Wish-List for Dominions 4

Wahnsinniger · #1 July 19th, 2007, 02:09 AM

Strategy Games are one of the least useful genre's to sink 3D money into. Yeah, in a FPS, you need crisp and eye-catching graphics to attract gamers. Strategy games have been and always will be about the gameplay, not that graphics. The images in this game are fine, and have a certain charm to them since units even show their equipment(one of the best visual things to do in any Fantasy/RPG game).

Now this isn't to say that the interface couldn't use some improvement. The Tactical Battles are the worst in this regard, and could benefit from a control-bar with the current options (Pause, Exit, Fast-Forward), which would make it much more new-player friendly. Also, if you could add in a way to go forward-backwards through the battle, kinda like the Progress bar when watching a movie in Media Player for example, that would be great.

MaxWilson · #2 July 19th, 2007, 02:29 AM

FWIW, adding a forwards-backwards option would be time-consuming, given that the battle is actually regenerated while-you-watch from the random seed, not merely replayed from a pre-recording. There is no reason in principle why it couldn't be cached while it's regenerated, but it would take some work. Just for the record.

-Max

Gandalf Parker · #3 July 19th, 2007, 11:47 AM

forward-backward would be available if you use a 3rd party program such as fraps. Plus that would allow you to store battles, email them to thers, upload them to YouTube so you can link to them here (and help sell dominions). I agree that the battles could be improved visually but Im not big on the dev spending time and effort putting in anything that can be done with 3rd party programs

Saulot · #4 July 19th, 2007, 12:07 PM

That seems rather cumbersome. One would have to play through each battle at normal speed in order for fraps to record it. Then one would have to either switch out or exit dominions and then reload the video file in some external program and then replay it to get the forward/backward ability. This would also be unsuitable in some situations since you lose the ability to examine units, which is useful to see how certain mages use gems, if an enemy sc acquires an affliction, etc.
AFAIK fraps also saves everything as uncompressed video which would then need to be compressed if one wanted to share it with anyone else (which can be rather time-consuming, particularly for the very many battles that can occur in one turn during the late game).

Gandalf Parker · #5 July 19th, 2007, 12:15 PM

It has its pros and cons. But so does having Johan research and then program one into the game.