Christmas Wish List of Features! Dear Kriss Kringle ;)

[Karacan]

My personal wish list is much smaller.

• The ability to easily alchemy huge amounts of gems without clicking huge amounts of time.
• Battle-replay adjustable speed.
• Detailed battle-results in short for all battles witnessed (forts, witnessed battles, special events).
• Ranged attackers taking more care of friendly units.
• Ranged spell scattering having the chance to hit...
• Less disastrous bad luck events with high luck scales.
• More monsters, more nations, more items, more spells, more random events, more... (well, as long as we're wishing.

Well, perhaps there's a christmas miracle coming up, and everyone of us is going to get what he wants (not what he deserves ).

[ December 13, 2003, 17:37: Message edited by: Karacan ]

[HJ]

My wish list would be something like this:

• AI building forts and national units, and maybe some more interesting indie units such as mages as well
• "fire and attack" and maybe "fire and hold" unit orders which take into account how many times unit fires, not just turns
• ability to select more than one unit, gem, etc. when recruiting etc. (such as shift-click)
• research point 'lock' for schools of magic
• more details on exactly what different effects mean
• detailed lists of losses
• enabling/disabling spells [being able to indicate which spells your mage should pick from]

The first two are the most important for me, while the latter ones have already been mentioned by Zen.
Thanks.

[ December 13, 2003, 18:26: Message edited by: HJ ]

[Gandalf Parker]

Mine might be the shortest list yet. I think the modding is going to add plenty to the game.

What I want is a random map generator. Or some helpful smaller moves in that direction.

[SurvivalistMerc]

I will pick one from Zen's and two from HJ's as being most desirable to me.

I would like archer friendly unit behaviors. I'm not totally sure what Zen meant by this, but I would love it if my magi and archers were to consider the relative odds of harming my own units and compare that with the odds of harming enemy units...and NOT FIRE if they don't have at least twice the chance of helping as they do of hurting. Too many times I see my archers firing into my own units when there are about 20 of my units and only about 3 or 4 enemy units, each one of which is inferior to every one of my 20 units. Once I had a mass of Ctis light infantry...and it rather destroyed itself with inaccurately thrown javelins. Different folks may have different preferences here. For me, it makes no sense to hurt your own troops with friendly fire in order to kill off retreating independents, which is something I have seen happen.

From HJ's list, it would be wonderful to have a detailed list of combat losses in the battle summary. Perhaps even listing the commanders by name...Hunerik the Master Smith...etc. They could be detailed by icons if that would be easier to program.

It would also be great to enable/disable certain spells. There are some spells which are so inaccurate early in the game that their casting generally does more harm than good in my estimation.

My Definition of Archer Friendly behaviors is:

Archery Cavalry using their Archery to it's advantage based on orders. Things of this nature could be a "Fire and Run" command only usable my mounted archers of specific or non-specific nations. What this might encompass is the Horse-archers will fire their bows until they are approached a certain (closish, like 3 'hexes' or something) then they will move at full speed to the back of the map and fire their arrows until they are approached in that radius again, if so, they move back (this might only need to be something that happens once, depending on the speed of the unit, they will be at the 'wall' their first 'retreat') and fire their arrows. *IF* they get closer than 3, and can't go nowhere or run out of arrows, then the unit will charge the nearest enemy.

That may or may not be possible or too much work; I don't know if it is or not. That might be too complex for the engine (away would be better but might be too overpowering) but I don't know if the movevment is based on 'forward/backward' as much as 'left/right', whatever. What I would like is an effort if they are going to do anything at all, to make it 'semi-realistic' instead of blanket.

Another "Archer Friendly" issue would be Archers that are targeting a routing or within a radius of your a troops (hopefully the same priority checklist as placed below) (3 or whatever) army changes targets to the fartherst, largest cluster of units (maybe even put in a priority AI of tareting first Largest, next Non-Shield, next Farthest) type of scenario to imitate commander in battlefield order changes.

Common sense things.

Or maybe just put a little checkbox somewhere that says "Friendly Fire" that will tell your troops that if their is a friendly fire situation they don't fire. I can see some instances or army types where you don't care and that could support that. (Normal Archers and Infantry of Ulm for example, Shortbows can't do anything to them so they might as well shoot half at them and half at the enemy).


I know these things are sporatic and kind of jagged, but they are just ideas.

[PvK]

Archer intelligence is my main wish. Above all, avoiding firing when likely to kill own units. Lots of other good ideas here, but just not killing my own men is the main thing I'd like to see improve in the game.

PvK

[Lord Hammer]

Random map generator indeed That would be awesome! Anything else would be plus plus .