Wish-List for Dominions 4

[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).

[Luckmann]

UI and control additions and streamlining.

This is seriously everything I want.

[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?

[Peter Ebbesen]

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

Wish is so expensive that you will go for the strongest option, adding a buch of commands that are sub-optimal would be kind of moot.

No.

There are already many suboptimal wishes possible, some suboptimal in most situtations but not all, some just really poor things to wish for. You might have a point regarding the latter (though they could be fun to use in SP even if they got no MP use) but most certainly not the former.

Examples of wishes that may occasionally be worth it but aren't in the game:

• Immortality - adding the recuperation effect and being able to die in own dominion is the big one and utterly thematic to boot. The wish caster that is created solely as a wish machine might not want to cast this, ever, preferring to summon in an SC instead - the wish caster/battlefield mage/SC might, depending on circumstances.
• Getting rid of horror marks - not worth the hefty price in the majority of cases but there are situations where it might be worth it.
• Elemental immunity - gain 100 resistance to fire, water, cold, poison. Yes, this would probably be used almost solely in SP; so what?
• Ritual Spell - attempts to duplicate the designated ritual spell as if the caster had his astral path strength in the relevant path but with no extra gems. (Yes, this is not worth it if you actually have the research and a mage with the proper path to cast the spell you wish to duplicate, if it goes through it creates a fairly weak global with minimal overcasting from paths only, and it also creates balancing issues with globals more costly than wish - but it is very thematic)

[Burnsaber]

Originally Posted by Peter Ebbesen

There are already many suboptimal wishes possible, some suboptimal in most situtations but not all, some just really poor things to wish for. You might have a point regarding the latter (though they could be fun to use in SP even if they got no MP use) but most certainly not the former.

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.

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.

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.

[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.

[Rookierookie]

A lot of spells do scale with magic level.

[Tonno]

Omg guys u are killing me,I have read this 2 days and still I did not red it all...

I have seen a bunch of great ideas...
I would change only few things...
1)Change the battle graphics in 3d mode,some thing like the total war stuff (not to put the unite control mode,just do the graphics)
2)need to make all nations good in something,and bad in something as well
3)put some new spells and items...

I could write some few things,but I would be happy with this
I know that there is a lot of stuff to do,and that is not easy but, I really want to see dom4...