designs for best single play experience

[GavinWheeler]

Originally posted by Gandalf Parker:
And there is no real setup for remembering things across turns. I think almost everything is refigured each turn.

Well, if you can remember that mage X is casting such-and-such a ritual every turn, or that a scout is bloodhunting every turn, then you could presumably remember that commander X is trying to get to province #133 (or whatever) and use that every turn to calculate an automated guess at the next step in the journey.

There would be plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong (automatic pathfinding seems to be one of those tricky things to implement that quickly get complicated with various special cases) but the facility could be provided on a 'caveat emptor' basis - use it at your own risk.

Like the bloodhunting thing. If you could order bloodhunters to bloodhunt until full, then transfer their bloodslaves to the nearest laboratory before returning to their original province to start hunting again, that would eliminate the tedium of micromanaging bloodhunters. Each would simply need to know where it was, that it was on 'automatic bloodhunt in province XYZ' orders and how full of bloodslaves it currently was, and it could work out what its move this turn 'should' be. You would just run the risk that the bloodhunters would wander happily into the midst of a battle or something similair. Your choice - use it or not as you wish.

The problem is that there are so many little things like that which could be added, and only two programmers, if I have understood correctly. Implementing a scripting system like the one in the Baldurs Gate series) might let fans contribute their own 'bloodhunting scripts' or similar items, but it's not as if a scripting system like that would be trivial.