What could we steal from other fantasy games...

[Dragar]

As a new player it is definitely the UI that I think could be improved, it can be very tedious handling a lot of the small things each turn. In turns of content and depth the game is great. Civ IV probably handles a lot of similar issues, if we’re talking about games to steal from. Maybe some better ways around them exist and I just don’t know how yet, but the repetitive tasks I’d love to avoid are:
• Movement – scheduling movement over a number of turns with waypoints, or alternately a pathfinding mechanism. Wouldn’t hurt to have someway of automoving troops recruited in a province to a different province, particularly where the place you are recruiting from is far from the battlefront. I understand there is an issue with commander requirements, but there must be a valid solution to it.
• Repeat build – setting a province to recruit the same units each turn until you change it.
• Repeat forge – as above, would be a great time saver with some of the mass produced items especially.
• Site searching – would love to be able to tell a mage to wander amongst friendly provinces and site search. Or even to assign his movement with waypoints but be able to tell him to search for a turn at each one. Could do the same with site searching spells, the caster casts the specific spell each turn on a province that hasn’t been tested for it before.
• Goto next active unit – I often find I forget to move someone. The difficulty I guess is units that have moved defaulting to Defend, so how would the computer identify active units you want to do something with? I’m sure there is an answer somewhere though
• Battle reports – More detail on the units present and numbers of each type killed, not just overall numbers. Watching every battle is time consuming, having enough summary information would reduce the number we need to watch. Also when capturing a fortress or an assassination fight, no detail is given at all in the sense of a normal battle.

I’m sure there are others – basic theme is to take mundane tasks out of the game to save more time for the interesting stuff! I’m sure it would make multiplayer games faster and more viable too.

One other is with regards to save games. At first I thought it was great not to have a save option, no incentive to cheat a little to go back. That is until I sent my Pretender alone into a fight a couple of hours into a game, not realising that the other commander with the army hadn’t:
- been selected,
- couldn’t fulfil the move but it wasn’t flagged when I click
- picked up all the troops sitting in the province due to a retreat or commander death

Those little mistakes that happen because you aren’t spending a heap of time checking everything can ruin a long game due to the save system. I fully understand having the ability to save as an option only, especially in MP, but I find the level of checking required in a SP game when I’m trying to learn pretty tiring. I want to spend my time making interesting decisions, not micromanaging detail. I can only imagine how much work there is playing larger maps – I’m only on medium so far!
That said, very interesting game with a steep learning curve, which is awesome. I’ve already convinced one other friend to buy so we can MP.

[MaxWilson]

"Goto next active unit – I often find I forget to move someone." Do you want something more than the 'N' key shortcut that currently exists?

[Dragar]

like i said, I'm sure some things exist I don't know about yet will try that tonight, cheers

[Edi]

Could do the same with site searching spells, the caster casts the specific spell each turn on a province that hasn’t been tested for it before.

Dragar, this has already been incorporated in patches. Set mage to cast monthly ritual with shift-m and select radar spell. The mage will keep casting until there are no more gems of that type left or there are no more provinces that have not been searched for that path OR all provinces left already have 2 or more sites in them. See the site searching threads linked from the strategy index for details.

[Twan]

A waypoint system would be great both to reduce microgestion for long strategic moves over several turns and to allow interceptions inside a done turn (if each commander do one mapmove, then another, etc... someone moving to a friendly province just having the initiative for each of the strategic impulses ; so an unit going 2 or 3 provinces away can be stopped before the destination if a province it crosses is attacked).

But waypoints may pause problems with the huge number of commanders in late game as for each several provinces numbers would have to be stored. It would be sad to make commander caps smaller when one of the strength of the dominions engine is to allow massive games with 50+ players (a feature that must be kept for dom4 if it's made).

[thejeff]

The only improvement I'd like to see with the "N" next commander handling is some way to mark a commander as done.

Late game it becomes frustrating to cycle again and again through all the scouts and commanders I don't want to move trying to make sure I haven't missed anyone important.

[SelfishGene]

Repeat Commander Recruitment.

Fleeing from assassination is not fatal in your own territory.

[MaxWilson]

Making fleeing from assassination non-fatal would make assassination pretty useless, wouldn't it? Only flying assassins would ever kill anybody.

-Max

[thejeff]

Well, attacks on commanders in the field could still work.
Mages aren't much use in battle if you script them to retreat.

[SelfishGene]

1st -
Assassination is almost too powerful as it is right now. Please note i said "almost".

2nd -
Retreating because of a lucky hit breaking morale is frankly the most frustrating thing in Dominions. Nothing ruins a game like a horror causing your Pretender to retreat, even if the horror can't actually beat your Pretender in combat, or your assassin just running away to his death because of a lucky shot. If it's a fight to the death, they sure don't act like they know it.

3rd -
This would probably break the Deathmatch minigame.

OTOH, i'd like to see recruitable assassins be allowed to use a few stealthy troops during the attempts as well. It would make recruitable assassins a whole lot less sucky, and give new life to marginal units like shades. Of course, as a band, they would be easier to find and kill with patrollers...(i'm not a big fan of the +10 scout stealth buff recently either).