Wish-List for Dominions 4

[korenje]

ok I have a serious wish.

The problem is with magic (dom3). Why can some über strong mage (fire 20 for example) cast some spells at the same level as some very weak mage. There should be a slider where you change strength of some spell and slider for quantity. So basically when you want to cast weak spell, the mage should cast more spells per turn until he runs out of action points.

All magic should be linked to mage strength - for example summoning. Strong mage should summon stronger monster or more monsters or have ability to summon more different stuff. (perhaps add some action points while in map mode).

Also in dominions 3 everything leans towards death at the end of the game. Assuming the game is played for infinite time, you should have ability to change capital, move population there etc. Perhaps something more strategic.

Also if some death nation can easily create some of their death monsters, there should also be a harder way for other nations to create the same monster by not using death magic. (perhaps magic levels should be limited for other nations).

Dom3: The capital should be holy grail for every race? in single player mode shouldn't opponents attack my capital with strong spells to halve population or something? At 6 opponents at impossible level that never happens. Should be fixed in dom4.

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

The thing is that these "new wishes" do not come as a gift from Santa or something. A coder will have to dive in to the ancient code that "wish" uses (it has been around since Dom:PPP, mind you) and add that new option. And coding time from Illwinter on Dom3 is a rare occurance nowdays, a very rare resource if you allow the simplification.

I just think that if JK really finds the time or intrest to do some coding on dom3*, it would *really* be wasted on adding some excessive wish option that almost no one would use. There are much much more crucial things that could be fixed. Just check the bug list for some of them.

In case you somehow failed to notice it, Burnsaber, this is the wish-list for Dominions 4 (hint: it says so in the title) - a hypothetical game that quite possibly will never exist - not a wish list for changes to Dominions 3 to be added in minor content patches that would be better spent on fixing existing bugs.

Sure, if some "coding fairy" comes along and just happens to fart all the code needed to make a bug free "immortality" wish, yeah, we could add that. But I wouldn't waste precious dom3 "code time" on the matter.

Since neither of us are in control of the development budget or developer time, there is no way that any of us can waste precious dom3 coding time either way. On your general point that any developer time spent on Dom3 would be better spent on other things I do agree, but that is utterly irrelevant to this thread.

It's sort of moot to discuss this though, we both know that there will likely be no big update pathces ahead, just tweaks and fixes.

I refer you again to the bloody title of this thread. This is a thread for wishes for a future game in the series, not a thread for players second-guessing developers on what would be a good use of developer time in Dom3 patches.

[BigDaddy]

I think you should be able to wish for traits, such as trample, immortal, fire resistance, etc...

[thejeff]

Well if wish cleared horror marks, it might well be worth it for a pretender, who's in danger of dropping into the Horror mark Death Spiral.

Especially if he's your only Wish caster, without empowering one of those Wished up SCs. And even that might not give you the path combinations you'd designed the pretender for.

[nordlys]

Wishing for "death" or for one of doom horrors is not particularly optimal either, but these options are present.

Besides, SP is not about minmaxing cost-effectiveness, it's about exploring and experimenting.

[BigDaddy]

If you're feeling adventuress then just wishing for power might not be enough, you'll need imortality too... plus you can't get much more thematic than wishing for immortality.

[Corporal Kindel]

I think there needs to be a 9th magical path: "Life"

We got a "death" magic path that includes demons, a "blood" path that includes un-dead, now we need a "life" path that includes angels & archangels, who would be summoned from the conjuration school. "Life" would be a strong healing type magic path with little/no offence (since we have plenty of that already) and include upper level spells for removing curses & horror-marks, spells for healing specific type inflictions (and poison damage), and spells to remove curses from artifacts would be great too. There would be a need for a new type of magic gem, say something like "water of life" that could be made by "life" priests in a similar mechanic to how blood magic/priests works [minus the sacrificing ].

It would be a kool mechanic if archangels had an "aura of healing" power that could increase health (remove damage) from units in battle withing a certain radius, similar to how the "cold" and "heat" specialized units do heat damage in a radius, since there's a precedent for this it shouldn't be too difficult to script. Maybe angels can do this too but within a smaller radius.

Personally, I'd like to see levels increase also. Spells that are more powerful, say up to 15th level with corresponding more powerful (and more expensive) artifacts/armor would be great. A piece of armor that costs 100 gems to make but was incredibly strong would increase options for players (bangs per buck most wouldn't buy it, but it would be great to have the option nonetheless).

I think there's a huge room for more & varied magical weapons as well as more unique items. A fourth version of the game should included at minimum a thousand more items/armor/swords/artifacts. Odd combinations such as fire/water, water/blood, and nature/death/blood could provide a lot of additional variety that is possible for this game.

Having a larger "mod" space would be great for really big mods too, or more than 4 at once, say 8 or 10.

At the new 15th level, have spells available such as "summon/resurrect god", which would be a unique highly powerful unit for each nationality. It would be great if some of the god's abilities (or even the whole enchilada) could be defined by the player before game, in a manner similar to pretender design. Or even, a "resurrect the Pantokrator" (whatever the hell that is) would be huge. This would also be a unique unit that could only be summoned once in the game by any nation that met the spell reqs.

Of course, most games would not last this long, perhaps only on large maps. But, this would be great for players who like large maps and long games and not the 1,2,3 and it's over small game. It could also turn the tide if the game happened to be evenly matched this far into the game.

I'd love to be able to mod these things into the game but it can't be done without a game re-design (at least the additional levels & ninth magic path).

[nordlys]

A thought occured to me: the current point-distribution scheme for research is too generic and unthematic. I'd make it so an invididual researcher can only focus at one school at a time, kind of like Hearts of Iron 2 with its researcher teams being assigned to specific projects. The current interface could remain as a shortcut to mass-switch multiple researchers from one project to the next, but finetuning it on point-by-point basis would go. At very least, spreading a researcher across several projects would severely penalize his output. In addition, an aptitude to a specific school could develop over time, a newly assigned student would work less effectively, but with time spent on uninterrupted research of a single school his output would increase to nominal and more.

And then of course the classic 4x random events like "your researchers found a nether scroll, your alteration research was boosted" or "a drunk janitor set fire to your research records, 200 points of evocation research lost".

Come to think of it, the stealth units could have a bunch of diversionary actions like "sabotage research", "set fire to a temple" etc too...

[thejeff]

A micromanagement nightmare.

Though events that boost research in a specific school would be cool. And general loss of research. Loss in a specific school would just be one more reason to not spread research out over multiple schools at ones. Or could you lose spells you'd already learned?

[13lackGu4rd]

Solar Brilliance is sort of a "reverse darkness", well not exactly its reverse but pretty close... also would would be the point of reverse light of the northern star? -1 magic attributes for enemies instead of +1 for allies? cause well, magic debuffs are just not available at all, only way to lower magic is the mute infection, or death on non immortal pretender.