Re: The Dominions 3: \"Wishlist\"
Diplomacy and unit diversity.
Should I finish my summary of all posts? I'd planned to do another one this month, but this thread is soooo long, and it seems that the devs are reading each message anyway. The only real purpose would be to avoid duplicates.
I don't think these are duplicate suggestions but I might have mis-read, misunderstood or simply failed to notice/read some posts. If I'm repeating earlier suggestions, I apologize. These suggestions are not as modular as they could be - I view them as a piece.
1) Unit Generation
Preamble, heroes should just cost money. You get one hero, per turn, per province, and they bring their own gear, so no resource costs.
Firstly, each province should generate a fixed amount of-
Resources (needed to make fancy equipment)
Mounts (needed to make cavalry)
Special Training (needed to make elite units)
Holiness (needed to make sacred units)
Magic (needed to make special units and monsters)
Each province outputs a number of units per turn, based on the levy rate, which is like the tax rate but set independently. Additionally, you assign each province a recruiting budget, but this should be small.
Raising the levy rate causes you a penalty to population growth, and may increase unrest. Ideally, unrest should be mitigated by a credible threat (i.e. neighboring hostile force.) Levies should appear prior to offensive unit movement. This will make sending twenty heroes with 15 guys each against somebody less of promising as a military strategy, which is good for realism and reduces a really annoying feature of playing against the AI (and some players.)
Provinces without temples ordinarily make no holiness (perhaps at dominion strength 8+ they do anyway).
Provinces without labs ordinarily make no magic. Magic is used to make special units like trolls, giant hydras, Pegasus riders, etc. Some population types make extra magic, amazons for example.
A province with a castle makes (lots of) extra training, as well as national unit profiles and unit equipment (see below.)
Provinces with marketplaces/foundries/whatever (some extra building) make bonus resources, possibly bonus money as well. Or not.
Provinces with a stables make mounts, as do provinces with certain culture types, for example horse barbarians in plains provinces make mounts without needing a stables built for them.
mechanics -
Firstly, each province figures out how many units it is building, based on the levy rate and the population. Then, if the budget for the province and the number of training and/or holiness points is sufficient, units are upgraded to have elite profiles (automatically).
So, for example, if Pythium levees 22 units and has 13 training available, 13 of those units will have the elite profile (str, precision etc. of a praetorian guard) and 9 will have the basic profile (of a velite). There can be more than 2 profiles, of course, but then you need a system for the player to pick which elite profile is preferred. In fact, you probably need such a system anyway, since some holy/elite profiles should forbid heavy equipment. The simplest (and I think best) way to approach this is to simply let the player turn profiles off with checkboxes. If no profiles are deactivated, the computer will have some relatively simple heuristic to choose whether to build more battle vestals or more praetorian guards. Obviously you can't disable the worst of the profiles (the one that only costs a levy point.)
Then, assuming the budget is sufficient and enough mounts are available, units are mounted. Elite units get mounted first. Some profiles forbid mounting.
Finally, any remaining money is spent on equipment packages, which are handed out to individual models, with the elite units getting the pick of the stuff. So in the example above, if there were money/resources left for 16 full legionnaire packages and 6 wussy packages, you'd get:
13 Praetorian Guard is full armor
3 Velites in full armor
6 Velites in cheap junk
Again, checkboxes should be available to disable most of the packages (except the cheapest/defaults.) That way you can specify that your legionaires all get swords, or all get spears, whatever.
Each province should have a mix of population types and a predominant culture. By population types I mean for example:
Human
Elven
Abyssian
Caelumite
Lizardmen
etc.
and by cultures I mean:
Western (Ermor, Marignon, Pythium, Ulm)
Northern (Jotunheim, Man, Vanheim)
Natural (wild lizardmen, druids, Pangaea?)
etc.
Undead population shares generate a fixed number of units, irrespective of levee rate. If your nation/theme does not have the undead-friendly tag, you don't get the units. Undead unit generation could depend both on population and dominion strength, if desired.
When a new game is generated, for provinces with unspecified population, population and culture in adjacent provinces should be more likely to match. Thus, all else being equal, caelum will have a cluster of caelumite provinces in their general vicinity to make many more caelumites in.
The province mix in the capital is fixed by your nation/theme.
Anyway, based on the population mix, you find out what profiles you get at stage 1 of unit generation.
So if a 50% caelumite, 50% human province levees 14 units, you get 7 humans and 7 caelumites, which can then be trained to be elite humans / elite caelumites, and so on.
The culture of a province may influence which profiles you get (so Amazon provinces should generate female versions of everything), as well as which equipment packages are available.
If you build a castle, you get a pile of extra production of every sort. Also, a certain percentage of the levy turns into your national population type, and they get first pick of all goodies. Finally, your national equipment packages become available to all the units there. This means that a pythianise castle in a lizard men province will produce mostly human legionnaires but also some lizard men in legionnaire armor.
2) Unit dismissal.
Units should not cost a lot to hire, but they should cost a lot to maintain (relatively speaking), and even more to dismiss.
When units flee a province, or are dismissed, they should have a chance of taking up banditry and turning into unrest points, as well as a chance of deserting harmlessly. The same is true for units who are not fed, or who are not paid, with varying likelihoods having to do with morale, existing unrest level etc. When you dismiss units, you can (and generally this should be beneficial on balance) spend money to prevent them from turning into unrest points.
Anyway, the idea of these changes is to make the game, absent magic, a better simulation of late dark ages period warfare. It's already pretty good.
3) Diplomacy, between player positions
Firstly, some people are going to hate diplomacy and there should be both custom map and start of game flags that disable it. So they can stop complaining right now.
The game needs to support the following pacts. These pacts can be reciprocal, but need not be. The target of a pact must accept the pact, and can cancel it at any time (generally by giving units the "attack current province" order)
a) Permission to travel. If you have permission to travel from me, then you get to move through my provinces without attacking them, if you wish. If a province changes hands while your troops are in it, your troops will fight the new owner unless you also have permission to travel from them.
b) Aid defense. If you have aid defense from me, you have permission to travel through my provinces, AND, if my provinces are attacked while your units are in them, your units will fight.
c) Respect your faith in your lands. This pact greatly reduces my ability to reduce your dominion in your territory.
d) Respect your faith in all lands. This pact greatly reduces my ability to reduce your dominion PERIOD.
e) Alliance. Must be reciprocal. Includes reciprocal aid defense and respect faith in your lands pacts, automatically. The number of VP you need (or other condition) to win is increased somewhat, but your VP, provinces, total research and total dominion are pooled for victory purposes.
All of this is modeled after the Dune board game, which had a special event card that allowed alliances to be formed/changed. You might consider the same thing.
Trade pacts and such would be cute but aren't really needed.
Computer players should sometimes, ala Master of Orion, call you up and demand tribute to avoid attacking you (this option is of course already available to players.) Likewise, there should be some way to make such demands to computer players, and a chance they'll respond.
4) Diplomacy, with the peoples of the world and the powers of the spheres
Again, some people will hate this, so if you include it, include options to turn it off.
You have relationship meters with the various forces - one for each element, plus the celestials, the demons, nature sprits and the denizens of the underworld.
Your deities spheres and the nation you play influence them as starting values.
If game settings allow, these different factions are capable of taking the initiative in helping your enemies if they hate you. They might offer a bounty (in gems of the corresponding type, or magic units) to take out specific players provinces.
You can improve relations with these forces by attacking players they hate, or by offering them various pacts/bribes. Of these the two most important are:
a) Pact of joint worship. Beings associated with that force are incorporated into your religion as your aids and flunkies, and prayers are directed to them as intermediaries to your glory. This dilutes your religion (a penalty to dominion strength) but makes the forces in question like you. It may also unlock extra, sacred versions of units associated with that force.
b) Pact of elevation. When you are Supreme Being, you promise to elevate one faction of supernatural beings above all others. That faction now adores you - all the other factions now hate your guts.
Relationships with forces modify -
a) Morale of beings associated with that force in your armies (and/or magic resistance.)
b) Severity of detrimental spells, associated with that force, that land in your provinces.
c) Type of random events that are generated in provinces that contain sites associated with that force. If Water hates you, provinces with water sites risk being targetted by raiding water elementals and sea trolls, for example.
d) Income from sites associated with that force - water sites have a chance of spitting out extra gems if water really likes you.
e) Random events in general. Some events (e.g. Queen of Water shows up to work for you for no reason) require and/or become more likely depending on elemental relation scales.
These may be independent of any diplomatic initiatives that the forces of water may make for or against you. The two aspects of diplomacy should be disable-able separately.
Similar diplomacy should be available in dealings with the various sentient races.
Pillaging provinces not only pisses off the residents of a given province, but the races represented in the province dislike you, world-wide. This isn't a perfectly satisfying mechanic.
If a race likes you, unrest in provinces populated with that race is reduced, units of that race have positive morale adjustments, and your dominion spreads more easily in provinces populated by that race.
If a race hates you, the reverse of all that applies.
Same things with random events and so forth.
Races can't call players up and demand things, but you should have the option on race-specific policies.
A policy of genocide against a given race means your troops perpetually, and selectively, pillage that race out of all provinces. Obviously they hate you.
A policy of disfavor against a race raises tax income from that race's population, at the expense of making them dislike you.
A neutral policy towards a given race has no effect.
A policy of favor towards a race costs you money but makes them like you more.
Finally, you can nominate one race as the master race, if you wish, promising them a favored place in the new order when you ascend. Like the equivalent pact with one of the forces, they really like this and all the other races really hate it.
__________________
If you read his speech at Rice, all his arguments for going to the moon work equally well as arguments for blowing up the moon, sending cloned dinosaurs into space, or constructing a towering *****-shaped obelisk on Mars. --Randall Munroe
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