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#475458 29/11/13 11:06 PM
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I really like Dragon Commander a lot, I think it is truly greater than the sum of its parts. I’ve done a few playthroughs, but I still haven’t seen all the content.

I haven't even played Ophelia's story at all, or seen all the faction arcs - especially since there are more than one arc per side.

I thought I'd give a big list of feedback. Not just negative, but positive as well. The positive things, because they are positive, tend to require little explanation.

Positive Feedback
  • The voice acting is excellent, the facial capturing really worked with the dialogue to make the characters come alive more.
  • The music is great as usual.
  • The different phases relate to each other very smoothly and logically.
  • It is interesting having to try and balance your personal beliefs with what will benefit you politically. The lack of options “in the middle” of the two extremes emphasizes the conflict, and adds shades of grey as you decide which is the least objectional, not which is the good and evil option. A lot of decisions were really hard to make. Larian even managed to make changing from a dictatorship to a democratic government sound like a bad idea (although maybe that was just because I was the dictator).
  • The different characters story arcs, and their branching are really well done, with some clever twists and surprises.
  • I like how the side stories also impact your political standing with the races – not just your laws, but also the kind of people your queen and generals are influence your popularity as well.
  • The mechanics of the game are simple to understand.
  • All the units have a distinct role, and the upgrades extend their usefulness even into the late game.
  • (Once the AI gets on with building advanced units instead of just Troopers,) the AI is quite good at building counters to your build, forcing you to stay alert and focused.
  • The Cinematics between acts are charming. Even the one where you lose is funny.
  • The custom campaign options are fantastic and help to change the gameplay quite a lot.
  • There’s an incredible number of variations that it will take a ton of replays to see them all. That’s a lot of replay value. I think that there are even two different Faction arcs possible per faction – one for if you approve the first faction decision and approve the following ones, and another arc for if you turn down the first faction decision and then get your popularity back up to 85% again.
  • Of course, controlling the Dragon is grea t, it is very responsive, very useful without feeing too overpowered, yet you can beat the RTS phases without needing to use the Dragon.
  • The RTS phases are optional for people who don’t want to play them. Most developers wouldn’t have bothered adding an option like that at all.
  • I like having to manage your card resources. Proper use of cards can change the course of a battle drastically.
  • The game has a lot of the standard RTS features. I found them intuitive, although I’ve played a few RTS’s before.



I do have a list of complaints and issues, which I am posting in the name of feedback, but I do understand the realities of having to compromise and work within a budget, and I saw how the game changed through the course of the beta. These are not all requests for things to be changed in a patch. A lot of these things are totally subjective issues. Some suggestions might be useful for Dragon Commander 2. Many of these I may have posted before.

  • Custom Campaign
  • The custom campaign is a great idea, letting you get all the story (except for Corvus) without the filler. A lot of people probably don’t know what that is exactly, and only touch the story campaign. A bunch of people don’t like the default RTS gameplay, and there’s no way to use custom settings in the normal story campaign. If that was in, then I think a lot of the complainers would have less to complain about.
  • In Custom and Multiplayer campaigns, you always start on the same place in the world map. It would be nice for a random starting location. I know it doesn’t seem to matter much when the map is symmetrical, but at least playing the same map would look a little different from time to time if you started in different places.
  • There could be more custom settings, like maximum tech levels, and maybe sliders to convert Campaign map units to RTS map units at a different rate.
  • The player always moves first in single-player campaigns, which severely limits the chance of being surprised or attacked at sea. I really would like a round-robin option like there was in the multiplayer.
  • Characters
  • The Generals story arcs get repetitive on multiple playthroughs. I don’t think that this can be fixed. Even if they all have the same amount of choice and consequence as the queens, because you always have the four generals storylines advancing at once, the four generals stories run out faster than the four queens.
  • (Subjective) The Generals don't have a big impact on gameplay. It's easy to advance cautiously and almost never need to use them. This does depend on how the individual player plays, though.
  • Generals salary is tied to your overall income, making them too expensive for what you get for using them. It can get as high as 30 gold a turn - far too expensive a price to pay to win a single battle. I think the price should be capped at 15 gold. You could also lower the cap more and allow more generals to be used per turn.
  • (Dragon Commander 2) It might have been nice for the Generals to be the ones giving you in-battle announcements and warnings instead of the generic announcer.
  • At the end of the game,
    there's no final scene with your queen she's just absent with a hand-wave from Maxos
    . From that it seems clear that your budget ran out, but it’s still disappointing to be denied that last scene.
  • Politics
  • It's pretty easy to keep lots of faction ratings high. I think one big cause for this is the faction decisions: they tend to be rather extreme, which often makes you want to turn them down. If you turn down a faction decision, you get a 10%? boost for all the non-faction races, which is huge. Maybe if turning down a faction decision didn’t do anything to boost your approval for the non-faction races, or at least only a 5% boost. It might not be strictly balanced, but it might be better for making decisions matter more.
  • Certain political decisions and factions are slanted and not given even-handed treatment. I’m thinking most notably about one in particular. I was doing basically a “complete jerk” playthrough, and for a Catherine decision, I opted to deny her request to execute all of our soldiers commiting rape. Her next decision was whether I should allow distribution of an abortion drug to the victims of our soldiers. My options were to agree, or to say “the more babies, the more conscripts for the army!” Notably lacking was an option to say something along the lines of “regardless of their origins, I do not agree with killing unborn children”. To be clear, I am not saying this because I agree with that position (I was personally in agreement with Catherine), but even to me, the wording of the option to turn her down was completely uneven-handed, which doesn’t reflect the opinions of anyone. There was a fairly obvious alternate reply that does.
  • Another lopsided Catherine decision: It was said that all decisions have both positive and negative consequences. If you decide to let Catherine execute rapist soldiers, she gets a bonus attribute, and you lose 10% of your total troops. That’s fine, but the next decision is whether to fire half the men and replace them with women. The positive consequence is that your total troops increase by 10%, and there is NO negative consequence. My complaints about that are two-fold. Number one, it renders the previous negative consequence pointless! It cancels it out! That’s too simple a solution. Number 2, there is no negative consequence associated with it. That breaks the guideline of each decision having a positive and negative consequence. I can easily think of one: it’s in the Dragon Commander’s decision options, where turning it down is because he doesn’t want to sack officers blindly, and officers should have their positions on merit. Therefore, one negative consequence could be a -5% Luck penalty, because the women replacements simply have less experience.
  • Genocide cards do not have negative political consequences in single-player (which Swen explicitly said was going to be in during a Q&A).
  • Interface
  • On the Campaign Map, the support listed for enemy countries is always shown as 250, because that’s what it is at permanently. That is unfortunately not useful information, because what really matters is YOUR support in that country. This is important when making decisions about who to invade. The support listed when mousing over countries should always display YOUR support level with the race, regardless of whether or not that country belongs to you. Listing the enemy support could be optional, but it’s not important.
  • Gameplay – Campaign
  • Wizard Towers aren't very useful, because they generate random cards, including already-researched skills.
  • There's no way to trade, transmute, or sell cards you can't use.
  • The AI uses population buff/debuff cards, but doesn’t know that those are only useful if you’re attacking or defending, so it wastes them.
  • Population regenerates to full immediately after a battle. That ruins what might have been an interesting wrinkle to battles on the front lines. There should be an option to let population regenerate over 0-10 turns (1 turn is default, 10 turns is 10% of max population per turn, 0 is no regeneration at all). That would also make population cards more useful.
  • (Dragon Commander 2) It's possible to get all upgrades in the game, there are no either-or upgrade paths like Starcraft 2. That would add more replayability to the game
  • Gameplay - RTS
  • (Dragon Commander 2) There are no AI Dragons, which would be another interesting wrinkle to battle. I am not expecting this, it’s just a feedback note.
  • There is no good "support" skill that can counter the Eye of the Patriarch. "Mass Restoration" comes closest, but you can't restore dead units. Maybe a mass shield skill could work – that could help mitigate the damage of Eye of the Patriarch.
  • The AI relies too much on the easily-countered Battle Forge units, to the point where they build a second Battle Forge at the start of the map. They take a very long time to build a War Factory. By the time they get around to that, they’ve generally squandered over 100 Recruits on Troopers that died fast to the War Factory units I had.
  • The AI seems to be a bit broken currently. It refuses to budge from its starting location (except to capture build sites in its base) until it has almost finished building a Battle Forge. It could easily spread out to capture fresh build sites and resource construction sites, but it doesn't do anything. I'm sure it used to be better. That 2-3 minute head start they give me makes it far too easy even on Hard.
  • Some skills aren't that useful or require a lot more micro than they're worth to use. Optional Auto-cast could be useful on Grenadier’s Chemical Warfare, Shaman’s Immunity, and Zeppelin’s Firebats.
  • Troopers capture turrets so fast they're almost worthless as a base defense, which seems backwards.
  • No formation options to make your troops move together.
  • The huge numbers of easily-killed units makes it hard to maintain control groups, there's no way to automatically assign units to control groups.
  • It's a bit awkward to manage your units in Dragon form. (Understandable because this feature was only added halfway through the beta.)
  • (subjective) I wouldn’t mind some higher difficulty settings. With all the practive, even Hard isn’t that hard anymore. That might be in part because the AI takes a long time to stop massing Battle Forge units and build higher Tier stuff.



I might cross-post this to the Steam forum as well.

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Pretty much co-incides with my findings, aside that I didn't put that much effort in the RTS to get the flaws and pro's there to wording.

Your descriptions are detailed, hopefully this allows Larian to do something with it! And yes, I agree it was sour that that endgame option was lacking, I commented on it too.

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Quote
The Generals story arcs get repetitive on multiple playthroughs. I don’t think that this can be fixed. Even if they all have the same amount of choice and consequence as the queens, because you always have the four generals storylines advancing at once, the four generals stories run out faster than the four queens.

I'd agree this cannot be fixed.

The general story arcs are too long but with too few branches. If you play through the campaigns at a brisk pace, you won't have enough time to actually finish any of their story arcs. At the same time, the relatively few junctions in their stories means they get very repetitive. It would have been better if their story arcs were much shorter (maybe 3 decision branches each) but had several different options at each stage.


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(Subjective) The Generals don't have a big impact on gameplay. It's easy to advance cautiously and almost never need to use them. This does depend on how the individual player plays, though.

I've found them useless; their cost is so high that you're virtually always better off just accepting a loss. This is made even worse if you have access to an emporium, which lets you buy cards that will offer similar combat boosts for a tiny fraction of the cost.


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It's pretty easy to keep lots of faction ratings high. I think one big cause for this is the faction decisions: they tend to be rather extreme, which often makes you want to turn them down.

Agreed; there are too many 4:1 council votes. Since you don't even know what political benefit you'll reap for rebuking the majority, the player will almost always go for the politically expedient choice. After experimenting with multiple approaches, I've found always voting with the majority to be by far the safest strategy.

I'd like it if the consequences of each decision were shown before you make it, which could give you more reason to side with the minority if it gives a cool benefit that you like.


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Genocide cards do not have negative political consequences in single-player (which Swen explicitly said was going to be in during a Q&A).

The genocide card is already one of the worst in the game; they'd need to be buffed significantly if they're getting a political downside. I personally only find the 100% variety to be useful, and even then I've used it maybe twice? The card is just way too circumstantial.


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Wizard Towers aren't very useful, because they generate random cards, including already-researched skills.

Agreed; I sell these on the spot. The cards they produce are usually pure clutter.


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Population regenerates to full immediately after a battle. That ruins what might have been an interesting wrinkle to battles on the front lines. There should be an option to let population regenerate over 0-10 turns (1 turn is default, 10 turns is 10% of max population per turn, 0 is no regeneration at all). That would also make population cards more useful.

This would make the genocide cards a lot more interesting and influential at the same time. I wholeheartedly support this idea.


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Troopers capture turrets so fast they're almost worthless as a base defense, which seems backwards.

The best way to counter this is to have your own troopers behind the turret ready to re-capture it. It defeats the point of a stand-alone defender, though, and is usually only worthwhile for shoring up a forward position when reinforcements won't arrive in time.

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Your mention of the population cards just reminded me of something else:

  • Genocide cards can only be used on enemy-held territories, population increase cards can only be used on friendly territories. I suppose that does make sense, but it does limit the use of those cards even further. Genocide cards can be used in conjunction with an attack on an enemy territory, Population Increase are only useful if you know that there's an attack imminent on a specific one of your own territories.



Having Troopers standing by near all your own static defenses to recapture them defeats the purpose of having static defenses, so is not a solution.

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I've been playing a custom campaign of Raven's Realm, because that's rather challenging, and I have some thoughts on that map.

  • (Subjective) The third story campaign map (Raven's Realm) is badly designed in my view. Here's why:
  • Story-wise, it's really f'ing bizarre that suddenly and inexplicably, the Act 1 map is connected to another island through a land bridge that didn't exist at all in map 1. There isn't even a little tile of ocean that you have to use Transports to cross, which might have made that easier to swallow.
  • The existence of the land bridge makes for boring gameplay. After you control all your Act 1 territory, you're faced with a long march in country after country, in a straight line, with no opportunities to flank or be flanked, save the sea. There's no strategy needed there, just pile all your units into one big ball and push it on the straight line to the next country.
  • The land bridge makes the enemy's huge air and sea advantage somewhat irrelevant, because you can ignore it and bypass them completely instead of having to cross water.
  • The land bridge makes the islands to the north strategically worthless to conquer. They're not on the way to the capital, and it takes a while to ship units that far north. The enemy capital would have been better situated up there, to give them a point.
  • I agree that a campaign map force of only air and/or sea units shouldn't be able to capture hostile territory, but they can't do anything to it, which is a bit odd. It night have been interesting if air and sea units (not Zeppelins or Ironclads) could destroy buildings on the country if left on there for 2 or more turns. It would be some kind of consequence for letting enemy air/sea units to perch on your undefended countries. As it is now, you can safely leave your capital completely empty. The enemy can park their entire navy and air force on it, as long as they have no ground units on it. EDIT: Okay, you probably shouldn't do that, because the enemy will actually eventually send Transports to land on your capital.
  • In an RTS match on an island map, I sent some Imp fighters (with bombs) to attack some fully upgraded Bombers Balloons, Zeppelins and Juggernauts. The enemy didn't use the Zeppelin's firebat skill, the Balloons didn't use air mines, even though I was in range for them, and the Juggernauts only launched a single Imp Fighter. The only other thing they did to try and stop me was to build Warlocks, but they only used their normal attack, not even cloaking or polymorph.
  • EDIT: The AI doesn't build and use enough Transports (and other Air/Sea units), and this map is particularly problematic for it, because large numbers of enemy forces are built on islands well out of the main linked islands, and never reach the main islands. They are not positioned well to attack my side of the map, or defend their own capital - especially the northern island force.



Last edited by Stabbey; 05/12/13 04:36 AM. Reason: some corrections
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Originally Posted by Darvin
I'd like it if the consequences of each decision were shown before you make it, which could give you more reason to side with the minority if it gives a cool benefit that you like.

That would make it 'gamey' and one of the strong points of the political system is that you make choices and reap the results of said choices... not take the choice best fit for your game-statistics.
The 4:1 choices do work enormously against this prinicple.
Actually, if they made a DC2 they should probably untie those choices from race-influence, and give them more options than yes and no, with varying consequences. So you can make the choices you WANT and live with the consequences instead just to garner some influence. Prob show the result about 2-3 turns later (and even some side-effects to show even later) to prevent people just save/reloading to get the best option (again, gaming the system). It would still be possible ofcourse (as always) but more promotes actually sticking to the path you take.
Also, it's just a lot more fun to have a political choice later have some effect, rather than a one time 'done with it, you never hear of it again'...
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It defeats the point of a stand-alone defender, though

I'm pretty sure that's the point here wink

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I'd ask not to argue in terms of how others should play the game.


The whole concept of "playing a game as someone else wants you to", even if it's the developer saying it, is just absurd. That includes cheating, that includes save/reload and whatnot (that is legal). Applying only for single player, of course.

Just as people are allowed to do anything that is within legal limits in the privacy of their own home, no matter how socially frowned upon it may be, so should people be allowed to enjoy their own private single player experience the way they choose.


Sorry if it seems too preachy... I've been in this kind of argument before and I have a bit of an issue with the notion of telling anyone what to do on their own, when not affecting anyone else.


But to be back on topic for a change:

I've made most of the same observations as Stabbey and I do specifically remember at least a few of the game-play issues mentioned dating back to the beta period, most of which I had written about in the beta reports.

As for pretty much all of the observations on the simplicity of decisions made as the emperor: I pretty much agree, but I never really expected that much from a studio the size of Larian's. They just don't have that many resources to make all the sides of the game work that well. Maybe later, when they're a multi-gazibillion dollar game-making corporation rivaling Microsoft as a whole :p


Also, Swen promised us AI Dragons while live on TwitchTV, pre-launch. We're still waiting wink


Unless otherwise specified, just an opinion or simple curiosity.
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Originally Posted by Stabbey
(Subjective) The third story campaign map (Raven's Realm) is badly designed in my view.

I'd agree with you for much the same reasons. It's just not a very interesting strategic map.

Originally Posted by Hassat Hunter
That would make it 'gamey' and one of the strong points of the political system is that you make choices and reap the results of said choices... not take the choice best fit for your game-statistics.

While I respect that this was the designer's intent, the way faction support works undermines it. Because you always know what effect a decision will have on faction support, the decision is already "gamey" in that respect. I'd prefer to just have the consequences spelled out so I could make a choice of which I wanted.


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I'm pretty sure that's the point here

Just because it isn't useful as a stand-alone defender doesn't mean it's not useful. I don't have a problem with units filling counter-intuitive roles so long as they're fun and interesting.


Originally Posted by EinTroll
Also, Swen promised us AI Dragons while live on TwitchTV, pre-launch. We're still waiting

Would be cool, but I'm not holding my breath.

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ARGH, no wonder the AI seemed bugged. Somehow, the Options > Gameplay setting got set to Casual. I don't know how long that's been there, but didn't notice it until I realized that my Battle Forges were building about twice as fast as the enemy Battle Forges.

Now I have to see how many of my complaints about the AI were mistaken and wrong.

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@ EinTroll; Oh, yes I hate that. A lot of that going on with Obsidian's Project Eternity forums from time to time, like how savepoints need to be used instead of a save-system to avoid so called 'save scumming' or how some other type of player should definitely enjoy the game less than what they prefer (combat vs. stealth for example).
I personally always try what's the best option for all addopted gamestyles and the actual 'goal' of the game's design. Not favour one another, but also not sacrifice the purpose of a certain function just because someone doesn't like it. It's a hard thing to do for us, let stand game-designers who actually have to implement it, test it, maybe take it out, release it, and are then thrown to the sharks.

Larian is certainly ambitious, and good at biting more than they can chew. But I rather have that, and some factors remaining avarage, outright bad or ill-worked out, than a very streamlined, slick game that does one thing perfect, but does so in a very secure way, without risk, utterly boring. And as a result not much fun to play since you really can't help doing it before.

@ Darvin; I would rather they fix it so it's less tied to bonusses and boosts, rather than becoming pure numbers. The purpose is to make you think, make responses you would make, or you would in your role (benevolent leader, dictator, bloodluster?) take. Rather than just being a min-maxer for gameplay. If it turns into that, it will loose all it's purpose, it's ideal, it's intended goal. It would turn all about the boosts you want, like a branch in a skill tree. Instead of making you think 'Do I *really* want to torture people for information?' you would end up with skilltree skill 'torture' and 'no torture'. And I have yet to see skill-trees making you emotionally involved, or think outside a "does this fit my build?"

Okay, I am honestly curious here (since I hated the RTS so much I stopped playing it, which made the game kinda dull since NO DRAGON :(); What are stationary defenses good for if not for defense? I'm all up for counter-intuitive uses, but I honestly... see none.

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To add my own advice:
-In campaign add personality to siblings, they dont react to/dont talk about your actions, if the cutscene didnt tell me that i was fighting them, i wouldnt have known.

-Extend the story in the campaign its way too short.

-Make the map phase more interesting.

-Make battle phase more interesting, and not so micromanagey, also less blobby. For example make built defenses count for something, as in buff their defense for one. Also for dragon transform there are 2 outcomes either its too easy to kill with it, or later, its too hard to kill with it especially once the ai starts to develop tech during battle, if the battle drags on too long, this needs to be better balanced. Right now the combat focuses on constant attack, which isnt a good thing for players who like playing defensively.

-Reduce price of game, i have seen deeper games with more content for 24 eur or less than this game has for 40 eur.
Or you can just add more content, so it's worth that 40 eur.

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Hi, I wanted to give you some constructive critique about what Divinity Dragon Commander does wrong and what you can do to improve the experiance, but first of all let me say, that this is a really great game. I'm a fan of the RTS genre and what Dragon Commander does it rips the best parts of the best RTS games, puts them together in one game and does so pretty well. I've seen elements from Pretorians (Ressources), War of the Worlds (general gameplay and some units), Sacrifice (Dragon), Command & Conquer (Units) and Supreme Commander (icons & zoom). These are all games I really enjoyed and to have them combined in a single game that adds that extremly good and funny RPG part in a strategy game is just great. So even if my critique sounds negative sometimes, it's really just because there are things that really kill my longtime fun with the game and I want to enjoy it even longer. Oh and thank you for beeing one of the very few RTS titels with a working pathfinding system.



[Tutorial]
Well the Tutorial ends when it gets interesting, I wished it had some extensive part about what happens if you are in Dragon Form and have units selected, but it just doesn't. You have to figure out these things for yourself and every friend I'm playing the game with asks me what to do there and I can't direct them to a good tutorial.



[Combat Phase "C&C Mode"]
I do have very few issues here, I think the mode is done quite well. One problem I have is that the AI never uses a dragon. You can't even enable it. I recognize that that would take an extensive amount of work to implement that feature, but you could also think of options to compensate for that, like giving them a titan unit or a ressource boost or something like that. Currently it's after two minutes the human player has the advantage which almost guarantees him to win the game.

Oh and a selfdestruct-option for units would be great. (I invaded a country and had transports using up all my supply and wasn't able to build land units)

Also a diplomacy option would be nice to ally up with players. Imagine you play a four-player-free-for-all match. Red and Blue are competing for a territory. Green and Yellow join in just because. It would be their interest to kill both red and blue to annihilate both armies or let the weaker of both win, depending on the situation. However they have no gain from attacking eachother. So they should have the option to ally up.



[Map Phase "Risk Mode"]
Here come my major points of critique. The first problem I'll adress is that the AI doesn't use vehicles proberly. You can use vehicles to get two countries in one turn, the AI never does that.

The second problem is the survivablity of units. If you have a a combat with a small amount of units, the system works just perfect, but once the scale gets bigger, the bigger army always obliterates the small one without or with very few losses. Ironically, if you would go into C&C mode, you would have your army size limited by support and put the remainder of the army put in reserve. However this isn't true in the auto-resolve, making it the better choice once your army is big enough, since this way, you can attack in full force.
Also, if you win in C&C mode, even with your entire start units destroyed, they'll still survive after the battle is resolved. I wish for a greater impact on losses.

Here comes the biggest problem I have with the game and unfortunately, I must say, it's a game breaker. Every strategy game has the problem, that the first person to capture the most resources has the advantage. If the skill of all players is equal, that person is bound to win. In other words, the desicive battle about who wins is the very first one, the rest of the game is just wasted time until the game ends, without a real chance of winning for the other players. Now every game has a system to counter that to a degree. Risk had these reinforcement cards, where once you use them, the next person using them gets even more. Starcraft has supply. Rise of Nations has dynamic costs for everything which increase the more units you've got. Battle for Wesnoth has upkeep costs for units and much luck involved in batles. Supreme Commander has the power system. While DDC has a support system in the C&C mode, it hase none in the Risk Mode.
Okay, the cost of buildings increase, but these aren't that relevant to the game. You basically need just gold mines, and to some extend taverns. When it comes to war factories, you can can sell the old ones, and build new ones at the front, so no siginificant cost increase here. And that's it. There is no penalty for having a big army. So the player who gets the greatest army first, wins. No way for others to catch up.
I see two possible solutions for that problem. One is to make units actually cost an upkeep. And the second one is the introduction of support on the risk map. Simply put, as in c&c mode, if you run out of supply, you can't build units. Supply is gained by building supply buildings which increase in cost as normal buildings do. You need to experiment whether it's good if the "supply depots" are influenced by the resource output of a country or not, i think it's a good idea, but this needs confirmation. If your depots get destroyed or captured, you might have one turn to fix that, otherwise you'll lose the units or maybe they defect to another player with supply left. Again experimenting if the one-turn rule is good or whether the results should be instant, is required.
The Kohan II system may also help here, bacially if you have enough supply, nothing happens, if you have not enough supply, the units cost upkeep money.

To give you and example just how game breaking this can be: On my last playthrough through the campaign, I didn't go into C&C mode once, because in any battle I made, I had 75%+ win chance anyway. I couldn't really get to the beef of the game because it just would make much sence.



[Raven Phase]
No issues here, but I do have a suggestion. If you bet the game once, you should be able to enable an optional "scrying mode" which would be basically a tooltip to see where which political descision would lead to. After beating the game multiple times, I found myself comming back to the campaign just to see what descision does what and experiment and so on. Would be nice to have optional support here.



[Options]
More difficulty options please, I still find the game much to easy on Hard Mode. Oh and a tooltip, what each difficulty actually influences.



[Multiplayer]
Two words: GOG version. I'm not a steam user, in fact I refuse to use steam. DRM issues matter to me, so I'm using the GOG version. Online Multiplayer is pretty much inexistant to me and I'm wondering why you would want the most effective way of advertising you game to be cut out. Give out an optional multiplayer key for GOG just as for example "Unepic" does and let your customers have access to it.

In the lobby you can't change your avatar or your starting positions, this needs to change.


[Further Things]
I noticed some crashes during the loading screens and the savegames sometimes get mixed up. Aside from that the game runs stable.

On some maps, you need to fix the building placement, if you have pre-build devestators, they sometimes get stuck between buildings right at the start.

Release the map editor. (But i've read this is planned anyway)

3-player maps and campaigns are missing.

In Dragon Mode, make the e.g. the middle mousebutton able to select units. Just as in normal mode the left click would do.

I found it rather odd, not to get the intro movie or the cutscenes in custom campaign mode, yet still get the outro-movie after winning.

During camaign, it's possible to just don't take the last country on a particular map, then research everything, horde gold and then take the last country and go to the next map with a surplus of ressources that guarantees you the win.

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Heh, it's funny you and I look completely at some things a different way.
Mostly TBS vs. RTS.

Cards can make a major difference, the difference you mention should be added. Sadly, the +gold card is broken, and potentially the person with the biggest army would also get the most cards.

While I like the supply system in Kohan II (and like Kohan II in general) I'm not sure if the same would work here. Especially if the supply is just one resource, one building. They would become the new goldmines you mention and probably not a whole lot would change.

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I second the comment about the AI being far too timid in campaign mode, especially in custom campaigns.

I'll play the AI on one of the custom maps, where most of the territories are neutral to start. I expand quickly, whereas the AI only proceeds one territory at a time. By the time we meet, I have 3/4 of the map. Also, the AI spends a lot of time ferrying units back and forth between territories for no apparent reason.

I would like the option to play against 2 or 3 allied AI opponents

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If you play a multiplayer campaign you can set the AI factions to be the same. It would be nice to have that option in a single player custom campaign, though.

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Stabbey Offline OP
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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.


***

I have more requests (see: this very thread), but those are my personal Top 5. What are your Top 5?

Joined: Jan 2009
Stabbey Offline OP
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I think that something has changed in one of the patches to make all ocean maps have islands and bases. I liked the ocean maps, they were a neat change of pace. But if they appear, they appear very, very rarely compared to islands with bases. I find that disappointing.

If it was changed because Transports could ditch enemies onto rocks that Ironclads couldn't kill, or other stalemate situations, there could be some kind of Stalemate outcome where one side or both retreats their units to another tile on the strategy map.


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