The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Sindai]

Breaking up the "spells" order for mages into several slightly more specific orders, namely "attack spells," "summon spells," and "buff spells."

This would keep people from creating super-micromanaged mages of doom while still eliminating some of the really irritating aspects of the current mage AI, such as how they favor summons over attack spells, leading any elemental mage with gems to waste them summoning elementals instead of using attack spells and conserving their gems.

ALso, it would be nice if saving army orders using ctrl-# also saved the position of that unit on the battlefield. Voila, two clicks eliminated for every commander and unit group.

EDIT: Also, having some more details in the descriptions for battlefield and global spells would be nice. As it is most combat spells and summoning rituals have decent descriptions (ie: they include all the important pieces of data like area of effect/# of effects, damage, etc), but often you have very little idea of what a battlefield enchantment or global does until you actually cast it. Flavor descriptions are nice, but actual knowledge is better.

[CJN]

Use .dominions3 instead of dominion3 as the name of the savefile directory under Unix/Linux systems. It is convention to create all top-level computer generated files in the user's home directory as dotfiles.

[Baalz]

Here are some ideas for enhancements that should be fairly easy to implement. Some of these I know have already been mentioned, but I think they are all easy and pretty much popular suggestions.

1) How about saving battle replays to a file? Shouldn’t be too hard since that data must be stored somewhere already, and it’d be really cool to be able to save some of your really awesome battles. They could be shared for AARs, as tutorials, etc. Also, having a button to rewind to the Last round (same functionality as the skip forward button, only reversed) would be great to.

2) Ranged troops set to fire should try and maintain a minimum distance (ie skirmish) while ammo Lasts. Fire & Withdraw should have them continue firing until either ammo is depleted or they move off the back of the battlefield trying to maintain a minimum distance. I think it would go a long way towards making LI viable if I could harass the enemy, then (at least try to manage it so that) my LI fell back behind my HI so that the HI met the enemy’s charge, at which point my LI runs out of ammo and attacks to support the HI (or withdraws if that’s what I want).

3) Have a withdraw option, distinct from routing (keep your troops together).

4) An option to specify that a mage not use gems unless scripted to. I think it’s very often the case that players want somebody to cast a single spell requiring gems (ie wrathful skies, mass protection, etc) then preserve the rest of the gems for future fights. Since this can already be accomplished through MM, this is just a MM reducing feature.

5) In keeping with the Dom paradigm, its important to limit the amount of tactical control the player has when scripting mages. It would be very strategically useful though to be able to assign them a role (summoning spells, attack spells, buff-other spells). Artillery mages shouldn’t pass out buffing themselves, and death mages should be able to do something other than summoning skeletons. It’d be great (and fit the paradigm) to be able to script a few specific buffs then give them very general direction.

6) Allow good hooks for AI modding. AI design for such a complex game is really hard, and this is one of the more vocal complaints I’ve seen about Dom II. This game has a large community of creative types who know the strats and game mechanics ridiculously well. Lets leverage it, and shut up all the AI whiners with a “put your money where your mouth is”. Expanding this to include modding the unit battlefield AI would be great(if not prohibitively difficult). That would give interested parties a way to play around with archer friendly fire, light infantry, mage spell selection, etc.

[Taqwus]

I've been idly wondering whether it'd be possible to model troops falling back without actually routing first.

To take an example from another computer game, the "Total War" engine -- at least, the incarnation that features in the "Shogun:TW" game -- permits the outcome of 'push' from two soldiers fighting each other: one soldier forces the other a bit backwards, but the fight continues on both parties.

For a more historical perspective, if we take Machiavelli's "Art of War" as an authority on Roman tactics when he quotes his contemporary Fabrizio (an assertion which I'm not qualified to properly assess, not having studied this in any detail), the different lines in formation might fall back and join with lines previously held in reserve during battle, and continue the fight from there.

These are most likely two different situations -- falling back as an individual, and falling back while trying to preserve some semblance of organization as a line. Adding either would add a bit of flavor over the currently binary advance-or-flee model. I'd also agree that having light infantry -- velites! -- fire and fall back (either through gaps or along the flanks) would add a reasonable option and go a long way towards making them something other than patrollers and garrison troops.

[tinkthank]

I second Alneyan's idea. I would also very much like to see more types of checks and balances and counters of the type:

debuff
disenchant
dispel

Perhaps there can be spells which dispel all (including friendly) "entire battlefield" air spells, death spells, etc., and one which dispels all of them.

[Edi]

What I would like to see is having a research level limit adjustable from game to game, either as a blanket limit or preferably school by school, so that you could for example limit construction to Lv 4, have conjuration up to 6 and alteration and enchantment to lv 7. It could make for very interesting games where some options would be limited while still having a magic rich game (because right now the only way to limit magic is by lowering site frequency so that gems will have to be used very carefully and there won't be massive hordes of fully equipped SCs in late game.

[Turin]

yeah more starting options would be great:

apart from the research restriction I would like to see:
-efficiency of bloodhunting (low/normal/high)
-number of global spell slots (5/10/15)
-bigger hall of fame(5-50)
-gem cost of ritual spells/forging items(half/normal/twice the cost)
-number of pretender design points
-fog of war on/off(every player has an eyes of god enchantment always active)

[Edi]

Turin said:
-fog of war on/off(every player has an eyes of god enchantment always active)

That's a little harsh and removes a lot of strategy. I'd be willing to go with a seriously truncated Version of this, which would allow everyone to always see who owns which province, but nothing else unless they really have EoG or some other means of seeing in there (Astral Window, scouts, spies etc)

Edi

[Alneyan]

Something else I should really have posted before, but forgot. It would be fairly likely that someone made the same request before though.

I would like to see multi-path spells/items in Dominions 3, requiring more than two magic paths to be used. I believe it would be a nice addition for nations with Jack-of-all-trades mages (who said T'ien Ch'i?), which would be the only ones with an easy access to these spells.

[SurvivalistMerc]

More good ideas.

I have another from a mistake I made in a SP game. How about a confirmation screen the first time you attack a nation you are not "at war" with? Just something like "Really attack Pangea?"

I hate to just about lose a game due to a stupid accident made in a strategy game moving one priest into a neighbor's territory instead of into my own.