The Dominions 3: "Wishlist"

[Zen]

The following is the Dominions 3 Wishlist. Just to clarify, this is what Users would like to have, not neccessarily what they will get. With the announcement of Dominions 3 I'd like to funnel all the "Feature Request", "Johan do this", "This is what I hate about Dom2, change it in Dom3" Posts so that it's easier for Illwinter to read about potential suggestions (that are probably already brewing) and to allow Users to feel they are being heard.

Suggestions will get potentially more attention if they are worded correctly and not as an attack or "x is BROKE! FIX IT" so foam at your own risk.

[Zooko]

Shouldn't there be a separate thread for the "Less Micromanagement" wishes?

I wish for less micromanagement in tax rates. I have a simple rules: if unrest > 9, then lower tax rate by ceil(unrest/10) * 2. If unrest < 10, then set tax rate to 100.

I'm sure the flexibility to set provincial taxes is useful for more sophisticated players than myself, but I'd rather not have to manually tweak taxes in each province each turn unless I want to.

[Zooko]

I wish for super-duper 3-D graphics, as I accidentally blurted out on another non-wishlist thread.

[Zen]

It's okay But knowing those who love Dom2 I know the feature requests are going to be pouring in. This just makes it easier to read and possibly implement any ideas that people may have and would like to share. More than likely IW will be busy making Dom3 that they don't have to spend alot of time reading through suggestions in multiple threads.

[Taqwus]

Sure. I'm a bit of a nut about reducing tedium in interfaces.

Example: Tax policy in a fairly large empire. If tax rates could be set automatically due to a policy dependent on unrest (e.g.
if unrest <= 0 tax at 100
elsif unrest <= 5 tax at 90
elsif unrest <= 10 tax at 80
elsif unrest <= 15 tax at 70
elsif unrest <= 20 tax at 60
etc (or, more succintly, "reduce taxes by 20 for every 5 unrest") with a per-province manual override and a global override (i.e. the current system: no global rule).

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Units are aggregated in some displays, notably Gift of Reason is much nicer about not showing numerous indistinguishable units for selection. Aggregation in the army screen would be even spiffier; instead of

aaabaaaaabbbcccaaddaa

where a,b,c,d are unit types,

a b c d
12 4 3 2

would be faster to parse in terms of differentiating between units although it'd require an extra step for selecting subsets, and perhaps would need to be expanded anyway in terms of identifying wounded, experienced, etc. Those could be treated as separate unit types, eh.

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If blood slave pooling still affects sacrificers, it probably shouldn't, as this hampers Mictlan rather disproportionately. I might even wonder if pooling (any resource) should only affect those -gathering- slaves or holding gem-producing items or who innately generate such bits; this would reduce the need to re-arm battle mages who happen to be hovering over a lab that time. Could always have an additional button to force the current comprehensive pooling in case you need it, e.g. getting ready to cast a global or dispel.

Also on gem rearming, perhaps a mage who's expended gems should know how many gems he's used and reload the next chance he gets (over lab and there's sufficient gems); not really sure about this, 'tho, as there might be gem shortages during which we want them to hold off on this.

[Zooko]

I don't really wish for more nations, more units, more spells, or more items. I mean, sure that would be nice (once all the balance issues get ironed out), but it isn't something I really wish for. I've been playing dom2 for around a year, and at the current rate, it will be several more years before I've tried out all the current nations, learned about all the current summonables, etc.

So, while I expect more stuff (due to Illwinter's admirable philosophy), and I intend to enjoy the new stuff, it isn't really a priority for me.

If given the choice between "Dom 2 THREE DEE" with the exactly current gameplay (plus patches and mods) but fancy graphics, or "Dom 3" with exactly the current graphics but a bucketload of new stuff, I might go ahead and play Dom 2 THREE DEE for at least a few months.

I know this makes me sound shallow and ignorant, to say it in this crowd, but somebody's gotta speak up for the shallow and ignorant masses who might buy lots of copies of "Dom 2 THREE DEE" and thus put lots of money into the pockets of Illwinter and Shrapnel.

Just to be clear, I would much rather play Dom2 as is than play a prettier game with worse gameplay. It's just that there has to be a point of diminishing returns in adding units. When do you stop? Eventually you can have so many units that most players are unfamiliar with most of them. Is that good?

At the current rate, by the time Dom3 comes out in 2005 I *might* have learned about most of Dom2's units and I might be ready to try new ones. We'll see.

[Cohen]

Here my first opinions:

Better Pretender and Nation balance.
National Troops *always useful*, perhaps enhanced with more battlefield spells and such.
Better Divine/Unholy Spellcasting, perhaps a dedicated magic school, and forging.
Improved Messaging interface.
More orders for troops, spells in queue.
More skills and special abilities.
More terrain types and more influence of terrain type in battles.
Improved siege.
More indeps unit types and magic site recruits.
Heroic skills assigned related to unit base skills.
Experience gains different from magic summons and national troops.
A random national hero generator (pick a base commander, add something, and create it when the default ones are ended).
More battle maneuver, like flanking (delaying your troop but they enter from flank or rear, doable only by light cavalry for example).
A wider range of events.
Some scales need to be worthy and not exploitable to take negative, especially growth.
Primary and Secondary castle choice, perhaps the secondary allowing only to recruit your troops/mages in, and the primary giving effective defence.
Movement order given by a "command rating" (something like a strategy skill) stat assigned to commanders.
Battle movement given by a tactic skill (if your commander is most skilled you could be even able to move twice than enemy, but only troops are affected, or you move first only ...).
Different kind of battles or order issued (hiding troops could get an Ambush order, to attack only a group of the enemy force for example, this could make useful even villains or such).
Conquering an enemy controlled (from more than X turn --- to avoid a take and retake of a lab in a war, before the lab is filled of stuff it should be considered secure) laboratory could give you a loot due to sacking, stealing gems and perhaps 1 random item from enemy lab.
Better assassination calculation or different way to do that. The assassin could wait for the victim to sleep or to be distracted instead of attacking it in a battlefield.
An assassin could have an assassination percentage that is the chance of success he's, this is augmented by items and experience, and lowered by the amount of bodyguard assigned to the victim. You should be able too to choose who to assassinate.


Now stomach claims something to fill it.

[Zooko]

I spend a lot of time laboriously checking my units for battle wounds, then checking what each battle wound is, in order to sort them into new squads.

Battle Fraught units and badly damaged melee units get thrown into one squad which has the privilege of leading the attack. Damaged archers are allowed to stay in the main archer squads unless they have a wound which reduces their usefulness such as Lost One Eye or Lost One Arm.

One very simple improvement would be for a tooltip to indicate the name of the wound when I hover over the red heart icon.

[Zooko]

I love building up heroes. Even in a game like Dom2 where some of them are destined for a glorious death instead of a glorious victory.

One thing I always loved in Heroes of Might and Magic III was getting to choose between two randomly generated heroic improvements whenever the hero levelled up.

The equivalent in Dom2 is to try to get as many different units into the Hall of Fame as I can, and then choose the one who got the best heroic ability to be my prophet.

All of which is just to say that allowing some kind of (limited) choice about heroic ability could be a real thrill for me.

[johan osterman]

Cohen:
What do you mean with battle movement? Are you saying troops should be 'quickened' if they have commanders with a high leadership?


What do you mean with more skills? Are you saying there should be more stats on the units?