Dominions 3: The Awakening

There's so much quality on all levels here. It's indie strategy for me.

Dominions 3 is to 4X strategy as Magic: The Gathering is to card games. On the surface, it appears to be a run of the mill turn-based fantasy game, where you invest in your province, research spells and build up your army, but if you peek under the skin, you’ll find one of the richest strategy games ever devised, thanks to its diversity and wild flexibility in gameplay. That’s a big assertion, so bear with us.

Dominions 3 doesn’t have a plot in the traditional sense; there’s no campaign to step your way through, nor is it based on any historical or existing fictional analogue. Instead, the story of Dominions 3 is told through the carefully crafted nations, which are divided up into early, middle and late Ages. The premise for every game is the ascension of the one true god, as each nation pits its respective pretenders against each other, using spells, armies, and subversion.



Before you get into battle, however, you’ll spend a great deal of time just customising your nation and building your pretender god. You’ll decide on a pre-made scenario or randomly generated map, then the Age you want to play, then you’ll decide your nation. That’s not as easy as it sounds, as there are 50 nations spread across the Ages, where each nation has differing benefits and armies. After you’ve chosen your nation, you also get a chance to customise it, where you can invest points into various scales for benefits, or get points back by intentionally handicapping yourself. And finally, there’s the pretender god. Your pretender could be an immobile fountain of blood that sits in your capital city casting spells, or it could be terrifying dragon that you take out into the battlefield to slaughter entire armies on its own.

Once you’re in, it’s standard 4X strategy. You can zip around the 2D map, recruit armies, research spells and expand your dominion. In contrast to other turn-based strategy games like Civilizations IV, empire management is relatively simple, where you have a global accumulating income to spend on structures, defence and expensive units; and each province has its own generic non-accumulating resource value, which is used mainly for recruiting armies.



The other half of the game takes place on the battle map, but as each battle is resolved during the turn, the battles are passive replays rather than a tactical screen. To improve your chances of success, you must give units and commanders a formation and basic attack or spell casting orders before the battle, and then leave the rest up to the AI. During the battle movie, you can zip around, looking at the effects of each spell, and glean vital information to make some tweaks before your next battle.

The magic of Dominions is not in the battle tactics or the high strategy. Rather, it’s the complex interactions between the units, magic and pretenders that let you create any type of army you’d like. If you want, you can create a traditional army with foot soldiers in the front, archers behind, and cavalry screaming up the flanks. Or, you could drop some stealthy battle mages and some elite troops to strike provinces behind enemy lines. In fact, you could do away with armies altogether and equip your pretender god with spells and magical weapons to make it nigh invulnerable in battle. With 600 spells and 1500 units, you can create any fantasy army you can think of, and it’s this element that makes Dominions 3 a winner.



This is so close to a 10/10 game, but there are some unnecessarily poor design decisions that stop it short of perfection. The first is the interface which, while more streamlined than Dominions 2, doesn’t present you with as much information as you’d like. Secondly, the game setup is atrociously clunky, forcing you to jump in and out of screens repeatedly when you could have simply had the screens combined into a single nation generator page. And finally, while we’re conflicted about saying this, the incredible manual doesn’t go far enough to explain the differences between each army – you’ll have to go online to get a unit list, and even then, it’s not an official one. These are fairly minor issues, though, and are only apparent in the first few weeks of playing. After that point, you’re used to the interface and you’re familiar with each nation and army breakdown.

In the end, this is a big, complex beast of a game. It’s a game you have to ‘get’, but when you do, you’ll be a convert forever. You’ll explore each nation, each magic path, and eventually find some killer combination that dominates the map. And then you’ll put it aside and start all over again. And once it grabs you, you’ll find other games of its type shallow and simple. For an independent game, the US$55 might seem steep, but once you start playing, you’ll get months, or even years, of game time, which makes it a true bargain. This is what strategy games are all about.