Obviously this stuff can wait until after the release of Original Sin. I’m mostly only posting it now because of the default “show posts made in last three months only” setting means this will be archived soon.
Stabbey’s Top 5 Most Wanted Changes to Dragon Commander:
1) Population Regeneration Options
Population regenerates to full after every battle. This is really, really terrible and it RUINS a great deal of strategic depth and complexity. It makes no difference how many times you fight a battle in the same territory. The first battle in Smoreland will have just as many available recruits as the 18,264th consecutive battle in Smoreland. You don’t have to worry about managing a battle with limited recruit resources.
It makes population cards worth very little because the effects are restricted to a single turn. Increased population cards are only useful as a defensive measure and the enemy attacks on the same turn. Genocide cards are more useful because you can at least be sure to attack and use them on the same turn.
I would like to see a Custom Campaign option that lets you set the number of turns it takes population to fully regenerate after a battle, ranging from 0 (does not regenerate) to 10 turns. (1 turn is the default).
2) “Round-Robin” Turn Order option for Custom Campaigns
In the beta, which was using the multiplayer rules, the different players went in a different order each turn, and the next turn they switched. This meant that there, even though it was against the AI, human players didn’t always have the advantage of moving first. In single-player and custom campaigns though, the human player always goes first. Always.
Moving first in IS a pretty big advantage. In the beta, I learned that if you planned to attack an enemy, but the enemy moved first and attacked you, your troops were stuck there – even if it was just a single Trooper. If you were sending troops from multiple countries at once to invade another target, and the AI attacked one of your countries, you would suddenly have fewer troops than you were counting on for that battle. It means that when crossing ocean tiles, no matter how heavily populated the seas are with the enemy, your Transports can never be intercepted by the enemy.
When you always go first, it means the enemy has many fewer chances to surprise you or disrupt your attacks. Less surprise makes the game less interesting. I would like to see a Custom Campaign option to allow for round-robin style moves like the multiplayer has.
3) Let the Three-Act Story-Campaign use Custom Campaign Options
I love the Custom Campaign settings. They’re great, and they let me adjust the balance of the game to my taste to keep things challenging but fair. I use Double Recruit Costs, Double Dragon Spawn Cost, increased Dragon Respawn Time and 70 Starting Recruits (enough to produce 1 Battle Forge and 1 Recruitment Center). This slows down the unit production and makes the Strategy Map units you bring into the RTS phase a lot more important.
But the Story Campaign is stuck with the default settings, and not everyone likes those settings. Many people think the unit production is too zerg-like, with too many units which are too hard to control and micromanage. It can be learned, but it takes quite a lot of practice.
I’m not sure how many people even know what the Custom Campaign option is, and they may just stick to the story campaign. Because the story campaign is not for everyone, and it can’t be changed, when I recommend this game, I have to offer caveats and warnings. If there was a way to use Custom Campaign settings (including the two options I proposed above) in the story campaign, I would be able to give a much stronger recommendation of the game.
4) Make Wizard Towers Useful
Wizard Towers are without a doubt the most useless World Map building in the game. They’re the only building which gets less useful the more you have. They give you a random Dragon Skill card once every three turns. The only real advantage I can see for these is that it lets you get Dragon Skills for one round without needing to spend Research points on them.
However, because the card is random that advantage comes with severe drawbacks that basically outweigh the benefits: it could be a skill you’ve already researched, giving you a useless card you can do nothing with, and there’s no way to reliably get skills you might want to use regularly. If you want to use Dragon skills, it’s better to just research them.
I can see two possible changes to make Wizard Towers useful:
The first is to change the Wizard Tower into an “Emporium” for Dragon Skill Cards only. A random selection of eight Dragon Skill cards are made available. Because the cards are Dragon Skill specific, they should be cheaper than normal Emporium cards (say a 2, 4, 6, or 8 gold fee depending on Tier level of the skill.) This lets Wizard Towers actually fulfill their intended role: It gives players the strategic option to let them buy Dragon Skills with gold instead of Research Points – saving the RP for unit upgrades. More towers means more selection will be available.
The second is to add an additional function of the Wizard Tower, in addition to the Dragon Cards: The ability to trade or transmute 3-5 existing cards into a single new card for a small gold fee. This immediately makes Wizard Towers more attractive because even if you get Dragon Skill cards you don’t want, you now have the potential to use those cards to maybe get a card you DO want. If that’s not enough, then more Wizard Towers could reduce the fee you pay to transmute the cards (or perhaps reduce the amount of cards you need to trade in at once).
5) Display Proper Support Cap Levels
When mousing over a country on the world map, the “Support Cap” for a country currently shows the Support Cap of the current owner. If the owner is not the player, that information is completely worthless. In multiplayer and single-player, the Support is always fixed at 250 for the enemy.
The information which IS important is how much support the HUMAN PLAYER will have if they engage in battle in that country. That will inform decisions about which country to invade. Yes, it’s true that you can see the popularity under the country information, but that makes you have to calculate that in your head (5% = 25 Support), instead of using the UI element which is right there to display the information for you.
This one seems like a really simple change, too.
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I have more requests (see: this very thread), but those are my personal Top 5. What are your Top 5?
