The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Chazar]

Another technical whish: Within a .map file, a "#start x" command should supersede a "#terrain x 512" command. In this way, the existing option to use special starting positions or not would make more sense (e.g. in my Chandrea map V4.2 (soon to come), special starting positions yield bonus items, so if one does not want to use these special starting provinces, those provinces should not be choosen at random. However, setting terrain flag 512 will always supersede an explicit "#start", which is odd).

[RedRover]

Just popping in to drop off a summary of Dom3 related items from the Abysian AAR CB5.0 to save a little dev time. Some of these will be familiar (hopefully not all):

More Aggressive AI: At Difficult and higher level.

Strands of Arcane Power global spell: Identify and locate newly found sites.

Blood Economy: Make this less fiddly, improve documentation in manual.

State of War: It would be nice to have a reference screen showing which AIs are actively at war with the player.

Mercs: Alert player the turn before they leave, maybe allow automatic rehire bid (non-default, possibly disabled in multiplayer).

Wish spell…for “Population”: What’s fair for 150 Astral? Suggest 1,500 (that is, 7.5x, where x is the popnumber in the tax formula). Also, let wisher choose a target province. It might be interesting (and easier) to allow any province to be targeted, even if not owned by the player. You might also enable the word “Corpses” to convert population to corpses at the same rate.

((Digression: Hmmm, another possible way to get a base population number might be to work backwards, alchemizing Astral gems to Death gems to reversing the Raven’s Feast conversion into corpses—see what population matches. That is, go from Astral Gems (150)->Alchemy-> Death gems (75)-> reverse Raven’s Feast conversion -> corpses (?) = population. Or maybe not.))

Amulet of Arcane Authority: New item, misc slot, allows command of 10 magic beings. Allows a Gift of Reasoned magic being Commander to lead a raiding force of his base unit type (e.g.: Summer Lion).

Post Game Playback: A desirable feature.

[Chazar]

And more minor technical wishes:

All related to map-editing. They are just annoying and it is possible to get along without, but mapmaking is a real pain sometimes and these little things would really help and should be easy to obtain:

• A way to comment things out within .map files. Currently "--#somecommand" is treated as "#somecommand". So Dom2 ignores everything until seeing a "#" and then tries to parse a sensible command. Bad! I would not mind braced /* comments */ to avoid the problem arising from different end-of-line's on different OS.
• The Mapeditor should alter .map files instead of rewriting/overwriting them. I want a mapediting GUI which preserves my comments and gimmicks (such a placed commanders and units)! Currently, once you used a text-editor you are stuck to edit this way or copy-paste between various versions.
• The mapeditor should fasciliate renumbering: If I 'add' or 'remove' a white dot in the tga, the mapeditor should be able to recover the mapfile, once I told him the number of the 'added' or 'removed' dot. This is really a pain, as a simple search-and-replace for each-and-every shifted province is not even enough: Code:

  ---

   ...
  
  #setland 33
  
  #commander 34
  
  #units 35 33
  
  #setland 34
  
  ... 

  ---

  So if province 33 becomes 34 after .tga editing and province 34 becomes 35, etc., then I still want 35 archers placed in province 34 and not 35 commanders-as-units instead! Similarly , province 32 should remain swampy when renumbering province 32 to 31: "#terrain 32 32". So this is real pain when doing it by hand.
• Related to the one before, there should be a "#ignore_prov xy" command, which tells Dom2 to ignore the white dot which would otherwise be province xy. Cannot be too difficult, but would really help when removing editing a map.

[Wick]

I'd like 1) Machakan Spider Warriors to have the Assassin flag. This is thematic but would only come up with Gift of Reason except 2) any guards of an assassin leader (only the Bane Spider (BS) or someone with a Black Heart AFAIK) that are assassins should also leap out like the pack of crazed ninjas they are.

I think this is wonderfully thematic, would give an incentive to buy Spider Warriors, and is still balanced.

I recognize that the balance is debatable but I find that low stealth makes a BS vulnerable, a BS's best weapon is a Skull Talisman and bane weapons are only useful when losing, and a Bane Spider is too expensive to be expendable and Black Sorcerers are comparatively too valuable. In short a BS is currently a poor value.

On a national level, while Machaka is strong it doesn't seem to be rated in the top tier nor do I think this would put it there.

[Cainehill]

Not sure this has been mentioned lately : I'd like to see blessings that weren't banes. What I mean is, the nature blessing in particular is a screwy one. No other blessing is ever bad, but Nature is for any and all nations with sacred mages. Even when I take a pretender that starts with nature magic, half the time I'm unwilling to bump nature past 3 : Marignon, pythium, ermor, Tien Chi, does anyone take berserk blessing a second time when all their good (or in some cases, all period) mages will go berserk at 1 point of damage and start swinging a dagger instead of casting blade wind?

A flag on commanders that says whether or not they'll accept a blessing maybe? A modification to where mages won't go berserk from the blessing while they've still spells scripted to cast? (Or maybe, at least, a chance depending on MR that they'll cast their spells instead of going berserk?)


*shrug* Maybe it's intentional - Nature-9 is certainly a potent blessing that is supposed to have a drawback to it. But W9 and F9 are also uber-potent, with no drawbacks. Guess I'm just tired of seeing Nature magic being schizophrenic the way Astral is on pretender. (IE : no astral unless it's high astral or immortal. No nature above N3 unless you're either going for N9, or don't have sacred mages to worry about.)

[shovah]

i often take high nature (evin with marignon) and against alot of foes try N9 E9. not much damage but effective. or try N4+ with some good air to stop those arrows making you berserk

[boltcutter]

I think this has been gone over somewhat, but adding to "Cast spells" (last thing scripted) "Cast offensive", "Cast support" and possibly "Cast personal defensive".

Because sometimes I want my mages to be massive archers, sometimes I want them to be casting heals and whatnot, and I suppose there might be times I want them to drive themselves unconscious protecting themselves. . .

[Sandman]

Some minor interface/usability suggestions:

Bless effect information: Simple, really. Bless effects should be visible on the pretender magic selection screen, as well as on the pretender's info screen.

Scales infomation: You should be able to see this on the creation screen as well.

Tower information: The disposition of a nation's tower weapons should be displayed on the fortress choice screen.

More obviously different units: A lot of commander units are pretty indistinguishable to the untrained eye. It's not exactly easy to tell the difference between a witch hunter and a grand master, for example.

[Cainehill]

Here's a wish for better placement of starting positions : on a 180 province map, I had another nation's capital right next to mine (which was hard coded for a particular province).

[Molog]

Perhaps allow pretender gods to create weaker avatars of themselves, for a substantial cost.