Quick bits of feedback after about 100 hours of play

[diamondspider]

Just to be clear up-front: I love Dom2!! So please don't take my suggestions as gripes. I also suspect that these ideas have crossed the developers minds, so maybe just count these as "votes" for raising the priority on any of these ideas that are deemed to be good.

There are currently only four things that "frustrate" me at times while playing:

1) Load game. This is a minor one since there is an easy work around. I can obviously back-up my .trn and ftherlnd files each turn before hosting but it would be SO nice to have a "revert" feature to undo the Last turn. For me, if the AI does a great move and rolls me back I have no problem with this.

The problem is that there can be 100s of orders to give before hitting host and if I stupidly forget to, say, take my 10 full units of Werewolves/wolves out of sneak during a castle siege and therefore kiss my entire "big stack" goodbye, it is really a pain in the neck.

I just find it tedious to do the back-ups over and over but it is even more tedious to throw a game away due to forgetting a single important and trivial chore.

2) Target switching. This was talked about in another thread. In that thread it was noted that when a faster unit closes on a unit that if firing the firing unit won't switch to the newly close unit but instead keeps trying to attack the unit that was closest at the time the battle started.

I do find that annoying, but even more annoying, and similarly, I really hate when a huge unit of mine breaks a small and fast one early in the battle and then tries to pursue it all the way off the board instead of changing targets.

This should be very easy to fix in that it could just, maybe, pick a random number between 0 and 3 and pursue for that many rounds then switch to the closest target at that point.

3) Starting placement. This is minorly annoying in single player games, but would be TOTALLY annoying in a multi-player game (haven't done one yet).

As is often the case in these sorts of games, being in a corner is a huge advantage compared with being surrounded by enemies. Yes, many features help like aquatic races, wrap-around maps, and the fact that one often starts near an "edge".

STILL, while I haven't played with the map editor enough to know if it is possible, or if this is already implemented on maps, but it would be GREAT to for the map designers to specify where the players can and cannot start.

I'd feel very uncomfortable starting a large MP game if I had started in some of the positions that I've been placed on the Aran map (still playing it since I like smaller maps even after my copy of the game arrived).

I mean, I'd basically resign if I was surrounded by enemies knowing that I was at about a 50% disadvantage to those starting on edges or corners. And, I'd feel terrible about resigning having promised to play.

All I know for sure is that, on that map at least, I can predict how hard the game will be nearly immediately based on my map placement and I'd hope that it would be skill rather than luck that determine game outcomes.

The rest of the many luck factors I have no real problem with. The luck setting helps enough, along with lucky enchantments, that if a player fears unlucky events and such there is at least a recourse that they have to help protect them.

4) Firing at enemy commanders. Yes, it is true, the AI is targetting my commanders with missle fire in very unrealistic ways. I saw another thread regarding the fact that they AI might still be doing this since it was a feature in Dom1 (if I understood the post correctly).

Well, the upshot of this problem is having a huge impact on my game. So many times a large group of AI controlled crossbow troops are given the order to fire at my commanders that, practically speaking, there is no way for me to survive these battles apart from given 10 Air and blessing them or spending all of my resources creating etherial/lucky/armor items for ALL of my commanders.

This drastically reduces the flexibility of the game since I'd love to explore the vast other number of possibilities that Dom2 offers!


That's it! Pretty short list for such a complex game Thanks for listening and happy gaming!!