Pavlov is on your side.

[Agrajag]

Well, I'll start this post by mentioning its about a "wish" for Dominions III.
And I'll start the actual post with a heart-rending story, about me.
After playing the game for about one hour, I got bored of the music (naturaly) that constantly repeats itself in very short intervals.
My natural choice was turning the Dom sound completely down (the battle sounds are too loud and wierd anyway) and putting some generic music in the background.
As luck would have it I really liked a particular band at that time, so I made it a traidition that everytime I played Dom II I put the same songs in the background.
After months of playing, Pavluv caught up with me and I noticed that whenever I heard this specific band's music, I had a sudden urge to play Dom II.
So what's the point?
The point is that good music (in various ways) can make players want to come back and play the game again, thus increasing the chance they will: A)Join the community to contribute. B)Tell all their friends about the game and make them buy it, repeatedly.
Which are obviously good things.
So what am I saying now?
All Im saying is that working on a good soundtrack with immersive music that will fit the atmosphere of the game will be a great improvement upon the game (rather than just giving up completely, like I consider the current soundtrack, no offence).
The entire HoMM series had awesome music, so why can't you?

P.S. If Pavlov's name isn't spelled this way, its not my fault, its פבלוב in hebrew...

[PashaDawg]

I am one of those guys who always turns the music off for games right away. I'd rather play music on my stereo. But, perhaps, I am a freak of nature. (But, I drool whenever I hear a bell.)

[capnq]

I usually have to turn the music off to get the game to run faster.

[Ironhawk]

I usually turn off all background-type music in all games I play. Even if it is good, games are not like a movie where you might watch it only once or if you like it perhaps 5, 10, 20 times. You will play some games for uncounted hours over its lifetime and I just dont think that any set of music could stand up to that repitition.

[Saber Cherry]

Agrajag said:
The entire HoMM series had awesome music, so why can't you?

HoMM 3, for example, had a large budget for music. Now ironically, ID Software's games have had huge budgets for music, and their music was utterly terrible. And Star Control II had great music composed by one of the programmers. But generally speaking, I think you'll find that games with great music have both a budget and staff for music... while gameplay quality is almost totally independant of buget. Therefore, the number of games whose gameplay is substantially better than their music is inevitably large.

On the other hand, there was a strategy game I played a long time ago set to a Rachmaninoff piano piece, which was exceptionally fitting for the dark atmosphere. There's a large amount of essentially license-free classical music that can be applied to games, just as it is often applied to movies, but this is rarely done. I think it would be a nice addition, especially if each race featured classical from a specific composer or genre...


My suggestions:

Carmen (the opera) instrumental pieces for Marignon
Wagner (Ride of the Valkyries) for Vanheim battles, and "A Night on Bald Mountain" for normal music.
Wagner (Ring Cycle, parts where fat ladies are singing) for Jotunheim
Bach fugues for Ulm
Vivaldi (Four Seasons, changing with the season) for Tien Chi
Mozart's Requiem for Ermor
Gregorian chants for Pythium
Strange 12-tone crap for Ryleh
Handel's Water Music for Atlantis
Beethoven's 9th (Choral part) for Abysia
Irish tavern songs for Man (not really classical, but that's ok)
Orff (Carmena Burana) for Mictlan
Panflute (aka panpipe) music for Pangaea (of course! I don't know of any composers, though)
Indonesian gamalan music for C'tis
Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata for Arco
Star Control II Illwrath music for Machaka. Haha! Just kidding - drums and chanting would be better.

[NTJedi]

Music should be one of the last things done. I almost always turn it off and for when I don't I lower the music level setting to almost nothing.

[Manuk]

Where can someone download Starcontrol 2 music?

I liked that one

[deccan]

Manuk said:
Where can someone download Starcontrol 2 music?

I liked that one

If you want to try playing an open source remake of SC2, try here:

The Ur-Quan Masters v0.3 alpha

If you want some remixed SC2 music, try here:

Precursors

[Endoperez]

Despite being only Alpha, about the only thing that is still missing are the start and end animations. They, and the music if you really want only the original music, can be downloaded from The Pages of Now and Forever:

http://www.classicgaming.com/starcon...iles/sc2.shtml

[Chazar]

I really like the music that comes with Dom2. I think Dom2's magic was quite due to the good textual descriptions and the music.

Nevertheless, the repetition became annoying soon, so I turned it off eventually. After a reinstall, it was there again and suddenly I felt the original magic of the game again and recalled how exciting it was to discover the demo. So I went and bought the full album of that music group that did the soundtrack. Very nice, though my wife keeps turning the music down. I guess that's a Pavlow Reflex too, for she does not appreciate me playing Dom2...