Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Majestic7]

Game page on steam

I figured some of you might be interested in this; bought it on a whim at Steam sale. It is a very fun game that suffers from some weird design choices and balance issues. Still, considering the low price, I think it has great bang for buck.

You are playing a Roman noblewoman who inherited a gladiator school from her dad. You are aiming towards Imperial gladiator match arranged in a year's time. Till then you train gladiators and earn money by participating in matches. Your relationship with local political leaders affects both the matches themselves and the events you get during the game. You can hire people like architect, healer and bard to support your gladiator school and gladiators. Your trainer can research "technologies" to improve all gladiators. If you don't like the story mode, there is an endless mode with no ending set for the campaign.

If you like, you can take control of a single gladiator on the arena yourself, but it is not necessary, you can just watch. The mixing of genres kind of reminds me of various games that were around in 1990s, like Joan of Arc and Conquest of X -serie.

[nenjin]

Saw this during the summer sale. Definitely caught my interest because I love gladiator games. But I didn't pull the trigger. Does it have legs? I understand it's all made by one guy. But I kinda want something to sink my teeth into, not something that will be done in 9 to 10 hours.

[Shadowgandor]

Yea I've been playing this for about an hour and it seems pretty interesting. I'm not sure how long it will keep me entertained, as it doesn't seem to have much depth at all, but I'll probably post a review'ish thing later if I've played it a bit more.

[Cthulhu]

Saw this during the summer sale. Definitely caught my interest because I love gladiator games. But I didn't pull the trigger. Does it have legs? I understand it's all made by one guy. But I kinda want something to sink my teeth into, not something that will be done in 9 to 10 hours.

The full game can be played through in like two hours tops. 

[Majestic7]

You can play the endless mode as long as you like, but one campaign takes maybe a few hours to play. Getting the best end result will likely take few grinds. On a plus side, the developer seems to be still adding new things to the game constantly.

[Mephansteras]

Best to treat it more like a roguelike. A given run is going to be short, one way or another, so the fun is in trying different things and just sort of seeing what happens on a given play-through.

[Shadowgandor]

So I completely finished this game in 2 hours. It's a fun little game, but once you keep a gladiator alive for long enough he'll become godlike. I literally could have had him go 1v15 including end game boss and win without a scratch. Fun and worth 3 euros, but yea. It's short

[Majestic7]

Yeah, that is the balance issue I was pointing towards. Keeping a gladiator alive through several victories will make him unbeatable, while training new gladiators from scratch is pretty hard. If you lose your primes, getting back on your feet can be hard. Although the game does drop difficulty after you lose, it is still a bother.

A hint to anyone starting this - first train meditation to 100 before training anyone else, this makes your gladiators smarter under AI control. When getting new gladiators, buy guys from the magistrate, they have better starting stats, especially if your relationship with him is high. Sell or free the gladiators you gain from victories, they are not worth keeping. Freeing them grants morale to other gladiators and has a hidden benefit you will find out about later.

[frightlever]

There's also Age of Gladiators which is more of a management sim. Recent reviews are mixed (when Domina was released the reviews for AoG seem to have become less positive. Not to entertain conspiracy theories or anything...) but it entertained me for a while. Tends more to the spreadsheet end of things. Currently a couple of quid.

[BuriBuriZaemon]

My biggest gripe with Domina is in between fight you cannot pause the game.

[Majestic7]

Yes you can? Space pauses the game?

[BuriBuriZaemon]

Yes you can? Space pauses the game?

I read in a review and watched on a lets play video that you couldnt. Dev mightve added that function then.

[Majestic7]

That is possible. The game seems to have changed a lot since launch with several things added and several more things incoming. I didn't honestly know anything about the game before last week.

[Mephansteras]

Yeah, initially you couldn't pause. Or save the game. It was a very 'you are doing a run of this game right now and that's it' sort of experience. The dev has been doing a fair amount of work on it.

[Mephansteras]

Hmm, did this game get easier with some of the more recent updates?

I just did a game on normal and...kinda breezed through it. Even keeping the Legate and Magistrate happy was super easy, and both were at least at 75% happy with me at the end of the game. I'm used to normal requiring a lot more effort to keep them happy, and generally more effort to keep my good soldiers alive long enough to become amazing.

I did almost lose, although that was purely my fault as I did some unneeded pit fights that ended up costing me a few of my better fighters. Worked out in the end, though, as one of my guys managed to squeak out a win in the final battle by going berserk and taking out the final two enemies on his own with his zweihander.

And then my god warrior who I'd freed pretty much single-handedly wiped out the 'bonus' fight at the end for me. He had help, but I'm not sure he needed them at all.

In any case, I guess my next run will need to be on a harder difficulty.