The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Sandman]

A new wish: Better Fire Magic

Fire magic lacks oomf. Its specialty, attack spells, are not particularly wonderful. For summoning, items and buffs, it's fairly weak.

Here are some new fire spell ideas. You could make room for them by clearing out some of the redundant evocations.

Incandescence: A self-buff that increases the damage inflicted by the mage's attack spells by 30%. This works for all spells, not just fire ones! The rationale behind this spell is to allow for a bit of synergy between fire and the other magic paths. We all know that a good mage can become great with a water random - due to quickness. This is the same sort of idea.

Forest Fire: An attack ritual that can only be uased on a forest square. Basically an evil version of those forest-only spells nature has. The province suffers population loss (10%?), and any troops in the province may receive injuries, although deaths are unlikely. Creatures with forest survival and/or are in stealth mode are more at risk.

Detonate: Incinerate is pretty good for a fire spell. But an offensively orientated school like fire should have an even better lethal alteration. Detonate is that spell. The mage points a finger towards an enemy, who instantly explodes, damaging everyone around them. Magic resistance negates.

Call of the Warrior: This is a ritual which focuses on the leadership aspect of fire magic. The targetted province will receive a large number of bonus resources next turn, allowing many units to be recruited. You can use it on resource-poor areas like farmland to recruit heavy units, or on your own capital for massive unit production.

This might be better off as an earth spell, but think of it as calling up, rather than producing, new units.

[RedRover]

(Found this in an old file labeled "Wacky Wishlist." The file is about a year old and has a time stamp of 3:38 AM. You have been warned.)


Nerf the Demons!

Are demons the key to victory in MP? Or are they just the flavor of the month?

Makes no difference—the thought is that if you have a computer to crunch numbers, why not crunch numbers?! Thus, a little idea to add a small cost to using Demons. We all know how nasty they are…

1. In the province they occupy, Demons torture and kill one person per 100 hp of Demons each month. Round fractions down (3 devils=1 kill).

2. These count as successful Blood Slave raids with respect to their impact on Unrest.

The population gets a suitable complaint popup.

(Hey, they're demons, they kill things for fun!)


Up the Angels!

1. Each 10 hp of Angels adds +1 to province population each month (Love is in the Air).

2. Each 50 hp of Angels reduces unrest by 1.


Chaos Reigns!

If Angels and Demons are in the same province on the same side at the end of the turn, they compare hit points. The weaker side deserts. If equal, they both desert!

[Endoperez]

Angels have already been empowered, there is new angel (cast of angels?) approximately the power of the Demon Lords, they have new graphics (Kristoffer's avatar is the new Harbringer), etc.

[Nerfix]

Sandman said:
A new wish: Better Fire Magic

Fire magic lacks oomf. Its specialty, attack spells, are not particularly wonderful. For summoning, items and buffs, it's fairly weak.

Here are some new fire spell ideas. You could make room for them by clearing out some of the redundant evocations.

Incandescence: A self-buff that increases the damage inflicted by the mage's attack spells by 30%. This works for all spells, not just fire ones! The rationale behind this spell is to allow for a bit of synergy between fire and the other magic paths. We all know that a good mage can become great with a water random - due to quickness. This is the same sort of idea.

Forest Fire: An attack ritual that can only be uased on a forest square. Basically an evil version of those forest-only spells nature has. The province suffers population loss (10%?), and any troops in the province may receive injuries, although deaths are unlikely. Creatures with forest survival and/or are in stealth mode are more at risk.

Detonate: Incinerate is pretty good for a fire spell. But an offensively orientated school like fire should have an even better lethal alteration. Detonate is that spell. The mage points a finger towards an enemy, who instantly explodes, damaging everyone around them. Magic resistance negates.

Call of the Warrior: This is a ritual which focuses on the leadership aspect of fire magic. The targetted province will receive a large number of bonus resources next turn, allowing many units to be recruited. You can use it on resource-poor areas like farmland to recruit heavy units, or on your own capital for massive unit production.

This might be better off as an earth spell, but think of it as calling up, rather than producing, new units.

I like them, expect I think that Forest Fire is a bit too powerfull. I don't think that all that many people lived in woods.

Incadescence is a neat idea and perhaps Detonate could provide a bigger bang if the enemy is larger? A hobbit would produce a small boom while a Niefel Giant would produce a massive explosion!

Call of the Warrior sounds fair but in all honesty I still expect that magical units "pwn" so to say the fleshly units.

[RedRover]

Endoperez: Great news, that! Thanks.


Something New

I just did a search of this list today and I found something that no modders have mentioned so far:

I wish for the ability to create new mercenaries.

If we are eventually do true mods for Warhammer's Old World, Forgotten Realms, Middle Earth, Adventurien, Tyrande, Black Company, and others, we need the ability to create mercenary groups native to those settings.

(I would really like to hear a word of feedback on this one...)

[Chazar]

I wish that in Dom3, messages send to nation X are also sent to the sender. I usually have some time in between turns so I sometimes forget what I had sent. So a CC to self would help me for one more turn...

[B0rsuk]

It would be very cool, and efficient, if I were able to select what kind of spells my mage is allowed to cast. It would work as a list of binary YES/NO switches. All spells are allowed by default.
The categories could be:

Area effect offensive spells and Spells Which Can Harm Your Army - to disallow casting Breath of Winter and suchlike.
Direct offensive magic(precision-dependant offensive spells?) - to disable fireballs, firedarts, flying shards, and all these annoying spells which usually have hardly any effect. They're especially pitiful on Scorpion King pretender (precision:9). As it is, fire magic on a pretender seems a disadvantage, because he keeps wasting time casting silly ineffective spells.
self-buffs - personal luck, twist fate, and so on. These are good on SC's, but there are ocassions when you don't want your mages to cast them. On the other hand, SCs may want to disable all else.
Team buff spells - all kinds of spells which target multiple units you control. There are reasons not to use them - high fatigue cost, etc. Sometimes you attack with a small group of commanders, and +3 armor isn't really going to do much.
non-combat combat spells - I mean stuff like Horror Mark, Curse, Seven Years Fever.... They're ok if your commanders are going down and will die anyway, but not in a serious battle I think. Well, curse may be useful, but not others I listed.
summonings - to have more options.
spells with gem cost/fatigue>100 - for fighting weaklings with well-equipped mages. I know one alternative:transfer gems to another commander.

Spells would have to be manually inserted into each category (by game developers). Comments ?

[shovah]

i would love that, maybe another option for more specific spells (keep my seraphs casting false horror instead of phantasmal wolves/warrior)

[Chazar]

• Dead God Option: During Pretender Design one might choose that the Pretender starts as dead (i.e. must be called by Priests first), which yields a few more design points. Thereby one might achieve a higher bless effect while still being somewhat less adapt of casting (because of the -1 for recalling).
• Minor Blessing: All own national troops should be able to receive a minor blessing. Something along the normal blessing -5, i.e. a 9-blessing would also yield minor blessing equivalent to a 4-blessing to the own national troops (but maybe with the +3 to morale reduced to +1 as well.)
  Priests and normal national troops could really benefit from a little boost and blessing is just cool, but so difficult to use with only one or two unit types to use.

[boltcutter]

I, as a new guy, wish for: (many of these have been covered)

1. Tutorial/Walkthrough/Something! I learned Dominions I the hard way, and so I can actually play, but I thought about trying to teach my wife, and . .. I flinch at the thought.

2. When some huge, spectacular feat of magic happens: you should get a picture of it, not just a message saying "There was Rain of Flaming Toads and 25% of your population died." I know, you are a two person company and your goal is to provide deep content rather than pretty pictures, but I think that one picture per "effect" [you might even reuse some pictures] is not too much to wish for.

3. I would like less micromanagement but have no useful ideas on how to acheive it, aside from what has been listed. "Deliver magic item to X", "Collect wounded troops and Heal" [for an Arco priestess], "Build Sages and set to Research" [for a Library]- those are some ideas I had.

4. If there was some way to tag your units with your color, that would be nice. If both sides are using, e.g. pikemen you have to guess who owns which based on what direction they're facing.

5. Single Player improvements- even basic ones like "Starving AI troops"- would be nice.

I realize most of my wishes are "chrome" but I think that a little chrome will go a long way. The people posting in this thread are, by definition, the ones who don't mind the graphics and are past the brutally-steep learning curve.

It's a hard game to convert someone to.