The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[tinkthank]

ADDENDI to my post above, v. 1

These fall under section III, "Concrete Suggestions", with one Plea at the end

- Concrete suggestion for UI overhaul: Make the "message" screen an interactive interface with either these 5 "filters" or with click-links to 5 different "tabs", "registers" or screens, each of which will have some of the functionality described below. The gist of this is to give the nation a "feel" for their various branches, ranging from executive (message) to the various operational aspects of running a nation.
1. Trade (shift-f1): The trade screen shows a list of all items, gems, and money you have sent Last month and to whom; on this screen you also see who sent what to you; this is also the screen you use to send gems, items or money to others next turn. I envision an interface that looks a bit like a webmail screen, with an IN and an OUT section, and there are buttons for sort-by (type, nation, etc.) and for sending new tradable resources (send-gems, send-money, send-items). EDIT: Individual trade actions in the Outbox can be edited and/or deleted here without having to delete all Messages.
2. Message Board (shift-f2): Another webmail-looking screen in which your incoming Messages are sorted and from which you can send new Messages to other nations. EDIT: Individual Messages in the Outbox can be edited and/or deleted here without having to delete all Messages.
3. Events (shift-f3): "Unrest in increasing in Bobville." A list of feedback from events, sortable by type: Battles, luck events, sneaking events, etc.
4. Magic (shift-f4): "Bob has cast Snotty Rain". A list of all the spells you have cast and who cast them Last turn.
5. Laboratory Reports (shift-f5): "Bob has forged a Hammer of Hatred": Lists the mages who have forged items, what they forged, and where they can be found.
Edit: Screen 6: Ally Screen (see below).

- Function: Disband Troops. I can think of two ways to do this; probably one of them is too hard, and the other may not be as neat but better from both an RPG as well as a game mechanics perspective.
v1: On a troop overview screen, click on and highlight the troops you want disbanded and hit "d"; a popup screen comes on and asks "Do you really want to disband these troops permanently?"
v2: Disbanding can only be done by a commander. Gather all the troops you want disbanded under a commander who can lead these troops. Set commander's orders to "Disband"; next month, all the troops under that commander's lead have disappeared (have been killed by "diseases", if the game mechanics require some way to do this easily).

- Some Random Events should be more strongly tied to the province in which they occur. For example, snows blocking trade routs resulting in tax losses of 100 gold should not be able to occur in provinces whose income are only 20 gold; there can be forest fires harming resource production, but only in forest provinces.

- I like the way that Dominion plays an important role in many ways, I would like to see this implemented even more. I would like to see more spells which are influenced by higher / lower dominion, and could imagine seeing tax income *slightly* more affected by dominion over and beyond scales (such as the way that Miasma works, but globally and with somewhat less potency).

- (odd BALANCE SUGGESTION: Taxes can only be raised in a province which is not your capital by 20% per month that province is owned; thus newly conquered provinces can have at most 120% taxes, although they can be set to 0% at any time, but to 200% only after 5 months.)


- ALLY INTERFACE: I know nothing about programming, but I think this would be a really big job; if successfull, it would easily take Dominions3 into a new dimension worthy of a new game, not just an expansion.
Screen 6 is Ally Screen: You can offer your alliance here to any nation you can "see"; if an Alliance offer is sent, the recipient may accept or decline. Once accepted, an alliance can be broke by using this screen -- but one can imagine setting up the interface to allow for certain conditions. Perhaps there are different kinds and types of alliances one may share.

Here's the kick: Once an alliance (of, say, Type A) is made between nation A and B, *the troops of nation A are treated as FRIENDLY by those of nation B and vice versa*.
That means at least these two implications: Nation A and B can both move into province X simultaneously without conflict; they then fight *together* on the battlefield against any enemies that may be there with all restrictions normally applied. (E.g., if Nation A brings 1 commander with 10 militia, Nation B brings only SCs, the armies of A and B will both route once the militia are dead; flaming arrows cast by A, for example, affect all A and B's units.) It also means that A's Globals affect allied B's units as if they were their own (GoH helps B too, Wrath of God does not hurt B).

If nation A and nation B are allied, and A asks nation C if he also wants to ally, both B and C will be messaged and both must give consent.
My suggestion would be that an alliance formed by using the Ally Screen would not change the victory conditions.

Perhaps some alliances can be set at the beginning of the game under Create Game. If A and B ally from the beginning against C and D, one could imagine that the VCs are shared; at least, this could be an exciting option. If the "Share VC" option is clicked, the sum of whatever quantified statistic could be taken (dominion, provs, whatever); I dont think that would be too problematic.

There would have to be rules (perhaps different settings which one can choose when setting up a game) which stipulate IF and if so, under what conditions an AI nation can become an ally. I think, however, that AI nations should not be allowed to ally; their reasons for accepting an alliance with A over B or not at all would be very hard to quantify. For simplicity's sake, I would be more than happy to exclude AI nations from the Ally Screen interface, but allow for AI nations to be allied at the start of the game under Game Setup.
I think this would be a fornicatingly bucketload of fun.
Thanks.


PLEA: It would be most helpful if a member of the Dev team were to express his or her feedback regarding (at least some of) the suggestions on this thread and/or the makeup of the thread in general (till now, there have been but two very brief comments on 2 aspects: commander renaming (already in) and the nagot gik fel message); what is the deal? Are we being helpful? Are we being constructive? Are some of the suggestions good, or bad, or noteworthy, or what? Which types are helpful? Or are we being useless? Are we being to vague? Are we being to unrealistic? Are we being read?
Are we being ignored?

[SurvivalistMerc]

I also like the idea to keep a record somewhere of at least all nations at war with you in case you leave a game for a while and come back but don't remember. This would be helpful even if no new diplomacy AI is implemented. (I personally like diplomacy the way it is because otherwise players learn how to take advantage of the AI to too great an extent.)

It would also help if anytime you see another pretender you would have a record of their magic paths at the time you Last saw them. (Of course you only learn this in battle.)

[Zooko]

I recently realized that if you play a multi-player game, you really ought to keep a record of all the provinces your scouts see, the stats of enemies that you observe in battle, etc.

It would be nice if dom3 would do all this for you, but it seems like a challenge to design and implement a user interface for it.

[Zen]

Tinkthank,

This thread isn't intended to be a "Dev feedback" thread, it is intended to concentrate all the suggestions and 'wishes' of players into one place so that *IF* IW wishes, they can take the suggestions they feel are good and implement them.

Getting a Developer to say "This is good, we'll implement this" is like pulling teeth, especially since these particular Developers are working on a schedule that doesn't allow some of the more "pie in the sky" wishes that might be great but can't be implemented.

Don't take silence from the Developers to be 'ideas are good, or ideas are bad'.

[johan osterman]

tinkthank said:
...

PLEA: It would be most helpful if a member of the Dev team were to express his or her feedback regarding (at least some of) the suggestions on this thread and/or the makeup of the thread in general (till now, there have been but two very brief comments on 2 aspects: commander renaming (already in) and the nagot gik fel message); what is the deal? Are we being helpful? Are we being constructive? Are some of the suggestions good, or bad, or noteworthy, or what? Which types are helpful? Or are we being useless? Are we being to vague? Are we being to unrealistic? Are we being read?
Are we being ignored?

You are being read.

Some of the ideas are constructive and useful others not quite as much so. Very specific requests for the creation of a certain unit, spell or nation are not likely to be listened to. Proposing a theme for a nation and then writing down stats for all the units you think should be included is probably counterproductive to your wishes. On the other hand making concrete and specific suggestions about rules is helpfull. So make general suggestions for content and specific suggestions for mechanics.

[tinkthank]

thanks, both to Zen and JO for the clearup, that is helpful.

[Taqwus]

If disbanding troops is permitted, I would suggest that troops disbanded outside their home province should at least sometimes be converted to unrest. (Perhaps even if -in- their home? And troops that desert due to low pay, should almost always cause unrest if they don't already. Brigandage and all that, you know.) Along similar lines, it might be interesting if mercenary bands despairing in their unemployment would look for weak provinces to plunder... or perhaps be "hired" by an independent province, even.

If I were being really cynical, I might suggest that spies be allowed to attempt to bribe other nations' mercenaries even the latter's contracts -aren't- going to end the next turn, although it shouldn't be feasible to be able to bribe them into a certain-death situation (sneak away into the bribing side's province next door, perhaps; try to take over the massively garrisoned capital province with nowhere to retreat to afterwards, no. They're in it for the money, not the glory of death in battle. And, being mercenaries, it wouldn't be out of character to take the bribe and betray the one who offered it.)

Continuing in the line of deceit and treachery, I wonder if experienced assassins should be permitted the initiative in battle (not when they're caught, that is).

There's a lot that potentially would be amusing in terms of counterintelligence (allocating spies to disinformation so that enemy scouts and spies perhaps get bogus information, say) but this would be rather hard to do well and realistically methinks. If a scout could be caught and turned so that, for instance, he'd keep reporting whatever he saw, troop-wise, the view from the turn before he was caught, then it'd be possible to hide the movements of an army...

A wargamer might wonder if there's a use for a force-marching option (e.g. get an extra movement point for the ground-pounders, at the cost of -2 or so morale (or more, even) and heavy fatigue (40-60+ ?) upon their arrival, and a penalty with regards to how much supply they're getting from provinces due to spending less time on that (which means: bring a supply train, er, broth etc). Bad if you're going to attack immediately afterwards, but the potential surprise factor may help and it might save your bacon if you find a reason to shift troops in a hurry.

On mobility, given that we have different movement classes (water, land, air) it might be interesting if a .map file could specify limitations on adjacency (e.g. province 1 is adjacent to province 2 for flying units only) so that one could specify rivers that could be flown or swum across, or perhaps a mountain range between two provinces that's an obstacle to flight, but has mines / tunnels that offer land units a way through.

[Cohen]

I'd like too see more impact on "survival" skills too.
Like a forest survival troops have a bonus in the forest in stats.
A sneaking has a bonus in forest provinces of his hiding skill.

There could be a counterpart that lowers the chances too, likewhise a "Plain Survival" (I know it doesn't exist), that could be the knights, have a boost in Plains/Farmlands, but have some hindrances in forests or swamps or mounts.

[Zooko]

I am confused by the rules about spending gems in battle. I've read the manual (back before I lost it Last week) and I've read Liga's manual addendum, and discussed it on the forum and in private Messages. I *think* mages can spend up to one gem to increase their effective level by one, plus up to N-1-K gems to reduce their fatigue, where N is their effective level (*before* the first gem was spent ??) and K is the gem cost of the spell. But I wouldn't bet on my understanding being correct.

I'm really hoping to figure this out before I try to cast huge high-level spells in combat. But to get back on topic for this thread, I'm also hoping that gem usage is simpler in dom3.

Hm. Now I will think of a concrete proposal to make it simpler -- not because I'm likely to think of a better idea than Johan and Kristoffer can think of, but because my proposal might stimulate them to think of a good idea.

... Hm. Okay:

My proposal is that gems have no effect in combat except to satisfy the "gem requirement" for spells.

That feels good to me, because I feel like the battle AI is sure to make bad decisions about when to spend or not to spend gems, so if the scope of opportunities to spend gems is narrowed I'm happy.

Also, it would reduce confusion, thus making the game easier for new players to get into.

[Chazar]

In reply to Taqwus' proposals:

• I really like your forced-march proposal! This would greatly increase strategical choices!
• Your example with tunnels is somewhat flawed, for flyers can surely walk through these tunnels as well. On the other hand, if they walk, they should not cover as much provinces as before (i.e. fly3, walk1). Since flying is a big boon, I've thought about using road-provinces in a map that I am making, but the simple adjacencies only give flyers another edge.
  
  So I propose the following simple solution for flyer/foot-movement, which retains the province-based movement of Dom2, which I really like (as opposed to provinceless hex-based or square-based games):
  
  A flyer has a strat movement score as everyone else, which works as for everyone else. The flying ability is then equipped with a number (e.g. like the supply bonus currently is). For an example, let's say that the flyer has start move of 2 and a flying ability of 100. This means that he can either move 2 provinces as everyone else by foot or may fly-move to all provinces whose white dot is within the 100 pixels radius of the white dot of his current province. Similar to the zoom factor, a .map-file should then contain an float entry which is used as a factor to flyers moves - that serves as a yardstick and sets the scale of the map.
  
  So flyers could then reach provinces that other units could not, but on large open plains they could only reach as far as any other unit could.
  
  (Non-metric maps, like those who use wrap-around but have a neighbor relation which ignores the torus shape of wrap-around but rather reflect a sphere (compare "World" to "Inland"), limits the use of the flying ability around the poles, but this is not a severe problem in my view and could also be repaired somewhat by allowing a set-individual-yardstick-value-command for provincs.)