Sorcerer King: Rivals Wishlist!

[Frogboy]

Greetings!

Now that you're starting to get into the game, what sorts of things would you like to see us add?

Let me give you examples of things we've thought of doing and you tell us if you like this or not:

1. Allow the other civilizations to pursue the Ascension spell.
2. Add a technology tree with plaeyrs building special city improvements to provide knowledge to gain new tech. (The skill tree would remain).
3. Add more resources into the game that you can find that are required for more types of units and city improvements.
4. Have more advanced diplomacy ala FE/GalCIv.
5. Develop more campaigns?
6. Something else entirely.

Let us know what you'd like to see first.

UPDATE: Master update list is now available here: http://forums.sorcererking.com/479801


Thanks!

Also, if you're playing the game, please consider taking a moment to review it. It helps determine how much exposure on Steam the game gets.

[Cablenexus]

- More options when generating random maps. Like plain / rough terrain maps, more / less mountains, islands / continents etc.

- More types of quests. most quests require only a few steps to solve. I would like to see some chainlink in quests to create a story that makes you actually explore the map.

Those are just the first that comes into mind for me.
Thank you for asking community feedback!

[mr.Badim]

New campaign - as a map or campaig pick - would be intresting.
More Huge/Big maps.
Undeads kinda sucks - general mercinaries are better. Makes no sence to build undead horsmens - what a waste of skill points.

[Fayte]

- Craft X of item at a time

- Make it a bit easier to increase the number of logistics (I could barely defend myself last game, I just coudn't build anymore and I had to start city spamming just to increase the limit... let me increase it some other way, like paying resources (metal and crystal - gets more expensive the more you buy))

- Have 2 auto resovles, one that doesn't use magic, I like to watch the battles, so I would get into a battle (with the intent of taking over if the computer was silly...) and it would spam my spells, when I already had a clear advantage.

- Have the AI, when on auto and watching a battle, not jelously target 1 enemy. I had 6 paladins, 4 did nothing, completely ignoring TONS of nearby, targatable enemies, to just rush at one guy.... Change the herustic so if it can't get to its prefered target, it picks the closest one or most dangerous or something.

- Better tooltips. I compltely missed enchanting my first game. Some soverign powers, I have no clue what they do. The one for the warrior soverign said it added 2 powers... damned if I could find them, lol.

- equipment compare

- move the 'small' turn to its own button, i.e. break 'move armies' to a seperate button. If I click end turn, assume I also mean move all armies. Clicking 2x to end the turn is givne me corporal tunnel.

- tech to buff city defences, something like give defenders more hp or more defenders. Make them recharge slowly. I.E. you add 2 heavy def, low damage melee units, if they die, they regen 1 unit ever 3 turns. Can only be used for defense. Lossing them debuffs city while their being built.

- Put a tooltip or tutorial explaining enemies won't destroy outposts or non-city tiles, except shards. I had no idea....

- A late game buff to ranged units. Not more damage, after turn 160, all ranged units were completely uselss. Archers and enchanters died in a single hit to the dark mages black magic ball attack. I had no idea how to defend against it, and probly didn't ahve the mats to buld what I would need. I was forced to go all mounts, since they absolutly crushed everything else.

- Add the cool monsters from FE in, and have them drop a rare recipe or something. They were AWESOME in FE!

- Repeatable bonus when a hero maxes levling. Make that a viable strat. (Your hero leveled up! gratzee, pick a new power! OH, you have them all, ok, click done.... why? lol)

- Repeatable bonus when you research all spells. So that can be a viable path too. Maybey make some op spell unuiqe to each soverign. I vote huge f'in lazer beam from my home city!

- Make loosing a unit less painful. Replacing archers every other fight sucks. It's so many clicks to get my army back up to full strength. Maybey let me take a snapshot and if I lose units, I can have a city start building and replace them quickly (maybey a building to tp them to army when complete - for a cost of crystals or something)


I'm sure I'll think of more, but now its time to play! Games a ton of fun so far! Also, feel free to completely ignore me, this is just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt.

[CivHunter]

Brad,
I like the sound of all 5 general ideas you put forward. Here are additional ideas.

Someone else suggested this but I liked it too; instead of ascension spell in the spell book make it a button that lights up every time you have enough mana to cast it that is located by the crystal ball.

A way to use the spell book enchantments again / a better explanation during game setup of what enchantments you'll have access to as you pick each spell book. Example a mix of spell books vs 8 fire books. What enchantments you'd have based on those selections.

Even more craftables. Legendary items.

More monster types. More special legendary monsters that may or may not show up in a given game.

A magical building that adds 1 or 2 essence to any city so you can enchant all cities

[abram_27]

Originally posted by Fayte:

- move the 'small' turn to its own button, i.e. break 'move armies' to a seperate button. If I click end turn, assume I also mean move all armies. Clicking 2x to end the turn is givne me corporal tunnel.

Look at using the auto turn option.

I might be in the minority but would like to see a mode enabling shorter games (10-30 min). I am not exactly sure how to pull it off (potentially borrowing concepts from rouge-likes). I found with the original Sorcerer King almost always restarting a new game after about 1/4-1/3 of the doom counter being full.

I never understood the point of stationary sorcerer king units spawning in my borders. I can see why they would be useful preventing a player from expanding outside of borders but if inside the borders I typically would just leave the units there or wait until can easily overwhelm, they die or nearly die from an outpost.

[phyagb]

The mechanics set in sorc:rivalary is broken. it is right now all about saving some mana and cast a spell couple times to win. Most of the time this happens before 10% of old doomsday counter not filled in the old version. Id like to see this changed first.

a better way of ascending is just each time you get a new shard that produce ascending points independent of the mana.

I suggest showing Sk forces moving to the shard and player have the chance either attack or stop forces by strategic spells like frozen spell for a long time or fire spell to destroy on track.

winning fights against Sk generals may add to ascending points. there should be more variety of generals with special army requiring various strategies to win. I also suggest put those general around the SK capital with each has a terriority to control.

the increase in ascending should be directly connected to threat level.

ascending points should be similar to dooms counter but for SK , therefore when only after some certain percentage of ascending points , some SK general even allowed to be attacked. And those bring more ascending points etc.

I d like to see a campaign game revolving around only couple heroes that you may carry from map to map. the campaign can be about the road to SK, like lord of the ring style where deception maybe a big part of it.

I am not sure you guys will be able to make a new game or dlc for this game, I heard the sales are not that good. it is unfortunate. since it is one of my favorite game.

cheers

[Astasia]

In game option to disable the ascension victory. I know it can be modded out in a few ways, but I think we all know most people aren't willing to touch mods for whatever reason.

A tech tree sounds really nice.

A limited character designer. Like the ability to design an equipment set for the current units so they can be built fully geared and ready to fight, or upgraded to those full gear sets with one click later on. Crafting individual items for every unit is a bit micro heavy, even with just a couple dozen units.

[Ferien auf dem Innenhof]

Option:
Random Pause between music (min, max), or a simple slider.

[Pendragon]

First of all:

ONE and FOUR.
Like ABSOLUTELY.

I bought Rivals in the first place hoping for something like that, but I was disappointed to see that nothing really changed in that regard. Sure the AI has improved, I could see them building more cities, which is nice. But what for?
I haven't seen them ever going for the sorcerer king, if they do they send random units once in a while which is meaningless.

I have never seen them actually building a meaningful army. They always seem to send units in random directions, for what?

As far as I know, they don't gather/have need for resources, they don't take treasure chests, they don't attack monsters, they don't defend their shards.

Basically their only use is for trading stuff/bonuses, which is useful and makes it worth it going through their quest. However it feels too stale.
Once you got 5 points of favour, or the sorcerer king does, it's over. It doesn't feel as diplomacy or interactoin with another civ, for as "minor" as they can be.
They feel like a quest that I do in order to get a renewable reward.
I mean, it's nice as I said, but I feel a lot could be improved upon it.

My idea to improve upon it would be to maybe mix/spice things up.
What I mean is. Maybe make it so some of them remain minors like they are now, they can't/won't even expand at all, but will defend their shard to the death and will actually send troops to attack when requested, not randomly (if they even do that). They would still give you their "hero" once you ally with them.
The others, probably it would make sense to let them be the ones the player can choose from, the dwarves and the undead, would behave like a 100% AI controlled civ.
So they would actually pursue the same victory condition, they would have a more traditional diplomacy, and they wouldn't give you their hero when you all with them.
Their hero would remain theirs, and they would actually use it on the field and gather an army with it, making them a real threat.

In any case, even if you don't like my idea or it's not feasable, any kind of improvement to diplomacy and minors would be my starting point, to me if feels like the weakest area of the game.
Sure, it's not and it doesn't want to be a typical 4x, which is great, i like the hybridization of the genre.
However at the moment, even for being just an hybrid, the interaction/diplomacy with other civs/minor/rivals is too weak.

Aside from that I would focus on:

- Improving the interface, loads of suggestion/points have been given already, I would name mostly the heroes/units bar, being able to keybind skills, and possibly adding a "route to" button in the city interface, to make it so the units just created will automatically move towards the destination you have set up. Would save a lot of time and micromanagement that I find annoying, not the micromanagement itself, the fact that you do it for something that doesn't need thinking or have different outcomes, it just makes you waste time for something that could be automated in advance and set up just once for all the future units coming out.

- Combat: I know you guys are against it because it would require a lot of time, so i don't expect a REAL cover/LOS system.
I do however propose that you insert in the random maps specific tiles that can offer different properties.
For example a tile with rocks that you CAN move into, and will provide more dodge against ranged, for example, or mud tiles that will cost more movement points (i know already that there are some spells that do something similar. However, having a system to randomly add some of these tiles, sometimes, when the field is generated, would still help making things more interesting.
Also, make "skipping" a turn with a unit more meaningful in my opinion. So far having high initiative and swarming enemies seems to be your best bet most of the times.
Rather than just providing a bit of dodge, I'd prefer if a unit set as "defending" by skipping a turn, would actually act as having damage reduction by a %.

- Ascension victory: My only tweak would be: Make it possible to "repair" the shards.
The spell that right now "increases the output" of a shard mana by 1. Make it instead repair a % of the damage inflicted, and decrease how full the orb is by the same amount it normally increases when a shard gets damaged. Obviously you can repair only your own shards in your own territory.
I am fine once the orb is filled to make it a mana war to see how can control most of it, I like it.
But I'd like to have the possibility to prevent the orb from being filled at all if for example I'd rather go to kill the sorcerer king and don't want to win by ascension. Increase the cooldown, mana cost and so on to make it balanced.

-Tech tree, yes please, maybe a small one, like the skill tree, and maybe having to choose which direction to take with the tech three, being able to choose only one, to make each playthrough a bit different.

Ah, almost forgot, I love the option to don't prompt you to fight flawless victories and autoresolve it.
Not so much the one with the threshold by number, as it autoresolved a fight with a dragon for me which wiped my party.
What I would like is a slider like the one for flawless victories, that can avoid the prompt even for normal "victory" results with damage inflicted on the units.

Last but not least, an option to increase the movement animation of units like for the combat with a slider to set the speed you prefer yourself.

[Falaris]

When playing Martin, one thing is rather noticeable - a lot of buildings give a bonus to newly trained units, but not to allready existing ones, meaning your units often tend to get outdated.

I would really like an option to retrain a unit - basically, to give it all the 'new unit' bonuses it doesn't allready have.

[Cablenexus]

- I want to add a minor wish myself. The red border color on the green background / landscape I can barely see it because of color blindness.

[Grumple Stiltskin]

Add the ability to suplex trains.

[El Bandito]

Originally posted by Cablenexus:

- I want to add a minor wish myself. The red border color on the green background / landscape I can barely see it because of color blindness.

Being color-blind, I can agree with this. It's a problem with a lot of games. Wish developers thought about us more.

[Fayte]

Seperate out the skills ont he unit menu in tactical combat. It's a wreck. I can't find the scroll I'm looking for and have no idea when I click the wrong power accidently. Also, instead of a pop-up window when I missclick, how but just an automated warning that fades on its own.

[El Bandito]

Ok, these obviously show I'm a modder:

• Have some sort of way of letting modders know what XML files have changed. Either add a versioning into the xml file or list out in change logs what XML files have changed.
  
• Scale the items better. Right now, there are a lot of items in which the scaling seems off.
  
• Use more of the abilities better. Very few units have the berserker ability (including some of the berserker units).