Wishlist for September

[Gandalf Parker]

Some of the items I have no problem being "desired features" but I would like to point them out as being possible now. For those who feel they are majorly important items and are willing to do abit to get them now. Maybe we could add a (3) after them to flag them as 3rd party capable.

* being able to Create god, game and go to play it without going back to the main menu in between

* Pre-made pretenders for new players

* Quick start game for new players

* Ability to store more than one god for each nation

* Battle Sim

- adding save/reload functionality for SP only

[Endoperez]

Heh, thanks! However, I only made five or so entries myself. I just copy-pasted the ideas of others, wrote some down from about dozen Posts two or three threads and posted it. But still not so bad, eh? ;D

It is quite easy to make pretenders, but making simple ones easily usable by newcomers is harder. If done officially after our forumites' ideas it wouldn't be too much of a problem, though.

My view of implementing it:
For demo-Abysia:
Special Moloch with Fire 6, Dominion 7, and pretty good scales. The trick is, instead (or in addition to) his description there are general gameplay tips and tricks. This would be easily done by a mod, but mods don't and shouldn't work with demo. The problem is in allowing it to be Abysia's pretender without it showing up in the pretender selection screen. I think Cheat Detection would notice it...

Quick-start game for new players:
Same way, but starting with maybe fourth turn and some general scripts already given to some units. I'm using Abysia as an example agian. One combat should be seen on the Messages, and in it Anathemant Salamander/Dragon participates and casts spells. The turn before a message should have been sent for everyone telling what the AS/AD did, what is the plan and what has already been done. Two Messages, the first being small story and second describing the gameplay effects would be even better.


About ability to store more than one god for each nation:
Everyone who reads this and has Excel or similar, go to SunrayBe's site and download the " An excel file to design and compare pretenders, by Schutzpat"! It uses Excel macros and OpenOffice does not seem to execute them properly. However, it lets you choose any pretender and theme available to man, magics and scales you wish as well as the castle you choose. Then it counts it together and shows wheter what you want is affordable. A great, great tool, or atleast great potential! Is it possible to do something along those lines but not requiring excel? Maybe something akin to the Online Grimoire.

I have been going to check Cherry's Battle Simulator for some time, but haven't had time. It only works and give hard numbers, and I presume you meant graphical one, but it is the closest we ahve not counting the one in Dom1.

[Gandalf Parker]

Endoperez said:
It is quite easy to make pretenders, but making simple ones easily usable by newcomers is harder. If done officially after our forumites' ideas it wouldn't be too much of a problem, though.

Yep, we had a thread going on the subject once. The initial set would mostly keep people from being confused because the menu buttons "dont work" unless you use them in the right order (cant play game till you start game, cant start game till you make god). The pretenders provided dont have to be great. In fact if they spur the new user with an immeadiate feeling of "I can do better" then that would be fine. There was a project started (the first one listed at www.dom2minions.com ) but nobody jumped up to help. Sometime I might finish it. It covers the starter game also.

About ability to store more than one god for each nation:

There are alot of ways it can be done. JohanK added the ability to do seperate directorys as an environment variable so that you can have different starter icons start the game using different directorys. Or batch files would work.

I have been going to check Cherry's Battle Simulator for some time, but haven't had time. It only works and give hard numbers, and I presume you meant graphical one, but it is the closest we ahve not counting the one in Dom1.

I did one also. Kindof. Its a mini map with an example of using it to test battles. It definetly could be improved but it does work pretty well for starting a quick game with any pretender/army/equipment set up in provinces next door to each other. At least it allows you to actually watch the battle in game but you have to read the PDF file on map commands to use it. I suppose a program could be built around it, graphically build what you want and have it write out the .map file calling Dom2 to play it.