META THREAD: Warlock Wishlist - Post ALL your Suggestions here...

  • We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Status
Not open for further replies.
Currently capital cities are placed on the coast most of the time. Because of that a large number of city hexes are in the water which can't be built on. This is a serious handicap and often requires a restart. So, some suggestions to fix this:
1) Allow water versions of the land buildings to be built on water hexes
2) Or, create unique water based structures to build
3) Or, (and this is probably easiest to implement in a patch) add a "land fill" spell that allows you to turn a water hex to a land hex so you can build on it.

Warlock uses bacically the same combat as Ino-Co's previous Fantasy Wars and Elven legacy games, which I liked. What puzzles me is why they did not include the ranged defensive support fire that's in those games. That was also a big part of Fantasy General and Panzer General. It allows for the use of combined arms and provides more tactical depth. I would like to suggest that they think about adding that back in.

There are no heroes at all in Warlock, which is really the biggest departure from other similar games. Even the Fantasy Wars series of games had heroes. A lot of the fun of these types of games for me is recruiting, leveling up and equipping your heroes. No heroes means no equipment. There's no swords of firey wrath or shields of +3 movement in this game to be had via monster lairs or quests. I would like to request that they add heroes and equipment to the game. Being able to get equipment from quests would add a lot of appeal to them.

There's no empire status info screen at all and it is sorely missed. You can't tell who is at war whith whom or which city has which spells cast on it. Please add a screen that displays this information along with your empire's statistics.

There's no score screen or game history stats screen after the game ends. It would add a lot to game replay value to add these.

Multiplayer and selectable victory conditions have been confirmed to be in a future patch so no need to list them.
 
Im not sure if its a bug or feature request but...

In my current game (xl continents 6 rivals 6 extra worlds) im sitting on turn 221 and am working on fully subjugating and colonizing the extra worlds. As im sure you can imagine ive had to create a fairly extensive army and when moving an army of 15+ units to the same area causes massive pathing issues. Since the game doesnt seem to allow unit pass-through it will often send my units quite literally around the entire world to reach a hex 20 tiles away because there are units "blocking" its path. While I dont like the idea of immediatley going to water it would be nice if the pathing could be improved a bit so i dont have to baby sit my units.

I would really also like to see teleport buildings able to be created in each city. Even by turn 221 (which im sure is early for some games) the turns are starting to take quite a while and spending the better part of the hour to just reposition my army seems a bit extreme.
 
• Splitting selection/action to left/right buttons from current left/left behavior.
• Better feedback on population growth and factors leading to it
• Better feedback on city radius increases and what the final size will be
• Actual magic research tree
• Keybinds (my personal preference would be bind to Civ defaults, D=defend S=sentry G=go, etc)
• Demolish building key!
• Ability to build other structures on resources. Once I have a Smithy, I'd like to build something else on Iron hexes in other non-production cities
• *An encyclopedia of buildings and especially units*
• Army and city overview windows - lists armies or cities and you can interact (selecting/upgrading units; setting build orders/unit production etc)
• AI pass - fire elemental should consider my approaching army over the defenseless NPC city it's attacking
• Diplomacy pass - constant demands of tribute with only responses pay/war gets old fast
• Water tile buildings - right now, building on a coast is a penalty; one city two tiles in for a harbor to get cogs is all you'd want
• Add water transport vehicles and remove the cog behavior - Cogs trivialize water maps (though see previous point), and they're exploitive (I had a lvl 1 veteran escape a powerful quest mob by embarking into the ocean). Transports also facilitate better troop movement, can embark and then use transport's move allowance rather than embark, wait, move, wait, debark, wait.
• Give tiles differing values for production. A farm in the desert? A market in the swamp? Give mages spells to terraform as needed to deal with subpar city locations.
• Better movement feedback - having the number of movement points expended appear in each hex of the path would be great. Alternately, have multi-turn moves show number of turns along the route.
• Civ-style combat odds window on alt+mouseover rather than current behavior of having to be in combat range to consider odds
• Ranged counterattack. If a ranged unit attacks another ranged unit, the defender should get an attack once the original attack's results have been calculated.
 
Last edited:
• Splitting selection/action to left/right buttons from current left/left behavior.
• Better feedback on population growth and factors leading to it
• Better feedback on city radius increases and what the final size will be
• Actual magic research tree
• Keybinds (my personal preference would be bind to Civ defaults, D=defend S=sentry G=go, etc)
• Demolish building key!
• Ability to build other structures on resources. Once I have a Smithy, I'd like to build something else on Iron hexes in other non-production cities
• *An encyclopedia of buildings and especially units*
• Army and city overview windows - lists armies or cities and you can interact (selecting/upgrading units; setting build orders/unit production etc)
• AI pass - fire elemental should consider my approaching army over the defenseless NPC city it's attacking
• Diplomacy pass - constant demands of tribute with only responses pay/war gets old fast
• Water tile buildings - right now, building on a coast is a penalty; one city two tiles in for a harbor to get cogs is all you'd want
• Add water transport vehicles and remove the cog behavior - Cogs trivialize water maps (though see previous point), and they're exploitive (I had a lvl 1 veteran escape a powerful quest mob by embarking into the ocean). Transports also facilitate better troop movement, can embark and then use transport's move allowance rather than embark, wait, move, wait, debark, wait.
Give tiles differing values for production. A farm in the desert? A market in the swamp? Give mages spells to terraform as needed to deal with subpar city locations.
• Better movement feedback - having the number of movement points expended appear in each hex of the path would be great. Alternately, have multi-turn moves show number of turns along the route.
• Civ-style combat odds window on alt+mouseover rather than current behavior of having to be in combat range to consider odds
• Ranged counterattack. If a ranged unit attacks another ranged unit, the defender should get an attack once the original attack's results have been calculated.

While I agree with this point I fear it would need a complete reworking of the map generator. Most of the maps ive played on have a shocking ammount of mountains/desert/lava and with the AI mentality of settle this land or I will.... it kinda means you HAVE to land grab where-ever you can.

Id like to see a bit more complexity with the city placement but without a total reworking of the system I dont think its really feasible.
 
Hotkeys for everything please, that show in the tooltips. And please summarize them in an in-game screen and a pdf "cheat sheet". If they are rebindable, better.

And expose more info when the player needs to make decisions. i.e. I need to pick between two buildings, can I please see the stats of the units they'll provide me with?

Also, maybe have the player check out the god's relations screen once at the beginning of the game... I was barely aware it was there for a long while.
 
- Multiplayer
- Modability

With the two big ones out of the way, here some (slightly) smaller ones.

Spells:
- More spells in General
- Terrain affecting spells, for example spells to raise or lower mountains, or sink land into the sea (and get it back up).
- Illusion spells
- Expanded Counterspells and spell battles.
This requires some explanation. I would like to have protection spells which protect your spells (unit, area or global) to be dispelled or spells which prevent spells to be casted on an area or, at high level, on your whole empire. Now what you have to do when you cast the spell is to dump a variable amount of mana into it. Now when an enemy tries to dispell one effect or tries to cast into a protected zone he has to bid mana in addition to the normal spell cost. If he bids more mana than what you dumped into the protection spell he breaches it and his spell goes off like normal. If not then the spell fizzles but he still looses all mana he bid. Of course you do not know how much mana the enemy used for his protection spell (A perk might give you some rough estimation).
That of course requires some mana gain rebalancing as undead earn much too much mana compared to other races.

- A longer game time / a slow mode
- A independent "production" value for cities to influence build speed including a building chain and new/reworked resources.
- Spellbook customization like in Master of Magic
In Master of Magic you not only bought perks at the start of the game but also spellbooks. The type and number of spellbook determined which spells you could research and what bonus spells you got at start. Spelbooks and Perks used the same points to buy so either you bought lots of perks, but did not have access to higher level spells in the game unless found or stolen or you go light on perks and either have access to the most powerful spells (after research) or can use spells from several different magic schools

- A mirror world instead of pocket dimensions
- Alternatively an additional incentive to conquer pocket worlds, for example each of them contains a powerful artifact which for example increases your casting speed or does other major stuff.
- A 3rd tier of Ships. Galleons are too weak compared to sea monsters.
- More different building trees for the races. Imo the build trees for the races are a bit too similar. Also too much stuff is branching off the money building tree.
- More customization of the world generator (or simply less mountains, especially for starting cities)
 
Last edited:
I thought of something more as I continued to play. Currently the idea of doing quests for the Gods an getting influence is cool. But it really starts too late in the game IMO. I realize you can boost this some by taking a favor perk. But I would like to see something like goody huts related to the gods. For example:

I discover a shrine to Fervus. I can either offer some money/food/mana for some influence with Fervus. Or loot the shrine and incur some some wrath from him. Which might cause him to spawn some of his units in my territory later on which I could kill for more negative influence. Basically what i'm saying is I would like to see the Religion aspect get started earlier in the game since its usually a while before you can clear out an build temples. Or at least it has been in my game I guess you could get lucky an start near a Holy Ground.



The other thing I would suggest is tweak monster behavior in the alternate planes to not camp the portal so badly. That's part of why you can't conquer them until your army is so strong you don't need anything in there. Since to even step foot in it you have to be able to survive attacks from 5 or 6 dragons at once. I would also LOVE to see a larger alternate plane added at some point with multiple portal entrances that might lead to different areas of Ardania as well as the other alternate planes. You could perhaps make this an expansion pack that adds a new race that comes from this large plane.
 
How about when you release updates to the game you post on your own forums (preferably on steam as well) about the changes from the last patch. This is a common practice amongst most game developers. Your players do not like do be surprised by changes when they thought they learned the game. If it is just bug fixes that is nice to know as well, posting the changelog can't hurt.
 
I've played through the game twice now, once on normal difficulty and once on the difficulty about that, and after two playthroughs there are several features that I would like to see.

First off, though, let me just say that I do very much like and enjoy the game: kudos, it's awesome. I just feel that certain minor tweaks could make the experience more enjoyable.

Interface:
  • The animations and AI moves take too long. Yes, I know that they can be clicked through, but it really does get excessive, especially near the end-game. There were times when I clicked "End Turn", then went to go take a bathroom break, and when I came back it still wasn't time for me to play again. I always turn off combat animations and use the "Quick enemy moves" options when playing this style of game, and they would be much appreciated here.
  • Bindable hotkeys for common actions.
  • Mouse: allow left/right customization; I can't count the number of times I've sent some unit marching off towards a different unit/city that I was trying to select.

AI
  • Does the AI build temples and their special units? I've never seen it happen, but that could be a fluke.
  • I've never seen the AI go above 8-10 perks/buffs on a single unit. The way to create ultimate units is to stack perks/enchantments--I've had over 20 on a single unit, and the AI can't compete. Is this a function of the difficulty level, or should it be tweaked?
  • Does the AI use mystic portals? I've never seen it happen, but it could be a difficulty thing or just a fluke. If they don't, they need to.
  • The AI makes utterly ridiculous demands for resources, and the only option is to accept or go to war: you need to be able to offer a lower amount or else just refuse without initiating armed conflict. Not that they should never make demands or attack you for refusing, but there should be more options.

Gameplay
  • It's harder to conquer an alternate dimension than it is to beat the AI. The army that could handle all the dragons and elementals that jump you the instance you step through a portal could steamroll a capitol with ease. This makes them the equivalent of a win-more card in MtG: awesome, but kinda pointless.
  • Spellcasting needs to be faster. Even with the archmage perk and the agile mind enchantment, the number of spells that you can fire off is excruciatingly low. In my most recent game, I finished with 6k mana, gaining ~200 a turn, despite having burned out that silly casting timer every turn for 100+ turns, mostly casting maintainable enchantments on my troops/cities. I could have easily spent all my gold on units/perks if I had wanted to, but there is simply no conceivable way to spend all of the mana that you get, which is frustrating. Casting time should be drastically reduced or else removed altogether; alternately, have an option to make some spells insta-cast by spending extra mana; or else have another, very expensive spell, which refills the casting time meter. This also means that:
  • The vast majority (90%+) of spells in the game are useless. Not because there isn't a use for them, but because the extreme limits on the number of spells that can be cast per turn mean that *ALL* of my casting time is spent on the really necessary ones (city buffs, unit buffs, and "emergency" spells) with absolutely nothing left over for "Lesser Dispel" or even flinging around random fireballs.
  • Multiplayer.


Tech/Research
  • It's not at all clear what building leads to what, or what the possibilities are. A visual tree diagram of all the buildings and their dependencies would be amazing.
  • Spell research seems to be random: I think that more advanced spells only show up once you have researched a certain number of other spells, but aside from that if there is any rhyme or reason to when things show up I haven't been able to tell what it is. In my first game, I found "vampiric weapons" long before the fire weapon enchant; in my second game I got fire weapons fairly early and won before vampiric weapons ever showed up. It would be nice to have a dependency tree--to reach X, research Y--rather than randomly clicking until what you want eventually shows up. Or, if something like this is already present, to get some in-game documentation of it.

Again, this post isn't intended to whine at all, but to offer some constructive criticism about what I found frustrating or lacking in an otherwise awesome game.
 
Please implement a mouse-grab-drag method of moving the map. Edge scrolling is weak with multiple monitors and seems disabled when I have a unit selected (and am planning its move) - at least in the direction of that 2nd monitor.

The universal LMB has led me to OFTEN move units unintentionally.

Why isn't there a defensive stance other than sentry?

Needs a space-bar skip option to bypass a unit or city (and more robust gameplay options that provide a toggle to enable NEXT unit automatically).

Would be great if the various terrain types had expanded effects beyond movement and combat modifiers. (damage from lava, shielding from missile attacks in forests, etc.)

...

Pretty swell game so far!
 
There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread, but I'm going to go out on a limb here.

I would suggest there be a hard cap on the amount of enchantments any single unit can recieve. The game becomes quite boring when you can steamroll the entire map with a single unit. (This unit was buffed as a court werewolf before being upgraded, and for added wtf factor, he has two lunord spell buffs on him)

Limiting single unit power would make the game quite a bit harder, since the AI has problems dealing with uber units like the one I just linked. The AI also seems incapable of building its own uber units.

Consider limiting some purchasable upgrades to make more sense instead of just piling them all on, like one armor perk, one weapon perk, one potion perk etc. Along with this idea, consider having multiple upgrades for each slot, like armor would be with the choice between masterwork, adamantine, and nevril.

With these limitations in place, the game becomes more about choosing the right upgrades and buffs for your units, like perk leveling up already is. Fighting undead? Might be a good choice to switch your ice weapon buff for a life weapon buff.

About temples and the units they grant: I'd love to see these make an appearance earlier in the game. Having an important game decision like which god to worship should be made earlier on and affect the overall game more. As it is, holy grounds appear to be quite rare in the overworld. I don't thnik they should be too common, but I do believe there should be exactly one nearby holy ground to each great mages' starting city. This allows you to make that god choice during your early expansion (or a little later if you decide to delay building the temple). In addition to this I'd also love to see lower tier temple units that are affordable mid game. As it is, temple units cost a whole ton of gold and are hard to get before you start dominating the countryside. Also allowing them to receive buffs would be nice considering the amount of resources they cost.

Overall, my hope is to see more unit variety and tactics used. You'll actually need to use weaken on those gold dragons when your units can only have 3 buffs.
 
After some more play, I wish I could cast spells more often. Despite Agile Mind and the Archmage Trait, I still am accumulating more mana than I can spend. And casting spells is fun anyway!

Perhaps 3 different spell cooldowns, broken up by spell type? 1 Combat Spell cooldown, 1 blessing type cooldown, and 1 divine/other cooldown. So you could cast easily cast 3 spells a turn, if you could finance it.
 
  • Spellcasting needs to be faster. Even with the archmage perk and the agile mind enchantment, the number of spells that you can fire off is excruciatingly low. In my most recent game, I finished with 6k mana, gaining ~200 a turn, despite having burned out that silly casting timer every turn for 100+ turns, mostly casting maintainable enchantments on my troops/cities. I could have easily spent all my gold on units/perks if I had wanted to, but there is simply no conceivable way to spend all of the mana that you get, which is frustrating. Casting time should be drastically reduced or else removed altogether; alternately, have an option to make some spells insta-cast by spending extra mana; or else have another, very expensive spell, which refills the casting time meter. This also means that:
  • The vast majority (90%+) of spells in the game are useless. Not because there isn't a use for them, but because the extreme limits on the number of spells that can be cast per turn mean that *ALL* of my casting time is spent on the really necessary ones (city buffs, unit buffs, and "emergency" spells) with absolutely nothing left over for "Lesser Dispel" or even flinging around random fireballs.
I agree with that. I finished all of of my games with a lot of mana, not only because I had mana fields.

What if our Great Mage could make Scrolls for casting units ? This would give a "consommable" perk to the unit which could cast the spell later (within his vision radius).

Making Scroll : Normal Mana Cost, Half Casting Time
Bring Scroll to Unit : Fixed Mana Cost
Use Scroll : Normal Mana Cost, No Casting Time for the Great Mage, Normal Casting Time for the casting unit.

The ability to make Scrolls could be gained and upgraded through the construction of some buildings (Library, to make a scroll per turn, Academy, to make two, for exemple...).

With this, we could : use more of our mana, cast more spells within a short laps of time.
 
Slower zombies.
Traditionally zombies are slow, yet they have the same land movement as most other units, and get a path perk at low levels - so end up being faster than most units.

Stunned units should not be "idle" - they can't do anything so why do they show up in the lists of units that are idle?
 
Wish List

  • Hotkeys - allow users to map shortcut keys
  • Right mouse button for action, left for select
  • Middle mouse button for map scroll
  • Show icon of spell completed in the "spell completed" notification
  • City summary list -Report Screen. Would be nice if there were icons for unit that it can build and improvments to units since they get them free in city
  • Unit summary list - Report screen
  • In windowed mode, give option for borderless and full screen (current shows title bar and does not use all the screen
  • City tab order - Have the city's tab in order of world location instead of order they were founded.
  • Spell order - would be nice if it was in alphabetic order instead of order researched. Since research is random, have to scroll a bit late game. Even better would be a category based tree list instead of a simple single list.
  • Animation speed - Setting to change Animation speed for friendly and enemy units similar to Eleven Legacy series.
  • When regaining focus on full screen, ignore the first click (causes unit movement when game is "paused" from tab out)
  • Tool tip on spell ready to be cast (As a new person, can't tell what the icon is and forget what I was casting when I reload)


BTW, excellent game :D
 
I'm having a blast with this game. My main issue is that the game can become tiresome, requiring me to constantly click on the right of the screen to view an alert, only to then have to go the left of the screen to perform an action, then back to the right for the next alert over and over again. A few more menu options, and the addition of keyboard shortcuts would make this much less effort and cut out a lot of time wasting.

My Suggestions:

1) Add keyboard shortcuts throughout (with tooltips).
2) Add keyboard shortcuts to cycle through alerts and cycle through idle units
3) Add menu options to permanently turn off Combat Animations, permanently turn off Movement Animations, automatically add unit upgrades (promotions), automatically buy all available perks when a new unit is built
4) Add menu option to stop perk menu from auto-closing after a perk is bought (tiresome when you are buying 4 or 5).
5) Add an option to 'buy all available perks' for a unit.
6) Add menu option to stop a unit in sentry mode from becoming alert when a non-hostile unit is nearby.
7) In the unit build menu in the city view, change the information panel to show perks that will be applied to the unit when it is built as currently these are not shown.
8) Split apart the attack/bane and heal/blessing magic filters into their own filters as these each become too large late game.
9) Add favourite slots to easily cast commonly used spells (using keyboard buttons 1 thru 8).
10) Stop defense towers from generating an 'enemy at the gates' alert when it's an enemy city in range, not an enemy unit.
11) Add tooltips to terrain to show movement penalties and defense penalties/bonuses.
 
  • City summary list -Report Screen.
  • Unit summary list - Report screen
  • City tab order - Have the city's tab in order of world location instead of order they were founded.
  • Spell order - would be nice if it was in alphabetic order instead of order researched. Since research is random, have to scroll a bit late game. Even better would be a category based tree list instead of a simple single list.

Great ideas!
 
Assassins power should not act like a melee attack but like a ranged attack with a range of one hex, otherwise their invisibility is useless if their target have friendly units in surrounding hexes.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.