Wish-List for Dominions 4

[sum1lost]

MaxWilson said:
StrictlyRockers,

In the interests of data-gathering, of the people you know who are turned off by the sprite-based graphics, how many of them have the patience for long strategy games? Or even short strategy games, a la Axis and Allies? What is it about Dominions that they're likely to enjoy?

It's just that I'm having trouble imagining a person who would appreciate a complicated game and yet NOT have an old wargamer's attitude toward graphics.

-Max

I like pretty games.

[Gandalf Parker]

I would suspect that a single unit in decent 3D animated graphic might take at least as long as long as 8 units in 2d with only 2 images (standing and attack move). For a full-time graphics person that might be feasable but I dont think that the few more sales would justify Kristoffer giving up his teaching career for it. And I sure wouldnt appreciate the game with 1/8th the units but oh gee they are so cool and 3d.

[Wahnsinniger]

Strategy Games are one of the least useful genre's to sink 3D money into. Yeah, in a FPS, you need crisp and eye-catching graphics to attract gamers. Strategy games have been and always will be about the gameplay, not that graphics. The images in this game are fine, and have a certain charm to them since units even show their equipment(one of the best visual things to do in any Fantasy/RPG game).

Now this isn't to say that the interface couldn't use some improvement. The Tactical Battles are the worst in this regard, and could benefit from a control-bar with the current options (Pause, Exit, Fast-Forward), which would make it much more new-player friendly. Also, if you could add in a way to go forward-backwards through the battle, kinda like the Progress bar when watching a movie in Media Player for example, that would be great.

[MaxWilson]

FWIW, adding a forwards-backwards option would be time-consuming, given that the battle is actually regenerated while-you-watch from the random seed, not merely replayed from a pre-recording. There is no reason in principle why it couldn't be cached while it's regenerated, but it would take some work. Just for the record.

-Max

[Gandalf Parker]

forward-backward would be available if you use a 3rd party program such as fraps. Plus that would allow you to store battles, email them to thers, upload them to YouTube so you can link to them here (and help sell dominions). I agree that the battles could be improved visually but Im not big on the dev spending time and effort putting in anything that can be done with 3rd party programs

[Saulot]

That seems rather cumbersome. One would have to play through each battle at normal speed in order for fraps to record it. Then one would have to either switch out or exit dominions and then reload the video file in some external program and then replay it to get the forward/backward ability. This would also be unsuitable in some situations since you lose the ability to examine units, which is useful to see how certain mages use gems, if an enemy sc acquires an affliction, etc.
AFAIK fraps also saves everything as uncompressed video which would then need to be compressed if one wanted to share it with anyone else (which can be rather time-consuming, particularly for the very many battles that can occur in one turn during the late game).

[Gandalf Parker]

It has its pros and cons. But so does having Johan research and then program one into the game.

[Benthien]

One thing that really annoys me when playing against the ai, is that it kills one of my commanders with a mindburn, seeking arrow or whatever..And the message you get is for instance "Suddently a arrow appeared out of nowhere and struck Alfred in the hearth, Alfred was killed by the attack" or something like it..Well thats all well and good, except 4 the fact that when playing large maps, you have 27 commanders with that same name..which one got killed and where was he?

[MaxWilson]

Some games, I have commanders with names like Alfred. Other times, I have commanders with names like "Death-x," or, if he's assigned to an army, "Death-7," or else "Ponsifaz the Summoner" and "Wericar Staffmaker." In that case, if I can't figure out where a commander was and what his job was from the message, it means it doesn't matter. He was probably just researching or site-searching.

It's not a fix for your problem, but it's a bit of a mitigator.

-Max

P.S. Plus, I think nicknames are thematic. I recall one time when I had a scout (named Sparrow-17 or something) get caught by province defense somehow. He killed 7 or 8 and managed to scare the rest off, single-handedly. (He was a Helheim scout, which helped.) I renamed him Sparrowhawk.

[Wait, maybe he wasn't caught. Maybe I had him attack the province, thinking it was empty or had only a single defender or something. I sure didn't expect as many as there actually there.]

[Cheezeninja]

I would love to see more ritual style personal enchantments. I think that it could be a relatively easy way to add yet another level of wonderful complexity to the game.

Imagine a ritual like ritual of returning that would add a fire shield to you, possibly with increasing intensity with each casting. Or allow an aquatic unit to breathe on land for a certain number of turns, as long as it kept re-casting the ritual. Or any number of different buffs that are already in the game.

Sure this would impact the relative power of magic items, and allow you to send a pre-buffed SC or thug into a battle without having to sit out the first few turns. But it could easily be balanced by an astral spell or two dispelling personal enchantments (which could be deadly to the aforementioned aquatic), adding yet another level to the paper-rock-scissors balance in what I think would be an interesting way. You could even have another astral enchantment designed just to lock your other enchantments in, by always being the first one dispelled.

I think it would be a cool middle ground between combat buffs and items, allowing for some interesting strategies and counters.