The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Turin]

I would like to see a bit more randomness in the unique summons. e. g. an air queen could get 3-5 air +-2 attack/defense etc. Would raise the excitement before summoning those spells a bit and you would get memorable games, where you have those "perfect" Uniques.

[ioticus]

I hope Illwinter adds more spells, magic items and monsters to the game instead of reducing them. The variety of stuff in the game is one of its best features. I think it would be nice if more variety of troops could be recruited for each nation. I would like to see each nation have a special unit that could be recruited after a certain level of research and maybe after building a special structure.

[kukimuki]

First, I take back my suggestion about using rectangles with area that correspods to troops instead of troops in the power of 2. Seeing 20 militia producing four times as large rectangle area as 10 militia must have been an artifact of zooming out the map too much. So it's already as i wished it to be.

SurvivalistMerc said:
Kukimuki,

I find the correspondence to "squares of troops" to actually be useful. I would of course prefer for it to give me a rough idea of army strength. (Black plate infantry should produce a bigger square than militia perhaps.)

Using squares of troops rather than troops gives a better idea of how powerful the force is. Because one Jotun is significantly more powerful than one regular-sized unit. That is true for most of the larger units.

As this post was written in response to me and I cannot understand what it's about, i guess there might have been some misunderstandings.

What i meant was that when you have size 10 army (no matter if it's units or sum of unit sizes or whatever way you measure it), and you draw a rectangle 10 X 10, then the area of the rectangle corresponts to the square of army size. To get area that corresponds to army size, you would need sqrt(10) X sqrt(10) rectangle.

[tinkthank]

I would like to make the following suggestions, which I am trying to classify into sections:
- General comments on development strategy
- General wishes for prioritizing development resources
- Concrete functionality wishes

I hope this is helpful to the devs (and others) in understanding what I think would make a great game, and by that I mean what is fun for me and, hopefully, for others too.

GENERAL COMMENTS on development strategy
- Perhaps the most important factor of making a game successful is making it fun to play. I think this point has often wrongly been considered trivial and hence not worth mentioning. But it is: “Fun” also means paying attention to what players like doing, encouraging actions and functionality which supports that, and by making actions which players DON’T like doing as seldom as possible. So with keeping that in mind and trying to incorporate the results of the polls I have made:
- Maximize the user interface transparency: from every screen, let us be able to access all appropriate information with as few clicks as possible (e.g.: battle orders and scripting, statistics, inventory, etc.); currently, a province with 20 commanders is hard to manage, you cannot see who is doing what: When you click on a commander to view his statistics, you cannot access the battle orders screen from there, you must go back to that screen and find the commander again; I really dislike doing this in midgame.
- Minimize late-game micromanagement needs where possible; if possible, make the late-game function much like early- and mid-game.
- The game is LESS FUN if there appears to be only a limited number of successful strategies which lead to a win. A game like Dom2 becomes broken if there is only one way to win, since everyone will race to mimic this one path. Keep it as varied as possible. Thus ensure that there can be no clear “no-brainers” and ensure that some paths (e.g., it has been said in dom2 that there is a race for certain Summons (e.g. Queens of Air, high-level Blood) or the building of certain SCs) are not overstressed.

PRIORITZING WISHES
I know that Illwinter has very limited resources, and cannot do everything. But here are some of the things that I find important, in order of their importance to me.

- AI. I would really enjoy a challenge from an AI, and I would greatly wish for most energy to be spent on AI improvement, both *tactically* (script building, troop placement, spotting and exploiting the enemy’s weakness) and *strategically* (troop and fort building, movement, plan development and plan follow-through, dynamic plan changes, minimal diplo possibilities (bribes, etc.)).
- User Interface: I would wish for an interface which is as smooth as possible; let us issue battle orders from every commander screen (or a link to the battle-orders on every commander screen); let us use the keyboard as much as possible (spending money, spending spell research points, etc.), use of hotkeys (f9-f12), use of strategic scripts (e.g. “forge X monthly”, “forge X and return hammer to lab”, etc.); User Interface customization
- Variation: As third point, I would wish for more tactical variation and more checks and balances: Make more types of buffs and de-buffs. EXAMPLE: Debuff Spells which slightly *decrease* an enemy’s resistances to poison, magic, or the elements; Debuff spells which temporarily make it more difficult to cast certain spells or spell types; Debuff spells which slow down an enemy’s movement rate; Buff spells which counter the effects of these types of spells.
- Graphics: I would love to have fabulous Warcraft-III-style graphics, but I believe that is very difficult to do, so I would suggest not even getting started on graphical improvement.
- Music: Please do NOT invest in music. (I personally listen to my own.)


CONCRETE WISHES
- Increased RPG elements: Experienced units have non-combat bonuses as well, such as increased chance of raising dominion in province when preaching; increased stealth ability; etc.
- Theme modding: From the hints I have received elsewhere, I think that Illwinter is concentrating on this. I think it would be great to be able to have an interface which allows us to plug in as many themes to a nation as we want; if players A, B, and C all have these mods downloaded and installed, they can be played.
- Creativity modding: Don’t underestimate the wishes of the players. Let *all attributes be moddable and conditional*: E.g., let it be possible to mod the stealth value of Type A to be dependent on Terrain Type, or on Season of Year, or on Temperature; let it be possible for the “assassination” command to be practiced only on Undead, or during the Winter, or in Wastelands. Etc.
- Increased Interface Flexibility: Access to battle order screen via Stats/Inventory screen; f12 scrolls through forts; f11 scrolls through hidden/stealthy commanders; f10 switches between prophet and pretender; f9 scrolls through mages with forge bonus; Customizationability: shift-f1 displays commanders alphabetically, shift-f2 displays them in order of their type, shift-f3 displays them in order of their action queue (as it is presently);
- Enhanced Tactical Spell AI Interface: Commanders can not only queue spells they want to cast, but can, for the rest of the spells, click one of four boxes: 1. Never Cast, 2. Cast with Low Priority, 3. Cast with Medium Priority, 4. Cast with High Priority; default setting can be determined by the player
- Enhanced Message System: With Outbox which one can review and delete one message without deleting all; copy-and-paste ability
- Complete Icons (see thread here )

Thanks for listening; your feedback on our feedback will also be greatly appreciated!

[deccan]

A couple of suggestions:

1) Let me sort the order that my commanders are displayed in various screens in whatever way I want. When I have lots of mages with the same paths, I'd like them all to appear one after the one. Makes it a lot neater.

2) Maybe make it so that creating pretender / nation is like in SEIV, allowing the player to choose the development points allowed in a game and to save the result to a named file. I can't be the only one who has fantasies of playing Mictlan with F9A9W9 blessings...

[ioticus]

Awesome post tinkthank! I agree 110%!!

[FarAway Pretender]

Yeah, tinktank echoed a lot of my sentiments, but a bit more succinctly.

For me, enhancing the RPG aspects of the game would be the most enjoyable part--especially if it could be done while very slightly weakening SC's.

Giving individual heroes, and individual provinces, more "personal" flavor, would make the games more enjoyable to me. I prefer to play on smaller maps (100 provinces or less), so the individualized provinces thing just may be my own preference.

[Zooko]

I agree that more individualized heroes would be fun, and that they shouldn't strengthen the supercombatant strategy.

I still love the "Heroes of Might and Magic III" mechanism of being allowed to choose between two randomly-selected heroic abilities whenever your hero levels up.

One way to increase the RPG aspect of heroes without strengthening the supercombatant strategy would be to invent more heroic abilities that help the troops under the hero's command.

[Zooko]

P.S. But despite what I just said about heroic abilities and RPGs, my wishlist definitely falls into this priority order:

1. Better UI
* reduce unnecessary clicking to see the information I want to see (e.g. configuring a large army with many commanders and units)
* less micro-management (e.g. taxes)
* reduce unnecessary clicking to do the action I want to do (e.g. when I do alchemy, just use the best alchemist who is currently in a laboratory)
2. More mechanisms made visible.
* e.g. how much contribution is made by what kind of units to rebuilding or tearing down castle walls? I don't want to read through a manual, read through forum Posts, and do a bunch of arithmetic on a napkin, I want to SEE it happening. See also the next wishlist item.
3. Simpler rules. There are too many damn rules. If dom3 adds more rules and more exceptions and more terms to the algebraic equations that determine what happens, I am going to scream.
* Why not eliminate some of the less important features, like maybe repelling, or morale checks? Notice that I think of eliminating features which are less "visible" to me.
* Why not simplify the equations that determine what happens? Maybe some things like the effects of fatigue no longer get randomized (33% chance of reducing your armor at fatigue > 50 blah blah blah) but instead are simple and deterministic (your armor = your armor - your fatigue).
4. Better graphics and sound effects. (I know, this one is potentially difficult.)
5. Tweaked style of play, e.g. more RPG flavor.
6. More balance. Let N be the number of different strategies that an experienced player will attempt when playing against other experienced players. Now let N go to infinity!
7. Better combat AI.
8. Programmability for modding battle and strategic AIs. The simplest way to do this is just to open up and document the turn file (for strategic AI) and to invent a "per-battle-turn battle turn file" (for battle AI).
9. More units, more magic items, more spells, more nations, more gods.

NOT-A-WISH 10. Something I really do not want to see is increased scriptability and micromanagement such as the frequently requested deeper queues of scripted spells.

The difference between #8 and #10 is that #8 is something that a programmer does and then every player uses it, exactly like a mod. #10 is something that each player does to use for himself against the other players.

Thanks for listening! Or actually if you aren't listening, thanks for not banning me from the forum in order to prevent me from posting.

[ioticus]

3. Simpler rules. There are too many damn rules. If dom3 adds more rules and more exceptions and more terms to the algebraic equations that determine what happens, I am going to scream.
* Why not eliminate some of the less important features, like maybe repelling, or morale checks? Notice that I think of eliminating features which are less "visible" to me.

I strongly disagree with simplifying the rules. There are enough games with "simple" rules, but very few for the hardcore fantasy wargamer. (I can't think of any besides Dominions 2, actually.) I think the equations used are very well done, and brilliantly simulate the chaos of war. The features that you say are hidden are actually very important to the wargame feel, allowing you to plan strategy without being certain of the outcome. Repelling and morale? Those are some of its best features in my opinion. I do agree that all equations should be well documented.