Item wish list?

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by Morag:
More nation specific artifacts. There is only one for C'tis now. Why other nations haven't got any?

Mjollnir or Gungnir would be great for Vanheim.

They might appear with the Ragnarök scenario/patch i never seem to finish.

[Kristoffer O]

Originally posted by GhostHawk:
What about the ability to forge custom items with combined effects (similar to Master of Magic). You could balance with the cost: e.g. Items with 2 effects cost 3x and take two rounds to forge, etcetera…

Balancing of items is a major obstacle. Simple spell effects can be very powerful when placed in an item. A wise way to assign paths, levels and research is not easily done. I haven't played much MOM, but IIRC artifacts was one of the major imbalances in that game. Modding of items is easier and not as easy to abuse vs other players as they will have to agree to your mods if you want them in your game.

[GhostHawk]

Thanks Kris. I agree that the ability to customize or combine powers into an item can take a lot of effort to balance. I don’t believe the developers can be made accountable for every way in which people will abuse the system. We know that it is never possible to completely balance a game…. ;-)

In any case, if you would support that feature, others could write a mod that would enable its use. In that way it is up to the players as to if they wanted to include it.

As a side, it is really great that the developers actively participate in the Boards and I appreciate all the hard work you have done to date on the game.

[PvK]

Agreed. MOM had tons of balance issues, bugs and AI weaknesses, and the magic items were probably one of them. Another advantage of Dominions items not being free-form-creatable (besides balance issues) is that they are well-chosen in interesting and appropriate ways that make sense have have a history (or comedy, or mystery) to them. It was sort of fun in MOM to be able to put the same spell on every picture, but it also detracted from the meaningfulness of the images, since they generally meant next to nothing - an impressive-looking item could do nothing impressive and/or nothing related to what it looked like, or could look the same as a completely different item, even though they both looked unique, etc.

Anyway, modding items would be great. The current items are very diverse and well done, but more are of course always welcome, assuming they're carefully made and balanced, like the existing ones.

As for nation-specific items, they are nice, and would be fun to be able to mod in new ones. Ermor has a laurel (which for some reason, other nations can make but not use?), and Mictlan has a jade knife, but I think that's available to others as well.

I was thinking it'd be interesting to mod in some more national items, even if just generic ones like giving everyone Versions of the magic trinket and armor items that match their national equipment and/or theme - magic spathas, pikes, greco helmets and round shields for Arco, magic obsidian swords for Mictlan, etc etc etc, all pretty tame and based on the existing items and existing difference in generic items.

Not that I've got around to using anywhere near all of the existing items...

PvK

[Norfleet]

I wouldn't say MOM had balance issues: There wasn't any multiplayer, and as such, it's hard to say anything is balanced or unbalanced. By that analogy, everyone would agree that Ashen Empire is way overpowered, because it steamrolls over the AI every time. Of course, Dom2 has multiplayer, and the overwhelming AI dominance of AE simply doesn't appear against humans who have any idea how to play.

Dominions 2 does a much better job overall than MOM, though: Master of Magic had a fair number of thoroughly useless spells and items, whereas in Dominions, everything does SOMETHING useful for somebody.

[PvK]

Well yes, that's what I meant. If you define balance as multiplayer human balance, well that's not what I meant by balance. As you mentioned, MOM (without 3rd party hacks) was single-player only, and the AI wasn't good enough to offer much challenge to a player who figured out what some of the more powerful techniques were, and who didn't prevent himself from using them. So yes, you could say that rather than being unbalanced, the AI just wasn't programmed to be able to compete against a human who had learned tricks. That's true of essentially any very complex game, and it becomes a matter of degree (how long it takes players to learn strategies the AI can't counter; in my case I don't think I ever actually lost any game against the MOM AI). Perhaps you could even claim MOM was balanced, because every choice of human nation could be used to wipe out the AI.

Naturally, there are different ways to define balance. (Edit: Another way to put it - there are different types of balance.) Ability to steamroller the AI using certain fairly simple techniques, and relative impotence of a large number of game features are a couple of them. Those were what I was referring to.

If you could play MOM multi-player, though (and yes a couple of 3rd party hacks allow this), there might be many interesting choices of nation and strategy which could be balanced and interesting to play against each other.

PvK

[ February 03, 2004, 23:09: Message edited by: PvK ]

[Norfleet]

A couple of third party hacks did manage to enable multiplayer capability, but I don't think they ever overcame in the inability of a defending player to actually control his forces....so basically, the attacker always won, and defense was totally worthless. It tended to strongly distort the game in favor of making sure your units were able to disappear before being attacked at all. All in all, I wouldn't say that the multiplayer hacks did anything to demonstrate balance or lack thereof. While it's true that MOM had a fair number of humorous ways to abuse the AI, the Dominions II AI is just as susceptible to various abusive techniques that fail easily against humans.

Although at least Dominions II doesn't have the 13-book Free Infinite Monster flash mob summoner. Still, for a single player game....balance, schmalance.

[ February 04, 2004, 00:50: Message edited by: Norfleet ]