Re: what about the future?
 

If it's any help on the combat, here's an interesting discussion of AI development.

Re: what about the future?
 

10 of the 80.

"Defend" is an activity. And in a province with a castle it is a choice between patrol the province or sit in the keep. So it really isn't indicative of whether you want that commander to continue doing what he's doing or not.

There's a monthly command for the mages casting, that's it. You can't say cast 'x' for ten months and wave at me for new instructions.

I need to mark those commanders who need orders next turn. And I need to find them too.

Again, whether a commander is defending or not, has nothing to do with if he needs a new order. That may be his order. That may be exactly what he should be doing.

I need to find the guys who need orders. Next turn or next week.

The 'I need attention' status could be manual or a default status at the end of some directed activity such as spell casting. You could even specify when it is the default. It is a status, not an activity. Defending is an activity.

You could search for other status's too, like find all commanders with a disease. Etc.

Re: what about the future?
 

So... you want to manually specify 10 of the 80 one turn in advance? I like the idea that it could occur at the end of a fixed-duration activity though.

Re: what about the future?
 

I have to agree on the Next commander thing. Commanders on defend, siege and hide stay in the rotation, which is good because those are the default orders in their situation, but it's bad because when you have a lot who should be doing that it makes it hard to find the ones who should be doing something else. Scouts are the one that drive me crazy. It would be nice to have a way to specify, "I'm done with this guy. I want him to stay hiding/defending/seiging and not show up again." Even if it's just for a turn. That way I know I haven't missed anyone when 'n' doesn't cycle anymore, not when I think there isn't anyone in the cycle but the ~50 scouts.

As for individual mage research, that sounds neat but ridiculously complex. In a good size game, you may have hundreds of mages, with dozens of different path combinations. You want to have each of them learn spells individually? And keep track of who knows what when you're sending armies out? And new summoned uber-mages have to spend months studying before they can cast anything useful? Was Dom1 really like that? Or am I misunderstanding you?

Most of the other micro issues are well known and generally agreed on. The game is micro hell.

Re: what about the future?
 

I propose a lvl 10 blood ritual called "micro hell" that disables cntl-n, f1 and other key shortcuts for the other players.
ssj

Re: what about the future?
 

No they didn't. The magic system hasn't changed a bit from Dominions 1. Every mage has always had access to every spell your nation has researched.

Re: what about the future?
 

What they did (in D1) was contribute research points individually to the types of casting method rather than pool the points.

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Having the mages have to learn to cast and having reasons not to multi-train will mean more complexity, and choices. But this isn't an RTS. And yes, it means not having 'do everything/anything' mages. It makes finding those special mages really valuable.

Re: what about the future?
 

And? The result is the same, and the micromanagement is less.

This isn't a feasible game design decision (ie the resulting mess would be unplayable) unless you are going to limit players to about ten or twenty mages per game.

Re: what about the future?
 

Couple of small points.
The game wasnt designed. It evolved gradually. From a BASIC game on an Atari, thru C on Unix, thru C+ on Linux. For that its not a bad result. Some "design flaws" have been acknowledged by the devs as items which would require a complete rewrite.

And, the goal here was never to move from hobby to money-maker. That does have a part in understanding why some things got fixed and others didnt.

Re: what about the future?
 

If I'm not mistaken that is in fact one of the (main?) reasons Illwinter aren't actively planning on making a Dom4: They feel they have taken the current system as far as it can go, and improving it - amongst other things with various of the suggestions you make - would pretty much require them to rewrite the entire code from the ground up. Something they have no intrest in doing, since it isn't "fun" to remake something they have already made once before.

Unfortunately for us, of course...