Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith has just been announced!I'll post the basic new features list here, and post some commentary on some of the big features for those of you who don't want to or can't follow the link below it. Also, there should be a proper Dom5 thread started up soon by me for all things Dom5, this is the Dom4 thread after all, don't want to drown out the legitimate questions for help in all of the hype after all.
New Features! (Copy/Pasted from the site)
-Real time combat
-Per unit combat logs
-Design your pretender's bless effect
-Priest's banishment and smite spells will depend on what type of god he follows
-History playback when game is over, see how dominion spread and provinces changed owners
-New random maps with bridges and better looking terrains
-New resource system with recruitment points that encourages recruiting in highly populated areas
-Fortifications built by starting at the basic type, then upgrading it later
-New research queue, researching is now one school at a time
-New movement system
-Winter shown on map and affects movement
-Dominion overlay on map to clearly show its boundaries
-New retreat system, good leaders can prevent units from dispersing in all directions
-Updated user interface with information more clearly presented than before
-New 3d-engine with better looking terrain, huge performance increase for good graphics cards
-More reliable network, now works on less than perfect connections too
-New nations
-Some old nations have been reworked and updated
-More spells, magic items, special abilities, events, monsters, titles, thrones, ....
Real time combat!The turn based system is gone! No longer do you have to fear advancing into Turn 1 Rain of Stones or Earthquake Spam!
Both sides go simultaneously, and unit attack order is based upon RNG. Also, spells now have a casting time, and there was mentions of being able to interrupt a spell if you damage the caster too.
Oh right, you also get to see the glory of all your fireballs being launched. At the same time.
Finally, shields can be broken if hit really hard now.
Design your Bless!No longer does a N9E4 Pretender mean your bless is 10% regen, +8 max hp, and -2 fatigue/turn!
It now operates under a point-buy system, with your points dependent on your magic paths! So a N9E4 pretender has 9 nature points and 4 earth points to spend. At least, that's what I interpreted from one of the screenshots anyway. Some bless effects are quite cheap, for instance said screenshot showed a 'Magic Weapons' bless effect for 2S, so Rainbow Pretenders just got more viable, as X4 isn't the minimum for a bless effect anymore.
It also bears noting that the more powerful bless effects require your Pretender to be physically present in the world to take effect; if they're busy napping, being imprisoned, or just plain dead, your sacred units will not benefit from that bless effect! At the same time, some effects are passive, and will affect your sacred units even if they aren't blessed! Waterbreathing and 'Larger' were some examples presented of these.
With this system, you never know if that F9 god has one or two really big effects or a bunch of little ones, which makes things more fun!
Oh right, while technically not related to blessings, but your priests will get fun new spells based on your Pretenders magic paths. It'd make sense for a priest of a god of fire to be able to burn things yeah?
Recruitment and Command PointsRecruitment is a new resource attached to provinces just like income and resources, and will represent just how many people the province can spare to join your armies.
It's fairly simple, isn't it? A province with 50 iron mines but only 100 people just wouldn't be able to spare the manpower to join the army, in spite of being able to produce more than enough equipment to outfit an entire legion in just a month!
Forts can boost the recruitment points available, but no news on if it can pull it from adjacent provinces like they do for resources.
One last thing: Calvary will no longer cost as much gold, instead they will use up additional recruitment points!
With the introduction of Command Points, Slow to Recruit seems to be a thing of the past; it
seems to be technically possible to recruit multiple commanders per province per turn now, but no confirmation.
Scouts, normal commanders, and weak priests will only cost 1 command point, according to the preview info, but mages and stronger priests will cost 2 command points. Exceptionally strong mages, likely those that are currently StR, will cost 4.
That being said provinces will only have 1 command point by default, forts (not palisades apparantly) can raise it to 2, with Citadels being able to give a province 3 Command Points per turn. The mention of mages that cost 4 Command Points implies that these will work like resources, so you'll be able to recruit your mages from a palisade even if they cost 2 or 3 points, you just have to accept only being able to recruit one every 2 or 3 turns.
And speaking of forts, you can't just start building a citadel now, you have to start from the bottom, and then upgrade the fort to the higher tier options.
Release Date? OMG JILLADILLA WHEN IS THE RELEASE DATE?!They said that if everything goes as planned that they will release in the beginning of November on Steam, with PC, Mac, and Linux versions being released simultaneously. Oh, and they said that there is more information on changes that will be released in the days to come, so stay tuned!