[magnate]

Most of my "most important" ones have already been covered -

1. Little need for yet more races/units/spells/items - in hundreds of hours of play I've only explored a fraction of them. I know there will inevitably be more, but units/spells/items that nobody uses (because there's something better and cheaper) are a bit of a waste. That's not a criticism that can be levelled at much of the current content, but the more you have, the more likely it is to occur.

2. More sophisticated combat scripting - lots of people seem to want this, and I'm not an expert by any means but my personal bugbear is storming castles. I'd really love to see "get inside and melee defenders" and "stay outside and pelt defenders" orders. For some reason my troops always end up on the wrong side of the walls ...

3. UI improvements (definable shortcuts, global taxation orders, grouping troops by wounds or experience, selective pooling of gems, etc.). My top top single UI improvement is a screen for locating items - a scrolling list of every commander's inventory (name followed by icons would do, if hovering over the icon pops up the item name or something).

4. On (semi-)automating of tasks (like taxation, production, research etc.): all the games I've ever seen with "governors" or "advisers" to reduce micromanagement have suffered from the excruciating flaw of not making them user-definable! So I either have to do the micro and input the same build queue each time, or turn on the AI "governor" who won't build what I want. If you go down this route, please please please allow players to define and save recruitment queues, forge queues, ritual queues, tax heuristics etc. etc. Otherwise the "reduction" of micro becomes negligible if you can't tailor it to your own play style.

5. Allowing waypoints would be very handy for the later stages of long games. I often find I can't remember where a particular army was heading, especially if a game is only running once or twice a week.

6. I instinctively prefer SP so I'm in the "better and/or moddable AI" camp. I also share Gandalf's love of minor random SP experiences. I used to love finding "retorts" in MoM - if there was a way to include random events which adjusted your scales, or awarded (or took away) magic paths or items from a commander ... without making such things potentially unbalancing ... that would be fun. (Purists please remember that you can always switch such random events OFF ....)

7. (Sorry, I'm getting really carried away now) I think much more could be made of heroic abilities. Being able to choose them would be a bit potentially cheesy, but a little less randomness would be really good (eg. strength more likely on a melee commander or SC, precision more likely on an archer or spellcaster etc.). Perhaps do away with the somewhat artifical HoF mechanic and make heroic abilities the result of experience (meaning finer gradations of xp levels) ... or something. I do think heroes really add to the game (full marks to the person who suggested more national heroes, or randomly generated ones or whatever). Maybe if you got a heroic ability you really didn't want, you could eventually choose to start developing a 2nd one instead of continuing to improve the first one (so the 2nd one would be a much smaller boost, but better than yet more Valour ...)

8. More sophisticated squad arrangements, including routing conditions! Is there a reason why a commander respected by 300 troops can only have 5 squads? Being able to specify that your army will rout if your key HI squad at the front gets decimated (but not if the archers get mashed) would be really good. Not that I want to start another debate about routing of course ....

I'll stop there. Still, this is no criticism - Dom2 is right up in my top 5 games of all time (only MoM, Elite, Civ1 and maybe MoO1 have ever occupied more of my time) - if Dom3 never gets made I bet I will still be playing Dom2 in 5 years' time.

CC