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

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Things this game should have:

-Information
1. In-game building tech tree including links to the units and perks each building gives.
2. Unit "tech tree" showing all possible units and their stats, what each unit can upgrade into (if possible), and what perks and level upgrade each unit can use (perks could possibly get their own info tab if needed, which would describe the perk, what building gives it, and what units can use it)
3. Spell list, less random spell research would be nice (different suggestion though), but even if the spell system isn't changed there needs to be an in game listing of all spells and their effects sorted by spell type and spell tier.
4. End of game stats screen. People like to see details on how they did compared to others.

-UI/organization
1. Consistent spell research, spell tree/web allowing players to plan out in advance what spells they want instead of always getting random spells.
2. Visible spell tags, each spell belongs to a various category and it would be nice to see which one labeled on the spells themselves, such as the fireball spell saying "attack" and "elemental" at the bottom of the spell.

-Usability
1. Ability to delete buildings, will likely need a "deconstruct" time which would be considered a construction (you wouldn't be able to build while destroying a building), this is important to the game as high end buildings require player choices and if the wrong one is made, or a player just wants to change things up, there is currently no way other than to destroy a whole town. This is also a big issue later game when capturing enemy towns, as they may have built structures that are useless to you.
2. Hotkey options. Hotkeys for things such as going to next unit with move points or next city with an open build slot, would be a great addition, but please make sure to add them to the options menu so players can change them to their needs.

-Diplomacy
1. The AI aside, the diplomacy settings need a few more options. First, there needs to be the option of obligated minimum turn requirements as an option. Ex. You could offer another player/AI a 5 turn peace treaty for 500 gold. If they accept the treaty they would be unable to go to war with you for at least 5 turns, afterward the treaty would not end, but war could be started if desired. This prevents abuse such as accepting gold from an AI in a peace offer, only to take the gold, declare war, and attack on the same turn. It also makes diplomacy mean more in multiplayer. I'd suggest turn limits of 1, 5, 10, and 15. With 15 maybe pushing the boundary of too many turns (seeing as you can renew it if you'd like). Note this should not prevent players from "upgrading" their friendliness, if I accepted a 5 term peace treaty, I should still be able to make an alliance with that player even if I can't declare war on them.

-Other
1. If possible, map seed numbers, if I play a map I really like it'd be great to play the same one again sometime without having to go to a save of the game.
2. Option to start with what I'll call a caravan (super peasant) instead of a city. This let's players get the feeling of starting a kingdom from nothing and for some is very rewarding. It also allows players to choose their starting location as sometimes the random starting spots are pretty bad.
3. Assassin attack/defense sounds. This may seem nit-picky, but the other unit sounds are pretty solid, this one just doesn't cut it. Assassin's are supposed to be silent cold killers, instead when they attack/defend all I hear is a lot of screams coming from the assassin's themselves. If possible please change this unit sound (so far I've found the other unit sounds are pretty good and enjoyable).
4. At least 1 more race, even if it requires getting some cheap DLC the game needs a bit more variety in what players can build, be creative and players will eat it up (figuratively of course, if they did it literally then I'd be concerned).
5. Game option to allow changing of a players capitol city. The current mode of when the capitol is taken the players cities go neutral is interesting, but it would be nice to have the option to have to fight empires to the bitter end as well.
6. A keep playing option. Sure you may have destroyed all your enemies, but what if your personal goal is to completely colonize the world? Or what if you want the satisfaction of wiping out all the monsters on the map? This really should be in the game.

I hope this gets looked at because these seemingly simple changes would take this game to the next level (well, simple in concept, coding may be a different story, though hopefully not).
 
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Get rid of the 1 hit point soldier in units of more than 1. It's fine and not so noticeable in a group of goblins. It's when your third troll gets hit by some weak attack and dies on ya. It just seems stupid that at 99% health your reduced 1/3 character. Perhaps add wounds on slightly damaged units so that when your unit is full health you can tell by the lack of blood and scars/missing arm and cracked skull.
 
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Just finishing up first impossible game, and it's a lot of fun. I have a blast with the game but since we're suggesting improvements I thought I'd give my two cents. Some of the main things have obviously been broached in this 16 page thread but I find it necessary to differentiate between issues that need addressing rather urgently as opposed to changes which would understandably require a lot of forethought and should be made on down the line.

The most pressing issues:

1) AI/Diplomacy. Both of these issues overlap a lot. At lower difficulty settings your opponents basically set themselves up to be destroyed, at higher difficulty settings the AI seems to make its outrageous demands as soon as you go to war with someone else and seeing as you are often placed immediately next to your opponents, it can get old. Beside that it's hard to negotiate anything of any value since there's only gold and mana as bargaining chips.

2) Hotkeys.

3) Toggling the ability to skip AI turns. There are times in the game where you need to know what another player (usually an enemy) is doing but most of the time it's just an annoying click-fest.

4) Spell research. Spell research is so confounding as it is that it allows for no reliable magic strategy. In a game where you are supposed to be a wizard it seems to me that magic would figure heavily as part of your strategy, but when you can't predict when you're going to get spells or even when you're going to get higher level spells it gets hard to plan around using magic. Also it makes you research a bunch of spells you'll never use without any guarantee that you'll get the ones you want. Some spells suit specific games better than others, so it would be nice to know if you're progressing along a certain tree. Either a magic tree, or make it so that the five points in the pentagram for spell research corresponds to a spell tree for the gods in that direction. Even if it's randomized between the two-three gods in that direction it's an improvement over the seemingly random direction of spell research now.

5) Spells. There seem to be a bunch of rather useless spells but that is up for debate. What I do know is whoever said windwalking and water walking should be made into the same spell is 100% right. I'd like to see a greater diversity of spells. Most of them are just damage over a certain AOE.

6) Unit strengths/movement. I know that you want certain units to be much stronger than others but there has got to be some serious work on the level of strength. Once you get a single elite unit every single regular unit your opponent owns becomes obsolete; their magic on top of their stats on top of their regen is insane, regular units do 0 damage and then get killed in one counter. On an unrelated note, in a game where you have to build tons of cities it seems like your armies compared to the number of your cities is rather small. Also the idea of fielding armies becomes tedious because of the fact that most terrain requires pathfinding to be explorable. Pathfinding would be great if there was a decent mix of terrains but as it is it's almost a requirement for a unit to be of any use in the game since the units you'll be fielding for the first 50 turns or so will only be able to move one or two spaces if they don't have it. Either make it possible to make roads (perhaps making builders have a dual use as both citybuilders and roadbuilders) or make it possible to determine the level of rough terrain on a map (for most maps I've played it's been upwards of 75%).

7) Selecting units/cities is so tedious sometimes.

Not so pressing:

8) Cities. Ok so this is a big one but it's not urgent. The current system is nice, but it makes it difficult to tech. I know that there are not really an abundance of tech buildings necessary and so this isn't a huge problem but if you want to make tech more complex then I think it's necessary. I'd like to be able to concentrate on one city, maybe even at the expense of others, perhaps importing population from surrounding cities. I'd just like to be able to build cities bigger and better, perhaps at a scaling price to do so. Also, it would be nice to be able to build defenses without needing a population raise. They're useless later on so I doubt spamming would be a big issue as long as there was a gold price to build one instead of or in addition to upgrade costs.

9) New units and races. Because that'd be cool. But it takes a long while to conceive and implement these things effectively and I'd rather see something well thought out than something rushed.

10) When you look at your production values at the top of the screen I'd like to see what specific enchantments on what units need how much mana upkeep.

11) Early game you get in tons of wars that are impossible to finish because main cities are absolutely unassailable. If they're going to placed right next to my main city and they're going to force me into a war early game, I think I should be able to finish them off. If you beat their entire army, you can't withstand the power of their city + their magic.

12) Make water tiles be worth something for building purposes! I know it's been said but it can't be said enough.
 
Great game, no really been a long time since I havent enjoyed so much a waregame on my PC.

About "a new race" which I think is a wish of most of us, would be happy to pay as DLC and yes it need to be well thought and not rushed.

- It needs to be "different" aka non human, non undead and non monsters (you may wish to add more units on those, but this is another subject),
the best that pops up to my mind so far are:
1.) "robot" or "droids" is my favorite (the old and rusty type, made on underlying 1850's steam power energy with gears and steam piston, not too dissimilar to the skyrim robots dwemers, not the japanese manga ones. They would develop from a recently crashed flying saucer on land.
2.) "atlantis " or "underwater" may be another good candidate, a mix of cthulhu mythos, giant fishes, sea horses and the inabitant of atlantis in the spirit Namor the Sub-Mariner. Obviously they would develop underwater for a coral barrier themed town.
3.) "alice wonderland" may be a bit farfetched and may break the overall feel of the game, still it is clearly distinguisable and provides a good starting point for a full army (cards, etc), not my favorite though. Would develop from an outer plane, and emerge from the outer door.
4.) "dinos" again, easily identifiable, offers a full spectrum of monsters, but may be hard for the player to relate too. Could also develop from an outer plane, and emerge from the outer door.

I realise that this may be alot of work as this needs new graphics, new animations and stuff, still it would enhance greatly the fun.
 
I, there is definilty a slight perf issue creeping after some hours of gaming. I think some of that is unavoiable as some algorythm must be to the N, N^2, M or M^2 with N and M number of units or cities in play. Still I think it is more noticeable since the patch. It is also surprising because it is happening when one select units (sometimes the mouse seem to have problems finding the next hex to point o), where one would think the pc isn't on its knees.
Still the game is solid and doesnt crash which is great and rare in this world. Bring on the DLC's.

Etienne
 
I would have to say the single most important thing that you could do for this game would be automation. Currently there are a host of activities that I have to do that I should not have to do or could be made much easier. They're things that every player will pretty much do the same each time and there is no reason to have to bother me.

Because of this, and because of the size of the empires typically seen, as the game goes on I end up fighting my desire to play more than I fight the opposing AI. The easiest way to describe this is that at different points in the game, activities that once were core to your effective management of the empire become trivial and rote. Because decisions no longer need to be made in these instances and because the game forces me to continually make them i waste the vast majority of my turn managing rather than strategizing.

Strategizing is fun. Managing is not fun. At least, not in the iteration provided in Warlock. The main problem with Warlock is that its interface confuses strategizing with managing. Strategy is "What do i build first/second? How many do i build? What do they do?". But warlock seems to think strategy is "tell this unit to do the same thing multiple times" or "make sure you build the right things even though you know what you're going to build".

This would not be a big deal if the number of units or cities was low. But since we don't have armies, and the number of cities we have should more or less always be expanding, or at the very least will be very high by the time we do stop expanding this becomes a really really large issue.

Instead I want to focus on empire management and automation. Hotkeys make it so that i can do things I do a lot faster. Automation makes it so that the things i was going to do anyway you don't have to bother me with.

Things that can be automated:

1) Building Construction: This is simple. Either allow us to create templates with building and building order priorities or allow us to turn on an AI manager that will build towards a specific goal. If i am making my fourth gold town as humans my build order is going to be pretty obvious. Market->Rogues->Bank->Mint->treasury->Harbor-> as many charter houses as possible with special gold places mixed in there.

Just give me a couple of tick boxes:

[]Able to produce x unit
[]Gold
[]Food
[]Mana
[]Number of Towers

and then the city doesn't bother me because for some reason i might want to produce wizards or food income instead of another charter house it just quietly expands while attempting to connect cities for easier travel.


2) Shoot Enemies at the Gates: Its almost always a good idea to shoot at enemies at the gate. If there is only one enemy within range why do i need to be informed that there is an enemy at the gate? Just shoot it and don't make me do the "enemy at the gate shuffle" 10 plus times in a round. If my capital is going to hit everything with an AoE, just shoot it and don't bother me. I still want to know where enemies are but letting me know where enemies and lairs are can more easily be achieved using the minimap.

If we have tools to identify enemies via the minimap then we don't need to be informed every time cockroaches spawn next to our level 5 cities. We can look at the map, see its a single neutral unit, and ignore it or see its two weak units and ignore it. To make this even better you can have it automatically shoot if you don't give it a target if there are two possible targets there. To make it even better you can have it only tell us if there is a reasonable chance that the enemies in range can actually take the city

3) Guards that Guard: In a lot of cases i like to stick units in places for various reasons. And, i like it that they are able to sit there and then tell me something is happening. And i like it when i can stick them on a city and have them defend that city and god damnit i have to put them in defend again and you keep telling me he is doing thing yes, i know he is doing nothing i want him to sit in the city and defend and i don't care what is out there!

Allow us to give units guard orders: Let us define a point they want to guard and then a range in which they will aggressively hunt creatures. They then stand on the spot and attack units that they can kill within their guard radius. And if there is an engagement the next round they go right back to guarding the spot so that I do not have to tell them, again, that i want them sitting on that castle tile. If we don't give them orders at the end of the round, have the automatically defend.

We can extend this concept to scouts. There must be some sort of AI for scouts, let me put scouts on the AI and ignore them. I want them to scout a general direction i don't want to have to micro manage my bats because they're going to fly into a greater fire elemental if i just click them to a corner of the map.

4) Rally Points: One of the most annoying things is getting all your troops to the front line, or a staging point or whatever when you're building a lot. You have to click each troop and move them to the area and you have to do this at each city and... Just let us give cities [or unit types] a rally point so that after they're built they go there. It would save me so much time.
 
2) Shoot Enemies at the Gates: Its almost always a good idea to shoot at enemies at the gate. .

i like all your suggestions except the one above.
Actually its quite often not a good idea to shoot at enemies at the gate.Because vs strong units your normal towers typically do only 0-2 damage.And shooting these is often not the best idea because you make them gain xp while doing almost no damage.Same with Undead towers vs death immunes.
Furthermore sometimes the order of actions can be important.E.g when i have a unit near that city and a weak neutral appears at the gate i want my unit to get the xp and not the tower to kill the neutral right away.
 
There's also the "roads" decision when placing structures.

Basically it does sound like you rather not play the game, but just... watch the game play itself. At least, that's how it seems to me...
 
2 B done

This must be, dare I say so, the best game I have ever played. I LOVE Civilization, I LOVE Heroes of Might and Magic, I LOVE turn based, exploratory strategy (4X)... call it what you want, I LOVE IT! My graphics card is having a vacation, as this game takes all my time... every, single day.

But... and the butts are plenty...

1. The map... the map really sucks... every so often, it will become a radar of cities, more than a map.
2. Keymapping... hotkeys, and what they are supposed to do... simple, yet mighty important.
3. Some kind of "Wait", with a hotkey...
4. Zoom... granted, this game does not depend on graphics, yet they are beautiful... let us get the BIG picture... world view...
5. An icon that indicates spells (and an overview, allowing you to disenchant old doofs that simply cost too much)...
6. STATS... with links... see your cities in a list, clicking takes you to them...
7. Huge worlds should have polar regions rather than map limits...
8. Different commands for garrison and sentry... fortify until reactivated and fortify until disturbed...
9. (Personal opinion)... upgrade ONLY in friendly territory...
10. Slightly more advanced diplomacy.... you should not have to declare war because Grumba does not get 100 gold... Grumba should declare war if he dislikes you enough when making his demand... well, if you reject it, that is...
11. Doesn't feel like talking to you should not protect them from an attack... unless allied... something about honor and individuals...
12. Warlockopedia..... when right-clicking on anything gives you info. I really want to see the stats of the terrain tiles...
13. A global road construction mechanism... try "Call to Power" if you don't know what I mean. Something like PW (public works) should be generated each turn, allowing you to construct roads between your cities (but not too many or too much). Strategic roads are important...

Yeah... there is plenty to complain about... BUT... some damn bears are blocking a city I really need to invade...

Upgrade, update, patch... I will gladly pay more if you will gladly work more... this is my happiest time since Civ 1... seriously, even Fallout must await its due time (yeah, I have some tasks I need to fix there, as well).

PS! This is the first time I have even bothered to sign into a game account, simply because these developers actually bother to read the shit we write... I have never bought something like this "unfinished" game, only to expect SO MUCH MORE! It may be great now, but to think what they could make of it.
 
There's also the "roads" decision when placing structures.

Basically it does sound like you rather not play the game, but just... watch the game play itself. At least, that's how it seems to me...

No. Its just that at some point shooting the critters that come up isn't playing the game any more. Early in the game these decisions matter a good deal, we only have a few cities and managing our borders and our units and what they're doing is important.

Later in the game we have a network of cities which we can defend from the random neutral spawn[or mega spawn] without using units or without using many units. Dealing with these spawns is no longer a core issue of gameplay because they don't actually make me change the decisions I am going to make. At turn 15, dealing with that predator spider near my first expansion is a big deal. At turn 115 is a nuisance. At turn 40, figuring out how I am going to get that greater fire elemental off of that holy site so i can put a city down is an important decision. But dealing with the cockroaches that spawned by my capital is not. At turn 40 on the front lines of my cities and a warring empire deciding whether or not i want unit production, late game expansion, turrets, or a mix is something that is important. At turn 140 it doesn't matter any more.

These things just make me click more times for a few turns while I am off doing important things. The management of my empire becomes a roadblock to the gameplay.

Civ 5 gas a good example of this, you're always limited in cities so build decisions are often very important and not terribly tedious. In the early game, improvements are quite valuable and which one you choose and how you build your roads is very important. But eventually you don't care any more, you care more that you should be upgrading than what you should be upgrading too. So you just automate your workers instead of micro managing them. This lets you get to the core gameplay of commanding your empire.
 
Bought Warlock during the sale and have been enjoying it a surprising amount. Fantasy + Civ 5 is a good mixture. With that said, there are a fair amount of things that I would love to see fixed in order to make it more on the level of the Civ series.

World Gen
-More options in general to tweak world gen would be nice. Increasing the number of forests or mountains for example, making a desert world, things like that.
-World gen in particular needs some fixes. Especially for multiplayer, it needs to have better capital placement.
-Give us an option to allow multiple portals going into one plane. This would allow for more strategic play (since if you control a plane you could use it to launch attacks into someone elses region). Additionally, planes should have multiple levels of difficulty and possibly different modifiers as well to denote what spawns in there. For example:
1. Peaceful Treasure Plane: Almost no foes or resources, but has a lot of broken down carts and piles of gold
2. Dangerous Nexus: No resources, tons of foes but contains multiple portals across all of Ardania
-Nothing too complex, but makes planes more interesting than just flat slugfests with a bunch of high level foes.
-With that said, it would be neat to have a world-gen type where you have players start on two different planes, with an intermediate plane in order to reach the other. Just throwing ideas out there.
-Give us an option to toggle off random world spawns please! Or make it so that they don't spawn within city limits. It's not fun when 10 ogres spawn all around your cities. It's not hard to deal with, just tedious.
-New World Gen Types: Torus World (Wraparound both horizontally and vertically), Hollow World ('Two' Ardanias linked together, achieve-able by using the current Planes mechanic)

Quality of Life
-Auto-skip combat animations
-Do not transition to other realm when sending units across

Balance
-Right now, Gold is the most useful followed by mana and then food. An idea I propose is making it so that you can 'spend' excess food on units to increase the amount of EXP they gain per turn or possibly use it to increase the growth speed of a city. Both Gold and Mana have no real upper limit on how much you want, more is always better.
-Summons are a bit strong considering their mana cost
-Water is too much of a liability for cities right now, especially if your capital spawns in the middle of a small island. Possibly add a spell that allows players to make land or make special water-based buildings. Alternately, an aquatic-based race could be interesting.

Right now I feel like the content level is alright, it just needs to be refined more.
 
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@ Goumindong;
So the problem is basically the city spam? Yeah, I can agree with that.
However any solutions I brough to fix that problem have been rejected by many players since having to make decisions on placement and which resources to get was not fun. Getting it all was fun. If not for that AI that makes it so easy to stomp them with your many many resources. Oh wait...
 
^It doesn't really fix anything, while making game less fun.

I mean, it's exactly the same as saying to play on smaller map size. Because, that what that suggestion essentially does (reduces max number of cities on map, due to longer range between cities).
 
@ Goumindong

The solution for this is to just add more options,that you can turn on/off in an option menu.E.g "Auto shoot with towers".
Personally i like micromanagement and I like all these small decisions where small mistakes can be made.Even on turn 180 with like 80 cities i would always want to aim manually with my towers unless the game is already won and i am just playing around a bit.
And i like the city spam as well,btw...
 
I think it would be nice if you could move your capital to one of the alternate planes. This would be pretty useful for multiplayer, I'd think. An upgrade built on dragon eggs, or something.

It would be good (for the AI) if it didn't attack things that it can't hurt. Watching the AI throw pure melee units at ghosts makes me feel kind of bad for the AI.
 
1 ) Please add a "Restart" option in the Main Menu, as it is offered in many games.

This option allows a player who does not like the ecology of his starting location to quickly restart with the very same settings, without having to go through the whole game-setup process.

Today, for example, I wanted to role-play as Nicholas Frost situated in a snowy environment : quite logical. I restarted the game 20 times in a row, with the very same settings, without ever encountering a snowy hex in those 20 starting positions : there was a lot of sand and jungle, though. It was very tedious and time-consuming to have to exit to the Main Menu each and every time, and to have to go through the 3-step game-setup process -- again and again.

2) Also, but less pressingly important, would be the option to determine the % of terrain types in the map setup : for example, 10% water + 15% snow & ice + 10% jungle + 20% forest, etc.

I do not know if it was bad luck, but in the many games I have started during the past few weeks, I have never encountered a starting location which included snow or ice patches (not counting snowy mountain tops). In May, starting positions with a lot of snow were not uncommon. (It spoils my role-playing mood to see Nicholas Frost start in a desert, surrounded by lava and jungle.)
 
1) Enrich maps to make exploring more fun and engaging.
Right now, I explore in order to grab a few free resources here and there, to find out where world portals are, where my enemies are, and to build cities. I think it'd be great to include more world "fun points of interest", such as a tavern to visit to buy items/recruit heroes, encounter wandering mages who can teach you a spell for a price, lairs you can enter and explore where a powerful boss creature lives protecting some nice loot, fountains that bless Great Mages or Lords with random effects, individual forts that produce unique units (which then would need to be defended!). I think this would also compliment the Lords concept, as the Lords would generally be the "player avatars" then doing the exploring and reaping the benefits.

2) More Random World Events
In addition to enriching the world map, I recommend making the world a more organic environment through random world events and terrain deformation. World events could include plagues, famines, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. They can then also be tied in to the religion system if by lets say a particular God is unhappy, then make strike a player with a plague. Or if no players have built a temple to Krypta, then maybe she'll do a world event. Terrain deformation has already been covered, though in addition to roads, I think it's worth exploring how bolster hexes with defense improvements for strategic purposes. A Great Mage spell could then be to either raise a barricade, or to destroy a terrain hex.

3. More Artifacts, or, Artifacts with Enchantments!
Now with Lords and artifacts, while loving them, I'm also beginning to quickly grow weary of the repetitiveness. The world event where artifact chests appear is cool... though when half of all the loot are Combat Brooms or Swords of Truth, it becomes disappointing. There are so many spells and affects available, I think it's a low hanging fruit to greatly increase the artifacts available, if only by simply adding a chance for an artifact to be generated with a random spell affectation. It'd be great to find a Sword of Truth... that also was randomly generated to grant the wielder a Frost Weapon Enchantment! There could be even more rare randomly generated charts where an item could even grant the Lord multiple enchantments.

I could go on all day, though are the three I'd like to see initial focus on. Thanks for the great game, I know you guys at Paradox and Ino-Co are gamers at heart and must be really proud of this product! Kudos!
 
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