What could we steal from other fantasy games...

[weimaar]

Hi Johan, what is the rationale behind the not-implementing of a magic item forge?

[Kristoffer O]

There is a magic item forge. It's just that the players can't pick together anything.

Allowing forging of generic items would make them boring and less diverse in our opinion. Balancing is also difficult.

[weimaar]

Christoffer, giving people the FEELING of them being in charge is one of the most addicting and fun features one can add in a game. Being able - as a player- to tinker with magical items is a very very "empowering" thing. If you remember, half the reason one played master of orion 2 was the possibility to (even if it was completely unnecessary sometimes) design the ships. It made a unique game absolutely fantastic. Dominions 3 has the same potential.

[Twan]

I tend to agree with weimaar. I find item forging in MoM far more interesting and immersive than in dominions. Then of course there may be a lot of balance issues with this one approach.

I also think many items descriptions are strange for items you just created.

I mean, if I'm a quasi god and forge a relic I can't see why its description say its a legendary item someone else has made (what all artefacts description do). For me there is a thematic inconsistency here.

Anyway as designing items is a too big feature for dom 3, and changing all descriptions too much work for no gameplay addition... and as dom 4 isn't planned for the moment, I'm fine with items are they are.

ps : the best system for me would combine the two approachs...
- generic pre-made non unique items for low levels gear and boosters
- unique legendary items of the past not available from construction (they are already made) but from summoning schools
- designing some national non unique items (with a limited number of items models slots for each nation, and powers dependant on research in other schools) as mid-late game construction school power
- designing relics (with the pretender himself forging) as the endgame construction school power

And as soon a national item model or relic with done powers would be made, these powers would stop to be available for other nations/gods designed items, so item variety and race to endgame construction would be preserved.

[Omnirizon]

weimaar said:
Christoffer, giving people the FEELING of them being in charge is one of the most addicting and fun features one can add in a game. Being able - as a player- to tinker with magical items is a very very "empowering" thing. If you remember, half the reason one played master of orion 2 was the possibility to (even if it was completely unnecessary sometimes) design the ships. It made a unique game absolutely fantastic. Dominions 3 has the same potential.

yeah but you forget you could design a ship that could single-handedly take out hundreds of all the best things the AI could throw at you. All you had to do was combine two pieces of technology (I can't remember what they were called now) and you'de get 10 free turns at the start of every battle.

with the ability to design magic items all the players would quickly find the most exploitable designs and the great diversity of magic items would collapse to just a few that had to be used in order to compete. in practice the diversity of the game system would actually be reduced by designable magic items.

sector24 said:
...He ranks up there with Gary Gygax and Wikipedia as far as rewriting history goes...

I LOL'd. But hey, I love wikipedia! are you referring to the vandalism? Or simply the different perspective wiki offers on history?

Any _contemporary_ historian worth their salt will tell you history is subjective, and has commonly been written from a top-down perspective. There is a lot of effort today to capture history from other perspectives. Voices of the subaltern and all that. In reality, wikipedia is criticized for silencing subaltern perspectives, because it takes a certain expertise to use it that many of the "subaltern" (itself a subjective signifier) do not possess.

[MaxWilson]

Weimaar,

Yes, you can do that with a mod. You can create new magic items in a mod, and in fact you can edit the mod while the game is in progress to add new magic items. However, you can't make magic items cost gold, and the cost in gems is always fixed by the path forging requirements. N4F2 items will always cost 25 nature, 10 fire gems.

-Max