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[nenjin]

I guess maybe some expect like, Total War kind of control over battles. Which this isn't.

[Malus]

Dom5 is great. Chalk me up as another "SP only" player. I probably spent my first 2 or 3 hours just reading the descriptions of every nation, pretender, and spell, then designing a god that sounded fun. Steam claims I have 73 hours in Dom5 and 31 in Dom4, which sounds about right: that's double the time I spend on most 4Xs. Once you start steamrolling the AI a bit too easily the game loses some of its charm, but really, 90% of the enjoyment I had was spent designing my pretender and coming up with strategies, scouring item/unit lists. In that sense, there's not much else out there that's like Dominions. Sure, there are games where you can spend a while customizing your nation, like Stellaris or the Endless series, but there's nowhere near the same amount of depth. Dominions really is all about that initial customization and setup. (As someone who plays SP, anyway; I assume MP is a whole different ballgame).

I guess it appeals to me in the same way that, say, rolling D&D characters and theorycrafting how to build them is appealing, even if I don't spend much time actually playing D&D. Also, I'm a sucker for games where you play as a god, and the theme of Dominions (where faith is directly correlated with power) is one of my favorite fantasy tropes. Dominions but "more 4x" would easily be one of my favorite games of all time. Fallen Enchantress is kind of vaguely in that sort of direction but unfortunately not very good. Age of Wonders 3 is like, super simplified and also just bland. I'd be interested to see how Illwinter would design a more standard 4X game.

[etgfrog]

But also, Dom is about strats. Strats to wreck people. I just don't really feel like being subjected to someone's professional combo, tbh. I've read the Dom threads and people can't be eeeeevvvvviiiilllll.

You can most definitely be evil in the game, just don't be surprised if your opponent looks to team up against you if your showing you can win against them alone. Domkill nations do make poor allies because the land is worth almost nothing, that does sort of mean a domkill nation can feel safe with the allies they do get, so that gets a bit complex. Regardless, when a player gives up then they will sometimes hand everything they can to their ally or someone who opposes their enemy.

I tried to respond but the statement about there being no strategy broke me.
I think there must be some semantic disagreement about what strategy means or something. But I still can't even.

Its mostly the idea that strategy is starcraft style, which is mostly on the fly strategy. Unfortunately that can be debated quite a bit, but it comes does down to being able to control the fight itself. In some ways dominions is like dwarf fortress, you have indirect control of how the battle will happen.

[E. Albright]

The semantic mismatch there I think is that granular control is more frequently understood to relate to tactics than strategy; strategy is everything up until combat starts, and then on contact with the enemy it's tactics (if you're lucky ). That's still a sloppy definition, but that plus something like "tactics are the building blocks that strategy is composed of" sorta points in the right direction IMO.

Dominions gives you a fair amount of strategy, but its tactical control is essentially "no plan survives contact with the enemy" hardcoded.

Dominions but "more 4x" would easily be one of my favorite games of all time. Fallen Enchantress is kind of vaguely in that sort of direction but unfortunately not very good. Age of Wonders 3 is like, super simplified and also just bland. I'd be interested to see how Illwinter would design a more standard 4X game.

Deity Empires is supposedly something along those lines; I've seen it described as "MoM meets Dominions". (I say "supposedly" and "described" because when I bought it on sale (which was still 24$US), it aggressively CTD every time I tried loading it, regardless of some of the creative ways I tried to work around that. The forum discussions of this particular problem, to include dev input, were... unhelpful. So I refunded it with 2m played and can only speculate.)

If Illwinter ever get the itch to finish it, their perpetually-never-released Trade and Taint sounds like it might be a bit more "traditional 4x-y".

[nenjin]

Now that I'm a little less busy I want to expand on my answer of why I like Dominions in a SP capacity even though it's really a MP game.

I like playing crunchy, mechanical RPG games slow. Really slow. I like playing defensively. I like feeling out all my options. I hate losing when I don't have to.

In this regard, Dominions is great. There's SO much to see. Dozens and dozens of spells I've never even tried to cast, split up amongst all the different factions, elements and spell schools. Tons and tons of unique magic sites offering unique stuff. More magic items than you'll ever get a chance to make. Tons of different units scattered over the whole game. So much you will likely never see it all in one playthrough.

So I like making big maps, having lots of AI opponents. The beginning of a game of Dominions is the usually the most fun part. You're new and you have to expand the boundaries of your empire. You start drawing imaginary boundaries based on the terrain, figuring out where you're going to make choke points. Thematically I enjoy imagining my empire growing, rolling across the countryside enveloping all these small, independent towns and villages, occasionally finding a sizeable one, before you eventually run in to a legit nation with a Pretender. Your army isn't large or OP yet and you don't have master spellcasters and all the magic researched, so resources and logistics matter starting out and victory is not always certain. I like naming my leaders, watching them become heroic, tracking their exploits. I like building my Magic Site finding crew, making sure I'm getting the most bang out of my lands that I can. I like making and equipping magic items despite the fact most of the guys they will go to will just sit in the back ranks anyways. I like taking my time, preserving my guys, winning and seeing what's out there.

Truth is though, I've never finished a game of Dominions. The game played SP against dumb AI reaches a point where you have too much to care about that doesn't actually matter. You've got more magic sites generating gems than you'll ever use. New territory no longer thrills or really matters when you control half the known world. All the fancy global enchantments just give additional edge you don't even need. You're creating commanders not for fun or effect really, but just because you need more bodies to cover the vast amount of terrain you now control, so they're no longer really special. The AI can easily be cut off, isolated and pummeled into submission so there's no real challenge for your masses of troops. The last 1/3rd of the game ends up feeling like post V-Day in WW2: there's a shit load of necessary clean up to do even though you've already won.

And when you bump up the AI to higher difficulties, what you still end up with eventually is massive stacks of dudes defending forts that you have to take apart one at a time, and the AI starts using spells to, if not beat you, at least annoy you by cursing your guys, giving them Horror marks, etc...

So basically I don't play MP because I don't want to be rushed, and I still feel more inclined to do less than effective things just for the sake of novelty, experimentation or flavor, rather than what "works." Because if I just wanted to win I'd play on smaller maps and skip all the flavor and nancing about on things that won't help me win directly....but where's the fun in that? Playing against people would provide a real challenge but I guess I don't play Dom to be challenged. I play it to get immersed, flip on some classic, bombastic RPG music and just enjoy playing God, subjugating a fantasy world.

That's why I think Dom is special. It's a deep strategy game that can be appreciated multiple ways by multiple kinds of gamers. Doesn't mean it's going to please every gamer at all, though, and I don't blame anyone for finding it dull or slow. At the end of the day Dominions to me is like Risk with multiple sublayers of mechanics...but still essentially Risk. I don't really enjoy Risk, but I enjoy Dom because there's so much more to it than just capturing territory. Maybe one day I'll have exhausted all the novelty and know enough about the game to want to try my hand at some real strats against real people. But for now it's absolutely not necessary for me to continue to love the game.

[thegoatgod_pan]

I am in a game with two friends and it is a blast, we do 1-2 turns per day, so it doesn’t feel rushed at all. 

we all only somewhat understand it, but it is neat discovering it. We are mostly wiping out the AI so far and haven’t gotten to PVP besides harassing each other and dispelling each others global spells.

It is a really rich game, with soooo many options, I’ve been mostly playing mictlan, my friend is playing pangea, which seems like a good race for newbies.

[Frumple]

Your criticism is on point with regards to this being a battle simulator, and all other aspects being subservient to that. You conquer territories to finance your army, you research spells to either improve your battle performance or summon troops, you build forts to recruit your faction's troops. The only thing that doesn't really feed into the battles is Dominion itself (and even that, IIRC, gives you +1 morale.).

Unless D5 changed things, dominion itself can play pretty heavily into battles; above and beyond special dominions or globals that only effect dominion influenced areas, it has direct and substantial effect on the strength of prophets and pretenders, and import for stuff like immortals. Probably something else I'm forgetting, heh.

... that said, personally the dominion games like... haven't been about the battles for me. They're pretty great and I like hands off-ish stuff a great deal as a general thing, but with dominions it's always been the battles enabling everything else -- the territory exploration and exploitation, the army building and commander outfitting, the skulduggery and world changing spellslinging. I've never really spent terribly much time on the battle organization and often enough don't even watch the fights, particularly if nothing odd happens in the results. Basic formation and spell orders and that's about it.

Battles were there to get territory to get gems and resources to get crazy explode-y things and rampaging supercombatants (which were more about the bling than actual combat performance for me ) and so on. I honestly don't think I'd mind something that was like... dominions without the direct army vs. army encounters. All magic artillery, cloak and dagger, and champion duels/small squad battles, with maybe a fairly loose economy, but without most of the fiddly army stuff (and especially its logistics).

... gods, if someone like married dominions and ogre battle I think I'd be in some sort of game heaven.

E: Though now I'm kinda' wondering how a "commanders only" Dom game would play out. You'd probably have to fiddle with things to make the early game not a complete slog (like... somehow start with 10-15 commanders and a spread of cheap magic items?), but after that it might be neat. Pretty certainly would be a very different playthrough, in any case.

[etgfrog]

E: Though now I'm kinda' wondering how a "commanders only" Dom game would play out. You'd probably have to fiddle with things to make the early game not a complete slog (like... somehow start with 10-15 commanders and a spread of cheap magic items?), but after that it might be neat. Pretty certainly would be a very different playthrough, in any case.

There is some ways of making a "thug" commander that can expand for you. Neifelheim, Jotunhiem and utgard is probably easiest to do by playing around with the bless effects and recruiting jarls constantly. Key thing if you do go that route is to build a fort+temple everywhere.

Spoiler: Something like this as a pretender (click to show/hide)

[Radsoc]

It's 4x in many ways, so a great deal will be about optimization and betting on outcomes. It's about adapting strategies to beat your enemy. Battles (or not battling when you don't want to) is an important part, with economic warfare being a thing as well.

I would say it's an operational layer type of strategy game (similar to many AGEOD titles). The close combat series, on the other hand, would be tactical.   Strategy, well, there you have Risk.

[Trolldefender99]

Well I suppose saying battles are automated isn't so fair. I play EU4/Ck2 all the time. And obviously battles not controllable at all.

The difference is, I just found EU4/Ck2 to be the vastly more indepth grand strategy game. Like in EU4 probably be best example, since Ck2 is more a dynasty/character based game. But in EU4, you have a ton of resources to manage, technology, choosing what to build and where (which dominions is super limited there) and personally the battles seemed more strategic to me in EU4. For example, in EU4 if you attack with someone inside mountains you probably gonna lose if not have severe losses. If you attack someone across a river, there are penalties for that. Of course to most, its painting the map but I never play it that way (but I use MEIOU which offers more a tall/economic game).

maybe dominions just isn't my type of game or something. Cause to expand on what I said before, and maybe it isn't fair to the game how I said it before, but the way Dominions seemed in the bit less than 2 hours I played was at least upfront kinda simple seeming. Granted I play the MEIOU mod for EU4, and there is a ton of stuff to manage. In MEIOU, I played one game where I got independence as Wales and conquered england and played tall rest of the game. I had the best economy. There is technology and all kinds of things.  Though to me MEIOU is more like a super advanced victoria 2 than actually "EU4"

Where as Dominions was 100% battles/army, and not really much else. And that I suppose is what I was trying to get at with last post and failed at...there isn't any strategy outside of battles and army building. Granted total war is sorta the same, but with some mods  (for warhammer 2 at least is what I currently play) you can play it a bit more like EU4/MEIOU and be a trade empire or all kinds of ways to play outside of "painting" the map. I didn't see any strategy outside of building an army and attacking stuff. No trade that I could see, no huge economy of various resources, not much besides army building). So its probably just not my type of strategy game, not so much the game itself.

Hope that explains it a bit better. Also keep in mind, maybe I missed stuff...2 hours isn't much time to see everything in a game. But its kinda expensive and so I wanted to use the money for other stuff. If it was cheaper, I'd probably buy it since it was laid back and relaxing but not a 40 dollar game for me.

On the positive side for me. The mods for dominions 4/5 are amazing. So many awesome races. That part I liked a lot. Really awesome player made maps too. But the rest I dunno. Maybe I expected something different or something. Or it could just be because when I play strategy games I always play it economically and be a trade empire, or be the best at economy, and I didn't really see that part of dominions. but again, 2 hours isn't really that much time.

I just wanted to post what my own personal experience was, with the limited but still rather giving 2 hour window steam offers for refunds. So maybe someone will come in and say I was/am completely wrong and I missed a ton of stuff that I didn't know about.

[Il Palazzo]

Hey, man, no need to explain yourself. My post was tongue-in-cheek since I'm such a Dominions fanboy.

The distinction you're making was actually pretty clear to me, as it has functioned for as long as I remember. There's always been (since Civ1?) the genre of strategy and the genre of wargames (or grand strategy - both extremely pretentious names). The former being skewed towards some form of economic strategy, the latter towards troop movement.

One of the defining characteristics of a wargame, to me, is that it's specifically adversarial - you are given these assets, and you gotta kill this guy with them. Which is also why they tend to shine when played against other humans.
In strategy games that's optional, and you can just treat them as a simulation of building a tall house in a hostile environment.

Dominions is much closer to wargames than to 4Xs, is what I'm saying.

[E. Albright]

I strongly agree with that; it always seemed a bit weird to me to see it described as 4x. It's a wargame first and foremost, with some 4x features giving it a bit more depth.

[Sean Mirrsen]

A "wargame" is about fighting an enemy with a predetermined force, Dominions isn't that. You definitely build up from almost nothing, and rise up to conquer everything. The lack of tactical control only highlights the importance of strategy, but you have plenty of strategic control to exercise. It's very definitely still a 4X game.

If you want to say what genre Dominions isn't, it would be "grand strategy", not 4X. The base tenets of 4X - Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate - are all present. Your scouts are exploring the terrain and determining where to expand into and where the enemies are and what they are doing. You then expand with your armies, conquering independents and erecting temples to expand your dominion. You exploit the land you conquered, either by just owning it and taking in the taxes, or also recruiting troops for the war effort, building forts to increase your gains, searching for magic sites, casting temporary and permanent enchantments, etc. And then when your enemies, who are also doing all those things, become completely intolerable because they worship another god and don't serve a purpose to you, you exterminate them.

It's the Grand Strategy genre, where you have things like complex systems, diplomacy, intelligence and counterintelligence, all those things, and Dominions isn't that. Dominions is a game about a no-nonsense holy war, where your enemies only exist so long as they're either out of your way, or somehow serve a purpose. There are no alliances or trade agreements except those bound by word only. There are no allies except those that worship you. It's a 4X strategy game alright, and it actually does have some of the nuances of Grand Strategy, but none of them are explicitly defined as mechanics because it's only a matter of two players talking between each other. It's this lack of systems, first and foremost, that makes it 'shine in multiplayer'. If the AI were a little more advanced, and could understand simple constructed messages like those in Sword of the Stars - another combat-focused 4X strategy game - then Dominions could 'shine' in single player, too.

[Il Palazzo]

I disagree. Neither having a predetermined force is a requirement for a wargame, nor are all the 4X elements in Dominions on equal footing with manipulating armies on the board.
Players spend most of the time planning army composition, movements and combat orders. The exterminate bit is not just one of four roughly equal parts, as 4X suggests.
The scouting element is also of the wargaming variety, not 4X - you're trying to keep tabs on positions and tactics of enemy troops, not exploring the map. The closest the game gets to Xploration is site searching, but other than that you know nearly everything about the map from the get go - the geography, the resource allocation, the placement of victory points.

A game like Clash of Steel - an oldie where you push tokens on the map of WWII Europe - also has mechanics for building armies and infrastructure, researching, etc. Similarly the Hearts of Iron series (or Battle Isle). But if you'd call either of them 4X you end up with people complaining that they can't spot any strategy (genre) in them.

In the end it's about the expectation of an experience that one gets from the label. Dominions doesn't feel (subjective, I know) like any 4X game. Not like Civ, not like MoM and its clones, not like SotS, not like the 'Endless' games. On the other hand, it feels very much like playing a tabletop wargame.

[E. Albright]

Besides the scouting (which I think Il Palazzo captures perfectly - that doesn't feel like exploration), the part of Dominions that feels the least 4x-y for me is: what do you do when you're not at war? There's no peacetime development, nor does it feel like there should be. To be completely clear, I'm one of those awful people who plays 4x games on huge maps specifically because they hate to go to war, so this part of 4x games has disproportionate importance to me. But still.