What it will take for me to purchase Dom III

[Ironhawk]

Sandman said:
Suggestion: Castable perma-upgrades: These are a set of spells which confer a permanent bonus on mundane humans or similar. Fire resistance, demon blood, lycanthropy, undeath, etc. The key feature? Only one upgrade per unit - they don't stack. Even so, it gives you a lot of options to play with when it comes to national troops.

I like your suggestion. Have it with a moderate gem cost so that you have interesting decisions b/w summons and mortal troops: Should I spend these 5 nature gems to give these 25 elite troops the perma +10-15hp? Or should I summon 10 vine ogres? And before people start picking that example apart - I'm not promoting that as a specific spell im just trying to point out a concept.

And I still like the idea of a buildable site which allows access to even more elite national troops. Like say only your Prophet is allowed to build a single site which has some profound cost... Maybe you need to have so many points of total dominion before you can build it. Or it costs an absolute fortune in gold or time? But when this unique nation-specific site was built, you could then produce your nation's uber-elite units.

[Vicious Love]

Sandman said:
National troops should be upgradeable. At the moment they derive rather less benefit from magic research than mages, summons and SCs.

Suggestion: Castable perma-upgrades: These are a set of spells which confer a permanent bonus on mundane humans or similar. Fire resistance, demon blood, lycanthropy, undeath, etc. The key feature? Only one upgrade per unit - they don't stack. Even so, it gives you a lot of options to play with when it comes to national troops.

I like, I like. Though it would be nice if national troops were still useful without magical support. Mages are crucial enough already.

[Ygorl]

I'm on the side saying that national troops shouldn't be competetive with summons (with the obvious exceptions), except for the cheapest crappiest summons, with which they are already competetive. If someone else has spent years of dedicated research to be able to summon serious nasties, why should I be able to match such an army from turn 1 just by clicking "Recruit"? Vice-versa, why would anyone research summons when they can do just as well hiring dudes, and divert their precious research, gems, etc. towards magic items to make their hired guys even more powerful, or combat spells to kill off the enemy's summoned guys even more effectively... No, summoned troops should be more powerful than those you hire. Hired troops are for growing in the early game, and depending on what you research and how you play, they can still be useful mid-game. One of the neat things about Dominions is that the power level grows so astronomically as time progresses and yet things still stay reasonably balanced. Proposals that would allow for the power of hired troops to increase as the game progressed are interesting, as long as that increase in power requires effort to be spent developing it, but making them much more powerful right off the bat would throw the balance way off, I think.

[Chazar]

Using small maps (10-12 per participating player) is all it takes make the game to progress quicker, where there isnt simply enough time to accumulate the gems necessary for lots of summonings... How long do your games take? Are they over after 40-60 turns?

Another thing is the playstyle: If all player wait and built-up, national troops are a burden by their upkeep alone. As soon as there is one aggressive player around, the game changes, as gems are burned by mages on the battlefield rather than hoarded and turned into summonings...

But you are still right somehow: resources, upkeep, food, slow movement are much too much trouble for troops which get burned away by the next mage, if there are so many upkeep free non-eating critters around, which actually survive a blast and deal damage all by themselves. National troops can use a little boost (see mods) and battlespells should have casting times longer than a single turn.

There are boosting spells, but most are area-1 or battlefield wide and I agree that there should be more 10-area boosts and more of the barksin variety, which also have some drawbacks...

[HotNifeThruButr]

I don't think allowing more or more free troops or restricting magical troops is the answer.

I think the answer lies in expanding the content behind national (and independent?) troops. How about something like custom troops?

When you want to create a custom soldier, You get taken to a window where you start with a basic naked infantryman, cavalryman, or etc (no pictures ).

Then, you choose what sort of training you want, like militia, regular, elite, super-elite, and each higher option costs more gold.

Then you're taken to a window with your national weapons, like a glaive, pike, spear + tower shield, composite bow, and falchion + tower shield for Tien'Chi, and you pick a weapon, which costs either and/or resources.

Then, you're taken to another window where you pick your armor, like leather or scale, and you pick cuirass, hauberk, or full, with better armor costing more gold and/or resources.

Different nations will get different national weapons and armor, or troop types, and etc. Atlanteans would have something like "Atlantian" and "Shambler" instead of "infantry" and "cavalry"

This way, you can make "normal" Dom2 scale soldiers, or, for a lot more cash, you can make soldiers competitive with summoned enemies.

Another way to make national troops better would be to simply make better troops recruitable. Some factions have pretty pathetic selections of troops, often with redundant roles. When you've gotten down to it, few nations have more than two troop types. Maybe

just my two cents.

[Vicious Love]

HotNifeThruButr said:
I don't think allowing more or more free troops or restricting magical troops is the answer.

I think the answer lies in expanding the content behind national (and independent?) troops. How about something like custom troops?

When you want to create a custom soldier, You get taken to a window where you start with a basic naked infantryman, cavalryman, or etc (no pictures ).

Then, you choose what sort of training you want, like militia, regular, elite, super-elite, and each higher option costs more gold.

Then you're taken to a window with your national weapons, like a glaive, pike, spear + tower shield, composite bow, and falchion + tower shield for Tien'Chi, and you pick a weapon, which costs either and/or resources.

Then, you're taken to another window where you pick your armor, like leather or scale, and you pick cuirass, hauberk, or full, with better armor costing more gold and/or resources.

Different nations will get different national weapons and armor, or troop types, and etc. Atlanteans would have something like "Atlantian" and "Shambler" instead of "infantry" and "cavalry"

This way, you can make "normal" Dom2 scale soldiers, or, for a lot more cash, you can make soldiers competitive with summoned enemies.

Another way to make national troops better would be to simply make better troops recruitable. Some factions have pretty pathetic selections of troops, often with redundant roles. When you've gotten down to it, few nations have more than two troop types. Maybe

just my two cents.

This wouldn't actually make national troops any tougher, though. It'd mostly just allow players to field hordes and hordes of naked troops, since practically all national troops are good for is a quick meatshield.

Besides, everyone who favors the "beef up national troops" approach seems to be overlooking the thematic dissonance that sort of fix would entail. National troops, with the exception of Niefel Jarls and whatnot, should not be able to defeat mid- and high-level summons in a fair fight.
I suppose it might be balanced for a squad of heavy infantry to bring down a mad, undying god from the underworld, or a gargantuan flying statue with foot-long claws, or a brood of giant snakes whose skin can melt iron, but it would also be downright ridiculous. Either you're a hero, capable of picking your teeth with trees and chasing the sun into hiding with a scowl, or you're a mortal. In the latter case, you've got 12 HP, tops, and no amount of skill or determination is going to change that.
On the bright side, there are plenty of alternate means of making national troops viable without granting them power beyond mortal ken. For instance,
A) Create a niche for them. Going toe-to-toe with a wight or devil should never be a good idea, but a few tweaks to unit gold and resource costs might see them come into their own as patrollers, raiders, skirmishers, whatever.
B) Don't strengthen national troops, but price them much more efficiently(and/or raise the cost of summons, give them gem upkeep, et cetera). In smaller battles, where supply is not an issue, national troops would have a quantity>quality edge over most summons. In larger battles, they'd still make a strong backbone for an army of summoned shock troops, flankers, and so on. For an even larger battle, they'd still be so competitively-priced and expendable that they'd play a useful support role, if only as a meatshield or as missile support. Awfully similar to option A, save that the idea here is for national units to actually have the advantage on an open battlefield, rather than simply in a few specialized roles.
Note that this may require that something be done about spells that effect the entire battlefield. An army that can be effortlessly routed and half-annihilated in one casting of Wrathful Skies or two or three of Bone Grinding is no army at all.

C) Tweak research and the magical economy so that summons only begin to dominate later in the game. National troops would still serve no real function in the endgame, but they'd play more instrumental a role in the early stages of the war, when the infrastructure for the later stages is established. Sort of a gradual slide towards obsolescence, rather than a near-instantaneous plummet within the first two or three research levels.

[Chazar]

I dont like the course of this discussion: National troops should not be more powerful, neither should summons be less powerful. Summons should be powerful and become slowly more and more abundant as the game progresses.

However, allmost everything in the game is capped by either a hard limit or by some sort of upkeep (gold,supplies,...). So why should the majority of the summons be exempt from this upkeep principle?

[Turin]

national troops shouldn´t be more powerful, but buffed national troops should be more powerful.
Right now you can cast every troopbuffing spell on any number of (human) national troops and they´d still be unable to take out a decent SC/thug.

And unmodded troops are far too expensive for their power compared to mages. For example once conj 3 and evo 4 are researched, every e2 mage can kill dozens of lightly armored troops with bladewind. And he doesn´t even have to be near the front lines.

[Ironhawk]

One thing I've always found odd. If national troops play such a small role in the overall game, why do they have such a good and well used UI for recruitment? Whereas the UI for summoning is poor at best.

[Cainehill]

Hmm. Is it possible to mod upkeep down to 0 for national troops? Then, the only real difference between national and summoned troops would be that some summons don't eat food.

(And also, that one has to invest in forts for troops, vice mages for summonses. Given that a fort can only recruit in one spot, where a mage can move to summon elsewhere, a slight advantage to mages over forts. A bigger imbalance, imo, is that mages summoning can be concentrated in the safety of a fort, in a single province. Think : To go to an extreme, Clash of the Titans has what - 40 provinces? That means at most 40 forts to recruit, limitted by resources and gold. But with a single province, 50 or more mages can summon. Big advantage mages, _especially_ as resources doesn't carry over turn to turn.)

Here's a thought : something like 1/2 all resources from a fort only carry over to successive turns. IE : If someone has 1 province with a fort, but isn't buying troops, 1/2 the resources piles up from turn to turn, only for that fort.

This balances things a little bit with the mages, and also has an OOC justification : the troops are hired with gold, but the smiths can be forging weapons and armor for months or years before the troops are recruited.

Another thing that might help balance things : allow a fort to recruit troops the first turn after it's besieged. Gameplay-wise, this helps balance things against instant-army attacks ( Tree Lord popping in with 200 troops ) and is also justifiable in roleplaying / thematic terms : when a walled city is besieged by invaders (especially those of a different religion, ie all besiegements in Dom2), a certain amount of the locals inside are going to volunteer to serve their city/nation/god.

Again - this merely helps to balance another of the huge, major, issues favoring summons over national troops. Right now, if your province is invaded, 0 troops can be recruited, no matter how many commanders you have there. But if you had 20 researchers, that's 20 summoning spells that might be cast. Huge advantage, mages. ( Mind you : I happen to think that summons should be better than your average national troops. But right now, 0 upkeep, ability to gain while besieged, etc, give summonings too many overwhelming non-combat advantages.)

I've taken advantage of this a number of times : playing nations like Man, Pangaea, Arco, you wind up with boatloads of researchers with nature magic. With a mere conjuration 1, construction 2, every bard / dryad can be shifted to summoning very cost efficient quantities of vine men every turn. With enough nature income, I've held for ages. There is nothing comparable for national troops. If cities (forts) could recruit while besieged, I think it would be more balanced.

There'd still be starvation for troops inside the city; there'd still be a limit on how many troops could be marshalled, compared to the invader recruiting everywhere. But it would give a little balance, a little more of a chance to the defenders, in a situation where, well, all the women (or men) capable of wielding a weapon would be joining the military to protect their men and children from looting, rape, pillage, plunder, etc.