The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Hasslmaster]

Dear Illwinter,

I just want to encourage you to stick to your well-thought-out design decisions rather than replacing them with posters' generic more-of-everything proposals.

E.g., it was your well considered choice to let players determine only five orders for a leader. It's a nice device to not let mages and supercombatants get out of hand.
Other examples include how assassination is handled randomly, that troopless leaders rout when one of them dies (thus giving troops a reason to exist in late game), or the restriction to build only one castle type.

Stardock and Quicksilver (with their unspeakable MoO3) both made the experience that it's not a good move to base game design decisions on the choices of hard core gamers on forums. Learn from their mistakes before you have the chance to repeat them.

But, as we're allowed to place suggestions here,

• please get rid of the item exploits like clam hoarding, (instead of make them easier to manage!)
  
• and please greatly nerf life draining effects like soul vortex.

[silhouette]

A couple of the requests here have asked to be able to save pretenders or have backups of such, why not go the next step: Make the pretender/nation design a standalone program, and make the game executable able to find and ask you to pick from all the defined pretenders on nation selection.

It wouldn't need a fancy database backend, most (sane) folks won't have hundreds of choices, but even being able to have a favorite set of 6 for some nations would be great. Having to juggle the newlord files is possible but does not add teh fun (sic). I am an old roleplayer and have almost as much fun designing new gods as playing them. I imagine being able to load up a just-played pretender, changing his name, altering some magic paths and scales, and trying the new design in a game. If I don't like him, I can delete it and load the original back to try different tweaks. This would be also great since I like to play human-designed, AI played opponents in SP -- pick all human nations, set them all up from the pretenders I designed for each, and then set all but 1 or 2 to AI to play against.

Thanks for considering our input. We are a fortunate community to have a company and developers who are accessable and so open to feedback.

Sill

[silhouette]

Oooh, how about two additional stealth commander orders...

- Pilfer from lab: Allows a chance to take a random item from the enemy magic item treasury in the province (or gems?). If you fail you fight the province defense.
- Pickpocket from commander: Allows a chance to take a random misc slot item from a commander (or gems?). If you fail you fight [the commander and bodyguards | the commander and all his troops | the commander and troops plus province defence | all enemy forces ?]

Sill

[YellowCactus]

I'd like a movement safeguard. Like pressing the space-bar as you give movement orders. There's nothing more frustrating than planning moves to perfection, then getting a message that some of your army didn't make the critical move because you mis-clicked at some point.
Maybe a sageguard for changing movements would work as well.
Thanks,
-Yc

[Addreon]

Well, from what I have gathered, Dominions seems to be a very interesting game. A game in which I've been waiting for quite some time now.

Here are my ideas:

1) A divinty status after a certain amount of levels in each sphere of influence is achieved (necromancy and etc) starting from a demigod, to a lesser god, then finally a full god. At the divine status of a full god, the player will become a disembodied god, letting the faith be the primary power. This will make it even more of a challenge for players to eliminate them. They must destroy the faith to destroy the god, not the other way around. The god's former form could become his/her avatar and could be used to appear in battles and so forth.

2) When I played the demo, I had no control over my units and it all seemed automated. I'd like complete full control over my units and their abilities. It is the best to allow me to strategize tactics.

3) Animated units in battle.

4) Fully customizable god forms. From size, to wings, skin color, auras, and more. Perhaps when a god reaches a new level to learn new abilities, he or she could add bonus appearance changes to their god.

[RedRover]

Dom3 Wish List: Flight Over Seas

I would like to see Flying units gain the capability to cross one sea province, provided they can land at the end of their movement.

I don't care if they can't use the full fly move across water, but sometimes there's a map with an island one sea zone from everything, and I think a flyer should be able to reach something like that.

I wouldn't mind if such units attacking across a sea province were destroyed if they fail. Players choose their risks and take their chances.

(Not knowing that much about coding, I’m not certain how this might be incorporated. My current idea is the rather clunky one of introducing some sort of ocean waypoint command and make the player click on the sea province to be crossed, then click again on the target province, but as I said, clunky. Anyone have any ideas about an approach?)

[Zen]

All this requires is to give the Flying Command a tie into the Sailing. It wouldn 't be hard at all to code as the command and effect is already there.

However, if it's a good idea, is another matter

[slimemold]

People have asked for less micromanagement. Here's a tangentially related request: cumulative intelligence. Dom2 rewards players who tediously record every bit of information from previous turns, in order to get estimates of indy strength, or to track likely sources of enemy dominion. When a scout goes through an indy province, it would be nice if someone could remember his report 2 turns later, perhaps with a notation indicating how old the intelligence is.

Currently, to play optimally it is necessary to maintain a spreadsheet of past information, and that's just not very fun. We are playing this on a computer, after all, and computers are nothing if not good at compiling data.

[RedRover]

Zen:

I think the simple tying of flight to Sailing is not a good idea.

First, there may be some conditions that would affect one and not the other.

Second, allowing the full aerial move over water leads to other distortions, particularly on the world-size maps where the sea provinces represent huge areas.

Also, my intuition is that allowing aerial moves across a several-water-province barrier is bad for balance.

On the other hand, not being able to make a small jump plays havoc with my suspension of disbelief and immersion.

Thus, a small conflict and a wish.

[RedRover]

Spell Scripting Improvements

1) Show what spells are being scripted as the scripting is being done.
Many times I get confused halfway through scripting a sequence, lose track of where I am, and have to start over.

2) Add the ability to edit a spell script without starting over.
Let’s say I have plugged in Mistform and Body Ethereal, then decide I should have cast Quickness first. I’d like to be able to insert Quickness at the start of the sequence without having to go back and retype everything.