So I picked this up when the stars aligned and Dom 4 went on sale (I knew it was a sign of the apocalypse, but I figured I might as well have one title from the series before the world ends), and Steam claims I've spent over a hundred hours in it so far.
I'm almost entirely certain that 90 of those hours were spent in Pretender Design. The rest are from leaving the game running while I had to head out and do errands.
I'm not very good at the game, never have been... But I managed to biff a couple Normal AIs while playing as LA R'lyeh, which for me is actually a milestone. Also got another game with Lanka where pretty much the only thing standing between me and ascension is the remaining paperwork, but that game's kinda on hold because I came up with different pretender designs, running a bunch of test games, can't be arsed managing the dozens upon dozens of commanders yadda yadda...
I guess I could say I'm having fun. I spent most of my time chewing my lip and frowning furiously at the screen while trying to squeeze every last drop of usefulness from those precious design points, only to start up a test run, play a few turns and go back to the drawing board because it didn't work as planned. I... Have a weird sense of "fun".
I've only ever played the demos to the previous games, but I dunno... Kinda almost feels like it's "degenerated", at least with the current state of some of the nations and such. Some things really do just look and feel like tacked-on fan mods. Berytos for example seems like it could be really nice, but... There's just something weird about it. Xibalba is hilarious in EA, tragic in MA, and... Basically undergoes no change for LA. And don't get me started on Ragha's lunacy...
Still though, here I am; with the legions upon legions of games named "EA", "MA" or "LA" depending on which era I'm poking around with, and gods named such creative things as "Test", "Jomon1" and "hhh". Come up with a looooot of quirky ideas... Some good, most bad, others... Still on the pretender list because I haven't made up my mind about them yet.
Dinnae suppose this would be the place to seek out should I feel like ranting about whatever harebrained idea I've come up with for a build, or discussing scales and tactics for ye olde variouse nationes?
EDIT: P.S. Asphodel is broken as fuck.