What's really painful is that I like the game for what it does well, but must conceed that you have many good points.
>The game's interface is definitely better than Dominions 1. However, it is still fairly clunky.
Indeed.
>The game still lacks a display of the name of the nation that owns a territory when you select that territory.
Absolutely. It should be part of the info when you look at the province.
>Friendly fire is far too much of a problem in this game.
Always has been.
I must assume that this is a low priority for the developers, since a 'fire and hold' commmand would be fairly easy to do.
>Mages miss way too often in this game. They need much higher precision scores. All of them. Unless right next to their targets, my mages tend to hit targets less than 20% of the time.
This got much worse in Dom2.
I don't know what Illwinter was thinking.
"Perhaps the players will enjoy missing often?"
This singlehandedly made a host of spells near pointless.
>The automatic casting choices are a bit strange. My mages will sometimes cast low level weak damaging spells, rather than higher level ones that can do a lot more damage. Sometimes they make smart choices.
Always been a problem.
I have suggested many times that a simple solution woule be to have a 'repeat Last cast' command, that would have the mage simply keep repeating his Last spell. This would require no change to the AI, and wouldn't be a complex change, but would afford players some control of the mages actions. I'd love to see more, but I'd settle for this simple fix.
I understand that they are trying to simulate the choas of battle. However there is no reason for mages to get stupid.
>The mountain citadel is 100% useles. It is the same as the dark citadel in every way, except that it has only 10 admin instead of 20.
If you fought one you'd see the difference.
They are much stronger from the wall layout and arrow fire (the DC has no fire).
On the other hand I agree that it's not a very useful fort for the players. Illwinter has overestimated the value of defense and underestimated the value of economics.
Honestly, I don't think anyone is happy with the forts costs. Illwinter seems particularly stubborn about changing it, so don't hold your breath.
>The way some of these units have costs scaled is not very well designed.
Agreed.
>The game designers seemed to be far too concerned with having more types of units than necessary, while not paying enough attention to the purpose of all of the units, or the balance between them.
The light cav and light inf are still a waste of time. If they produce the mod utility I will come out with a mod with units that have better balance. I'll fix the mage precision as well. Yes I know... how arrogant of me. It'll happen though, if the tools get released.
>Battles tend to end after only killing a small amount of the enemy and then they just run away, even when they have roughly equatable forces. The morale system is more of a hindrance to this game than a benefit.
This is one place where I disagree.
The games morale systems is awesome.
I suggest playing more.
>The loss of the ability in Dominions 1 to target enemy mages and/or enemy commanders specifically seems rather strange...
I'm still not sure if I like or dislike this.
>Almost forgot... the game devs could have definitely chosen a better image pattern to make the basic game interface with. If you don't have an art budget, keep it simple.
Without doubt.
>I shall delay my final judgement on the game until after reading some responses...
Even with all it's failings... it's a great game.
Play it. 
[ January 12, 2004, 00:00: Message edited by: apoger ]