Wishlist for September

[Alneyan]

Endoperez said:
Why no-one else seems to remember that *any* spell can be made a national spell of *any* nation... This includes those special summons of both Ermor themes!

I am not sure I get your point here. You could indeed give Ermor's spells to, say, Arcoscephale, but that will simply destroy themed Ermor when this mod is applied (standard Ermor should be fine though). Or did I fail to understand you here?

[Kristoffer O]

He says that summon cave drake could be made Man only, nature lvl 6, death 2 and fatigue cost 300. Then exchange the cave drake with your cigar smoking pumpkin man sprite, a good set of stats and immortality and an assault rifle and you are ready to go kicking some ... sorry, lost track of topic!

No one will create cave drakes anymore, but if you restrict each of the drakes it might not matter much.

[deccan]

I didn't notice it so apologies if it's already in:

The ability to change a nation's password after a game has started (to take effect after hosting).

[Edi]

This is a wider feature request, and one I'm sure has been posted several times earlier, but how about allied victory possibility?

It'd require a bit of additional code, but having War, Neutral and Allied status for nations, with a simnple diplomacy system where you can propose alliance and declare war (which would set the status accordingly when decalring war or when alliance proposal is accepted).

This would make pantheon games feasible without using special victory conditions, and instead of a single god rising above all, it would be a pantheon of gods.

Edi

[Gandalf Parker]

Edi said:
This is a wider feature request, and one I'm sure has been posted several times earlier, but how about allied victory possibility?

That is pretty automatic, and happens a lot with multiplayer games. Did you need some sort of menu in order to allow it with solo-play games? Im just commenting because adding menu features is alot of work and this seems kindof cosmetic.

[daesthai]

UI:

My humble request is simple to continue to push for the ability to alter the color of the nieghboring provinces filter.

[Ozymandias]

I would really like some way to configure the keyboard shortcuts... editing a text file would be fine for me, and wouldn't require any ui work (although the informative popups ingame are another matter). This is mostly because some commands like sacrifice (used by three nations) and pillage (usable by all nations, but I really want the shortcut for ermor) have no keyboard shortcut, while capture slaves, usable only by mictlan, does. Also it would be great if the C and M hotkeys worked with ritual spells from items. Nobody would dislike a monthly forging hotkey either.

[Edi]

Gandalf Parker said:
That is pretty automatic, and happens a lot with multiplayer games. Did you need some sort of menu in order to allow it with solo-play games? Im just commenting because adding menu features is alot of work and this seems kindof cosmetic.

More like just adding a checkbox of Allied victory on/off. I was thinking in terms of how it was done in the original Age of Wonders where they had this small box that you could click on or off. Much like the cheat detection on/off when setting up a game. Of course, the functions and new menu items for the message menu would have to be added, four that I can think of: declare war, propose alliance, propose peace/truce (to return state of war to neutrality) and cancel aliance (to reset alliance to neutrality).

The only actual UI change or new addition required would be a diplomacy status display screen where you can see if you're at war with, neutral or allied with the different nations. The rest could be done by just adding the menu options, assuming the menu buttons have been made on the list type basis as follows:

Pseudocode
Code:

---

Menu Button 1

display code

functions



Menu Button 2

display code

functions



etc

---

Adding three new ones to an existing menu should not be difficult. Writing the actual diplomacy code (i.e. how the AI should behave in the three different states) could be easy or difficult, depending. As I see it, neutrality and war don't need much, the existing AI implementation works just fine, usually the AI will initially leave you alone for a while unless you bother it. It will eventually attack and pursue the war more or less actively (unless it gets seriously attacked from another front).

Alliance option can already be set with map commands in the map file to specify that nation A and nation B will not attack each other, the alliance coding would just have to make this a resettable variable, with the actual status determined by the actions from the message menu.

Optionally, if a little bit more complex diplomacy were to be added, there could be a relationship value for the nations on a scale of +/- something for different actions. Breaking alliance without declaring war should obviously decrease chance of renewing the alliance in the future, otherwise this could be abused against the AI. Increasing the value should be through considerable (meaning really big) gifts of gems, gold or magic items and declaring war on an AI nation's enemies, while decreses would be through declaration of war, even more for attacking without declaration of war and most for backstabbing an ally.

The idea is basically a system like AoW 1 had, simple and effective. Scope for influencing relations here is more limited, but then again, alliances are often less imnportant in SP games than MP, and I think my idea as such would offer a relatively simple and effective (yet hopefully not too complex) framework for formalizing stuff in MP. Secret alliances would still have to be done as neutrals with verbal agreements, but you'd have to formalize them eventually to get pantheon victory.

Of course, like I said, this is more a wider feature request than just a simple improvement suggestion, and because I know nothing about the actual Dom2 code, I have no idea how feasible it is to implement and how eager the devs would be to do that even if it is feasible.

But just thinking of the possibilities, e.g. heat vs cold nations games and other kinds of alliance (e.g. Ulm and Marignon vs Man and Pangaea would be anoher pretty thematic one) games would be easier to formally set up, you could have really nice full pantheon clashes where you don't need so much to worry about being constantly backstabbed.

Did this post make things any clearer?

Edi

[Gandalf Parker]

Edi said:

Adding three new ones to an existing menu should not be difficult. Writing the actual diplomacy code (i.e. how the AI should behave in the three different states) could be easy or difficult, depending.

Ahhh so you are seeking for a way to win a game while allied to the AI? Thats what I was trying to find out. The feature would mean little in multiplay, and we have a hard time trying to get things for solo-play.

Optionally, if a little bit more complex diplomacy were to be added, there could be a relationship value for the nations on a scale of +/- something for different actions. Breaking alliance without declaring war should obviously decrease chance of renewing the alliance in the future, otherwise this could be abused against the AI. Increasing the value should be through considerable (meaning really big) gifts of gems, gold or magic items and declaring war on an AI nation's enemies, while decreses would be through declaration of war, even more for attacking without declaration of war and most for backstabbing an ally.

This has been discussed before. The PbEM form of the game makes it more difficult to track such things across multiple turns.

The idea is basically a system like AoW 1 had, simple and effective. Scope for influencing relations here is more limited, but then again, alliances are often less imnportant in SP games than MP, and I think my idea as such would offer a relatively simple and effective (yet hopefully not too complex) framework for formalizing stuff in MP. Secret alliances would still have to be done as neutrals with verbal agreements, but you'd have to formalize them eventually to get pantheon victory.

As much as I like having diplomacy in a game, I fail to see where this will be used. In a MP game having the game recognize an alliance usually limits it. And having it declare an allied win will probably never happen. Very few MP games (or solo games for that matter) actually continue until the game itself declares a winner.

But just thinking of the possibilities, e.g. heat vs cold nations games and other kinds of alliance (e.g. Ulm and Marignon vs Man and Pangaea would be anoher pretty thematic one) games would be easier to formally set up, you could have really nice full pantheon clashes where you don't need so much to worry about being constantly backstabbed.

Those are all great ideas and could be done with a map setup. Take a look at WEvsTHEM at www.dom2minions.com