What it will take for me to purchase Dom III

[Sandman]

National troops should be upgradeable. At the moment they derive rather less benefit from magic research than mages, summons and SCs.

Suggestion: Castable perma-upgrades: These are a set of spells which confer a permanent bonus on mundane humans or similar. Fire resistance, demon blood, lycanthropy, undeath, etc. The key feature? Only one upgrade per unit - they don't stack. Even so, it gives you a lot of options to play with when it comes to national troops.

[WraithLord]

B0rsuk said:

Would put more strain on commanders, and supplies (food), as bigger armies are harder to maintain.

Supplies wise. not gold wise. For supplies there are solutions. Growth scale, nature mages and food items.
I don't understand how more strain on commanders when in end games normal commanders are rarely used at all.

[Ironhawk]

Sandman said:
Suggestion: Castable perma-upgrades: These are a set of spells which confer a permanent bonus on mundane humans or similar. Fire resistance, demon blood, lycanthropy, undeath, etc. The key feature? Only one upgrade per unit - they don't stack. Even so, it gives you a lot of options to play with when it comes to national troops.

I like your suggestion. Have it with a moderate gem cost so that you have interesting decisions b/w summons and mortal troops: Should I spend these 5 nature gems to give these 25 elite troops the perma +10-15hp? Or should I summon 10 vine ogres? And before people start picking that example apart - I'm not promoting that as a specific spell im just trying to point out a concept.

And I still like the idea of a buildable site which allows access to even more elite national troops. Like say only your Prophet is allowed to build a single site which has some profound cost... Maybe you need to have so many points of total dominion before you can build it. Or it costs an absolute fortune in gold or time? But when this unique nation-specific site was built, you could then produce your nation's uber-elite units.

[HotNifeThruButr]

I don't think allowing more or more free troops or restricting magical troops is the answer.

I think the answer lies in expanding the content behind national (and independent?) troops. How about something like custom troops?

When you want to create a custom soldier, You get taken to a window where you start with a basic naked infantryman, cavalryman, or etc (no pictures ).

Then, you choose what sort of training you want, like militia, regular, elite, super-elite, and each higher option costs more gold.

Then you're taken to a window with your national weapons, like a glaive, pike, spear + tower shield, composite bow, and falchion + tower shield for Tien'Chi, and you pick a weapon, which costs either and/or resources.

Then, you're taken to another window where you pick your armor, like leather or scale, and you pick cuirass, hauberk, or full, with better armor costing more gold and/or resources.

Different nations will get different national weapons and armor, or troop types, and etc. Atlanteans would have something like "Atlantian" and "Shambler" instead of "infantry" and "cavalry"

This way, you can make "normal" Dom2 scale soldiers, or, for a lot more cash, you can make soldiers competitive with summoned enemies.

Another way to make national troops better would be to simply make better troops recruitable. Some factions have pretty pathetic selections of troops, often with redundant roles. When you've gotten down to it, few nations have more than two troop types. Maybe

just my two cents.

[Vicious Love]

HotNifeThruButr said:
I don't think allowing more or more free troops or restricting magical troops is the answer.

I think the answer lies in expanding the content behind national (and independent?) troops. How about something like custom troops?

When you want to create a custom soldier, You get taken to a window where you start with a basic naked infantryman, cavalryman, or etc (no pictures ).

Then, you choose what sort of training you want, like militia, regular, elite, super-elite, and each higher option costs more gold.

Then you're taken to a window with your national weapons, like a glaive, pike, spear + tower shield, composite bow, and falchion + tower shield for Tien'Chi, and you pick a weapon, which costs either and/or resources.

Then, you're taken to another window where you pick your armor, like leather or scale, and you pick cuirass, hauberk, or full, with better armor costing more gold and/or resources.

Different nations will get different national weapons and armor, or troop types, and etc. Atlanteans would have something like "Atlantian" and "Shambler" instead of "infantry" and "cavalry"

This way, you can make "normal" Dom2 scale soldiers, or, for a lot more cash, you can make soldiers competitive with summoned enemies.

Another way to make national troops better would be to simply make better troops recruitable. Some factions have pretty pathetic selections of troops, often with redundant roles. When you've gotten down to it, few nations have more than two troop types. Maybe

just my two cents.

This wouldn't actually make national troops any tougher, though. It'd mostly just allow players to field hordes and hordes of naked troops, since practically all national troops are good for is a quick meatshield.

Besides, everyone who favors the "beef up national troops" approach seems to be overlooking the thematic dissonance that sort of fix would entail. National troops, with the exception of Niefel Jarls and whatnot, should not be able to defeat mid- and high-level summons in a fair fight.
I suppose it might be balanced for a squad of heavy infantry to bring down a mad, undying god from the underworld, or a gargantuan flying statue with foot-long claws, or a brood of giant snakes whose skin can melt iron, but it would also be downright ridiculous. Either you're a hero, capable of picking your teeth with trees and chasing the sun into hiding with a scowl, or you're a mortal. In the latter case, you've got 12 HP, tops, and no amount of skill or determination is going to change that.
On the bright side, there are plenty of alternate means of making national troops viable without granting them power beyond mortal ken. For instance,
A) Create a niche for them. Going toe-to-toe with a wight or devil should never be a good idea, but a few tweaks to unit gold and resource costs might see them come into their own as patrollers, raiders, skirmishers, whatever.
B) Don't strengthen national troops, but price them much more efficiently(and/or raise the cost of summons, give them gem upkeep, et cetera). In smaller battles, where supply is not an issue, national troops would have a quantity>quality edge over most summons. In larger battles, they'd still make a strong backbone for an army of summoned shock troops, flankers, and so on. For an even larger battle, they'd still be so competitively-priced and expendable that they'd play a useful support role, if only as a meatshield or as missile support. Awfully similar to option A, save that the idea here is for national units to actually have the advantage on an open battlefield, rather than simply in a few specialized roles.
Note that this may require that something be done about spells that effect the entire battlefield. An army that can be effortlessly routed and half-annihilated in one casting of Wrathful Skies or two or three of Bone Grinding is no army at all.

C) Tweak research and the magical economy so that summons only begin to dominate later in the game. National troops would still serve no real function in the endgame, but they'd play more instrumental a role in the early stages of the war, when the infrastructure for the later stages is established. Sort of a gradual slide towards obsolescence, rather than a near-instantaneous plummet within the first two or three research levels.

[Vicious Love]

Sandman said:
National troops should be upgradeable. At the moment they derive rather less benefit from magic research than mages, summons and SCs.

Suggestion: Castable perma-upgrades: These are a set of spells which confer a permanent bonus on mundane humans or similar. Fire resistance, demon blood, lycanthropy, undeath, etc. The key feature? Only one upgrade per unit - they don't stack. Even so, it gives you a lot of options to play with when it comes to national troops.

I like, I like. Though it would be nice if national troops were still useful without magical support. Mages are crucial enough already.

[Ygorl]

I'm on the side saying that national troops shouldn't be competetive with summons (with the obvious exceptions), except for the cheapest crappiest summons, with which they are already competetive. If someone else has spent years of dedicated research to be able to summon serious nasties, why should I be able to match such an army from turn 1 just by clicking "Recruit"? Vice-versa, why would anyone research summons when they can do just as well hiring dudes, and divert their precious research, gems, etc. towards magic items to make their hired guys even more powerful, or combat spells to kill off the enemy's summoned guys even more effectively... No, summoned troops should be more powerful than those you hire. Hired troops are for growing in the early game, and depending on what you research and how you play, they can still be useful mid-game. One of the neat things about Dominions is that the power level grows so astronomically as time progresses and yet things still stay reasonably balanced. Proposals that would allow for the power of hired troops to increase as the game progressed are interesting, as long as that increase in power requires effort to be spent developing it, but making them much more powerful right off the bat would throw the balance way off, I think.

[jeffr]

I like how the Conceptual Balance mod handles things. It's the result of a lot of playtesting. National troop costs have been lowered and no brainer, devastating spell combos (Staff of Storms/Wrathful Skies) have been made more difficult to achieve. Unit enhancing spells have been made less expensive, allowing buffed national units to be more effective later in the game. Items, in particular, have been modded to try and eliminate the "there is always a best choice" problem. The Super Combatant remains very powerful but is no longer all powerful and different unit/summons/item mixes are more viable. There is room for both summons and national troops.

At least that's the idea, and I think it's working pretty well.

[Agrajag]

I think the problem lies in the fact that summons get stronger as the game progresses, while regular national troops do not.
If it was possible to divert magical research to technological research to improve your troops, it might contribute towards making national troops viable later in the game.
Maybe you can add a "techonology" tab to research, where you can choose to spend RP on technological advances, so in that tab, instead of "Enchantment" and "Conjuration" you would have "Infantry Weapons" and "Cavalry Shields", and instead of spells you would have upgrades, such as "Sharpening Stone" which increases damage for all weapons by 1 or "Combat Training" which gives all newly produced units an expirience star etc...

[Endoperez]

Many of the suggestions here would shoot micromanagement through the roof. While it would be nice to be able to enchance units magically, quickly choosing the most experienced, least wounded units of most useful types from hundred or so soldiers would take time. Another research tree would also be a nuisance, and I imagine most nations already know of the "Sharpening Stones", and that the more non-militia have already undergone "Combat Training" (just compare a Militia to a generic Light infantry).

I still think I'd like to see a way to have national units play a big(ger) role in DomIII, but Jeff, Ygorl and Vicious Love make good points about the absurdness of mere humans standing against unnatural, supernatural, or even b]big[/b] enemies.