Wishlist for September

[Thufir]

Endoperez said:
Maybe I should post my old "friendly area = friendly dominion" -idea. In short, change the first mover from the owner of the province to the one in his own dominion. Raiders would be caught unless they raided in their own dominion.

This idea sounds a bit arbitrary, to me. From my limited experience, it seems like a difficult proposition to fix the raiding problem in a patch.

The notion that I had (which may well have been proposed previously) is a generalization of the idea of light cavalry having a chance to catch raiders. That being to allow some probability of catching raider based on strat movement. Perhaps +1 strat move gives a 50% chance, +2 gives 75%, etc. Flying armies could give a bonus to catching, and stealthy raiders could give a negative modifier to being caught.

But this sounds like an idea that will be unbalancing, maybe doable in Dom3, but perhaps not in a Dom2 patch.

[Boron]

Cohen said:
The problem is that Nations like Vanheim, Thuata Man, Caelum, Abysya and Mictlan with Fiends or Devils, and every skilled raider could attack you with hit and run, but setting taxes to 200% so he'll kill your pop too even if you after retake the provinces.

Yeah this raiding is imo the most effective way to wage war earlygame when you still can't risk beating the enemy SC pretender . But with your mentioned nations you can raid the hell out of your enemy and he almost can't defend against it .
This way you create a huge gap between you and him and then some turns later your new Sc like an Airqueen or similiar can finish off what the raiders prepared .

[deccan]

Alneyan said:
My only wish is for more modding commands (magic items, or possibly even a way of making new summons; perhaps by copying an already existing spell, and changing the ID of the summoned creature?)

Me too. This way I can get around to making a vampire-only nation to replace Ermor. Hehe.

[Alneyan]

You should actually be able to do so Deccan, although you would have to suffer the Dominion of either Ashen Empire or Soul Gate. These two themes come in with a lot of nation-only spells, and so you should be able to fully change these spells and the creatures they summon to suit your tastes.

In this case, the problem would be the auto-summon of AE/SG (you could ignore these creatures though), and their population-killing Dominions. Note that the above has not been tested, although I should toy with modding nation specific spells one of these days...

[Endoperez]

For dyccan/Alneyan:

Wouldn't it be possible to just make the special spells of Ermor themes national spells of Ermor? This would give them to base Ermor. You could even change the unholy spells as they are unique to Ermor (I think) and your mod won't probably have any unholy priests... Besides, if you changed Ermorian Cultists and Ghouls vampires could just turn up and attack your enemies!

For Thufir:

What about this: the army with faster strategic move moves first. If the army moves in owned province, they get a bonus of +1 to their strategic move when the moving order is considered. With this chance, armies consisting of light cavalry and other troops with Strat. Move of 3 would always catch armies consisting of heavy infantry.

It woldn't help against Caelum though, and would make it very easy for them to repel raids. But then, Caelum is meant to be a good raider...

[deccan]

Endoperez said:
For dyccan/Alneyan:

Wouldn't it be possible to just make the special spells of Ermor themes national spells of Ermor? This would give them to base Ermor. You could even change the unholy spells as they are unique to Ermor (I think) and your mod won't probably have any unholy priests... Besides, if you changed Ermorian Cultists and Ghouls vampires could just turn up and attack your enemies!

Interesting. I did some tests and yes, I could change the paths, ritual casting costs and the resulting creature from a spell like say "Revive Lictor". However, there doesn't seem to be a way to give the spell "Revive Lictor" to base Ermor, so a player will have to choose the AE theme to gain access to the spell, and it doesn't seem to be possible to rename the spell itself.

I'll run some tests and work through some ideas. Thanks Alneyan.

[Alneyan]

Actually you can set the spell to be nation-only; the School command allows you to set it to Ermor only, and it will be available in standard Ermor.

You cannot change the name or the description of the spell though, but everything else can be altered (such as path requirements or gem cost).

[atul]

Endoperez said:
What about this: the army with faster strategic move moves first. If the army moves in owned province, they get a bonus of +1 to their strategic move when the moving order is considered. With this chance, armies consisting of light cavalry and other troops with Strat. Move of 3 would always catch armies consisting of heavy infantry.

The problem I see with this, is that it'd force the implementation of third battle resolution phase. Now, the battles are resolved after 1) magic movement and 2) normal movement. Any new system to catch raiders based on fast movement would need to resolve battles after 1) magic movement, 2) fast unit movement and 3) slow unit movement. It'd be a management nightmare.

Without the third phase, how else would you implement raider movement? Sure, anti-raider group catches the raiders, but what if raiders win? They move to next province like first instructed and battle again? Or could you keep raiders immobile by sending small move-3 Groups at them turn after turn?

I may be missing something since I haven't thought about this much, but that's what I come up with first impression.

[Arryn]

I just need to reiterate the following: The bug, which has been around for the past several patches, in which global spells do not go away when the pretender who cast them goes poof really REALLY needs to be fixed. It's extremely annoying. Please, please, if we get no other fixes/tweaks, let's get this one.

(Can you tell I'm miffed at the moment? )

[Endoperez]

atul said:
Without the third phase, how else would you implement raider movement? Sure, anti-raider group catches the raiders, but what if raiders win? They move to next province like first instructed and battle again? Or could you keep raiders immobile by sending small move-3 Groups at them turn after turn?

I may be missing something since I haven't thought about this much, but that's what I come up with first impression.

That's what I had thought, but I hadn't realised that one could keep the raiders immobile that way... I quess if the raiders moved to the province the small army moved from they might cross each other unnoticed, but that would be the only way of doing so.

I am beginning to think that there is no easy solution to the raiding issue. We still don't have any word from Ilwinter so we don't even know if they are considering changing something. Even if they are they just might not know what to do about it. I wouldn't want to be in a situation like that.