What it will take for me to purchase Dom III

[Endoperez]

shovah said:

would immortality not be enough of a payment?

Shovah makes a good point. Most of the immortal commanders are not recruited, but granted the power of immortality. This is the case with at least Demiliches and regular Vampires, probably with Vampire Counts as well. Similarly, most of the summons are willing to fight, for the gratitude of letting them here or for the joy of fighting on itself.

Non-mindless commanders, maybe units too, should have some kind of an upkeep cost though. There isn't any reason to use national units over summoned ones. It would be nice to have a reason to do what I've been doing all along.
In Master of Magic, only national units could become experienced. This might work in Dominions as well. Creatures like Devils should have to fight for their first star as much as the Velites fight for their third or fourth, as the trident-wielders have already fought for centuries in the depths of Hell from where they were summoned.

[Chazar]

Well, flavour is important, but game mechanics are more so. There should be some restriction, and it is not too hard to come with explanations, e.g.:

• Elemental royalities simply do not exist out there on there own, but are distributed all over the world. The summoner forces these raw elemental power to form the entity it forms when angered. The spell's power to bind the raw elemental power into an AirQueen only last a number of turns, but can be renewed as well as stolen by an enemy mage. Otherwise the force slowly starts to disperse again (slow loss of HPs?) until it is called upon again to concentrate and form the identity it has done so a thousands of times before. Raw elemental powers like it quiet, until angered that is...
• Check common fairy tales why it might be a bad idea to bind devils to do your bidding. Devils need to be amused somehow, so an upkeep in the form of blood slaves (taken from lab) is not too unrealistic, is it? A lack of slaves must not drive them away, as devils take promises all too often, but their need could make it difficult to assemble enough blood slaves to summon even more. I am also happy with Devils/Demons consuming a quarter blood slave or less each...(e.g. as in once every four month)
• Undead and especially vampires feed on the living and spread diseases, so each undead in a province might yield a chance to tip the growth scale in that province towards death or even spread disease like some already do. This would not hurt the undead themes, but would make it more difficult for non-undead themes to use undead in abundance...

Furthermore, I did not understand it that way that Wraith Lords were given immortality by the mage, especially not by pretenders lacking immortality by themselves (a ritual to make sacred commanders immortal would be nice). So why do they serve at all? Because of an old forgotten vow? No, thank you, I had enough of that before in that movie... )

Again, the restrictions for national troops are plenty, thematic and useful, but summons are a bit out of the way. I am not saying though that ALL summons should require upkeep - wolves already need food, mechanical men need resources to heal, etc. - but a bit of variety cant hurt the game, can it?

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I agree on the experience issues, as I wrote in an earlier tread months ago, experience for national troops should be enhanced. Luckily, mindless troops do not get experience already...

[shovah]

i was thinking of something like that, maybe summons cost gems to maintain, and will either
Awly drain your lab supply
Brain commanders held supply if no lab is present or
Cwly decay/lose health overtime
this would be a realatively small amount (a percentage of summon cost perhaps) and although would trouble small amounts of summons would easily start to cripple players with large amounts of said creatures unless they clam in which case they will have a big advantage wether this rule exists or not (and clamming hopefully will be harder in dom3)

[Chazar]

I do not oppose clamming, since it isnt an issue if your games are finished by turn 50-70. The current balance mod is way to restrictive in that respect imho, e.g. as Machaka I had real trouble to forge a few fever fetishes to keep my "flaming arrow" archers hords going without the managing hordes of scouts shipping gems...

[shovah]

just as a little off topic note how would a flaming windguide combo work? just wondering . and yes although not a problem on small games they generally dont tend to get summon heavy so........

[Ironhawk]

That combo works quite well. Tho I think only Arco can reasonably implement it.

[B0rsuk]

Unless you use some mods.
E.g. you may mod the scales and the production settings so you get more growth, more supplies and more gold - all this will strengthen the conventional units somewhat.

I don't like this solution at all. Why should I have to pay additional costs to have halfway decent conventional army ? I already pay in gold and food - and now design points ? Scales aren't free.
I think that base income should be increased, not effectiveness of scales. Of course, if base amount of gold/resources was higher, scales would get you more, too. But I don't like the concept of scales being a requirement for decent conventional army.

[WraithLord]

I think that lowering the price of national fighting units (not mages) can make armies of normal troops more of an option.

After all, there are some pretty powerful national troops almost for all the nations.

For example a mod that halves the cost of all recruitable fighting units. (almost equivalent to doubling the cost of all summons, except that mages are doubly more expensive which further hardens the requirements for summons)

[B0rsuk]

izaqyos said:
For example a mod that halves the cost of all recruitable fighting units. (almost equivalent to doubling the cost of all summons, except that mages are doubly more expensive which further hardens the requirements for summons)

Would put more strain on commanders, and supplies (food), as bigger armies are harder to maintain.

[Arralen]

B0rsuk said:

I don't like this solution at all. Why should I have to pay additional costs to have halfway decent conventional army ? I already pay in gold and food - and now design points ? Scales aren't free.
I think that base income should be increased, not effectiveness of scales. Of course, if base amount of gold/resources was higher, scales would get you more, too. But I don't like the concept of scales being a requirement for decent conventional army.

It was "scales and production settings". Means you get more gold, ress and supplies with the same scales. Similar to choosing the "rich" setting.
And I don't see where I suggest you would have to pay additionally in scales if you want to build a conventional army. After all, you have use decent scales to do that with the basic settings already ...

On the other hand, it's not so much about making positiv scales better, but make negative scales more costly. Atm, lots of people go for negative growth and negative productivity to feed the points into high magic / double bless strategies. IMHO, death scale should really hurt.

And as there are only random events to kill pop but no to give free pop, having real high growth-%tage with positive scale wouldn't hurt either.


concerning troop cost
With troops costing only 10 gold, there's only so much you can do about the pricing ... qm already made lots of troops 20% cheaper in his complete balance mod, and I like the changes. But there's not much room if you want to differentiate between milita, light, heavy infantry and special elite troops ... .