Two very good ideas!(i promise)

[Xietor]

Actually in dom II, you did affect castle design in start up.
So I see pd as a natural follow-up to the loss of the ability to design castles.

There are many cases now where you may be stuck with 20-30 unspent points. And it would be nice to have other options available.

I do think you should get some bonus(besides gems) for conquering an enemy castle. Maybe you can build one of their units.

[MaxWilson]

You get the bonus of him no longer being able to produce his capital-only troops. That's nontrivial. It also tends to be a rich province which means lots of income, plus the gems as you mentioned. Maybe you're looking for something closer to the feel of Axis and Allies, where if Germany manages to take Russia's capital it can start pumping out 8 infantry per turn in Russia and the game is basically over because the allies can't take it back. Maybe playing with victory points would help that feel a little, since each capital captured is another step towards winning, although it doesn't give you any in-game boost like better armies.

Producing other nations' units is something I'm pretty sure will never happen in official Dom3. Marverni's population isn't going to enlist in your army just because you conquered Marverni (although it's true that indepedents do). It's probably possible to mod it (or even use map commands), if you pick a priori which unit should be produceable in each capital.

-Max

[Endoperez]

If we were able to mod poptypes, and could add a new poptype for every nation in the game, it'd be pretty simple to have e.g. the capital of C'tis to have a custom poptype that allows the recruitment of C'tis Militia, C'tis Light Infantry, Slave Lizards, Runners and Lizard Shamans, or the capital of Abysia to have a custom poptype that allows the recruitment of one type of Humanbred, Garnet Amazons (but not griffon riders) and maybe a mage of some kind (Garnet Sorceress?), etc. Even now, the poptypes of the capitals could be defined to be e.g. Knights/Longbow for Man (which would be very nice because the capital would actually have the resources to produce knights), Garnet Amazons for Abysia, Lizards and Lizard Shamans for C'tis, HI/crossbows for Ulm, tribals for Mictlan/Machaka/Tien Chi, Markata/Atavi for monkey nations, etc.

[B0rsuk]

I'd rather see it the other way around. When you capture enemy capitol, you can't recruit any units of that nation, which is very strange when you consider that, after all, C'tis is a centre of major civilisation.
I mean, you can capture and subdue various small tribes, with their fragile culture. It's verry strange that a much bigger civilisation leaves no trail at all. Additionaly, you get access to some non-national units the original player could never recruit (hidden population?).

I would love to see something like this: once you capture enemy capitol, you should be able to recruit 1-2 predefined unit(s) from that civilisation. Nothing really special, but it should stand out from regular poptypes, too. But it should be potentially useful.
Examples:
- if you capture Abysia, you can recruit Humanbreds
- Spider Riders in captured Machaka (NOT spider knights - the ones without armor) + Witch Doctor perhaps
- Harpies and/or Satyr Sneaks in Pangaea
- Runners in C'tis
- some basic infantry or regular composite archers in Tien Chi
- Arbalests in Ulm (I wonder... if squirrels report true,protection value of a shield doesn't matter against missiles.... doesn't make Arbalests even less useful ?)
- Halberdiers or Swordsmen in Marignon
- Shield+spear+sling warriors in Mictlan. They're interesting and they slaughter many kinds of archers. Actually, most slingers massacre Machakan archers.
- Marverni Javelineers for Marverni

Is it possible to mod this ?

[Endoperez]

B0rsuk, read my post before yours. It's poptype-dependent. The original player won't even see the poptype of his capital. The poptype will be all a conqueror sees besides his own national troops. There aren't enough poptypes to cover all the nations - no humanbreds, no satyrs, no non-raptor Caelumians, no halberd/pike independents (Ulm/Marignon), etc. However, many nations already have a poptype that fits them pretty well. Jaguar Tribe for Mictlan, Lion Tribe for Machaka, HI/crossbows indeps for Marignon, Slingers for Marverni, Lizards/Lizard Shamans for C'tis, etc.

Besides not being able to make new poptypes, the biggest problem is that the poptype of the capital can't be modded. It can be changed via map commands, but you'd need a program to automatically choose a random province to be the capital of a nation, and then choose which nation would start there, and then change the poptype into something suitable if you wanted to play random games.

[Ballbarian]

It can be changed via map commands, but you'd need a program to automatically choose a random province to be the capital of a nation, and then choose which nation would start there, and then change the poptype into something suitable if you wanted to play random games.

You will be able to do this with the next version of SemiRandom. I already have the random start positions and custom god files. Adding poptype to the god file would produce the desired result. (Really wish we could mod poptypes at the map file level.)

[Endoperez]

Ballbarian said:
You will be able to do this with the next version of SemiRandom. I already have the random start positions and custom god files. Adding poptype to the god file would produce the desired result. (Really wish we could mod poptypes at the map file level.)

I wasn't quite sure about the name of your program any more, otherwise I'd have mentioned it as an answer.

Also, I wish we could set maps to automatically enable spesific mods for all games played on it. That'd enable all kinds of interesting maps.