Dominions - Priests, Prophets and Pretenders

[Edi]

All right, heads up, people! Who here has heard of this game before looking in this thread? If you have, bloody good for you. If you haven't, prepare to be enlightened.

Dominions is a turn based fantasy strategy game made by Illwinter Games (http://www.illwinter.com), and it holds its own against anything and everything currently on the market (and in many cases kicks arse so badly it isn't even funny). The demo version available at their site allows full gameplay but restricts magic to just below all the really useful stuff and you don't get all the best units (The AI is not similarly restricted!)


Basic Setup:
You're the Pretender God of one of 14 different nations, and your job is to vanquish the infidels (i.e. everyone else, I don't think allied victory is possible) using the troops of your nation (and any you might possibly want to recruit from provinces you conquered), and magic.

You recruit armies and their generals in provinces you control, or you summon them with magic (if you have enough skills in a particular branch and have the requisite magic gems). On big maps and especially later in the game magical units usually steamroll the regular units in really one-sided massacres.

Each nation has a unique army, though certain units appear in the rosters of more than one nation, and each has particular strengths and weaknesses. You can never gain units specific to a rival nation. The generals of each nation are also unique to that nation, and range from simple priests and warriors to powerful mages, warlords and fantastic monsters. A leader has a leadership value ranging from 0 (scout, spy, assassin) to upwards of 250 (depending on experience and special abilities), and indicates how many regular soldiers that general can lead.

The number of undead units and magic beings (most summoned units are one of these categories) a general can lead depends on how much magic he knows (in the case of magic beings) or how much blood and/or death magic he knows (for undead) and special abilities.


Combat:
Under each leader you can have up to five stacks of troops, each of which you can position on the battlefield, and give standing orders to (such as fire at enemy archers or attack enemy cavalry or attack closest enemy). When your armies move to a province with hostile forces, combat is engaged and you'll get to see what happens. It's all done by the AI, according to the orders you gave (the AI is good at following and can improvise very well if e.g. there aren't those magic users you told your flying units to attack), and you get a summary of what happened at the beginning of next turn. You can also watch how the battle went, it is shown on a tactical map where you can see each individual unit and you can pause it so you can check the status of specific units.

For this reason, it's better to use either overkill or good tactical planning and clever orders (preferably both) to avoid excessive casualties. Units gain experience with time (and quicker if they see battle), which improves their stats and effectiveness, but they can also get permanent injuries of varying severity (a never healing wound reduces hit points permanently, loss of one eye reduces attack abilities, limp slows the unit down, loss of both eyes makes the unit useless (0 attack, 0 defence, 0 precision) and so forth) that are difficult to heal (only one nation's priests can heal them, one other has a chance of troops spontaneously recovering, all others need advanced nature magic).


Magic:
Magic is divided into the domains of Astral, Nature, Death, Blood, Air, Earth, Fire and Water, and into the schools of Conjuration, Construction, Evocation, Thaumaturgy, Enchantment and Blood.

Each domain governs a specific type of magic, and all spells require one or more types of magic (e.g. Bind Devil requires both Blood and Fire magic). The schools are groupings of spells with similar intent (e.g. evocation spells are almost invariably stuff that opens a can of whoop-arse on the target while conjuration usually summons something to serve you).

There are also holy and unholy magic, but these are available only to priest leaders (holy magic) or Ermor (the nation of undead, the only ones who can use unholy magic). These two are also limited in scope and only applicable on the battlefield.

A lot of spells (and all the more powerful ones) require magic gems of a specific type to use, and these are gained from magic sites. Magic sites can be found in provinces, once you search a province with a mage leader, all sites attuned to the magic the leader knows are revealed (e.g. a necromancer will find death sites, but not any others), provided the leader knows enough of it. Having 4 magic of any one type will reveal all sites of that type. The other alternative is to use a divination spell, but it's tedious and time consuming. Sites can also allow you to recruit special units or give some other benefit.

The magic system is more variable and richer than anything I've ever seen in any game, including Master of Magic, both Age of Wonders 1 and 2 and all the Heroes of Might and Magic games combined.


The Pretender God:
The fun part about being a pretender god is that you get to decide exactly what sort of a god you are by choosing your Avatar, Dominion, Magic and Castle as you see fit. You're given 500 points to play with, and everything costs something.

The Avatar ranges from an angel to a sphinx to a fountain of blood to a stone statue to a titan, dragon or an archmage and everything in between, with each having a different cost, different weaknesses and different strengths. A dragon will be very good for stomping armies, but will only have limited magic (because magic will cost 8 times as much as if you'd picked a mage), while a wizard god will know a lot of magic to begin with but will get murdered in battle unless you're careful about planning the battle order.

The Dominion affects the provinces you control. High growth Dominions have an easier time of supplying troops, high productivity increases resources (important in troop recruitment, recruiting a 40 resource unit in a 2 resource province takes 20 turns!), high heat or cold hinders combat performance (unless the nation prefers extreme climes) and so forth. Dominion Strength is also covered here, and ranges from 1 to 10. You can increase it by building temples in provinces, every 5 temples increases Dominion Strength by one.

Castle affects how much resources your castles suck from surrounding provinces, how long they take to build (and at what cost) and how hard they are to crack in a siege.


Gameplay:
Once you get used to Dominions, it's easy, but the learning curve is a bit steep at first. The AI is brutal, the lowest settings will be hard to beat on a large map, and I don't want to know how tough the highest is. The interface could be a bit more intuitive, but it works and is a lot better than many I've seen. Graphics aren't a feast of 3D splendour, but they are quite decent and Dominions is built to be solid and functional, something it eminently accomplishes. It's built particularly with PBEM (play by email) in mind, but allows hotseat and network play too.

In my opinion, quite possibly the best strategy game around, and definitely worth checking out. The downside is that it can only be obtained through the channels mentioned on the Illwinter site, but I'm getting it as soon as I can.

Edi

[Aeolus]

This is quickly becoming one of my favorite games. Primitive but it definately has That "Just one more turn" quality

[Luke Starkiller]

I'm definately looking at getting this; it is damn fun to play as Ermor and summon up huge hordes of undead.

[Aeolus]

I'm definately looking at getting this; it is damn fun to play as Ermor and summon up huge hordes of undead.

Pythium is VERY powerful as well

[Edi]

I should be getting the full version in the course of the next week.
I have sampled most of the nations so far, and they each have their own strengths.

The first one I tried was Ulm, and they just steamroller the opposition. The only bummer with them is inferior magic and sucky priests, but they really kick ass. Not bad at all. And they can easily summon Fall Bears, the most powerful seasonal spirits there are.

Abysia is another favorite, and they have both powerful magic and priests. They also get blood magic up the wazoo, so you can just take some worthless high population province (I mean, 12,000 pop, taxes 24 and resources 4?! What the FUCK do you call a province like that?!) , toss a couple of Demonbred's there and instigate slave hunt till they've got five blood slaves each, then make the dousing rods and resume slave hunt, and you'll get around to summoninghordes of devils and other fiends in short order. They'll also set the enemy on fire just by being close by...

I didn't particularly like Ermor or Pythium when I tried them, but if there's one nation I'd rather not play at all, that'd be C'tis. The lizards are just so bland that they bore me to tears.

Edi

[Edi]

WOOHOO!!!!!!

My friend just called and said the full versions came in mail! All I have to do is head over to his place and hand over the cash to get them, and then I'll really get to play! No more demo version for me!!!!

Edi

[PrinceofLowLight]

This game is damn cool once you get the hang of it. Pythium is great fun.

[Aeolus]

This game is damn cool once you get the hang of it. Pythium is great fun.

Pythium Is VERY powerful. Ctis can be powerful if the are used properly

[Edi]

Damn, looks like I'm going to have to gve Pythium a try too, then. They just ahve all those legionaries, not much variety. Damn. But I have seen how they can get powerful under AI control, in a hotseat game I'm playing with a friend of mine, they're constantly knocking at his door with armies of 300+ units and he has to keep a humongous garrison in one key province to keep from being overrun.

My objection to C'tis is that they bore me. I don't doubt they can be powerful, but they're just not my style.

Edi

[Edi]

All right, the full version has just gotten a test run, and damn but it's good! No more dicking around with inferior magic and gnashing teeth at not being able to recruit the better mages (such as the Caelum High Seraphs).

The magics beyond Circle 4 are what really starts having an instant impact on how things go. No more buggering around with your god to find magic sites, failing to keep up with expansion and getting no research and empowering done. Just burn 25 astral gems on Acashic Record and blam, all sites in a given province revealed. No more watching your best troops become useless cripples after a few engagements, 40 nature gems and Gift of Healing goes up, and your grunts start fixing themselves in short order whenever they are in your domain, and the summoning spells start getting some real teeth too.

As for favorite sites, gotta love the Troll Pit, recruit trolls for 60 gold and 3 resources a pop, instead of wasting earth gems to summon the critters one at a time, best part is the buggers don't need supplies either and have regen... Same thing for devil and fiend summoning sites, you get free nasties one per turn without needing to use blood slaves. Who gives a damn about some 15 additional unrest in that kind of cases?

In any case, for €30, Dominions was a bargain, games of this quality are few and far between.

Edi