Re: Wishlist for September
 

I'd like to see something against raiding that is so damn strong.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

I think population in general dies too quick .
Iirc 0,3% pop / 10% tax above 100% are killed .

Putting taxes to 200% is imo a bit too strong . If it is done only 1 turn you need to run taxes after that 1 turn on 40% to reduce the unrest to zero again and more important 3% of your pop died .
This is especially severe with Caelum . They can reduce by this your goldincome easy 20-30% when they do it earlygame even if you can take back the provinces .


My suggestion : Reduce the poploss from 200% taxation 2/3 to 1% .
This still prevents abuse earlygame by putting taxes to 200% for a few turns but in 2 turns the poploss by 1 turn 200% tax is recovered this way .

You still kill population fast enough by pillage .


Or perhaps include a spell which requires Water or Nature or a combination of both to cast which gives positive growth in some variations :
A rather cheap one with small effect like +0,5 % growth for 5 turns which is low research .
A more expensive one where the effect is bigger , mid level research .
And high level research a global which gives you something like +0,2% growth / dominionlevel in all your provinces .

But at the moment if ermor is included normally at turn 30-40 i think the world population is probably about 50-60% from the starting one . This is a bit too severe imo .

Population is the only resource which normally declines during the game . With lots of luck with events and positive growth you can keep it constant or get a small increase but not a big one .

Re: Wishlist for September
 

The real problem is that you can never catch enemy raiders unless you bet on the province where the enemy will go (and this is damn difficult with Caelum ...) and send in troops.
Considering other raiders like Thuata and Vanheim sneaks in shadows too probably you can't catch them properly.

So how to defend except mad castling? Trapeze or teleport an SC there? But if you haven't an A2 or S3 SC ... ?
If they sneak I dunno if your guys teleporting in will catch them.

So on I'd like to see troops having some chances to move into before the enemy can move. And I'd use the Leadership rating to choose who move first, the higher the first you'll move (leadership could be seen too as how a commander could organize troops, lead them in forced marches and such).
This could be a boost too for items not so used like Crown of Command and such, that are usually never used.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

I don't think you quite understand the implications of what you've just suggested. Lowering the death for high taxes would simply lead to people starting to tax and patrol to get the most gold.

Everybody suffers the same. What's the problem?

Re: Wishlist for September
 

The problem is that Pop don't regrowth except for growth scale, that however has a minimal effect.

I believe IW should improve the growth scale to 0.4 or 0.5%% at scale point.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Illwinter has also stated population was supposed to die because of the whole battle between gods; living in such a troubled era results in many deaths according to this logic. As such, you should not expect to gain much population, and I feel it is fine as it is currently.

My only wish is for more modding commands (magic items, or possibly even a way of making new summons; perhaps by copying an already existing spell, and changing the ID of the summoned creature?), but Illwinter already adds such commands with each patch, so it may be quite redudant to add it to a Wishlist.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

That's why i said reduced to 1% .
200% taxes give doubled income but also +18-20 points unrest .
50 points unrest lower the income to 1/2 but i think it is a exponential scale or similiar .
However at 18-20 points you still lose income , i think something between 10-20% .

Now patrolling comes into account : 40 patrollers give 0-40 points of unrest reduction with equal chances which means that 50% of the time they reduce unrest to 0 while 50% of the time some unrest remains : 1-20 points .
Furthermore patrolling kills a bit population too and all earlygame patrollers cost upkeep .
Call of winds would be good but it costs 5 airgems + a black hawk still costs 0,3 upkeep .

So it would be only worth doing that with your capitol and other highincome provinces .

The 1% was just a suggestion . It maybe a bit too low and 1,5% or 2% maybe better .

At growth 0 :

If you do the taxing with 1% as suggested for 10 turns 9,6% of your population has died with the 1% and a bit more with patrolling so about 10% .
So after 10 turns your base income is already 10% lower .
With very good scales + castle you have about 200 income in your capitol .
Let's take machaka as example :
They could patrol earlygame .
Costs for 40 patrollers :
Eye of the lord + 25 archers = 50 + 25x8 gold buycosts
50/30 + 25x 8/15 upkeep .

That is 250 gold + 15 upkeep / turn .

In a quick test with these 40 patrollers i got after 5 turns unrest of 47 .
You need about 80 patrollers to have an average unrest of about 5-10 .

Even with my 1% poploss in 50 turns this way 39,9% of the population is killed and a bit more by patrolling .
Furthermore you can always get a peasants have left their homes event with unrest >20 .
So after 50 turns you earn about the same as the province where never was taxed + patrolled .
And you have to pay upkeep of course for your stuff so it maybe ok for about 10-20 turns .
But in the first 10 turns until call of the wilds you don't get too good + cheap patrollers anyway .


Cohen's idea about leadership determining if you can catch an enemy or not is better though .

Re: Wishlist for September
 

A person wouldn't need to go to 200% taxes to see the benefit. Even 120% taxes would benefit greatly, and 150% would be easily doable with growth 3. 200% would also be possible in very large provinces with growth 3.

Which is exactly what happened in Dominions I, where incomes ended up being more than what they are now. It's a bad idea because it increases the micromanagement of any given turn by a huge amount.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

The problem is that Nations like Vanheim, Thuata Man, Caelum, Abysya and Mictlan with Fiends or Devils, and every skilled raider could attack you with hit and run, but setting taxes to 200% so he'll kill your pop too even if you after retake the provinces.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Maybe I should post my old "friendly area = friendly dominion" -idea. In short, change the first mover from the owner of the province to the one in his own dominion. Raiders would be caught unless they raided in their own dominion.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

This idea sounds a bit arbitrary, to me. From my limited experience, it seems like a difficult proposition to fix the raiding problem in a patch.

The notion that I had (which may well have been proposed previously) is a generalization of the idea of light cavalry having a chance to catch raiders. That being to allow some probability of catching raider based on strat movement. Perhaps +1 strat move gives a 50% chance, +2 gives 75%, etc. Flying armies could give a bonus to catching, and stealthy raiders could give a negative modifier to being caught.

But this sounds like an idea that will be unbalancing, maybe doable in Dom3, but perhaps not in a Dom2 patch.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Yeah this raiding is imo the most effective way to wage war earlygame when you still can't risk beating the enemy SC pretender . But with your mentioned nations you can raid the hell out of your enemy and he almost can't defend against it .
This way you create a huge gap between you and him and then some turns later your new Sc like an Airqueen or similiar can finish off what the raiders prepared .

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Me too. This way I can get around to making a vampire-only nation to replace Ermor. Hehe.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

You should actually be able to do so Deccan, although you would have to suffer the Dominion of either Ashen Empire or Soul Gate. These two themes come in with a lot of nation-only spells, and so you should be able to fully change these spells and the creatures they summon to suit your tastes.

In this case, the problem would be the auto-summon of AE/SG (you could ignore these creatures though), and their population-killing Dominions. Note that the above has not been tested, although I should toy with modding nation specific spells one of these days...

Re: Wishlist for September
 

For dyccan/Alneyan:

Wouldn't it be possible to just make the special spells of Ermor themes national spells of Ermor? This would give them to base Ermor. You could even change the unholy spells as they are unique to Ermor (I think) and your mod won't probably have any unholy priests... Besides, if you changed Ermorian Cultists and Ghouls vampires could just turn up and attack your enemies! http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

For Thufir:

What about this: the army with faster strategic move moves first. If the army moves in owned province, they get a bonus of +1 to their strategic move when the moving order is considered. With this chance, armies consisting of light cavalry and other troops with Strat. Move of 3 would always catch armies consisting of heavy infantry.

It woldn't help against Caelum though, and would make it very easy for them to repel raids. But then, Caelum is meant to be a good raider...

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Interesting. I did some tests and yes, I could change the paths, ritual casting costs and the resulting creature from a spell like say "Revive Lictor". However, there doesn't seem to be a way to give the spell "Revive Lictor" to base Ermor, so a player will have to choose the AE theme to gain access to the spell, and it doesn't seem to be possible to rename the spell itself.

I'll run some tests and work through some ideas. Thanks Alneyan.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Actually you can set the spell to be nation-only; the School command allows you to set it to Ermor only, and it will be available in standard Ermor.

You cannot change the name or the description of the spell though, but everything else can be altered (such as path requirements or gem cost).

Re: Wishlist for September
 

The problem I see with this, is that it'd force the implementation of third battle resolution phase. Now, the battles are resolved after 1) magic movement and 2) normal movement. Any new system to catch raiders based on fast movement would need to resolve battles after 1) magic movement, 2) fast unit movement and 3) slow unit movement. It'd be a management nightmare.

Without the third phase, how else would you implement raider movement? Sure, anti-raider group catches the raiders, but what if raiders win? They move to next province like first instructed and battle again? Or could you keep raiders immobile by sending small move-3 Groups at them turn after turn?

I may be missing something since I haven't thought about this much, but that's what I come up with first impression.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

I just need to reiterate the following: The bug, which has been around for the past several patches, in which global spells do not go away when the pretender who cast them goes poof really REALLY needs to be fixed. It's extremely annoying. Please, please, if we get no other fixes/tweaks, let's get this one.

(Can you tell I'm miffed at the moment? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/mad.gif )

Re: Wishlist for September
 

That's what I had thought, but I hadn't realised that one could keep the raiders immobile that way... I quess if the raiders moved to the province the small army moved from they might cross each other unnoticed, but that would be the only way of doing so.

I am beginning to think that there is no easy solution to the raiding issue. We still don't have any word from Ilwinter so we don't even know if they are considering changing something. Even if they are they just might not know what to do about it. I wouldn't want to be in a situation like that.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

This was with 2.14? Thought they said they'd cleaned up that problem.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Yes, the problem still exists in 2.14. I don't recall if the pretender went poof before or after I applied the 2.14 patch, but even if the pretender went bye-bye prior to my having applied 2.14, the game code should check every turn to see if the caster of a global spell is still alive, and it very much seems that the game fails to do so.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Umh, can I still add another wish to this small and topic-focused thread? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

- Ban pretenders from the Hall of Fame! Add their Kill/Exp stats to the Nations-Info screen instead. This would make a 10-place HoF worthwhile in games of ten nations...

- Add to the description text of "RitualOfReturning" that only the leading 10 heroes may return or fix that bug otherwise...

- Include markers on unit-pics within strategic maps, i.e. some flag to toggle on/off, or a dot that changes colour when clicked, or simply a coloured frame of the unit icon! This would make it easier to remember ViP (i.e. those carrying DwarvHammers, SiegeHorns, StaffofStorms,etc.)

Re: Wishlist for September
 

A request regarding the wishes we can make: do the developers need wishes about future modding commands, or will they be added as time/programming allows it?

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Hmm. Very annoying. I hope it's only a remnant from patch switch. If anyone can reproduce the global enchantment bug with 2.14 (not in 2.13-2.14 switched games) let us know.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Both. We could easily think of some modding commands that could be implemented, but it would not necessarily be useful ones. Post some suggestions on what is missing. They will be added as time/programming allows it, but in this case your suggestions are important. After all modding is for you. I can make whatever I want without modding tools http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

- A mod/map/command line command to make pop growth work as follows:

<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>
pop growth =((1+[number of growth scales])*[growth %tage])*
[acutal pop of province]^2
/
2*[average starting pop of province]
</pre><hr />

- AI that builds castles

- tac AI that can let a mage sit there and do nothing for a turn if no suitable target in range (not wasting fatigue on senseless buff spells)

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Very well; then, without further addendum, here comes my own wishes (and the three hundred astral pearls needed):

* A way of altering the required paths (and thus the cost) of magic items.
* If possible, a "clone" command for spells would be nice. It would create a copy of an already existing spell. I am thinking of possible applications mostly in the field of summoning spells.
* Allowing a player to select the ID of the summoned creature would also be an interesting addition if we are allowed to create new spells.
* These two suggestions could also be applied to magic items, mainly weapons and armour (miscellaneous items are likely much harder to change).
* The ability to edit descriptions of spells and items, and possibly the name of new spells as well (already existing spells may have a problem with having their name changed however).

At the moment, the only way to make new summonings is to highjack Ermor, which has more than enough of these, and to alter their nation specific creatures. If this solution is good enough to make creating new spells uneeded, being able to change descriptions would be needed; otherwise, you will be stuck with Ermorian descriptions, even if creating a nation of goodly creatures.

The other problem with having Ermor as the sole way of creating more than a few summoning spells is that it may make mods incomptabible with one another, if they all use Ermor to get their summoning spells. Even if T'ien Ch'i, C'tis and Pangaea have their summoning spells stolen by a modder, this problem will still likely occur.

As usual, I have no idea of how much work all the above requires, or how easy it is to implement these wishes.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

It would also be very nice to have some control over the special effects of some nations, such as the type/number of autosummons of dominions like Ermor and Pan CW, as well the inherent population killing effect (independent of death scale) of these nations.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Could ermorian cultists become stealthy. It would fit thematically and would make them more usefull.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Here are some ideas several players came up with to make the blood 9 bless worth it:

*A chance that anyone hit by the sacred unit would be effected by the Bleed spell.

*An incresaed chance for the sacred unit to give afflictions.

*A half-lifedrain effect, meaning they would only drain fatigue.

I'm not sure what would be easiest to add, but I would love to see one of these ideas used (or any other good ideas for the blood 9 bless).

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Mooding command ideas:

A way to poison weapons, or preferably a way to choose a special effect from special effect list. This would include banefire, the effects of bane blades and whatever is in there.

Way to choose number of effects for spells, both the summons and combat spells (I don't remember if any/bot of these already exist). Also a way to control the number of extra things gotten for skill level over one needed.

Ability to give mage linked randoms, like the ones of Kings of the Deep.

A general #copy that could be used to copy all the stats and abilities of target unit/item/spell to the unit/item/spell being modded. This would have to be used at the start of the modding file, because it would probably rewrite everything before it.

A way to change the names and descriptions of items and spells.

Being able to change the castable/targettable underwater/on land -tags.


Alneyan wrote:
Why no-one else seems to remember that *any* spell can be made a national spell of *any* nation... This includes those special summons of both Ermor themes!

Re: Wishlist for September
 

This you can already do and have been able to since the first Modding was implemented.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Really? I thought that there was a command for giving mage many randoms, but that they all would be different... Should have tried, not quessed, it seems... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: Wishlist for September
 

You can do that if you prefer, but if you apply a random, say:

#magicskill 51 2

It will put both randoms in the same slot. You can do this for Elemental or Sorcery only, if you prefer. It's harder to do a bunch of different randoms, you have to go.

#magicskill 50 1
#magicskill 50 1
#magicskill 50 1

So it's there and availiable if you'd rather have linked randoms or elementals/sorceries.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Okay, I thought that

#magicskill 51 2

would give the commander in question two random picks that were not linked to each other... I really should try things before posting.

However, now that I remember it, I will post one new command:

#prophetshape
When a unit is made prophet it becomes a unit of the id spesified by the #prophetshape. If possible, it would be nice if any magics the prophet shape might have were transferred too.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

I am not sure I get your point here. You could indeed give Ermor's spells to, say, Arcoscephale, but that will simply destroy themed Ermor when this mod is applied (standard Ermor should be fine though). Or did I fail to understand you here?

Re: Wishlist for September
 

He says that summon cave drake could be made Man only, nature lvl 6, death 2 and fatigue cost 300. Then exchange the cave drake with your cigar smoking pumpkin man sprite, a good set of stats and immortality and an assault rifle and you are ready to go kicking some ... sorry, lost track of topic!

No one will create cave drakes anymore, but if you restrict each of the drakes it might not matter much.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

I didn't notice it so apologies if it's already in:

The ability to change a nation's password after a game has started (to take effect after hosting).

Re: Wishlist for September
 

This is a wider feature request, and one I'm sure has been posted several times earlier, but how about allied victory possibility?

It'd require a bit of additional code, but having War, Neutral and Allied status for nations, with a simnple diplomacy system where you can propose alliance and declare war (which would set the status accordingly when decalring war or when alliance proposal is accepted).

This would make pantheon games feasible without using special victory conditions, and instead of a single god rising above all, it would be a pantheon of gods.

Edi

Re: Wishlist for September
 

That is pretty automatic, and happens a lot with multiplayer games. Did you need some sort of menu in order to allow it with solo-play games? Im just commenting because adding menu features is alot of work and this seems kindof cosmetic.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

UI:

My humble request is simple to continue to push for the ability to alter the color of the nieghboring provinces filter.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

I would really like some way to configure the keyboard shortcuts... editing a text file would be fine for me, and wouldn't require any ui work (although the informative popups ingame are another matter). This is mostly because some commands like sacrifice (used by three nations) and pillage (usable by all nations, but I really want the shortcut for ermor) have no keyboard shortcut, while capture slaves, usable only by mictlan, does. Also it would be great if the C and M hotkeys worked with ritual spells from items. Nobody would dislike a monthly forging hotkey either.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

That's probably the single most-requested feature that's yet to be implemented. And it should be a trivial matter for IW to code it ...

Re: Wishlist for September
 

More like just adding a checkbox of Allied victory on/off. I was thinking in terms of how it was done in the original Age of Wonders where they had this small box that you could click on or off. Much like the cheat detection on/off when setting up a game. Of course, the functions and new menu items for the message menu would have to be added, four that I can think of: declare war, propose alliance, propose peace/truce (to return state of war to neutrality) and cancel aliance (to reset alliance to neutrality).

The only actual UI change or new addition required would be a diplomacy status display screen where you can see if you're at war with, neutral or allied with the different nations. The rest could be done by just adding the menu options, assuming the menu buttons have been made on the list type basis as follows:

Pseudocode
<font class="small">Code:</font><hr /><pre>Menu Button 1
display code
functions

Menu Button 2
display code
functions

etc</pre><hr />

Adding three new ones to an existing menu should not be difficult. Writing the actual diplomacy code (i.e. how the AI should behave in the three different states) could be easy or difficult, depending. As I see it, neutrality and war don't need much, the existing AI implementation works just fine, usually the AI will initially leave you alone for a while unless you bother it. It will eventually attack and pursue the war more or less actively (unless it gets seriously attacked from another front).

Alliance option can already be set with map commands in the map file to specify that nation A and nation B will not attack each other, the alliance coding would just have to make this a resettable variable, with the actual status determined by the actions from the message menu.

Optionally, if a little bit more complex diplomacy were to be added, there could be a relationship value for the nations on a scale of +/- something for different actions. Breaking alliance without declaring war should obviously decrease chance of renewing the alliance in the future, otherwise this could be abused against the AI. Increasing the value should be through considerable (meaning really big) gifts of gems, gold or magic items and declaring war on an AI nation's enemies, while decreses would be through declaration of war, even more for attacking without declaration of war and most for backstabbing an ally.

The idea is basically a system like AoW 1 had, simple and effective. Scope for influencing relations here is more limited, but then again, alliances are often less imnportant in SP games than MP, and I think my idea as such would offer a relatively simple and effective (yet hopefully not too complex) framework for formalizing stuff in MP. Secret alliances would still have to be done as neutrals with verbal agreements, but you'd have to formalize them eventually to get pantheon victory.

Of course, like I said, this is more a wider feature request than just a simple improvement suggestion, and because I know nothing about the actual Dom2 code, I have no idea how feasible it is to implement and how eager the devs would be to do that even if it is feasible.

But just thinking of the possibilities, e.g. heat vs cold nations games and other kinds of alliance (e.g. Ulm and Marignon vs Man and Pangaea would be anoher pretty thematic one) games would be easier to formally set up, you could have really nice full pantheon clashes where you don't need so much to worry about being constantly backstabbed.

Did this post make things any clearer?

Edi

Re: Wishlist for September
 

This reminds me of a disband feature too http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif . Would be very very useful too and should be extremely easy to implement too i guess http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Ahhh so you are seeking for a way to win a game while allied to the AI? Thats what I was trying to find out. The feature would mean little in multiplay, and we have a hard time trying to get things for solo-play.

This has been discussed before. The PbEM form of the game makes it more difficult to track such things across multiple turns.

As much as I like having diplomacy in a game, I fail to see where this will be used. In a MP game having the game recognize an alliance usually limits it. And having it declare an allied win will probably never happen. Very few MP games (or solo games for that matter) actually continue until the game itself declares a winner.

Those are all great ideas and could be done with a map setup. Take a look at WEvsTHEM at www.dom2minions.com

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Being able to choose allied nations when changing to AI control.

I think this would help MP games quite a lot.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

Some threads about suggestions/improvements that I thought would be good to mention atleast once, and decided against bumping all these threads. Hopefully IW has already memorized these threads, but just in case they haven't... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif


New Water spells, including interesting Waterways (coastal-to-coastal teleport) and ideas for different summons (from Nessie to Yeti to Nymphs to Crocodiles).

Suggestions to improve the Water Magic Discipline, another Water thread, many ideas seem same. Longer, has more ideas, but also more non-topic discussion. First mention of the Waterways above

New Item SuggestionsStarted by Saber Cherry back then. Some interesting ideas, many overpowered ideas and Arms of Steel. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

AI thread (20 pages), started as AI improvements but turned to discussion about AI

AI troop building algorithm Not Tested

AI castle building algorithm Not Tested

Also, the Wishlist I made and linked to once, from my previous post. I thought about a thread, but decided against it.

Unfortunately I remember only those threads, and the 20-paged one didn't end so I had to give in looking through "suggestion" search.

Re: Wishlist for September
 

I haven't been playing long, but I'm still finding new sites I have never seen and that is great. I even appreciate the time I "discovered" one of those eeevil sites when it horror marked my prophet and pretender the same turn...http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/eek.gif

Here are a couple of ideas which might be fun for new magic sites that I haven't seen suggested anywhere:

+ Halls of Elevation: provides X% bonus for Empowerment
+ Empty Altar: provides a +X Call God bonus (I need this way way too often)
+ Mystic Archive: provides a +X Research bonus
+ Wormhole: a 1-way #neighbor to a random map province
+ Storm Home: permanent Storm effect for any combat (other Versions for Haunted Forest, Fog Bank for Mist, Energy Vortex for Antimagic, Holy Ground for Bless, etc)
+ Angered Earth: chance of an Earth Attack at any time (other Versions for Flames from the Sky, disease, Call of W/W, etc?)
+ Black Market: reduced (tax) income, chance an item will be "pickpocketed" from a commander, can recruit Villain/Assassin?
+ Echo Canyon / Resonant Woods reduces/increases the effect of all song/tunes (Soothing, Healing, etc)
+ Pirate's Lair: Can recruit Pirates and Captain (seacoast)

and how about a way to create new sites in a mod http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif


Silhouette
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