The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Cainehill]

Blessing troops underpowered? *snicker*

Yeah, blessed centaurs, spiders, giants, wardens, vans, and heart companions are all so underpowered.

The only problem with blessed troops is that some nations have relatively sucky sacred troops, and that most are capitol only while lucky lucky Vanheim gets to build one of the best and cheapest everywhere.

[Zooko]

In keeping with my on-going theme of "show me everything I want to know", it is really irritating to see "base hitpoints 100, dominion -20, current hit points 110". Please please please tell me the actual numbers which add up to the current number. If you can't bring yourself to do that, then just remove that whole page, because numbers that don't add up are more irritating than no numbers at all.

Next, battle wounds should have tooltips so that hovering over the red heart with the mouse will let you know which wound it is. (Even better: invent unique icons for every kind of wound. :-) But they all have to be identifiable as battle wounds (i.e. they all have to start with the same big red heart)).

Along the same lines, when inspecting troops on the armies page, they should have teeny tiny hearts and stars inscribed atop their image so that you can tell which ones are experienced and wounded without clicking on them. If you can't do that, then at least give tooltips so that you have to hover but don't have to click.

Next, when the "zoom into the province" happens just before a battle replay, I can rarely tell which province it is. That's because the image being zoomed in doesn't have the overlays that I'm used to, such as the name, fortresses, temples, dominions, etc.

One solution to this is to include the current overlay settings in the zoom image. Alternately, allow the user to pan and zoom the image before he clicks okay to see the battle.

[Zooko]

I like to watch the battles without knowing who wins. It makes it exciting! Unfortunately the messages screen sometimes gives away who won, either by having a random event happen in that province and showing the flag of the new owner or by announcing that my troops in that province are starving.

Perhaps this could be fixed by not-showing the flag of the owner of a province until the user has viewed all battles (or all battle-results-pages) in that province. Likewise, "troops are starving in Province" messages could be hidden until the user has seen results of all battles in that province. For users who want to see all messages and don't care about spoilers, there could be a "show all messages" button that effectively marks all battles as viewed.

[Zooko]

In general, if there is some information that I will often want to know, and which can be encoded into the current page without over cluttering that page, then that is the best solution.

example: wouldn't it be cool if the wound, poison, fatigue bars were displayed on the battle display, such as was done in the Myth games? (It would of course be togglable, just like the grid and background parts of the battle display are.)

example: show wound and experience marks right on the "t" military information screen, as teeny tiny graphical overlays on the units

example: which battle wound it is should be indicated right on the unit information page, by encoding the battle wound type into the battle wound red-heart icon.

example: when looking at the F1 nation page I often want to know the terrain type of a province. Currently I have to click on it to find out.

Okay, but for various reasons you sometimes don't encode all information onto the current page. In that case, the next alternative should be to make that information be tooltipped.

Example: if I hover the mouse over a unit on the battle display, the wound/fatigue/poison bars should pop up beneath (or next to, or on top of) the unit.

Example: if I hover over a unit on the "t" military information display, its battle-wound and experience status should appear.

Example: if I hover over a battle-wound on the unit information page, which battle-wound it is should appear.

Example: if I hover over a province on the F1 nation page, its terrain types should appear.

[Manuk]

I would like to have an option to list all spells or by school but only those that a specific mage can cas.

Example: I pick The renegade sage with 1 nature. then I can see the list of all 1 nature spells and not the others. This will make research pathing easier.

[Endoperez]

Zooko said:
In keeping with my on-going theme of "show me everything I want to know", it is really irritating to see "base hitpoints 100, dominion -20, current hit points 110". Please please please tell me the actual numbers which add up to the current number. If you can't bring yourself to do that, then just remove that whole page, because numbers that don't add up are more irritating than no numbers at all.

That works. "dominions: -20" shows how the dominion of the province the unit is in affects its hitpoints. The "current hitpoints" is (base + dominion_bonus) of the last turn. In your example, whether the pretender/prophet moves to another province or not in the next turn, it will have 80 hitpoints.
Except that it wont, because it has little extra hp left from the turn before (your example, i.e. 110 hp), but I don't know how that is calculated.

[Zooko]

Endoperez: I know the explanation of why the hit points numbers are reported like that, but it doesn't matter. My brother was playing yesterday and I was looking over his shoulder and when he looked at the hit point report, he cursed. The user interface is irritating, and turns off potential customers, even though it is actually possibly for an experienced player to figure out the hidden variables and deduce most of what it actually means.

[Nerfix]

- Wishing for "gems" produces a magic item called "Gems" which goes to the caster's misc slot. The description would say "They are pretty baubles".
- Wishing for "doom horror" would result in the caster gaining reversed effects of Twsit Fate and Luck and a Curse. Description would say "You're doomed, oh the horror!"
- Wishing for a particular kind of magic gems would result in 50 gems of the type

[sushiboat]

Nerfix said:
- Wishing for a particular kind of magic gems would result in 50 gems of the type

Wish costs 100 astral pearls, which can be alchemized into 50 gems of any other kind except blood slaves. Then again, I suppose that fits with the theme of screwing over newbies who don't know enough to download and read the user-written information files. Good way to prevent new people from enjoying the game!

[Nerfix]

It's a good way to screw

I wish
doom horror
gems
doom horror