The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Olive]

When stealthy units are in enemy territories, those territories should be flagged. It's difficult to find where your stealth armies are located when there are many...

[Endoperez]

F1 screen helps a little, but it is hard to find out which armies are close enough to work together. I agree that a flag (a cloak?) would be nice.

[Sandman]

Further Ideas:

More scale magic resistance dependencies: As well as the magic scale, you could also have order/turmoil affecting demon MR (higher MR in turbulent provinces), and the growth/death scales affecting undead MR (apart from vine undead).

More emphasis on leadership: Non-mage commanders don't really have much effect on the battle. What if there were a variety of different leadership traits which gave bonuses to commanded troops? Examples:

Armorer: All commanded units get +1 protection.
Sharpshooter: All commanded units get +1 precision.
Tactics: All commandered units get +1 AP.
Random: A random leadership trait.

Leadership traits, would, in fact, be similar to magic paths. You could even have booster items.

[Ballbarian]

This may have already been wished for, but I would love to see the ai made "scriptable". Along the lines of Age of Kings. There are still lots of people (including myself) scripting for those games and the ai players are much tougher than the original ai shipped with the game. You can try out multiple strategies, and easily give individual custom ai's alot of varied personality.

[NTJedi]

With an improved and more user friendly map editor the game will have more maps made available. My suggestions below:

1) Ability to create a map, the provinces and basic settings within the map editor itself... instead of using GIMP or another tool.

2) Ability to create events which occur during specific turns or when a specific province gets occupied or when a specific graph measurement is reached.
This would allow for more interesting and creative maps.

3) Ability to disable specific spells, items, or units. Thus players could remove stuff they feel are unbalanced or weaknesses for the computer AI.
example... during a recent game I noticed the computer AI with high research summon at least 20 cave drakes during late game. Would be nice to sometimes disable a spell like this since I very rarely use the spell and it only wastes gems by the computer AI.

4) Ability to add or improve the computer AI via scripts. This was done within Neverwinter Nights with great success!

5) Ability to place a limit for the number of each building type(forts, labs, temples). Map makers can then provide maps where gamers would need to place these buildings in more strategic locations.

6) Ability to easily change the units which can be recruited within a province. Many of these weak units such as militia are purchased in mass numbers by the computer AI. Allowing map makers to easily provide more useful units within a province can make the AI more challenging.

7) Lots of other great ideas exist within other turn-based strategy games. The two best map editors I know would be AgeofWonders:ShadowMagic and HeroesofMight&Magic_3. I definitely believe examining these map editors would provide some ideas for Dominions_3.

[Cainehill]

NTJedi said:
7) Lots of other great ideas exist within other turn-based strategy games. The two best map editors I know would be AgeofWonders:ShadowMagic and HeroesofMight&Magic_3. I definitely believe examining these map editors would provide some ideas for Dominions_3.

Some great ideas, but note that both the games mentioned here had complete, professional, development teams working on them, probably with at least one programmer whose main task was the map editor.

What we might hope for is to be able to do those various things by messing with the map files as we do now, only with more sophisticated, complex map commands for us to hang ourselves with.

[Endoperez]

Atleast HoMM games use tile-based system. With tiles creating a map is much easier, but Dominions doesn't really get any use from having tiles. On the other hand, making a map using HoMM editor and then converting it into Dominions map could be made much easier. Mainly, if the map editor/converter would allow:

1) change all white pixels to almost white, so that one could start adding capitals without worrying about the base map's colors.

2) adding map making commands to spesific province, either writing them or choosing from a list

3) adding and/or removing provinces, so that province numbers change, without changing the provinces' info. This would allow one to easily add or remove provinces from existing maps.

4) extracting province info from earlier maps. This would allow one to remake, for example, the Elric of Melnibone map made for Dom:PPP. This would also allow one more easily make a map that covers larger or smaller area of the same world that one of the existing maps already covers.

[NTJedi]

Cainehill said:

Some great ideas, but note that both the games mentioned here had complete, professional, development teams working on them, probably with at least one programmer whose main task was the map editor.

What we might hope for is to be able to do those various things by messing with the map files as we do now, only with more sophisticated, complex map commands for us to hang ourselves with.

Yes I don't expect it to match the quality of these other map editors... only that the developers might be able to pull a few ideas from them. Such as the developers might see that Hereoes_3 map editor had a tab where map editors could enable/disable the spells and items and depending on the Dominions_3 code it might be easy to add a GUI interface for this within the Dominions_3 map editor.
Even allowing the change available within the .map file would be nice.

[King Lear]

Don't know if this has been mentioned yet, but it would be nice to be able to change the initial province defense, so when you set the indipendents to 9, someones capitol's defense can be equally raised. As it is, a weak player is much more tempting than a cavalry defended rich province.

[PDF]

A small UI thing that would be quite useful : in the Army setup screens, after/below the scripta area, add a "Req'd Gem" number per gem type.
It would indicate the total basic gem cost of the scripted spells according to the mage's paths (basic, that is without any buff effects that could occur with the scripted spells, only counting base gem cost of spell and necessary additional gems if the mage is under the required level).

Any figure obtained that is more than the current number of gems carried by the mage should be tagged in red or whatever so the player is warned the guy needs more gems.