Wishlist: Suggestions for the next patch

[Actuarian]

There are still a lot of bugs. I would prefer to see most of them fixed before implementing any new features. I'd like to see some resolution of the problem where too many trrops on a battlefield causes a CTD. It pretty much ruined a play by email game for me recently.

[Edi]

Actuarian, that particular bug is going to be fixed in the next patch. You're going to see a fairly large amount of the more serious stuff posted into the shortlist thread as soon as I get it organized and formatted to a shortlist friendly format, but like the devs, I also suffer from the condition known as Real Life which entails things like work, girlfriend, friends and a couple of cats. So it'll take a few days now, but then we should have all of the things reported to date shortlisted and Johan and Kristoffer can take a look at them.

Edi

[Hellboy]

Edi said:
Actuarian, that particular bug is going to be fixed in the next patch. You're going to see a fairly large amount of the more serious stuff posted into the shortlist thread as soon as I get it organized and formatted to a shortlist friendly format, but like the devs, I also suffer from the condition known as Real Life which entails things like work, girlfriend, friends and a couple of cats. So it'll take a few days now, but then we should have all of the things reported to date shortlisted and Johan and Kristoffer can take a look at them.

Edi

BTW, I've been meaning to mention that the bug list is excellent work, Edi! Between that and the DB work you've don I'm sure IW must be paying you top dollar!

[Edi]

Thanks, Hellboy. I get paid something on the order of €0.00 per day, with an equally generous weekly, monthly and yearly bonus.

Seriously, it's all voluntary. I'd have done the DB in any case since it is such a useful tool for mapmakers and modders and helps produce superior quality mods and greatly improved maps (due to precise control of what units to put where). And a sufficient number of maps and mods are what will keep the game going quite a bit past the point where it would naturally taper off.

We saw that happen with Dom2, it was slowly starting to decline (as measured by activity here, or as I saw it anyhow) despite a modest number of mods and a fairly good selection of maps. We had Sunray's unit list at that point, but it was incomplete, didn't have all the unit numbers and while useful, wasn't exactly what I was looking for at the time (when I was making the first draft of the Faerun map). So I made a new version and organized that into the Dom2 DB. I later got to see the source code for sites for Dom2, which is why the magic site section of the Dom2 DB is the most complete and accurate part of that documentation.

A side effect of me releasing the Dom2 DB was that suddenly we got a veritable explosion of mods and Zen's idea of the Complete Balance series of mods took on a life of its own almost and becamse an instant hit. After Zen left, quantum mechani took over that and has continued the project since.

Even before I had my own copy of Dom3, I knew that my first order of business would be producing a DB of the base game so that the community would have better to tools to make things happen sooner rather than later. If you were to look at the pace things have gone forward with Dom3 vs how quickly this happened with Dom2, you would find that the process has been significantly accelerated and knowing what mistakes not to repeat has speeded it up still more.

As for the bug list thing, let's just say that the Shrapnel staff made me an offer I couldn't refuse.
Ok, not the Godfather type of offer, but I was asked to tackle the bug thread and sorting the reporting issues out. I accepted for several different reasons and the shortlist thread and the stricter reporting guidelines are an outgrowth of that.

Edi

[Kristoffer O]

And he gets an occasional pat on his head from us.

*pat, pat*



Actually, I've been off-board for a while. So this is his first pat

[Actuarian]

Edi said:
Actuarian, that particular bug is going to be fixed in the next patch. You're going to see a fairly large amount of the more serious stuff posted into the shortlist thread as soon as I get it organized and formatted to a shortlist friendly format, but like the devs, I also suffer from the condition known as Real Life which entails things like work, girlfriend, friends and a couple of cats. So it'll take a few days now, but then we should have all of the things reported to date shortlisted and Johan and Kristoffer can take a look at them.

Edi

Thaks for the heads up, Edi! I'm looking forward to the update. If you are suffering from real life, you can always ignore your friends and girlfriend, but not your cats. Actually, I've been married for 20 years and I can't remember if you can ignore your girlfriend or not. However, I speak with authority to say that you can ignore your wife and resume gaming after three minutes of intense listening.

[Rick L]

I would like to see the AI recruit more expensive units after, say year three. In the mid to late game the AI is a pushover because it recruits lots of low cost troops. The AI obviously never read the manual section entitled "God is not on the side of big battalions."