Feature Requests Thread - Conquest of Elysium 3

This thread will function just like the bug rporting thread in the bug subforum, but this is the place to make feature requests. Note that the feature requests should be reasonable, more in the line of tweaks to the existing structure than redesigning it from the ground up (i.e. no initiative system for combat etc).

To start off with a few:

• --battlereports and --rename switches as checkboxes in game preferences
• Snake List: Add an overview menu to F3 that will show what squares you lost to enemies that turn, i.e. what they snaked from you. Right clicking on the listed item centers the map on it. This way the Messages menu doesn't get cluttered up with news of every lost farm and forest.
• Fortification icon for fortified structures (crenellated wall would be a good one)
• Show library and temple icons in the terrain info popup when mouse-overing the square (they show up in the recruitment menu if you own any)

Add your own, we'll hash out a shortlist later.

Sites that when captured generate freespawn. Nothing game changing like freespawn manticores but say a holberg city that freespawns little holbergs or a merman seaside village. These sites could be somewhat well defended, so not able to be captured in the early game and thus unbalance the game.

Fortification is already identified by the tower shield symbol, your suggesting something more instantly easily identifiable like a castle wall right?

Here are a few that spring to mind:

• Tooltips - mousing over a unit in the army management or battle screen shows health and any buffs/status effects/wounds etc.
• I don't like the crosses that cover up your selected units, maybe that should be done with different background colours for the units.
• With multiple commanders in the army management screen, a way to change to showing and selecting the troops for the different commanders without having to exit to the main map. Maybe the "next commander" key could work here to select the next commander in this location.
• Max/min/current zoom buttons - to get a quick overview of the whole map.
• Quit to main menu and Load game in the File menu.
• Speed the mouse wheel zoom up.

• Movement cost in terrain tooltip showing how many AP it would cost to move to an adjacent square.
• Show the current Society you are playing with on the player summary screen. With a random Society selected I can't see which one I am actually playing anywhere.
• Option to turn off the red rectangular graphics in the background during the game.
• In the Recruit screen, right clicking the Recruit Location icons at the top of the window moves the map to that location. edit: it already does this lol

ZephyrDoo wrote: Fortification is already identified by the tower shield symbol, your suggesting something more instantly easily identifiable like a castle wall right?

The shield shows a defensive bonus, eg. it also shows up on mountains and various things. I think he means something to show a structure that would fall under "siege" rules. Unless the citadel Crown icon covers this?

Edited by: profanicus

• Autosave checkbox in preferences.
• A checkbox in preferences to disallow multiple players of the same race. I always play with random races, and I'm always a bit disappointed when I see two, or even three, players of the same race.
• I'm using the battlereports switch - and in my opinion this should be on by default - but I'd like to be able to zoom to the site of a battle, since it can sometimes take a whle to figure out where it took place.
• An undo button, for when I move into/attack the wrong square. Autosave helps with this, but is a bit cumbersome.

nikolajwa wrote:

• An undo button, for when I move into/attack the wrong square. Autosave helps with this, but is a bit cumbersome.

Make it optional, since I don't think moving and clearing Shroud/FoW should be undoable.

profanicus wrote:

nikolajwa wrote:

• An undo button, for when I move into/attack the wrong square. Autosave helps with this, but is a bit cumbersome.

Make it optional, since I don't think moving and clearing Shroud/FoW should be undoable.

Yeah, that's true. In some games, undo is only allowed if you didn't clear any FOW during the move. I'd be ok with not being able to use undo in such situations, or when running into hidden enemies.

Change the terrain tile for hills to make them stand out against plains just a little more

The suggestions that I have:

* Make the tooltip of the terrain show the AP cost (I don't know whether I'll be able to catch that enemy stack two squares away from me)
* Include the trade income / upkeep in the income / iron summary screen
* Add seasonal effects in the season tooltip
* AI Improvement: A lot of times the AI just doesn't do opportunistic site grabs. There are 3 sites next to each other for example. He occupies 2 of them, yet doesn't grab the 3rd one even though there are zero enemy units around. He could just capture it and return back to its previous square for example but he doesn't do it.

Edited by: Tarrax

A quit to menu button would be nice, right now you have to quit out of the game entirely. Also a load game button from the in game menu for the same reason.

Lots of good suggestions here. My quick one: make independent stationary "guard" armies have a different colored background or icon, so I can quickly tell which armies may attack me and which will sit around.

Really enjoying the game. Great work.

Command line switch to indicate the directory for savegames and other writeable files (key, config and maps). This is so I can run it off of a USB key and have the savegames on the key instead on the hard drive (on Windows). I was able to accomplish this but I had to write a batch file and change an environment variable.

- Instead of the green X when you're selecting units, draw a green rectangle around the unit instead so you can actually see what the unit is.
- the AI should ALWAYS leave one commander in it's home citadel. Playing against the default AI (jester?) during Dark Ages, I'd say that at least half of the AIs kill themselves off during the first 10 turns. Possible 'quick fix', an option to start each AI off with an immobile commander and possibly a few weak immobile troops in it's main citadel.
- Mentioned in another thread... Let us use the 1-4 keys to toggle units by speed in the transfer screen.

Edited by: Volthar

- an ability to customize keyboard shortcuts (the movement keys 'qweasdzxc' do not make much sense for dworak or colemak users).

- an option to turn off the battle screen coming up when summoning minor things, it gets annoying to have it come up every round when rounding up slaves with the priest king, conjuring animals and similar chaff. I would love to have it optional, like the optional battle reports.

- in a similar line of thinking, there was the monthy ritual in Dominions3, which saved a lot of micromanagement. I would love it to come back, as sometimes there are enough recources to summon the same things every round, for many rounds and it gets old to always do the same clicks, that the PC could do faster and better anyway

Volthar wrote:
- the AI should ALWAYS leave one commander in it's home citadel. Playing against the default AI (jester?) during Dark Ages, I'd say that at least half of the AIs kill themselves off during the first 10 turns. Possible 'quick fix', an option to start each AI off with an immobile commander and possibly a few weak immobile troops in it's main citadel.

I agree on that. I played against the 5 AI (Baron), and always one of the AI is dead within turn 10.

ZephyrDoo wrote: Fortification is already identified by the tower shield symbol, your suggesting something more instantly easily identifiable like a castle wall right?

Nope, like profanicus said, that's just the defense bonus. It tells you nothing about whether siege weapons are usable in battles there. Places like cities, town, ports, magic libraries and guard towers allow the use of siege engines, which instantly changes the balance of power if one side has them and the other doesn't. Right now you need to know that.

The crown icon only marks a citadel, but a citadel is not automatically a fortification. Some examples of non-fortification citadels are the Drui'd Hut, the Warlock's Magic Cave and the Barbarian Camp.

ZephyrDoo wrote: Change the terrain tile for hills to make them stand out against plains just a little more

No argument from me or anyone else, I suspect.

Volthar wrote: - Instead of the green X when you're selecting units, draw a green rectangle around the unit instead so you can actually see what the unit is.

Set the cross opacity from the preferences to somewhere around 30 and it will be very, very easy to see what the unit are even with the crosses. The default value is in my opinion too high and I had to fiddle with that to get it to a comfortable level. That's why the manual specifically recommends lower than default settings for this

Volthar wrote: - the AI should ALWAYS leave one commander in it's home citadel. Playing against the default AI (jester?) during Dark Ages, I'd say that at least half of the AIs kill themselves off during the first 10 turns. Possible 'quick fix', an option to start each AI off with an immobile commander and possibly a few weak immobile troops in it's main citadel.

Ideally, yes, it should leave one or two troops on guard. The problem decreases noticeably as the AI difficulty level is cranked up.

The game always shows a small message, saying it´s my turn. I find it superfluous. It would be a necessity for hotseat, but for singleplayer or networked multiplayer I don´t see the point

Please, add the standars menu option to create a new map from within the game without having to quit. If you really want to make the player's decision important and to make him suffer its consequences, do it as in dominions 3, allowing saving only when you quit the game. As implemented now, the game actually does not prevent what the feature is intended to do (as you can save whenever you want, what I ironically only do when I quit the game) but only hurts the game's usability.

Edited by: salvat

Just a couple! THANK YOU for listening

- Make the green and white "X"s on the transfer troops grid smaller (so one can identify what troops are hidden behind them)
- Checkbox to disable keyboard unit movement (how often have I hit "a" by mistake sent my units off to doom...)
- Save / Load game interface: Easier, user-friendlier, standard-type with sortable options, e.g. sort by date, sort by name, sort by type, etc. (I KNOW that JK and JO have said it is a design choice to avoid "abuse", but I am still a paying customer and as one I claim that there is no real abuse in a single-player game)
- make terrain features more visible (mines, for example, look too much like standard mountains), perhaps even "flags" for unowned features (instead of colored background, a blinking white....)
- Nameable recruitable locations: All locations at which one can purchase recruitable units should be able to be named, e.g. instead of "city" or "guard tower", the player can click-select the tile and select "rename recruit location", and type in e.g. "Home Base" or "Necromantia" or "Southwest Tower" (so as to facilitate future purchases -- how often have I made purchases at the wrong castle...)
- AI should place units with "long" weapons in the second rank if there are 2 or more ranks of front-ranked units in an army (and not in the first rank)
- Opponent AI should give more weight to capturing undefended map resources, especially those it can use: The AI will often wander around, it appears aimlessly, often bypassing or even moving around totally undefended resources, instead of capturing them
- Unit descriptions (similarly to Dom2-3)!
- The description rollover of "strength" in the unit information screen is misleading - strength apparently also affects melee (and ranged?) damage (how much exactly?), but the rollover only mentions breaking out of bonds...
- There are surprisingly few spells in the game which give and surprisingly few units in the game which have resistance or vulnerability to damage type: pierce, slash, blunt. What a shame! Make armor types slightly more prevalent and give us a reason for caring whether a unit has a sword, a hammer, or a spear.
- Magic is wacky and random: Good! But spells with a range of 1-999 are actually less wacky, since most units in the game have less than a 0.1% chance of not insta-dying. Wouldn't 1-120 be more suitable?
- Units that "run away" in fear seem to be gone for good -- is that a feature or a bug? If a feature, then that seems suboptimal, since the spell is functionally equivalent to "kill: resistance negates" (instead of: fear: resistance negates). Make fearful troops show up next turn adjacent.
- Hotkeys: ctrl 1-9 assigns commanders or forts, 1-9 recalls them
- Pathing hints: I often cannot tell if my commander and her troops will be able to make it to a hex 2 spots away, sometimes after moving 1 turn I can, sometimes not, depending what troops the commander is commanding. Some form of visual clue (like tiny footprints on the neighboring hexes, or translucent coloring on neighboring hexes my commander can reach in that turn with the troops it has) would be great!
- Is it a feature that a lone stealthy assassin will automatically be attacked when an enemy enters its square? That seems bizarre.
- Upon game ending, a the ability to review the battlefield and perhaps check some stats before being kicked out of the game....

[\quote]
Nope, like profanicus said, that's just the defense bonus. It tells you nothing about whether siege weapons are usable in battles there. Places like cities, town, ports, magic libraries and guard towers allow the use of siege engines, which instantly changes the balance of power if one side has them and the other doesn't. Right now you need to know that.The crown icon only marks a citadel, but a citadel is not automatically a fortification. Some examples of non-fortification citadels are the Drui'd Hut, the Warlock's Magic Cave and the Barbarian Camp.
[\unquote]

I had no idea! How can you tell the difference currently?

Edited by: onomastikon

I second the idea of unit descriptions - maybe not in the patch (too big feature for this i think), but in expansion pack or something?
Descriptions was one of the best aspects of Dominions 3 for me - they was really interesting to read. Me myself, I'll gladly pay for expansion pack with such feature alone.

Just a couple as they come to mind...

-Would love it if on mouse over, the season at the top right also told you what year you were in.
- On map leader icons should also display unit experience like DOM3

Lots of good ideas there onomastikon. I just wanted to comment on a couple:

- Magic is wacky and random: Good! But spells with a range of 1-999 are actually less wacky, since most units in the game have less than a 0.1% chance of not insta-dying. Wouldn't 1-120 be more suitable?

I don't mind this so much. I just lost most of my front row to a 9 hit point Banshee's Death Wail ... and it was awesome! It's called Death Wail for a reason, I think you are meant to feel lucky if it doesn't instakill a unit.

- Units that "run away" in fear seem to be gone for good -- is that a feature or a bug? If a feature, then that seems suboptimal, since the spell is functionally equivalent to "kill: resistance negates" (instead of: fear: resistance negates). Make fearful troops show up next turn adjacent.

If you are seeing that then it is a bug. Units that run away are supposed to be returned to your army if you win the battle.

- Is it a feature that a lone stealthy assassin will automatically be attacked when an enemy enters its square? That seems bizarre.

Yes, two opposing armies in the same square always trigger a battle, even if one or both parties have stealth. I don't think IW should start introducing "exception" rules like "but if there's only 1 unit in the army then do not trigger a battle".

Edited by: profanicus

Thanks much!
How do I use quotes here? My feeble attempt at using square brackets doesn't seem to work.

To comment on your helpful and good comments:
- I think that with a death wail of 1-100, most of your standard archers will be very lucky to survive (95% chance of insta-kill), and that is actually still a form of "chance", while a 99.9% chance of insta-kill (1-999) more like: well, why not just write "kills everything"? But it's only me I guess
- When ALL units in an army are stealthy, and when NO units with acute senses can detect them, then it seems to me as if the stealthy army should avoid engaging in combat, sort of Dominions-like. But of course if this is not the way the engine works, then c'est ca.

Edited by: onomastikon

onomasticon wrote: When ALL units in an army are stealthy, and when NO units with acute
senses can detect them, then it seems to me as if the stealthy army
should avoid engaging in combat, sort of Dominions-like.

The stealthy army can be quite strong. That's why you need a scout when wandering in the forests early in the game. And I haven't met Horrors yet, but I guess running into one can be rather unpleasant. Having an ability to decide if you want to avoid detection or setup an ambush would be nice, but it would probably overcomplicated things.

onomastikon wrote: How do I use quotes here?

.
Well, there is "Quote text" button in the reply box's toolbar. Not that it does much, but still...

I've had soulless survive 1d999 attacks and take only 1 point of damage, so it can happen. Most of the time the effect is instakill, which is as it should be, but there are the lucky (very) few who survive.