what about the future?

[Lizardo]

Pressing the N key cycles between idle commanders.

No, it cycles between commanders defending. If there are 40 defending commanders and another 40 doing something else but only 10 you want to give new orders you still have to find and look at all 80 of them unless you can keep track of them in your head from turn to turn or start up the next day. There is no dedicated status to indicate which ones YOU want to give orders to next. This is a non issue, for decades of development, in all other games, I can't even begin to understand why it's a problem here.

I don't quite follow here. I find the mages extremely specialized, ... In fact, the highly complex and specialized magic system is what makes the (it) great for me.

In Dom1 the Mages had to be individually targeted on each spell casting method. But instead of evolving to where the mages had to learn the methods individually (like the gem stuff) the method mutated into a general pool of point buckets when everyone instantly learned everything. Have your mage farm fill the buckets to level 9 and you get to do everything.

Yes there are existing some specialized mages and early in the game they make a difference but the most common thing to do is make rainbow mages.

There is no advantage to specialize. There are no real difficult choices when you can just research a method and all you mages can use it instantly.

The opportunity was to make the mages learn the methods individually even as you acquire the technology. The second thing to have done was to give mages who specialize in, method and gem, special related abilities and titles, which go away if they stray from the path. Getting a new, meaningful, title for your commander would be interesting.

Going further you could have specialized labs for, say, researching 'Alteration' or making potions or items.

Doing this give the player exclusive choices, which makes the choices both difficult and meaningful. It makes the 'rainbow' mage far less powerful and more difficult to come by.

Yes there is complexity, but it lacks an 'economy', rules that force choices. I want mages that learn and act like mages not magic mushrooms.

There are other shortcuts and mechanics that help too. Like monthly ..

I know all those. It doesn't substitute for poor design. Keeping all relevant information and actions together is what the design philosophy should be. But even in something as simple as casting a spell the amount of gems scrolls up out of sight as you scroll down the spell list.

Often, when doing something magical, you need to do some alchemy but then you have to back out of the lab and re-enter it to do that. Or put some rock in some mage's pocket to help with the lab activity.

The Gem information, Alchemy, Spell Casting, Item Production and list of available mages should all be right there. Available mages includes ALL mages with Lab access, not just the ones in the province.

Then you can do everything you need to do very quickly without jumping in and out of screens each and very time for each and every step of each and every activity.

For that matter, there's no reason why something the Alchemy Stone has to leave to lab to function as all alchemy occurs within the player turn.

With all due respect. The placement and scripting system is certainly a bit unintuitive, ..

I understand placement and scripting well. What happens is that if an orc runs up to my commanders on the right side of the field my mage on the left side of the field drops a nuke on them to kill the orc. And usually misses the orc while he blows up everyone else. Instead of aiming at the mass of archers far in the rear of the front line he drops bombs on the guys in melee. Which would be not horrible if he would center of the rear so undershoots don't wipe out the line. And there is no script that tells troops not to stack up.

There's a Paradox game, Chariots of War, which also does program resolved battles that you set up. Their algorithms don't exhibit this behavior, it it is possible to do.

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There have been some minor tweaks to the GUI from D2 to D3, including making the background dark so un-highlighted units fade into it but it hasn't really changed in a way that makes communicating with the program less difficult. It was behind the times when it was originally written and it's ten years older.

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Misc.
Have the ability to tell commanders how many gems they should be carrying and let them pick up or drop gems based upon that.

This is the idea of 'automating' micromanagement. Same with the build queues, state how many of what should be in production and for how long.

Allow complex plotting of movement, beyond one turn. As a good example HoI2 AoD, or Trade Empires. Those are RTS but it should be simple to do in a TBS.
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I love the complexity but there has to be a way to manage it without burn out. And complexity alone doesn't give you the kind of meaningful choices that are needed.

The game isn't nitch because it is complex, it is nitch because the interface discourages participation by all but the most dedicated and pain tolerant.

Solving these problems instead of excusing them will make the difference between the effort being a hobby and something that can earn money for the authors.

[Gregstrom]

Originally Posted by Lizardo

No, it cycles between commanders defending. If there are 40 defending commanders and another 40 doing something else but only 10 you want to give new orders you still have to find and look at all 80 of them unless you can keep track of them in your head from turn to turn or start up the next day. There is no dedicated status to indicate which ones YOU want to give orders to next.

Sorry, I'm missing something here. You have 80 commanders. 40 are idle (because defend=idle - defend is the default behaviour for commanders with no orders) and 40 are following orders already. Do you want to assign new orders to 10 of the 80, or just 10 of the 40 who are otherwise unassigned?

Either way, this 'I want to give this commander orders' status is a little confusing to me. Is it something you set manually?

[Graeme Dice]

Originally Posted by Lizardo

In Dom1 the Mages had to be individually targeted on each spell casting method.

No they didn't. The magic system hasn't changed a bit from Dominions 1. Every mage has always had access to every spell your nation has researched.

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Lizardo

I know all those. It doesn't substitute for poor design. Keeping all relevant information and actions together is what the design philosophy should be.

Solving these problems instead of excusing them will make the difference between the effort being a hobby and something that can earn money for the authors.

Couple of small points.
The game wasnt designed. It evolved gradually. From a BASIC game on an Atari, thru C on Unix, thru C+ on Linux. For that its not a bad result. Some "design flaws" have been acknowledged by the devs as items which would require a complete rewrite.

And, the goal here was never to move from hobby to money-maker. That does have a part in understanding why some things got fixed and others didnt.

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

Couple of small points.
The game wasnt designed. It evolved gradually. From a BASIC game on an Atari, thru C on Unix, thru C+ on Linux. For that its not a bad result. Some "design flaws" have been acknowledged by the devs as items which would require a complete rewrite.

And, the goal here was never to move from hobby to money-maker. That does have a part in understanding why some things got fixed and others didnt.

If I'm not mistaken that is in fact one of the (main?) reasons Illwinter aren't actively planning on making a Dom4: They feel they have taken the current system as far as it can go, and improving it - amongst other things with various of the suggestions you make - would pretty much require them to rewrite the entire code from the ground up. Something they have no intrest in doing, since it isn't "fun" to remake something they have already made once before.

Unfortunately for us, of course...

[Lizardo]

How much time is necessary for the program to evolve? It's been ten years.

And, the goal here was never to move from hobby to money-maker.

That mean I get my 50 back?

Besides money, how can I motivate a change to the UI to make it less painful and more helpful?

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If they are not interested in evolving a D4, would they turn it over to another development group?

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This isn't a feasible game design decision (ie the resulting mess ...

That's an exaggeration. Mages would be more focused, but more effective in their specialty.

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How far is their office from the Paradox office?

[Gandalf Parker]

Originally Posted by Lizardo

How much time is necessary for the program to evolve? It's been ten years.

I think it evolved great. Your little personal gripes seem very minor compared to where it came from. Also keep in mind that it goes real job, family, self time, hobby work on little game thing.

That mean I get my 50 back?

Well they are giving away their first game for free now. Which isnt really a bad little time killer. But no I think that the cost of outsourcing limited pressings has the cost of Dom3 fairly frozen.

Besides money, how can I motivate a change to the UI to make it less painful and more helpful?

3rd party programs, macro recorders, etc.

Or if you mean getting Illwinter to break off of their latest fun project to drudge back into the Dom3 code, didnt your mommy ever teach you about please and thank you? Some people here have a knack for reviving the devs love for certain nations or game aspects and then casually mention a slight irritation while praising most of the game. Others have a habit of insulting the game, the developers, the publishers, and then whining about things dont ever get changed. Its not too hard to trace back thru the games progress page and compare it to the threads that got things done to see.

If they are not interested in evolving a D4, would they turn it over to another development group?

Im not sure why they would want to do that. Generally that creates a bad taste to the original developers or authors when they see what a new company does with it.

But we arent sure they arent interested in a D4. Maybe the new project is one (I personally doubt it) or maybe they will swing back that direction down the road.

How far is their office from the Paradox office?

Illwinters? No real "offices" but it operates mostly in Lund, Sweden

[Squirrelloid]

Originally Posted by Gandalf Parker

But no I think that the cost of outsourcing limited pressings has the cost of Dom3 fairly frozen.

.... what?

Cost of the disc: <10 cents. Ok, its probably ~1 cent (a disc is a disc, they can buy in bulk and use them for multiple different titles) but we might assume they don't order enough discs total to get quite that good a price. But *I* can buy writeable discs for <10 cents, so a game publisher certainly can.

Which leaves the manual, which honestly, they could just put the pdf on the disc and reduce their materials cost/unit to the cost of the disc. However, the manual itself can't cost them more than a few bucks to print.

Most of a cost for a game is to account for development time. After a while (usually a year or less for computer games) the price starts dropping because the publisher understands that if more units move, then they'll see more total income and thus more profits, since the development cost/unit is not a fixed amount. (Rather, its a total that needs to be made up by all sales). Basic economics teaches us that reducing price increases sales.

That dom3's price hasn't moved is pure stupidity on Shrapnel's part.

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Re: "Dom 4". Now, IANAL, but, at least in the US, game mechanics aren't copyrightable or patentable. The description of the mechanics (in the manual or game help) is copyrightable, but not the mechanics themselves. So if someone wanted to make a Dominions 3 clone, they very well could. Of course, the creative content that is original to Dom3 is all copyrightable, so that couldn't be reproduced, but since much of the source material is mythological, factions derived from the same source material are perfectly permissible.

Of course, you wouldn't even want to use Dom3's exact mechanics, since that's where a lot of the problems are. So what you end up with is a game that's inspired by Dom3. What you lose is the factions that have the most creative work put into them - Abysia and Agartha (not the names, but the nature of the factions) for example. Other factions are pretty much straight up conversions of myth to faction, so while there would be changes, a Vanir inspired faction would still be recognizably Vanheim for example. And various gradations in-between.

The magic system's divisions are, for the most part, stolen straight from D+D (1st/2nd ed. AD+D specifically), so that's not a problem. The gem spending mechanic seems to be derivative of MoM in form (which would be the only arguably 'creative' aspect - function being the mechanic itself which is not copyrightable). The actual spells would need changing in many cases (although 'fireball' is certainly not intellectual property, some of them certainly are).

Not that Dom3 is without legal problems of its own... (Illithids and Aboleths are WotC's intellectual property, and used without permission afaict.)

Now, obviously it couldn't be *called* dom4...

[Valerius]

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

Re: "Dom 4". Now, IANAL, but, at least in the US, game mechanics aren't copyrightable or patentable. The description of the mechanics (in the manual or game help) is copyrightable, but not the mechanics themselves. So if someone wanted to make a Dominions 3 clone, they very well could. Of course, the creative content that is original to Dom3 is all copyrightable, so that couldn't be reproduced, but since much of the source material is mythological, factions derived from the same source material are perfectly permissible.

Of course, you wouldn't even want to use Dom3's exact mechanics, since that's where a lot of the problems are. So what you end up with is a game that's inspired by Dom3. What you lose is the factions that have the most creative work put into them - Abysia and Agartha (not the names, but the nature of the factions) for example.

Yes, I've got to think that would be the point of purchasing the rights to Dominions, since it is always mentioned that the code will be rewritten. But I wonder how long it would be before TNN would be changed to elves, Ulm to dwarves, etc. I like traditional fantasy but one of the things I like about Dominions is that it takes a different approach. It seems to me you could make a good argument that you'd sell more copies if you changed nations to the archetypes most people would expect. And while that argument might not do much to sway IW (something I've always liked about them) I would expect for most developers that would, understandably, be a big factor. In short, I wonder if Dominions would retain its spirit with IW out of the picture.

Originally Posted by Squirrelloid

The magic system's divisions are, for the most part, stolen straight from D+D (1st/2nd ed. AD+D specifically), so that's not a problem. The gem spending mechanic seems to be derivative of MoM in form (which would be the only arguably 'creative' aspect - function being the mechanic itself which is not copyrightable).

I recall reading that Ars Magica, an RPG with a wonderfully realized medieval setting, was an influence on the magic system.

[Soyweiser]

Originally Posted by Valerius

It seems to me you could make a good argument that you'd sell more copies if you changed nations to the archetypes most people would expect.

Buying the IP, and then throwing it out. Now that would be a design mistake. **** the code, the IP from dominions is worth the money. (With IP, I mean the backstory of the nations, the different nations themselves, the different sites, the magic system (spell names and effects), the images etc).

And why? Because with the IP comes a community of fans. (Yippy, that is you and me!).