What it will take for me to purchase Dom III

[shovah]

i think being able to research upgrades for items is a good idea and after reading a litttle of what everything does i doubt it would add much micromanegement

[Endoperez]

If better armors can be researched, and mages will research those, doesn't that screw Ulm with its "better steel but less magic" policy? And why play Ulm if the only thing you get is a head-start on others on the arms war, when you can't get as far in the magic war?

[B0rsuk]

I think I have an idea how to make nationals scalable without increasing micromanagement.
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National troops would get predefined bonuses for each additional fortification you control. Makes sense, as you need them to produce national anyway.
Flavor-wise it would be something along the line "The garrison of Blahuageuawraarhsaark made some improvements to heavy crossbow design and we can now use it nation-wide" or " new forging techniques, or news of national hero/propaganda (inspiration;see soviet Russia for reference), source of better ore...

To stop Watch Tower abuse, it would be NumberOfForts*FortAdminValue (no I have no idea of Dominions variables).
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Edit

For those of you who think that "you can just start producing nationals for free - therefore they should suck"
- nationals require forts (say 300-450 gold, 3-5 turns to build, and a commander)
- Process of building a fort can be interrupted.
- forts need adjacent provinces to work properly
- resources, unlike gems, don't carry over to next month (seems like, doesn't it ?)
- there's a hard limit on how much you can recruit in one turn. On the other hand, you can burn LOTS of gems in a single turns.
- you can get gems from another player, not true with resources. Technically you can get away without magic sites for some time.
- you can keep all summoners in one spot, forts force you to expand.
- many national units require temples (usually 200 and a priest to build it) or labs (200 and a mage). Combined with 450 fort, this means 850 gold, multiple turns of building and commanders.
- I'd say population killing spells are quite effective. Growth scale is slow. Your ability to buy conventional troops is affected by cold, heat, unrest, productivity, order..

[shovah]

Endoperez said:
If better armors can be researched, and mages will research those, doesn't that screw Ulm with its "better steel but less magic" policy? And why play Ulm if the only thing you get is a head-start on others on the arms war, when you can't get as far in the magic war?

i was thinking more like you just get x points of tech research per turn that dosnt require commanders research

[Chazar]

I dont like the course of this discussion: National troops should not be more powerful, neither should summons be less powerful. Summons should be powerful and become slowly more and more abundant as the game progresses.

However, allmost everything in the game is capped by either a hard limit or by some sort of upkeep (gold,supplies,...). So why should the majority of the summons be exempt from this upkeep principle?

[Turin]

national troops shouldn´t be more powerful, but buffed national troops should be more powerful.
Right now you can cast every troopbuffing spell on any number of (human) national troops and they´d still be unable to take out a decent SC/thug.

And unmodded troops are far too expensive for their power compared to mages. For example once conj 3 and evo 4 are researched, every e2 mage can kill dozens of lightly armored troops with bladewind. And he doesn´t even have to be near the front lines.

[Ironhawk]

One thing I've always found odd. If national troops play such a small role in the overall game, why do they have such a good and well used UI for recruitment? Whereas the UI for summoning is poor at best.

[Cainehill]

Hmm. Is it possible to mod upkeep down to 0 for national troops? Then, the only real difference between national and summoned troops would be that some summons don't eat food.

(And also, that one has to invest in forts for troops, vice mages for summonses. Given that a fort can only recruit in one spot, where a mage can move to summon elsewhere, a slight advantage to mages over forts. A bigger imbalance, imo, is that mages summoning can be concentrated in the safety of a fort, in a single province. Think : To go to an extreme, Clash of the Titans has what - 40 provinces? That means at most 40 forts to recruit, limitted by resources and gold. But with a single province, 50 or more mages can summon. Big advantage mages, _especially_ as resources doesn't carry over turn to turn.)

Here's a thought : something like 1/2 all resources from a fort only carry over to successive turns. IE : If someone has 1 province with a fort, but isn't buying troops, 1/2 the resources piles up from turn to turn, only for that fort.

This balances things a little bit with the mages, and also has an OOC justification : the troops are hired with gold, but the smiths can be forging weapons and armor for months or years before the troops are recruited.

Another thing that might help balance things : allow a fort to recruit troops the first turn after it's besieged. Gameplay-wise, this helps balance things against instant-army attacks ( Tree Lord popping in with 200 troops ) and is also justifiable in roleplaying / thematic terms : when a walled city is besieged by invaders (especially those of a different religion, ie all besiegements in Dom2), a certain amount of the locals inside are going to volunteer to serve their city/nation/god.

Again - this merely helps to balance another of the huge, major, issues favoring summons over national troops. Right now, if your province is invaded, 0 troops can be recruited, no matter how many commanders you have there. But if you had 20 researchers, that's 20 summoning spells that might be cast. Huge advantage, mages. ( Mind you : I happen to think that summons should be better than your average national troops. But right now, 0 upkeep, ability to gain while besieged, etc, give summonings too many overwhelming non-combat advantages.)

I've taken advantage of this a number of times : playing nations like Man, Pangaea, Arco, you wind up with boatloads of researchers with nature magic. With a mere conjuration 1, construction 2, every bard / dryad can be shifted to summoning very cost efficient quantities of vine men every turn. With enough nature income, I've held for ages. There is nothing comparable for national troops. If cities (forts) could recruit while besieged, I think it would be more balanced.

There'd still be starvation for troops inside the city; there'd still be a limit on how many troops could be marshalled, compared to the invader recruiting everywhere. But it would give a little balance, a little more of a chance to the defenders, in a situation where, well, all the women (or men) capable of wielding a weapon would be joining the military to protect their men and children from looting, rape, pillage, plunder, etc.

[quantum_mechani]

Cainehill said:
Hmm. Is it possible to mod upkeep down to 0 for national troops? Then, the only real difference between national and summoned troops would be that some summons don't eat food.

Upkeep cost is hard-linked to gold cost.

[Cainehill]

As far as weapon tech research screwing Ulm and a few others : what if it didn't improve the weapons and armor? If there were researchable things that .... could increase morale, or give better troops formations in battle, 6 scriptable mage spells vice 5, give a 20% increase in attack speed to troops, a little extra armor, a little extra chance to avoid an arrow, those seem like they might #1, fit more with Dominions - the average game ends within 40-100 turns, less than 10 years. Huge increases in weapons and armor don't tend to come in that span of time. Mmm, arguably magic might not progress as rapidly either - but tactics change rapidly enough to change the face of war. The hedgehog, the flanking maneuver, blitzkrieg, etc : tactics can transform the face of war.

All of these would be worth researching : but nations whose strength is in their troops to begin with would get greater benefits than would nations whose strength was mages. Ulm, Abysia, Jotuns, with solid troops, benefit more from incremental improvements to the troops than others do. But everyone would still want the improvements, especially if researching "tech" was separate from researching magic.

Maybe every fort generates weapons research; every military (non-mage, non-stealth) commander does as well. Maybe it's tied to Productivity (said scale needing some boosts, especially in the base game), or luck, or the inverse of the magic scale. Just some thoughts - but they do require changes in the base game, not just mods.