Dominions 3 Announced

[ioticus]

Zooko said:
I agree that Illwinter shouldn't spend their precious resources improving the strategic AI. But they should spend their precious resources opening up and documenting the turn protocol so that modsters can implement their own strategic AIs. Then Illwinter can take the best of those and put them into Dom3. ;-)

I agree that allowing people to mod the AI is a great idea I'd love to see. We could see some very challenging AI that way, much better than the developers could make.

[PhilD]

Once again, Gandalf speaks words of wisdom...

A good AI is always a good thing for a game, but it's something that takes a lot of work, and Illwinter should most likely focus on their strengths: Dom2 is great for its amount and variety of content, and because it fills a niche in the "deep, multiplayer-oriented, PBEM game" genre. With limited programming/development ressources (I guess), they should try to improve in this direction, or similar ones, instead of "wasting" efforts in orthogonal directions.

Now, exporting configuration to outside, moddable files, is also a good thing. Allowing for AI customization, if it can be added, would let the community of players try to improve on the supposedly dreadful AI - or, at least, we'd get to see if the "itshouldgothisway"ers and "justdothis"ers can actually improve on it, or just talk

[Zapmeister]

I'd like to see a solution to the problem that led me to give up Dom2. For me, the game is not fun if I've been losing for a good while, and in the late-game it can be not-fun even if I'm winning. There's no point in playing if you're not having fun.

The problem is that there is no way (short of finding a sub) to exit from the game without spoiling it for the remaining players.

Maybe make the quitter's provinces impassable and out of the game? I don't know - I don't claim to have a solution, I'm just putting the issue forward for discussion because I don't believe I'm alone in thinking it's important.

EDIT: Oops, just noticed the wishlist thread.