Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Actually, I'm quite positive that decapitation is an affliction which is already in the game. Although I've only seen it on Soulless, presumably because it's the only unit which can still function without a head. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

-Max

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Head protection and body protection already exist as separate values, and AFAIK, they are the only values the game uses in fights. Head hits are only affected by head protection. Small units can't hit big units in the head in melee, and some afflictions are based on the hit bodypart ( only headhits cause eyeloss etc).

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Oh yes, with spurting blood too. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Personally, I would love to see some diplomacy in the singleplayer game. Give us some gameplay options, instead of constant, mindless war.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I was thinking, not only blood-geysers, but head-graphics actually falling to the ground, bouncing around, and being kicked repeatedly across the battlefield. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Hows about a continue button on start up like MOO 2 has?

I would like to be able to jump straight back to the last game I was playing against the computer without going through the list of saved games trying to figure out which one it was.

The button I press most of the time in MOO 2 is the very top one putting me right back to where I stopped with no thought required on my part.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

It does have that, in a linux sort of way. On the command line you can give the name of the game to go right into it.

With Windows or Mac you can create a desktop link for your game which takes you right into it. You can also add other switches such as one to kill the credits for a faster quit.

I also like to use the desktop icon settings to set things that I continually change on every game I start. Like turning on renaming, setting the indepts higher, setting the magic sites higher. That way when I get to that screen, those settings are already chosen the way I like.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Has anyone mentioned naval battles yet? It would definitely require a new dimension (literally).

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

-I would like a big red X to appear over unique artifacts that have been forged. the greying out is not always helpful.

-I would like the path requirements to be listed in the artifacts decription

-I would like to be able to give commanders battle scripting from the main screen. or at least be able to click on them and bring up scripting screen for them only (I get confused with dozens of identical commanders)

-I would like to see more levels of experince, why a 5 star limit?

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Good idea about battle scripting for individual commanders. This is a better solution IMHO than being able to rearrange the order of commanders on the army setup screen.

-Max

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Support for ogg and flac files (both free to implement).

I have a huge amount of thematically suitable music that I'd love to put into directories like...

Dom3\Music\Combat\
Dom3\Music\Mapview\
Dom3\Music\Mainmenu\

...and have it auto utilised. I would say this would assist with people who want to make big game modifications and distribute new music with them.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

One silly little thing that I would like to see:

I like playing with the Score graphs off in multiplayer. But I'm always so curious about them at the same time. What's I'd like is a way to set them up so that the graphs would be visible like once every 20 turns or something. So everyone gets a report on all the other factions periodically.

Either that, or make it so that scouts can give you data by infiltrating the enemies capital, or something.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I was contemplating with Velusion about nerfing graphs a little bit, by collecting the scores.html files from the turns and generating an overview of the nations which doesn't reveal too much information. It should only give a list of the top nations like in Civilization, and maybe show a trend aswell (rising/constant/declining). Thus you know who is outperforming the others, but you don't know by how much he's doing it. After the game the data could be used to generate exactly the same graphs as in the game, too.

Since we had other things too keep us busy with and didn't talk about this again I didn't pursue this any further, but if there is interest in it I could whip up a PHP script or something.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I had a long write-up someplace on that subject. Collect the scores.html, import it into a spreadsheet, use a ghostscript or gnuplot routine to turn it into a graph, convert to .png

I hadnt considered the options for partial info or spaced out info which sound very interesting. I was hoping for single turn info in something abit more readable such as pie charts. Especially for really large games where the regular score info is hard to read.

Later I was considering how cool it would be to duplicate the in-game score screens for viewing on a webpage for that game. When I thought about trying to export them from inside the game it turned out easier to go with the build-from-scratch using the scores.html file.

Also, the same programming can be used to get around another complaint about the scores in the game. That they lose the info on a nation when its beat.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

So I take it that there's interest in the matter? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...ies/stupid.gif

I have a little free time at the moment and it shouldn't be too hard to program a script for this. There are lots of free PHP packages ready (JpGraph for example) for generating graphs that I can use (column, line, pie, whatever you want), so all I'd have to do is to parse the scores.html files and prepare the data, and that's quite easy.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Yeah, sounds great Ich. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I wish that when a message occurred for a province, the province number was listed as well as the name. "Banner has cast Voice of Apsu. 1 new magic site was found in Sedgewater (33)." It would make it much quicker to look it up in the nation overview table, and it would also make the "#" hotkey much more useful.

-Max

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I wish that turn reports were archived somehow, so that I could read messages from previous turns or even watch battles from last year. Even better if I could see what the map looked like in the past, and/or watch a replay of it changing, including watching dominion creep and border provinces changing hands, seeing phantom armies of now-defeated enemies menace my homeland and be shattered by a "battle" icon, etc.

-Max

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I'd be interested in your PHP script Ich.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I'd like an auto-generated cave system feature, so that you could search for caves in a province and may find one-might just find a slab of granite-but the cave system itself would be random.

You could still have user-generated cave systems, but this would allow extra random cave provinces that noone would know about until you found them. You could even find extra random caves in provinces that already are-or connect to-established user-created cave systems. Some would be dry land-based caves, while others would be full of water. You might even have some filled with lava.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I would like a double check on the end turn button (surely I'm not the only one who has prematurely ended a turn).

An expensive building to increase gold and/or resources in a province.

Better selection of units from a captured home province, maybe add another building that allows recruitment of a mage and/or a warrior (non-sacred).

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I tried suggesting just one extra building, and got a lot of negative responses from it-there's a lot of anti-building sentiment going around, unfortunately.

I'd like the ability to create spells that not only have greater effects depending on your path level, but different effects if you're strong enough to actuate them. Like, you could have a spell that creates a cone of wind that stuns enemies be the first effect, but if you have 2 more Water than you need to cast it, it also causes ice damage.

You could even have spells that can be improved if you've got other paths beside the standard one-like casting a Bladewind that, if you've got high enough Fire magic in addition to Earth, the spell does additional fire damage.

It would look something like this:

Bladewind, cost 3 Earth
If caster has 5 Earth plus 5 Fire-each blade does +1 fire damage. Every 2 levels of Earth and Fire beyond 5 (7, 9, 11, 13, 15) grants +1 fire damage beyond that.

Something like that

It wouldn't necessarily be over-powered, because mostly only Pretenders are going to be able to use these kinds of spells, and the really powerful ones might have increased gem-costs associated with them

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Could we get an option to reserve gems away from the "pool gems" button? It'd save a lot of work reassigning blood sacrifice slaves after pooling all the new recruits, or keeping my returning pearls where they need to be when I've got clams all over the map...I'd like to not have to wait for dom 4 for this one =)

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I agree in spirit about the end-of-turn thing, but rather than a dialogue box--"Are you sure you really want to end this turn?", which makes me think, "Yes, of course I am, I just clicked on the button!" except when I think, "Oops, no I thought my keyboard was on QWERTY and I was hitting 'd' for Defense"--what if the computer paused for a second or so before beginning its calculations, and if you hit Escape during that time it would dump you back to the main screen. Sort of like an Undo in that it doesn't get in your way except in the rare case when it actually is a mistake.

Confirmation dialogues are bad and should never exist.

-Max

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I'd like to get rid the bad events that dispose of gold you've already earned. There are ways around this, so it doesn't really serve a purpose except to punish newbies, and it doesn't really make the game better, because it's rather harsh.

Ok, I'm all for bad events that lower your income from one round to the next-temporarily or more permanently, but outright robbery? If you're going to do that, then let us as players take steps to protect our righteous loot.

Let us build stronghouses, assign guards, and cast protection magic.

Otherwise, let us keep the gold we've earned 3 turns ago and only take from the gold we earn this turn, so that we don't have to perform actions of dubious merit just to keep ahead in the game.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Which events are those? Snowfall costs 100 pounds, etc., but I thought those came from your income for the current turn. Are you saying that if you spend all your money in advance that those events don't hurt you?

-Max

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

No, there's a robbery event. I don't remember the specific message, but I have seen it.

I wonder if it only happens if you have some set amount left in your treasury at the end of the turn. Though it would be funny to read: "Robbers broke into your empty treasury and stole your last 3 gold."

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I was robbed once by a Master Thief who stole a whole bunch of my gems. Ouch! Maybe if you have no gold he takes your gems instead.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Max, you are right about the irritation I always get when the game implies "Are you too stupid to click on the right button?" However, the 3 or 4 times I've ended a turn by mistake makes me wonder.

You made an excellent sugestion.

Another simple and functional change would be to move the end turn button to some location that greatly reduces the misclick factor for people like me,although I can't think where that would be.

One possible idea would be to place it inside a second button, such as settings, that would really two hits. I'm positive many, if not most, will object to the extra click, but a turn on a medium sized map takes me 5 to 10 minutes, so 2 extra seconds would be an insignificent imposition.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Yeah. I don't know how you deal with misclicks now, but I usually alt-tab out as quickly as I can, and then kill the process. (Windows, so I use Task Manager.) My computer is slow enough that late-game turns on large maps take 2-5 minutes to process so there's plenty of time to do this. I know it's safe because the .2h file is the first thing written, and the ftherlnd and .trn are the last things written.

-Max

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

It would be nice to be able to set or change a password on an existing pretender.
This would help those who start a MP game without remembering to set one, but more importantly would let the host use the master password to let a substitute play without giving out the master password.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I think their are a handful of events that take directly from your gold, rather than affecting your income.

That doesn't bother me as much as that there are perfectly good-but cheesy-counters, the most obvious of which is to purchase more troops than your resources can handle and then halting the production on the next turn.

I mind the events less than I do the micromanagement and the jarring of immersion.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

My technique for misclicks requires loud and redundant swearing, a healthy dose of regret and a longing for multiple autosaves like Civ or even the "I think your too stupid to click properly" pop-up. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/image...es/biggrin.gif

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I think the better approach is to get rid of the need for pool gems.

If you obtain a gem while in a province with a lab it goes to your pool automatically, just like blood sacrificers pull from your pool to replenish their supply.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Yeah, I've clicked it by accident a couple of times when I meant to click what was next to it. I do agree it should have a confirmation or else be isolated from other buttons.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

A refined version of the magic as you rise in level wish.

#xpmagic <mask> <percent>

So a theurg acolyte could have a 30% chance of gaining AWS every time he goes up in level.
A theurg could have a 20% chance of gaining AWSF.
And a an archtheurg could have a 10% chance of gainin AWSF.

It would be theoretically possible for lower level units to "grow" into the higher level spellcasters, but rather unlikely (still, out of fifty theurgs you recruited, one would probably get the three bonus picks and become an archtheurg equivalent.)

And most of the high level casters have a 10% random anyway, so you'd just get another shot at that random each time they went up in level.

Edit: I'm not suggesting that this feature should even exist in the basic game, just that it should be available to modders who wished to try it.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I agree in principle, but in practice I'd push way back the percentage chance to something like 5%, 3%, 1%, just so you don't entirely eliminate the usefulness of empowerment for paths a caster already has. It's not the best strategy, but it is a strategy and should be allowed to have value.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Some new nation(s) for late age pretty please!
Something that could be perceived as 'optimistic' for the setting. I understand the Lovecraftian feel, dying world and such, but even in the most grim setting there should be some ray of hope. Too many cursed nations already, with Ermor vs Rlyeh Apocalypse in the end. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I thought Ermor, Ashen Empire, WAS optimistic. I mean, who doesn't want a second chance at life as a brain-eating zombie?

http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

-Max

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Besides the obvious better graphics wish there are a few things missing from Dominions that I would think should be there.

Diplomacy: creating alliances, Trading various items and resources etc.

Wish Spell: This is probably my favorite spell but would be a lot better if you could wish for more things, like maybe "I wish to be ethereal" or being able to wish to fly or be immortal etc.

Spying Options: I guess Dominions 3 does have certain spying options and to be honest in 4x games things like sabotage generally dont get much attention from me, but it would be nice to have the option to send spies to poison drinking water or burn temples etc. Which would mean you would have to employ your own spies to counter such things.

More improvements: Being able to build just a Temple, Lab and Fort don't exactly give you too many options. It would be great to be able to build things like Markets for income, Housing to increase population, Farms and Mines for more resources, Watch towers for small garrisons to help with province defense and detection of spies. There are certainly more things but those are probably some of the most important.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

RE: spying options. Try playing with Bane Venom charms. Yes, it requires magic, but I guess that's just how well-poisoning works in Dominioland.

-Max

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Three things that stand out.

Interface streamlining.
Graphics.
Sound.

The game has content abounds and tonnes of depth, but these three things are killers.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Orc laser troopers! Kidding :-D.

1- Please, re-work the routing system so that if you're holding out in a fortress surrounded by enemy territory; it's impossible for your units to suicide by retreating. I'm not sure how this would be possible, but IMO this is a big problem.

2- Variable battlefield size.

3- Powerful turf spells that visibly alter the battlefield.

4- Siege engines, and real sieges!

5- A diplomacy system for SP.

If any of these suggestions have already been mentioned, I apologize. I haven't quite managed to read all ten pages of this thread yet.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Off the top of my head:

1. ***Diplomacy*** that doesn't need to be too complex or it can be too.

-non-aggression pacts where you can set a penalty for breaking it and set a number of turns that must pass when the treaty is honorably nullified before attacks can begin.
- economic treaties that can boost income
- research treaties to boost research
- treaty to share fog of war
- alliances
- gem trading
- etc.

2. An improved GUI

- Place buttons that go to menus to manage all aspects of your empire next to each other. The point would be so you could simply click through each of these buttons to review/manage every aspect of your empire so you don't have to worry about forgetting something. Galactic Civs II uses this approach well.

3. Outposts that have little or no defense so they can be razed easy but are cost balanced.

supply outpost - provides supplies to surrounding provinces
mining outpost - boosts income in a mountain province
lumber mill - boosts income in a forest province
watch tower - reveals fog of war around the province with fairly inaccurate military details
etc.


4. set in map creation options the chance for special guarded inde provinces with one time instant rewards or interesting structures/objects

- item(s), gold
- ancient ruins, library, etc - one turn boost to RP
- dragon cave: enter to battle for the horde
- demon gate: Boosts RP of mages in the province through studying the gate but occasionally demons come through and attack or kidnap mages
- palantir: pay gems to scry
- wizards tower: boosts a magic skills by 1 for units in the province
- ancient forest: the sentient ancient trees will help defend the province, but first you have to take it from them
- volcano: slowly provides earth/fire gems but can erupt
- forgotten tomb: dare to enter to battle hordes of undead for the lost treasures.
- evil(demon,undead,cult) entity rules the province and demands living sacrifices from the population.
- the remnants of a lost civilization live in a fort in the province that can be taken over

5. counter spells in battle

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Please, please, please no waterwheels, lumbermills or mining for ore. Dominions is better for not having them.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

Agreed, if any new buildings are ever introduced keep them minimal.

irregardless of that I'm still going to suggest one http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Have a setting in game creation where no castles can be built beyond the capital. (or 1,2,3, etc beyond capital). At the same time have a "recruitment/training center" or somesuch where troops can be recruited.

Initially, sieging 50 AI castles in SP is a pain. I think it would also change MP by speeding it up a bit more and reducing castle grind on nations like LA Ermor. Give the benefits of a castle if it works (+resource %, +income %, +supply %, etc) there would just not be a siege phase. I'd probably still keep the same cost to limit them, or maybe 20% less...but it would speed up games a bit. Possibly upgrade castles at the same time as they're more valuable now..shrug.

If the above was ever implemented, possibly add a garrison command to an army. Garrison would just reduce income/supply needed to pay for turn by turn upkeep of the units. They would almost turn into PD, just not regenerating.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I'd like all gems to be saleable, just worth different amounts-astral gems worth the least, then elemental gems, then death/nature.

Blood slaves should be unsaleable, this would improve the balance of the game, since producing gems would actually improve your economy, while producing blood slaves would reduce it.

It would also be nice if you could have something set up to let you auction off magical items blindly-you put them in the auction and whoever bids the highest automatically gets the item, but you'd never know who won the item. Artifacts would be exempt from this. This would also allow you to auction off items to the AI, who might have set prices for select items.

Thirdly, it would be nice if you had another Empowerment option. Like, you could have the choice to sacrifice nature gems to improve a unit's HP, and death gems to improve it's lifespan: 1 year/1 hp for 1 gem, increasing on the same scale as PD.

Just a thought.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I'd like it if insane commanders could be placed on 'Defend' when they recover their sanity, so the n key does not skip over ordinary commanders whose insanity made them research/preach the previous turn. An indicator on the F1 screen (maybe show orders in red) for insane commanders would also cut down on the micro.

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

How about, instead of new buildings, the ability to "improve" provinces with gems? Like say 50-100 nature gems to change a province from plains to forest, or the same amount of gems to change it from plains to hills, or air gems to change plains to caverns?

Re: Wish-List for Dominions 4
 

I like this alternate empowerment idea of Honeybadger's, and the idea of Wishing for Flight, Recuperation, etc., abilities. It would probably have zero impact on MP games but might be fun in SP.

Terrain improvements: that could become a Nature spell. Echoes of Master of Magic, here...

-Max