Wishlist: The Modder's Wishlist

[HoneyBadger]

DrPraetorious, I have to disagree that an aging system such as I have proposed would disenfranchise humans. Humans age quickly, it's true, but they also breed quickly, learn quickly, and in their relatively(and relative to a dragon perhaps, but not relative to almost every other animal on earth) "short" lifespans (approaching 75 years life expectancy, up from around 55 at the turn of the century, and maybe 25 in Dom 3), are able to increase in skills, knowledge, and power quite efficiently, and to pass those things on to their children, so that those children might live longer and better lives. If they weren't able to adapt and grow over time, then yes, the other races eventually would overrun them. But that's not what happened on Planet Earth, and a clever player backed up with good balancing shouldn't let it happen in a game, providing his or her opponent isn't more clever still. And noone who was unable to protect and nurture his or her growing units over time should be picking such a long-lived race to play.

Very large games with very large maps might last a very long time. I've seen people talking about games already lasting 1000 turns. That's over 80 game years already, and Dom 3 hasn't been out for 2 whole months. Rather than a gigantic, epic game becoming boring over time, I'd like to know that I have the opportunity to play a game which will still be interesting a year or even 10 years from now, without creating a new game with a new nation every time I want to see something different. I'm just asking for a relatively simple solution (programming wise) which might possibly require the addition of several hundred new creatures, but has that ever been a bad thing? Certainly not for the Dominions franchise. And while it would require a lot of work indeed, I'm not asking that the burden be put on the designers, or anyone, for that matter. If you didn't want to put that work in, then you certainly wouldn't have to. I'm just asking for the option, the choice to use or not to use a function which can just as easily sit there and gather dust, or that could, with a great deal of time and effort, transform a game as we currently play it into something a lot more dynamic. And it would make the aging system (which I personally think is a wonderful idea, as is, but which I read a lot of gripes about) a lot more fun.

By the way, thank you for pointing out the .dm files available here. I really just needed a point to start off from, since I've badly misplaced my manual, and I can't get a mod to work just from reading the mod doc.

[B0rsuk]

I can't find a place to download the modding manual, and I'm still waiting for my copy, but

I'd love do see some unit orders restricted to terrain, for example

#restrictedtoforests
I have several ideas for my pseudo-slavic nation mod, and they would greatly benefit from commanders who can
1) summon allies in forests, swamps or mountains
2) assassinate in forests only
3) seduce in forest and swamp
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OUT OF TOPIC
Units getting stronger with age make sense only for units who _keep_growing_, and it's already the case (but not a game mechanic) for atlantians. Compare ages of atlantian spearmen, shambler, coral queen, basalt king....

In other cases, creatures should indeed get worse with age, especially old age. See Longdead, Master Lich...

[thejeff]

Humans could benefit from this kind of aging mechanic as well.
Especially mages, who might be expected to suffer physically, but grow in magical ability with age.
There are a number of units that already show an age progression, as B0rsuk suggests. The most obvious human example might be Man's Daughter, Mother, Crone.

[zepath]

Honeybadger, several hundred new creatures can take quite a lot of effort to make. I can't count the hours spent drawing art for the eighty or so monsters I've used in my nation mods. If such a system could be made to "fit" within the current parameters of the game and its rules, I think you should lobby for it to appear in Dominions 4. As a mod for the current game it is probably unrealistic. This is especially so because the devs are no doubt working at patching bugs and providing us with the additional nations they've mentioned and new game mechanics are much farther off on their horizon.

thejeff, most human and human-like mages already suffer physically with age through the old age mechanics and can grow in magical ability as the game progresses. Mages (and non-mages) of all races can grow in power by using Empowerment. Mages also gain research bonuses by acquiring experience. Age implies a biological process the ends of which are infirmity and death. Simply making creatures better because they get older does not fit in a game that already has numerous mechanics for individual unit improvement: experience, heroic abilities, prophethood, death matches, magic items, empowerment, etc. Now, if there were a mechanic for a mage with Death or Blood magic (or one who acquires them through Empowerment) to undergo the transition to lichdom, that would be sweet. I can imagine a few other means of alternate "Empowerment" that would be quite easy to implement and would add some of the additional depth that you and Honeybadger are talking about.

[HoneyBadger]

Zepath, the point isn't the time and effort required to produce several hundred monsters, it's the time and effort required to add the feature, which I figure could be done in under 15 minutes by a competent programmer, which Johan certainly is, and more. All you have to do is tell the computer to search through all the units per turn-which it would do anyway to check and see if any units are old-to see if any have reached a certain age number. The number's already in there for each unit. When it's determined that one has reached the target number, the computer looks up the unit and the mod tells the computer to #shapechange it to whatever unit, permanently, instead of telling it to age the unit, which it already does. With unit aging already implemented, the whole process takes the programmer a fraction of an hour to code and the computer a fraction of a second to perform. I could do it myself if I had the source code, and I'm a terrible programmer+unfamiliar with this particular language and where everything's located in the code for the game. It's pretty simple functionally even back to the days of BASIC, a million years ago.

The time spent creating a mod that utilizes such a function to it's full potential would ofcourse require a lot of man-hours. But, it could be done by a single dilligent modder, and that's the point I'm trying to make. I have lots of free time so no worries there, and I can draw reasonably well, even on a computer if I have to. If you want to make it a lot faster and easier for me, kindly send me a light-pen and driver software that will be compatible with my laptop I'd be more than happy to share any Dom 3 images I created with the pen with you and rest of the modding community.

[HoneyBadger]

Now to answer the questions about unit upgrades already in the game: Yes they are there and yes they do their job very well. But, it's a different type of strategy you're talking about, actively concentrating on upgrading your leader units with magic items, empowerments, what have you, or actively fighting with those units and gaining experience. In both case you are using those units directly. What I'm talking about is leaving those units alone so that they can do their own thing, or taking risks with them and potentially having those risks-which increase exponentially over time-pay off in the long term. Kind of like the state (you and your pretender) collecting taxes on a free-market economy (the units you're either risking and that are surviving the risk, or the units that you are protecting and paying the price of that protection). Conditions currently are something along the lines of a communist/socialist economy. No matter how long you stand in line, you're going to get the same scratchy toilet paper, it's just that if you stand in line long enough, you might get more and fresher than the other guy. If you're lucky.

Ofcourse, those units you're paying to protect can still be used for other things, but the longer the game goes on, the harder it is to keep any particular unit alive and undamaged/unafflicted enough to be very useful. Units which are good at passive things, such as research and preaching, often are not ones that are going to be good at combat anyway, nor should they be, and most of these would be afflicted with age, as happens now. Those units which would grow more powerful over time would be the ones that you'd want on the front lines anyway, and so holding them in reserve for years at a time would be a choice which would have real consequences, and if you put that type of unit at risk, and it survives anyway, and keeps surviving, you've gambled well and the Fates have smiled on it and it's good to be rewarded with increased viability as well as having the pleasure of increased individuality. These things help keep such a change to the game in balance, while at the same time, raising the stakes, instead of diminshing them-as happens now-in long epic games.

You start the game and maybe produce 10 Jotun skinshifters on the first turn, and it's exciting because you only have a few, and you put a lot of thought into how you're going to use those skinshifters, because they're all you've got, and if you don't use them carefully, you won't make it very far in the game. By turn 100 you've done well and you can churn out 250 Jotun skinshifters at a pop, knowing that they're going to be the same skinshifters on turn 5000.

Basically, you pay for better units with gold-which you get more of as the game goes on and you conquer more territory, and which, because of it's increased availability, diminishes in value until it's worth it's weight in dirty rainwater, and you pay for better units with resources, which you get a bit more of as you build your infrastructure, but the availability of resources stays much more stable throughout the game, and resources are valuable because of that. Time is always a very valuable resource. If you're paying for better units with time, it's always a rare commodity, and it becomes more and more valuable as a game progresses, because you always have less of it, and you always have the risk that, no matter how great a given game is, this might be your last turn. This means that the longer a game goes on, the better the game should become. This just doesn't happen naturally in a turn-based-strategy environment, or really with any kind of game. There have to be influencing factors such as: plenty of different things to see-which Dom3 does well, plenty of things to do-which Dom3 does VERY well, and good opponents, which the AI doesn't do a bad job of, but human players are generally better. As things are, there are only a finite amount of things to see and do in the game, and those are the same things that are programmed into the game. Thus the whole purpose of modding. If you can, however, add things to see and do, depending on how long you play a particular game (time as currency) then more people are going to want to play games for longer periods of time, which should mean that more people are going to want to buy Dom3, simply because the investment of their valuable time is going to pay off more here than it will playing another game that has a finite amount of things to see and do, regardless of how long you play it. My point is that turn-based-strategy games are exactly the sorts of games which SHOULD get better and more interesting the longer a game goes on, instead of the wave of going from everything-is-fresh-and-new to I-can-do-a-lot-of-things to I've-seen-it-all-and-I'm-bored/exhausted-what's-on-tv that most games currently ride. If Dom3 can break that cycle, then I think it's going to be a very good time for everyone concerned.

[B0rsuk]

Can we have last several posts erased, please ?
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#pathfinding
New commander skill. A commander with this ability automatically transfers his survival skills (if any) to troops he commands. So, for example, a commander with Forest Survival, Swamp Survival, and Pathfinding can lead a squad of units across a forest without movement penalties.