Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension Announced Thread - Dominions 3: The Awakening

Illwinter.com

Illwinter wrote: 18th June 2013 - Dominions 4 is under development
Dominions 4 is under development and it has now got a web page here that hasn't got any useful information yet, but it will come.

No news on the release date yet, but it's more and better than Dominions 3.

Edited by: Edirr

Well this is an excellent piece of news. I hope there will be some details soon.

Time to start saving up sick leave.

What are you allowed to say about design, content etc Edi? Do we get a new UI???? PLEASE!!!

Yes, UI is new. It is along the lines of the CoE3 UI. The CoE3 UI is moddable, so I expect that even if the Dom4 UI won't be at release, it will become so in a patch. I'll need to ask Johan about that.

EDIT: Except the elements in the Dom4 UI look better out of the box than the CoE3 UI elements.

And unit information and other stuff looks a lot better right now. You can also see all kinds of stuff straight away that you previously had to go one level deeper to see, such as attack and total damage output values for each attack of the unit as well as the type of damage it does.

Edited by: Edirr

Look when it comes down to it there's just one thing the community needs to know:

How many extra types of Bog Beast are we getting?

This is awesome! Perhaps the best news I've heard in years!

Great news!!!

OMG

Is it April first?

NO?!

OMG

Yeah the previous official announcement of "Dom4: Succubi In Heat" was an April Fools joke.
I did like some of the jokes in it
But this one is real

Edited by: gp1628

Edirr wrote: Yes, UI is new. It is along the lines of the CoE3 UI. The CoE3 UI is moddable

It is? Wow. Can you add new hot keys? (I checked manual_modding.pdf for CoE3 but didn't see a UI section, so I don't have anything to compare Dom4 to.)

Even just adding "space = Done With This Commander" would be awesome, in Dom3.

Edit: oh, it's under "GUI modding" in section 3. Thematic restyling and image replacement only.

-Max

Edited by: wilsonmax

wilsonmax wrote:

Edirr wrote: Yes, UI is new. It is along the lines of the CoE3 UI. The CoE3 UI is moddable

It is? Wow. Can you add new hot keys? (I checked manual_modding.pdf for CoE3 but didn't see a UI section, so I don't have anything to compare Dom4 to.)

Even just adding "space = Done With This Commander" would be awesome, in Dom3.

-Max

Moddable, as in you can change the visuals. Not add new functionality. The section in the CoE3 modding manual is GUI Modding and it's very early on. As long as you have the latest one from the Illwinter site, that is.

Are you allowed to say whether there will be any substantive changes to rules? (Changes to bless mechanics as one example, or besieging. Would be good for pacing IMHO to have forts give a defensive bonus to all units in the province a la CoE3 instead of taking multiple turns to penetrate a la Dom3.)

I hope so. Based on how JK and KO think, I'm expecting/hoping that new rules and new mythology are a large part of their motivation for wanting a Dom4. They seem to enjoy tweaking mechanics for verisimilitude, trying to make winning game tactics correspond to real life. Fatigue is a prime example.

P.S. "Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension." I like the name.

Edited by: wilsonmax

Yes, the name is excellent. There are certain very substantial changes to the rules that still leave the underlying engine more or less the same. Some of the changes are to blesses, if not the bless mechanics themselves. The greatest mechanics overhaul is in certain parts of the combat section.

Moddable UI?

So if I dualboot a linux distro on my android tablet I could install dom4 to that and design a touchscreen friendly UI mod for it? All you'd really need for that would be resizing and moving buttons, though the ability to move functions to swipein/out menus would be better. But I imagine you could do some of that outside of dom4 by creating a linked keyboard map that gives you a swipein menu for the hotkeys and other keyboard shortcuts.

I really wan't the ability to at least look at turns from my phone/tablet, even if actually playing the game that way might be too much it would be great to just look at turns on the go so you could do your thinking before having a computer. I travel so much so this is actually a real bottleneck for my ability to play.

I think I'll start by trying dom3 on the phone and see how that feels

Edited by: Fantomen

Fantomen wrote: Moddable UI? So if I dualboot a linux distro on my android tablet I could design a touchscreen friendly UI for it?

In CoE3. Which is not to say that the same commands could not be added to Dom4, which would allow changing the graphics (mostly frames or backgrounds) but not add new functionality. As I said above.

Edited by: Fantomen

Edirr wrote: And unit information and other stuff looks a lot better right now. You can also see all kinds of stuff straight away that you previously had to go one level deeper to see, such as attack and total damage output values for each attack of the unit as well as the type of damage it does.

The more areas this can be done in the better. I could see setting tax and pd directly on the map screen or on the F1 overview, for example.

Edited by (in order): The_Demon, Fantomen

Edirr wrote:

Fantomen wrote: Moddable UI? So if I dualboot a linux distro on my android tablet I could design a touchscreen friendly UI for it?

In CoE3. Which is not to say that the same commands could not be added to Dom4, which would allow changing the graphics (mostly frames or backgrounds) but not add new functionality. As I said above.

Ok, so not resizing and moving stuff around? (I think of that as "visuals" too, hence the confusion)

Edited by: Fantomen

I better get to all those games in my Steam backlog pretty quick, or else they're never going to see the light of day.

Cool. Thanks for the info Edi. Looking forward to seeing the result.

Is there a changelog we can look at to follow the game's progress like with dom3 and coe3, or does that still come under classified information?

Still classified. A progress page such as the Dom3 and CoE3 ones doesn't even exist yet for Dom4, it's done in other ways.

What makes you say that it's more and better than Dominions 3?

Just the basics of more stuff than in Dominions 3 and the interface improvements alone make it that. And then there's the other stuff that has not been talked about yet.

The_Demon wrote:

Edirr wrote: And unit information and other stuff looks a lot better right now. You can also see all kinds of stuff straight away that you previously had to go one level deeper to see, such as attack and total damage output values for each attack of the unit as well as the type of damage it does.

The more areas this can be done in the better. I could see setting tax and pd directly on the map screen or on the F1 overview, for example.

It's your lucky day--setting tax and PD from the F1 view is possible in Dom3 already, so you can start using this feature immediately. Edit: unless you meant, without a dialog box?

-Max

Edited by: wilsonmax