My 2 wishes for Dominions 3!!

[Cainehill]

DominionsFAN said:
Yes as it is now, 1 turn takes hella lot of time to play in MP, with a lobby/mp system this would speed up drastically.

I'm beginning to wonder what drugs you're on. How in Dog's name does a lobby speed up the process of taking turns in MP? If I have 30 provinces and 43 mages to manage and it takes me 45 minutes to do so, the other players have to wait 45 minutes.

You have 1 hour to play? Hell you are logging in, and if a game is up you join.

If a game is already up, there's no way to join in the middle of a game. If a game is starting and looking for players, it tends to take over an hour for people to get their pretenders, decide game settings, house rules, and nations. After going through all that, if a player joins and thinks to quit after 1 hour of play, that player probably isn't going to be welcomed back by the group of players.

When _ONE PLAYER_ decides they've played enough, that's it for the whole group of players, unless Player #1 goes AI. And with games often taking months to play, and often over 100 hours of player time, talking about "1 hour games" or 1 hour of playing time just doesn't make much sense.

[DominionsFan]

Cainehill, what about small map blitz games? 1 turn wont take more then 4-5 mins in late game. Have you ever played doms 2 blitz games for example? I doubt it! Also many players can just leave Dominions on, and leave the comp meanwhile if a turn takes too long in huge games...or just save! What the hell is your problem with the lobby/mp system?! I cant understand your points. This would be lot easier/user friendly then the current system. This is the key.
Yes, you can say that this isnt a must have, but would be a great addition IF IW would have time to code something like this.

[Chazar]

There are several shortcomings of Dom2, and only a limited time for the small developing crew to deal with them. A lobby system might be nice, a full-fledged in-game-message editor would be nice, better graphics would be nice, but all of these are not important. Dom2 lives from its rich gameplay, and this what should be further developed.

In addition, Dom2 network features are already impressive: PBEM, Lan & Hotseat - changeable on the fly; all cross-platform ! Now that's really great!

Other games may have a neat click-interface for Network, but how could you set up an interface like Mosehansen's with those? Dom2 offer all by the commandline, for a resource saving commandline host, which can be managed by all the commandline tools Linux-Users (mainly) are used to anyway. Sure Mosehansen's server might not be needed if the game brought along itself, but other people are able to do this pretty as we have seen, while other people are not able to add more to the gameplay itself!

And ok, to review/replay older turns you have to put your hands onto some files to manually copy them, but that's the least inconvenience I can imagine...

[Leif_-]

Not everybody knows about / how to use Irc. What Illwinter _could_ do, is to embed an irc client within Dominions itself, pre-configured to connect to #Dominions on a particular network. It would lower the threshold and get more players into the channel.

On the other hand, while embedding a client dosen't have to involve all that much work, it _does_ carry with it potential legal pitfalls re licensing, and also some amount of work in getting the UI to match with the rest of the game. And let's face it - Illwinter doesn't like doing UI (not that I blame them - it's excruciatingly painful and boring work.)

[Leif_-]

Oh, and as for a wish for Dominions 3 - I'd really like to be able to change the population types when modding. (I want a province where I can recruit dragons and wombat-riding rabbit knights!)

[Gandalf Parker]

Im sorry. I still havent seen anything that cant be done in IRC, or a web front, or a forum that allows file attaches to Posts, or an actual lobby by some 3rd party programmer. Those things are all already available, and someone else has banged their head on the security aspects of it. To write another, and insert it into the game, would be IMHO time consuming and open a can of worms for little return.

But then, this is a wish list. You can say its on your wish list with no problem at all. Its just trying to convince others that its an "absolute must have" which generates discussions. Mostly with people who have their own "absolute must haves" which yours would get in the way of.

[Graeme Dice]

DominionsFAN said:
Cainehill, what about small map blitz games? 1 turn wont take more then 4-5 mins in late game. Have you ever played doms 2 blitz games for example? I doubt it!

Yes, he's played quite a few blitz games. Enough to know that there will always be somebody who takes 30 minutes on turn 10, and that turns in the late game start to take more than 20 minutes unless you happen to losing.

Also many players can just leave Dominions on, and leave the comp meanwhile if a turn takes too long in huge games...or just save!

How is this different from what exists now?

What the hell is your problem with the lobby/mp system?! I cant understand your points. This would be lot easier/user friendly then the current system.

It's not any easier though. There would have to be hundreds of games starting at any given moment for a "Join Random Game" button to make sense.

[Cainehill]

DominionsFAN said:
Cainehill, what about small map blitz games? 1 turn wont take more then 4-5 mins in late game. Have you ever played doms 2 blitz games for example? I doubt it!

Do you also doubt that the earth is round? I've played a _lot_ of blitz games, organized and started via the #dominions IRC channel. And some people (like Stormbinder) take 30 minutes to do turn _10_, and in the late game, the turns for normal players commonly take 20-40 minutes.

A small map blitz game, with victory conditions, the turns might take 4-14 minutes, sure. But ...

Also many players can just leave Dominions on, and leave the comp meanwhile if a turn takes too long in huge games...or just save!

So then you have rude players who wander off from their computer, returning half an hour later while everyone else has been waiting for _them_. "or just save!"?? What part of, "That ends the current game session for everyone" don't you understand?

What the hell is your problem with the lobby/mp system?! I cant understand your points. This would be lot easier/user friendly then the current system. This is the key.
Yes, you can say that this isnt a must have, but would be a great addition IF IW would have time to code something like this.

My problem with the lobby system is that it does _nothing_ to enhance the game itself, does nothing that can't already be done via irc or a webserver like Esben's, and in fact would provide half-arsed chat facilities compared to IRC.

And, with only 2 developers (and _1_ programmer), IW isn't going to have the ability to dedicate the amount of programmer time necessary to do even a half-baked lobby without taking way too much development effort away from game-enhancing things.

Now, it'd be nice if they'd improve the interface for creating / joining games, sure. But the programmer hates UI work, so that ain't going to happen either - we can't even get "laboratory" put at the top of the magic item equiping menu.

[Chazar]

Cainehill said:...we can't even get "laboratory" put at the top of the magic item equiping menu.

Now thats is a real pain for sure! Fixing this would speed-up my turns considerably for me, since I dont have a scrollwheel-mouse on my laptop!

[Tuidjy]

Speaking of simple, but nice additions, how about a 'maximum research level'
in the game settings? I would love to try a few MP games with research levels
set to 0, 2, and 4.