The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Cainehill]

I'd really like to see Water magic improved, as even in the water it's less useful than certain other paths.

And in some ways, it's plain backwards. Example: Thetis' Blessing. Mostly castable only by the water nations, who don't really _want_ land units to come into the water, thus making it easier for land nations to invade the oceans.

Wouldn't it make more sense for the blessing to allow aquatic creatures onto the land? Then the water nations might actually cast it. As is, I've never seen the spell cast, in a _lot_ of games.

[Phoenix-D]

Several wishes, thiugh I haven't read the thread:

1. NO identically named commanders. Let us rename, use bigger lists, or at the very least put a number at the end. Yes, that damages immersion, but so does ordering the wrong commander because you have 2 with the same name.

2. Friendly fire needs work. Specifically it'd be nice to have a general "Don't fire when allies are near" setting..and units that don't run straight through poison clouds.

3. Retreat would be nice if it was based on the army power rather than the number of units. Eg an army with 10,000 peasents and 10 demigods in it might run if all the demigods fell but not if the peasents were wiped out.

4. Replays- a turn-by-turn scroll is a Good Thing, as is a reverse option. Right now Dom II has all the disadvantages of a real-time reply and none of the advantages..

[WraithLord]

Cainehill said:

You mean like ... Pangaea's Carrion Woods, or C'tis Desert Tombs?

I should have added. not death/evil theme

Sort of an ultra strong divine nation. With an inherent strategic weakness equivalent to Ermor's death spreading dominion. I was thinking maybe it's dominion can cause migration of population into friendly domonion.
This can make such a nation an obvious target in MP games.

[Cainehill]

Some other wishes, mostly UI related:

Expanding the F1 view - currently you can see the provinces all by themselves, or provinces and commanders.

Being able to see only commanders would be great, especially if you could sort the commanders - by magic path, by currently issued orders, etc. Also, to sort by or somehow show at least some of the magic items carried - symbols or letters indicating a commander has a gem producing item, a forging item, a magic path booster, or an artifact. Also, showing the commander's HPs - this would make life simpler when dealing with fever fetishes.

Similarly, if the provinces could be sorted - by population, by unrest, by what magic paths have been searched there, etc. Being able to see population would also be a big help there, as would icons (or even letters) for the terrain types.

This would simplify site searching, tax rate adjustments, figuring out where to blood hunt, etc.

Being able to see a province's population and terrain type simply by clicking on it, instead of having to bring up the info screen for each province. (Maybe a filter to show the terrain types?)

As someone else said - the ability to disband units, even if it costs gold - say, something like 1/10 to 1/2 the recruitment costs. This would represent demustering the troops, giving a retirement payout, etc. Right now, it's sometimes almost impossible to get rid of the militia, for instance - movement rate 1, so it can take 5 - 10 turns (or more) to get them somewhere where you can have a battle, and even then - players you aren't at war with may not understand that you're not _really_ attacking them, you're just trying to retire some troops.

[johan osterman]

Phoenix-D said:
Several wishes, thiugh I haven't read the thread:

1. NO identically named commanders. Let us rename, use bigger lists, or at the very least put a number at the end. Yes, that damages immersion, but so does ordering the wrong commander because you have 2 with the same name.
...

You can rename commanders, and you can add or change names by using mods. Unless you for some reason have not patched the game.

[The_Tauren13]

Nagot Gick Fel said:
Almost forgot this old pet peeve of mine -

One thing I'd really like to see in Dom 3: balanced recruitment for national troops. Eg, Arco has hoplite infantry and light cavalry, everybody likes the former but nobody uses the cavalry. The game should track troop recruitment and make overused troop types more expensive over time (or underused ones less expensive) to give players an incentive to field more balanced armies.

I second this.. sounds like a great idea! Perhaps do something similar with summons, so that you might have to think about actually getting some demon knights instead of more devils (no way! ).

Reduce the strategic use of flying. I mean, if a 2 strat move army can't march across a friendly plain and then engage the enemy the same turn, why can one fly over a territory and still be ready to fight?

I'd like to see water gems have a use besides clams. It should also have dominance of underwater battle spells.

On madcastling, raiding, and forts in general: Why should an entire army be able to hide inside a watchtower so that you have to break the door before you can even fight it? It should simply provide arrow support to any friendly troops, as should any fortress that doesn't have true walls. Also, a different movement scheme would be nice, so you can actually have a chance to catch those god damn raiders. This would also help reduce madcastling, as then you could counter raiders by other means. But hey, not everyone thinks madcastling is a problem.

Less emphasis on lifedrain. I mean, there really should be other weapons to consider putting on most SCs. Maybe just make lifedrain weaker, or getting it more expensive. I personally would like to see SCs in general weakened a little, but I'm in a small minority in saying that...

Where are the really sexy dragons? I personally dislike the pretender dragon's ability to turn into a human. Very unsexyish. I would also like to see some really cool non pretender dragons. I guess there is the Torrasque, but it's not like thats very useful competetively. The problem is that life drain is so important that not having arms kills the dragons.

[Cainehill]

johan osterman said:

You can rename commanders, and you can add or change names by using mods. Unless you for some reason have not patched the game.

It would sure be nice if the option for renaming commanders was on by default though - numerous games wind up having duplicate commander names with no way to rename them, because the game's creator forgot to turn the option on.

[Graeme Dice]

The_Tauren13 said:
I mean, there really should be other weapons to consider putting on most SCs.

Making lifedrain weaker or harder to obtain wouldn't accomplish that. It would simply make it so that there are less SCs around, and so that those that still had them would be at a significant advantage. The only way to make it viable to put other weapons on SCs would be to make reinvigoration items both cheaper and far more effective, or to completely overhaul the fatigue system.

[Taqwus]

Minor bit:

Messages that involve a commander dying (e.g. Seeking Arrow nails somebody) should at least mention the province; it would be even spiffier if it mentioned his Last order ("Foo, while researching in The Promised Land") or something like that. That way it's far easier to determine who needs replacing with what and where. With some, like Seeking Arrow, you can't even determine the location from a battle replay 'coz there isn't one. Not a big problem with a small game, but a long game on a huge map might have issues with this.


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Medium bit:

Distribution of themes is a little uneven. R'lyeh, for instance, has no extra themes. Perhaps an expensive theme ("R'lyeh Ascendant"? "Dreamland"?) that caused unrest, R'lyeh cultist attacks, perhaps even offering a slight risk of causing insanity among your enemies in the dominion, or make that Last bit a theme-specific global for better balance. One could also imagine a theme prior to the war with Atlantis; perhaps more illithids and friends, stronger ties to the Void, no Atlantian-derived slaves, no Traitor King hero.

Atlantis, prior to the Fall? Hm.

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MAJOR bit:

On cavalry, perhaps armies with a strategic move of 2 or 3+ attacking an adjacent province should have an option of "Attack and pillage", saving them a turn and allowing them to live off the land more effectively, at the cost of unrest. That, plus a phased system allowing faster armies to intercept slow armies, might encourage the use of light cavalry. Maybe even a plains survival skill (can this be weighted so basically the horse doesn't much impact supply on plains)?

Along with this, I'd encourage putting limits on how fast province defense can be raised per turn, especially if the province is ungarrisoned, and perhaps having unrest affect both this and the efficiency of constructing buildings; these might slow down how fast one can consolidate territory so while light cav can run around, pillaging and causing trouble, you still need to -hold- land to do well with it, and that should be difficult (at least if the citizens worship somebody else or were happy with their previous ruler) if few troops stay around. Tricky, tricky to get right and logical however.

[Cainehill]

A few password related wishes : The ability to change your password during a game, so that if you (like some people) use the same password for all your games, you can change it if you need a sub for one game and don't want the others compromised.

Also, the ability to set a password on a game at creation, so that people wanting to upload a pretender have to know the password. This would allow someone to start a game on a server while maintaining some control over who joined the game.

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The ability to see what Version the game server is running via "View Game Settings" so players can verify they're using the right Version to see accurate battle replays.