is a relatively small fraction of the cost, which only gets smaller if you can roll an astral random, empower to S2, and then forge a Starshine.

Re: Wish List
 

<font size="2" face="sans-serif, arial, verdana">I like this suggestion. It should be nice to see how much troops you have lost due to your own helpfull mages, archers, area-raiating troops, whatever, and you could use this feedback to improve your troops position/orders. Also it should be rather simple to implement.

I also would like to see the numerci results of my opponents battles (when I can directly observe them), and of course the numeric resutls of my storms/castle defenses.

[ May 16, 2004, 05:09: Message edited by: Stormbinder ]

Re: Wish List
 

I don't think that was an actual suggestion, Storm. I think the suggestion was more towards the reduction of friendly fire.

Re: Wish List
 

This post has gotten to be pretty long and its possible this has been mentioned before.

I'd like to have a better set of Diplomacy options with the computer. Trying to court and bribe your enemies and even forge temporary alliances would be a great improvment.

Re: Wish List
 

I'd really like to see a better text message interface that would include:

1) The ability to review previously sent and received Messages.

2) The ability to move the cursor around in the message to edit it.

3) Copy, paste, etc. functions

4) The ability to send the same message to a selected recipient list.

5) The ability to have the message up and have it be transparent so names of nations could be seen. Currently it's a bit of a pain to send a message to another player about a group of certain territories. I have to write down the names and then switch to the text interface type them into the message. It would be nice if I could alternate between map view and text message or see them both at the same time so I could reference the map while I am typing.

I guess that's about it.

Re: Wish List
 

Some sort of Earth and Blood nation/mage so that I can field my favorite demon, demon knights!