This would have been a lot better than dominions!

[Tichy]

A thought: It seems to me that magic summons are part of the design. The nations are supposed to become more powerful as time goes on, both horizontally (more provinces, money, larger armies) and vertically (more powerful individual units available). Vertical power is implemented in two ways. 1) Magic summons that must be researched, 2) items to give to recruitable units to put them more on a par with the units available through magic. The problem seems to be that most veterans agree that recruitable+items is almost never as powerful as decent mid-game summon+items.

A possible solution: A third way of introducing an increase in vertical power. Add in researchable spells specific to different nations that create magic sites that either allow the nation to recruit uniquely powerful units (thus adding in an upkeep component to certain particularly desirable troops) or allow mages to 'enter' the site and summon these units 1/turn (to prevent horde-ing).

I know that magic sites exist with these properties, but I don't know if the capacity exists for spells that create them. (Or if anyone would think this is a good idea.)

[konming]

This idea is implemented quite well in Master of Magic. In that game you get more and more powerful summons but as you develop your cities, you can also produce more and more powerful units. Top tier producable units like paladins can go toe on toe to most summons. And normal units buffed up by spells (like slingers) can also be extremely powerful.

[konming]

I think dominions is fine as way it is. COE is a quite interesting game, but it is geared towards single player. You always find more interesting encouters etc. But these role playing things are not so good for multiplayer as 1) it creates huge balance problem 2) it makes the turn even longer than it is now 3) multiplayer strategy are based mainly on strategy and therefore predictable things. The role playing element makes random choice and luck much more important and possibly defeat much of the strategy part.

[Nightblade]

I have only 2 annoyances with COE.

-sneaking armies
This one is annoying because of the very limited vision around your towns and towers, most of the time you find enemy troops in the middle of your whole territory wondering how they could have traveled there without being noticed by your army, towers or towns.
Certainly as a workaround you could send additional single commanders everywhere as scouts, but when i tried this i quickly understood that doing so is hurting your economy so much that you will be unable to field enough troops and so you are in fact dooming your side to lose in lnog term.

-combat rules
The primary annoyance i have with COE, the combat system that gives the advantage to the defense allowing a defensive stack to have all of their units hitting 1st.
Basically if you want to have a chance you must never attack an enemy stack that is globally equal to your troops, because by attacking them they will hit you first, weakening your troops a lot before you have even a chance to retaliate.

Certainly the problem is not big in the beginning of the game when you meet some stacks with 2 militia inside or 1 lonesome deer.
Or against some of the enemy races that field weak troops, but in the case of races that are capable of fielding several stacks like this one :

with the combat rules of defense hit first, this kind of enemy stack will always devastate your troops if you attack first, as they have more than 100hp each, multiple attack of strong damage and regenerating (those swamp gods especially i can't believe how much troops and catapults it took me to take just one down ).

And because the system always gives the 1st attack to the whole defense units, if you field some good troops yourself, those kind of stack will not attack first, waiting for you to do this (and so to have your troops weakened a lot).

Despite Dominons 3 combat system is turn based too, it avoids creating this problem in a verty elegant way with all the troops positions, scripted orders and units stats that will affect the outcome of the 1st assault.

But for a simpler game like COE that has no conditions to influence the 1st hitting side, it is very unfortunate that both sides do not attack in the same time during a turn, it would have been a lot better than the current system.

[Aezeal]

Hmm I'd say the point that dominions equalized mid-end game through use of summons if often correct. My suggestion for improvement would be the addition of a few "buildings" (al civ or even better master of magic (not so much of em)) which give the option to produce stronger units with a little better power/cost (either cash or resource) ratio OR (and this would be best) nice special attacks. More specialized units coudl have a role there too.

In the end it'll still end up with all nations taking the most powerfull mages and summons but there would be more steps towards that making the games more varied. Also making more national summons and or other spells and making them more powerfull OR giving them more special abilities would also help a lot in differentiating end game play.

Give some nations strong melee summons, others stronger mages, others weaker summons which summon other special troops that sort of thing.

Making more STRONG unique summons would help too, sure it would be a bit of a race towards the strongest of them but if they cost a lot then the runner up could always take nr 2 and still not be far behind. Or he could focus on killing the summon and then taking it himself.. or wishing for it

Aez

[WraithLord]

I was quietly following this thread and I'd like to say that I find most of the observations made here to be true. I think dominions is by far better than AOW-SM for example in the "generic multiple races" department but still lacking as was put so eloquently in this thread.

I'm very happy that KO has a similar perspective, so hopefully some resulting goodness will trickle to dominions.

All those references to a future project make me quite giddy - a new game by IW is sure to be deep and entertaining experience (given that this project is indeed a game and not a new 3d engine or some such ).

[Argitoth]

Funny thing about Dominions is that the strategies you can use are many. If you were to add strategies that would cause people to "rush to a summon or unit" people would counter that. That is a good thing.

The "rush to a summon or unit" in other games (real-time stratgies) make the game boring because there's nothing to counter it. You either get the best units or you are not as powerful. In dominions, it's not that way.

However, remember thant the best thing about Dominions is multiplayer. If Conquest of Elysium has no multiplayer, I'd never play it.

[Endoperez]

You should try it out because it's made by Illwinter if not for anything else. It's very different from Dominions thanks to the maps being tile-based: seasons are visible and have much greater effect, forests can be burned down, mines depleted etc to harm your enemies or to create golems, etc etc. Besides, it's much more fun in SP that Dominions, IMO. It's much more random, and because it uses the I-go-You-go turn-based system both in map and in battles, it's inherently unbalanced, and thus much less fun in multiplayer than it is in SP where you can mostly disregard that.

[Argitoth]

Playing a single player game, IMO, is like going to the movie theaters alone. Doesn't matter how great a game is, there's no point in playing by yourself IMO. Just like movies, no matter how great the movie is, I'd never go alone.

[Kristoffer O]

Just like reading a book by yourself. I would never do it