The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Endoperez]

Still a new idea: Magic paths dependent on seasons. If it is spring, they have air, if summer, fire and so on. This would make seasons much more important for that nation and anyone attacking against them.

I think coupling these kind of varying magic picks would go better if you/your enemy wouldn't know if it was static or varying magic pick, so that one wouldn't have to have own plan for every season. Maybe new ability for mystics, or celestial masters.


Just making the mage recruited have the "element of season" would also work, I think. Same could be done for Nature/Astral/Death, so that mages recruited in early/middle/late season would differ from each other.

And making some powerful (holy) units or mages only recruitable during certain season could also work, but that is more of a game-play limit than a thematic tool. I don't have the knowledge or imagination of IW, however!

So, this was my third post to this thread. Is there some kind of a limit?

[NTJedi]

I mentioned this within another topic yet just recently noticed this sticky and now placing the information here as well:

johan osterman said:
I assume you want a better AI as well, but I couldn't see you mention it.

One of the greatest features lacking in almost every game is a challenging AI. There are several important decisions which could definitely improve the Artificial Intelligence. Hopefully the following listed below will be considered for improving the existing AI opponents:

1) Multiple AI personalities available which are randomly selected at the start of each game. This would keep human players surprised and uncertain what to expect from their neighbors.

2) Providing option to disable/enable starving status for AI units. The AI opponents are not aware of food supply levels within provinces and thus should not suffer the penalties of starving which include diseased units and low morale.

3) Allow scripting or some other tool where Users can develop and customize an artificial intelligence which can then be added to the list of random multiple personalities.

4) Don't have computer opponents send their pretender into the death matches. The battle afflictions, horror marks, and curses are not worth the risk.

5) Higher difficulty setting should have the computer opponents be more aggressive against human opponents as well. This makes sense since its the human player looking for a greater challenge when increasing the difficulty level.


I'm sure there are others but these will greatly improve the AI for the game. Double Thanks !

[Agrajag]

Hmmm...
Did I put "Improved Modding Capabilities" in my previous wishlist?
I think I didn't!
So, please improve the modding capabilities, allow mods, allow multination pretender restriction, allow ALL the special abilities (including stuff like the auto-imp-summon), allow adding new spells, allow adding new forgeables etc.
There is a lot that could be added to the modding abilities...

[RedRover]

Dom3 Manual Wishlist

Sidebar with System Requirements/Installation:
It would be nice to have the system requirements and installation notes summarized directly in the manual.

Sidebar with CD Key Location: Just a little boxed note early on that reveals the location of the CD Key number (believe it or not, when I had occasion to look for this in Dominions 2, it took me a considerable amount of time to find it).

Nations/Themes
Please organize the Themes as sub-cases of their Nations. It seems to me that more people start with the question “What nation do I want to play?” and only later ask “What theme do I want to play.” So subordinating the theme to the nation will cut the page-turning time and organize the manual more efficiently.

Spell/Magic Item Sections

Descriptions: Please organize the descriptions in these sections alphabetically. Most of the time I need a reference, it's because I have the name of the spell or item, but don't know what it does. Paging through lists by school or item power is a big timewaster in this case. As the spell list grows, the inefficiency of organization by path grows as well.

Lists: Short lists by path and level for spells, and by power for items, would preserve this aspect of the current manual but, again, please make the actual description sections alphabetical.

I’d also like to see the manual include (in the description sections) the magic path/level requirements for casting/ forging.

Consider an electronic (searchable) manual.

FAQ Appendix
Some issues might be best handled by this format. For example:

1. Pretender Afflictions. Just a list of the game workarounds would be sufficient, IMO—the Gift of Health spell, the Chalice artifact, the Arcoscephale priestess, the queen of the Faerie Court spell.

2. Starting Capital and Scales: note these may not match.

3. Blood Economies: Getting started.

4. Plus a lot of the non-walkthrough elements of the on-line FAQ. The walk-thru elements should get their own section in the manual (or not) rather than appearing in the FAQ.

Unit Mod Appendix
Short intro to the idea of modding units and note where to find the current modding manual (assuming it’s not built into the manual).

Map Mod Appendix
Short intro to idea of map modding and note where to find current map editor manual. (assuming it’s not built into the manual.)

Scenario Building Appendix
Short intro to scenario building and how to coordinate it with mapping mods. IMO this material should be treated as a separate topic from map making. You can get into this easily with just text commands. It's also a difference in focus--scenarios are designed game set-ups with many fixed elements.

IMO a manual needs to be "playtested" the same way a game or scenario does.

[Truper]

Hire RedRover to help with the manual!

[RedRover]

Here's a short post with a theme...

HOTKEYS/OPTIONS

Save Game: Flash-save so I don’t have to quit the program in order to save a game. Maybe automatically disable this in Multiplayer mode.

Bug Log: A one key-stroke option to save the current turn files into a special “Bug Log” folder so everything that should be sent in is stored automatically in one place. Time stamp or number so subsequent saves using same nation/same game won’t overwrite an existing bugfile.

Show God: Screen stores the exact original setup of the Pretender in the current game; that is, all decisions made during Pretender setup. (Lots of times I have gone into a game so fast I forgot to write down the Pretender stats, then tried in vain to recall them during the mid-game or reconstruct them later for a new game.)

Save God: Automates the process of saving a god design, so when I find a design I want to play around with awhile, I don’t have to recreate it from scratch each time. This feature should also have the capacity to save more than one Pretender per nation.

Save/Restore Scenario: Automates the process of saving a game setup to a special “Scenario” file. The scenario is recallable, so the same map setup can be replayed. This also has tournament applications. A scenario hotkey might also bring up a Replace God screen, so that I could plug a new Pretender design (or a bunch of them) into an existing map setup.

Back-step Hotkey: Goes back a step at any screen in Pretender set-up. For example, if I have misspelled the god’s name, or want to tweak the setup due to a late brainstorm, I don’t have to redesign the whole Pretender from scratch again. Maybe have a “Confirm Start” popup that seals the set-up.

Set Default God <name>: File containing the original default Pretender seeds the AI has when the game is new, available for instant recall. It drove me crazy the first time I realized that I had overwritten the default AI gods when I made my first crude efforts at Pretender design. I was stuck playing really inferior opposition for awhile since I'd tried to play everything once before repeating. <Name> is the nation’s name.

Select Theme: A popup screen that appears in setup after nation selection. Allows theme selection and automatically sets minimum scales and adds any theme-specific Pretenders to the Pretender screen for setup.

Nation/Theme starting sites: A popup that let’s me see nation or theme gem income before I finish setting up my Pretender.

F[key] Command to scroll through own forts.
F[key] Command to scroll through own Hiding/Sneaking units.
F[key] Command to scroll through own mages with forge bonus.

Programmable “Find” function: Lets you pick what to search for—Examples: 1) scrolling though leaders for a specific magic item, 2) scrolling through a magic path and level+ (in other words, Air 2 would hit all friendly Air mages with 2+ levels), 3) scrolling through all known recruitment magic sites, 4) scrolling through all known casting bonus magic sites, etc.

An alternative might be a series of screens that record specific items, and take you to the map location when you click on the entry line (cf. the way Shogun: Total War handles Ninja/Shinobi tracking). Test to see which screens would be most-used and include those. Build in the capacity to plug in modular expansion screens as needed.

[Endoperez]

Re-made pretender creation so that you would have different options in tabs, and you could go from one tab to another any time in pretender creation. If you chose another pretender form the cost of magic paths/dominion selected would be calculated again.

This would make it much easier to see which is the cheapest way to achieve the desired results.

I also second the "Save God" -function.

[jseppane]

Could wounded or unnecessary troops be added/dumped to local province defence with 1:1 or some fixed or variable ratio?

Jukka

[Chazar]

I'd like to see that "Hall of Fame" commanders, and maybe prophets which die in battle get a random chance of surviving as prisoners:

Each of those notable ones gets a chance depending on the amount of negative HP and afflictions after the battle. If they are lucky and survive, the enemy may demand a ransom for their release for those survivors. If no agreement could be made within 3 turns they just day anyway in order to be called back or resurrected normally.

How much would you pay for your favoured mage? Would you allow your enemy to buy back a captured prophet for gold and gems?

[Edi]

There was something I thought of yesterday when micromanaging gems. As we all know, that's a very, very tedious part of the game, yet essential, and I've a suggestion to improve it:

Add a small checkbox to the commander description box titled "No Gem-pooling" or similar, and toggling that switch on or off will remove the commander from the list of whose gems are taken into the lab pools. Just adding a line into the pooling code to the effect of "If NoGemPool==1, do not pool gems from this commander" when itgoes through the list of commanders would remove a great amount of micromanagement and make everyone (but especially Mictlan players) happy. Shouldn't be too hard to do either, or is it?

Edi