Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - General Please add Custom rules for story campaign

I actually enjoy the RTS, warts and all, but a lot of people don't. In many cases the complaints are too many units on the field to control.

I see too many posts of people basically saying that they stopped going to RTS and just auto-resolved Act 3, which is a shame because it's a really fun challenge to deal with in RTS mode.

I've played custom campaigns with changed rules, and they play out much differently.

In the Beta, one of the things we requested to try was making strategy map units more useful in the RTS mode. Larian did notice and one patch was an experiment to try to do something about that, although what that test actually did was to make strategy map units even LESS useful than they were before before reverting it back. Larian didn't try increasing the costs of units in RTS mode, although they did add these options in for the custom campaign settings.

I think that adding a "Custom" difficulty setting to the Story campaign that lets you change some of the rules might encourage at least some people to give it another chance.

If it is possible, I'd like to see that, as well.
We already have custom settings in the custom campaign, but I wouldn't complain about getting them in the story campaign as well.

I liked the addition of the advanced settings in the beta, it's a great way to tune the RTS to your liking (and give it a very different feel if you would like to).

One more request, if possible:
A slider to change conversion rates between map and RTS units.

Yes, i'd like to see that as well.

Thinking about this, I know that one slider won't do - there's already two rates for units. The truck is that different units have different power levels. If a conversion rate slider is added for units, I don't think that any less than 12 sliders - one for each unit (except Transport) would be required. Something like a conversion ranging from 1-5. I would like this, but, that's a rather intimidating number of things to add to a menu, so it's probably not happening.


Other custom settings that I'd like to see:

- Random starting location on campaign map. (This should probably be the default for all non-story campaigns, not just custom.)
- Maximum Tech level options for Units and Dragon. (Based on the campaign research Tiers). Cards that allow you to produce a unit type or use an unresearched skill for one round would be allowed, even if those exceed your maximum tier.

Or keep one slider, but affect different units differently (e.g. "2x" will increase trooper conversion by 2, but keeps Juggernaut at 1. "3x" will increase troopers by 3, but Juggernaut by 2).

Honestly though, I'm not sure if it's so much of an issue.

Right now the conversion rate is 1:3 for Battle Forge units, and 1:2 for everything else. Bumping up to 1:5 for Troopers might be what you want, but 1:5 for Warlocks might not be. I think that this debate is academic though, I don't expect sliders, and certainly not 12 sliders.

I think the main problem with people auto-resolving has more to do with how difficult it is to micro-manage troops than anything else (assuming they give the game a proper chance and don't write if off immediately for not being like Warcraft or Total War).

What it needs is A) auto-casting, B) in-battle mouse control & tooltips (which I said during the beta), and C) better, more clearly implemented dragon-mode controls (like a circular Pikmin-style indicator whose radius marks which units you're selecting, etc.).

Oh: and a PAUSE button. Something else I mentioned in the beta.

+1 to be able to switch auto-casting to ON as an option for some spells prior the mission, like the shaman cloak... i don't have time for doing this manually

/signed

I do wish that when people say that the RTS sucks and is too zerg-like, I could say "change the difficulty setting to Custom and play with the rules like this to make it less so: ________ ", instead of going "you can't do it in story mode, but the custom campaign setting lets you ________ ".

EDIT: This guy is an example. With custom rules for the story campaign, I could have said that "yes, by default it's a lot of rushing, but you can change that by _____".

Custom rules for the story campaign would be more of a selling point.

My main issue was simply that going RTS added an unnecessary element of risk if I had an overwhelming unit advantage. It's been a while since I played, but I recall my massive army (on the strategic map) getting truncated due to having to adhere to some initial field limit and then actually losing.

This wouldn't have been so bad if I had some control over what units were deployed either.

Those are slightly different issues.

The army getting truncated is because it exceeds the support cap - the support the majority race have for your policies. The remaining units are held in reserve and are available from structures you build on the map (they won't cost any time or resources to bring into the battle). It's intentional that your starting forces are limited, and a key gameplay element.

Your chances could be improved by being able to pick which units are deployed, but that's an entirely new feature - but an interesting one. I think I would like to be able to select which units and how many to deploy to get a good mix under the cap.

In practice, all this does is make auto-resolving vastly more preferable once you hit the support bottleneck.

The game doesn't tell you how your incoming forces are arranged and what the support cost of them is, so figuring out the number of your support bottleneck isn't easy.

If you want to auto-resolve everything, that's your prerogative. It would be a neat feature if Dragon Commander 2 let you choose which units to deploy yourself (it's too big a feature to expect it implemented in DC 1), but the support cap and army truncation has to stay.

If you were to remove the support cap, and deploy as many units as you have, then the political decision making would have absolutely no gameplay effect at all. It's not supposed to be easy to win a war if the population of the country you're in hates your guts.

While this is true, obfuscation of the feature isn't a point in its favor.



When my power-gaming instincts kick in, it's less of a "want" and more of a "should". This is a strategy game, and for me part of the fun is pushing the boundaries of what's possible within the rules. Auto-resolve is part of those rules, and presents a trivial way of bypassing many of these difficulties.



While I see your point, the problem is that it doesn't work this way since auto-resolve lets you bypass all those limitations.

It was Larian's intention to allow players to ignore using RTS combat in favour of auto-resolving if they wanted to. There's already a lot of complaints about the RTS mode, can you imagine how much louder those would be if RTS combat was mandatory?

If you want to play RTS mode instead of auto-resolving, then do it.


Again, I like the idea of giving you the option of selecting what forces you bring into the battle. Unfortunately, I don't think we'll be seeing anything like that unless there's a Dragon Commander 2.