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[Dominions 3: The Awakening] Medieval Fantasy Grand Strategy. Stegadons ITT.
The Ender
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Okay, so what is Dominions 3: The Awakening?
Dominions 3: The Awakening is a 'video game'. Video games are electronic games that are played on a video feedback device, such as a television or CRT monitor. Video games can trace their origins back as far as the late 1940s, with the development of--
No you fucking idiot, i already know about Thomas Goldsmith's Cathode Ray Tube! What kind of video game is Dominions 3: The Awakening?
Dominions 3 is a grand strategy game with a medieval fantasy theme; it's surprisingly accessible for a game in it's genre, and has some of the elements you'd think would be more at home in a traditional 4x strategy game. If you were to slap a 100% ground Master of Magic patty onto a Heroes of Might and Magic bun, then squirt on just a bit of Europa Universalis sauce, you would have Dominions 3 on the menu.
Movement in the game is region-based, like you would expect in a GS game, and the maps are presented in a beautiful hand-drawn style:
They can be generated randomly, or you can choose from a variety of pre-built maps, or you can just make your own maps with the game's built-in editor.
Wars are waged on a massive scale, typical of most GS games, but are not simply abstracted behind the scenes: you can witness the carnage on a separate battlefield rendering as many hundreds of legions smash together, wizards toss fireballs into the skirmish and horses trample over men, elephants trample over horses and cyclopses trample over elephants.
That sounds great! Hundreds of units rendered in no doubt high definition glory? Finally something to tax my GTX Titan rig!
Um.
It is not an ugly game (well, okay - the battlefield ground textures, skydome and background trees look horrible, and probably should've just been a nice painting. Deal with it); the sprites are nicely drawn and the spell effects are a little subdued but surprisingly endearing. Sound assets are a mixed bag; the game's main theme is to my tastes, but ymmv, and the battle SFX range from very annoying (raise undead spells, fire spells) to appropriately retro (arrows being shot, most buff spells, banishment spells).
You do not have direct tactical control over combat; instead, you set-up intricate battle scripts and formations for your troops, and then you watch as your carefully brewed strategy totally falls flat on it's face. It may or may not be your cup of tea, but I have found it more engaging than tactical micro-management ever has been for me.
Wait just a fucking minute. Those are Goddamn Stegadons!
Dominions 3 has a very enthusiastic modding community. The vanilla game is loaded with content, with factions taken from ancient mythology all across the world, urban legends and popular horror works (like the Cthulhu mythos), but it's also dead simple to mod and jam even more stuff into. Want to play even more Warhammer than you already do? Most WH: Fantasy factions are available as mod downloads. Want to play as Spartan guys? Dragon guys? Guys mostly made of Magic: The Gathering ripped card art? There's a mod for you!
STEAM??? NEWELL????
Afraid not - though it is on Desura now, for 30 bucks (or you can wait around for inevitable sales, you cheap bastard).
IT HAS BEEN GREENLIT ON STEAM
THE NEWELL HAS SPAKE
OBEY THE NEWELL
This game's manual is 300 pages long! What in the name of Xithoph, Father of Fathers, King of Kings, have you got me into!?
There is a lot of nuance to Dominions 3, but it is not as impenetrable as it may look. The tutorial in the manual is actually brilliant, and will walk you through all of the fundamentals in the game (Moving, Sneaking, Search for Magic Sites, Research, etc), while the Wiki is also well fleshed out and you can use to reference any specific questions you might have about specific game functions.
There is also this exhaustively explanatory LP series by Das24680:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4erpr0d4G20&list=PLGB6RkFB7ZmPy9ezc07UXWZ8TNVFnRZUFI've heard this game is primarily Play-By-Email multiplayer focused?
There's a very large PBEM community for Dominions 3, but the single player is totally fine and entertaining if that's your thing. There's no diplomacy options with the AI, so it'll be all war all the time, but the opponents are reasonably competent (Just a heads-up: they do cheat at higher difficulty settings, if that's a thing that bothers you).
This is one of my most played games recently, along with Endless Space. The sheer amount of variety just reels me back in after I finish a given game, and you can opt for anything from a quick 45-minute session to something lengthier and epic - what makes it really special though, in my opinion, is that the pacing is snappy. There aren't a billion things to micromanage in a turn, the AI doesn't linger moving stack after stack of units, and it just feels so clean (which is surprising, given that the interface is pretty ugly).
Anyone else play this game?
Anyone interested in a succession game?
With Love and Courage
The Ender on
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It was fun to pretend to be a god-king though.
This is basically the most disheartening part of Dom 3: It shouldn't be 30 bucks. It really shouldn't. But the developer refuses to put it on sale or lower the price, so it remains a niche product because 'lol 30 dollars??? no'.
Kind of like that guy who made Armageddon Empires and Solium Infernum, because he refuses to have anything to do with Steam.
Some devs just have the idea of not wanting to "devalue" their games by sales and such, but in the end it means they'll make a lot less money out of them. It's a shame, since I'd love to see these sorts of games at the top of a sales list or something.
I'd be game for re-purchasing a game I used to have for a reduced price, but I won't pay full price for it. I've already played it a lot, and have plenty of other stuff to play too. So the seller made 0 dollars where they could've made 10. I'd wager that a lot more people err on the side of 'No' when looking at new games at full price. Impulse buying is a good thing, as it gets you revenue and introduces people who otherwise wouldn't play your stuff to your games.
The idea that the world is basically dying and you're eagerly helping the death of everything along (especially if you're LA Ermor) in a possibly doomed bid to become the One God is a pretty sweet one. Unfortunately, it's mostly about churning out armies in various ways. So I can't quite shake the feeling so much more could be done with the setting.
Yeah, this is pretty much how I feel. The various factions already in game are fairly unique in their feel, so expanding the game from just the wargaming aspect towards the idea of being the god of said society, and how different nations/whatever function, there'd be a lot of possible things that could be done with the setting.
Still, that'd be outside the scope for a small indie dev, especially one that's fairly crotchety about changing anything in the first place.
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
-Your Pretender, where you design your god, and decide if you want them to be a combat or a support god, to help in a fight or research, or spells etc.
-The board, where you move troops and conquer places, as well as build things and cast world spells etc.
-The combat phase, which is largely automatic. What you can do, is design the formations of your troops beforehand, and pick the spells your casters can cast by themselves.
That's it. Reading the manual helps. This shit ain't Dwarf Fortress.
Honestly, I wish it comes on steam and enters a sale. I think it's a game that could sell very, very well, if entered at a right price point.
The only difficult part is setting-up your Pretender God, really. Once you get into the game, it's about as easy as Civ (certainly much simpler than any Paradox GS game).
Honestly, I wish this game had more of a management side to it regarding your faction/society/minions. It needs to be more complex, not less, dammit!
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
T'ien Ch'i - Basically China
Marignon - Spain/French/Inquisition
Mictlan - Aztecs/Blood Sacrifice, that stuff
Atlantis/R'lyeh - Lovecraftian stuff
Pangaea - Greek myths, satyrs, fauns, etc.
Marverni - Celts
Pythium - Byzantium
Ermor - Roman Empire, later an undead empire
Arcoscephale - Ancient Greece
Bandar Log - Indian mythology
Agartha - After its namesake, subterranean civ, with a flair of axolotl giants
Abysia - Fairly generic fire/blood civ, kinda daemonic
Caelum - Civ of angel-dudes
T'ir na n'Og - Irish myths
Ulm - Starts as basically something out of Conan the Barbarian, turns into Transylvania
Shinuyama - Japanese goblins or something
Yomi - Japanese demons or something
Jomon - Japan or something
Fomoria - Some kinda mix between irish myths and cyclops
C'tis - Lizardmen, kinda mesoamerican/egyptian feel to them.
Lanka - Indian myth stuff
Man - Arthurian legend stuff
Oceania - Mermen, and such
Vanheim - Viking myths and so forth
Doesn't cover them all, but gives some brief real-world analogues.
Am I the only one who spent literally days obsessing over infinite variations on spellcasting scripts and troop placement for dozens of casters and hundreds of troops for individual turns? Like, all the time, for months on end during a game? Maybe I just have an unusually dangerous personality for this game.
I'm with you. When you really get into working out your casters (particularly when setting up communions/reverse communions) and equiping them with various items, unlocking more and more spells, it gets insanely complicated. And building a good super champion/thug for dealing with whatever it is you happen to be up against in any one game is an art in itself. Dom3 is one of the most complex games I've ever played.
Also making the subterranean and deep sea factions more useful in their respective environments.
I would not recommend buying it on release; if it's like Dom3 in that respect, it'll be buggy and unstable as all Hell for the first few months. Small dev house and all that jazz.
My favorite god to make was the big rock. I just sat there, as a big old rock, and inspired my people to greatness. Also really enjoy that under water is its own territory/battlefield and not just empty space on the map.
Hell, really everything about this game is good times. Does it have multiplayer? We should do that some day.
Yes, it has multiplayer. Very good multiplayer, in fact. It's arguably the focus of the series. Easy to set up too. One player hosts the game, and then all the players can connect and submit their turns whenever they want. Game automatically advances to the next turn once everyone has submitted. It also has play by email, if I remember correctly, though I've never used it.
Dom4 also has a new team mode where one player plays as the pretender, while anyone else on that player's team plays as one of that pretender's disciples.
Now you have no excuse. Obey the Newell.
It does, and I always considered that to be the best way to play (if you can handle the time commitment). There's even a community-made hosting service called llamaserver where everyone just emails their turn to the server and it automatically resolves the turn and emails new files back out.
The OP does not go into enough detail to convey how awesome this game is. I know many people will look at the graphics and just pass but what you have to consider is that having relatively simple/sprite based graphics allows such an incredible variety of units/spells/items/abilities because you don't have to worry about programming some unique flashy graphic effect for everything like you would in a modern game. This means the game has so much depth and variety because there are so many combinations of different things you can do. I'll try to give some examples to highlight both the variety and the combinatory (is that a word?) aspects of the gameplay.
Gods: The "story" of each match in Dominions is that the all powerful god is dead and a whole host of "pretender" gods are now vying to take his place. So before you start a game, you create your pretender. Here is a small sampling of different gods you can choose (just trying to show variety here):
Dragon - you can turn into a dragon, breathe fire (or other stuff) etc
Vampire Queen - Summon Vampires each turn to you, strong in death magic
Fountain of Blood - You are a fountain of blood that possesses a sacrificial victim to speak for you. Cast blood magic.
Great general - A famous general skilled in martial combat.
Natarayaja - A 4 or 6 armed giant out of Hindu myth.
Queen of Monsters: Think Scylla from Greek Myth. Giant medusa type creature.
Angel of Death: Fallen Angel
Archdruid: Powerful druid skilled in nature magic
That is a tiny sliver of what is available. You need to think about what you want your god to do in the game and how he will complement your other forces. So if you are a fountain of blood, for instance, you aren't going to be going into combat (you are a fountain, you can't move) but you can specialize him in blood magic, send your minions out to gather sacrificial victims, and expend them to summon demons to join and lead your armies. If you want your god leading your troops and wading into the fighting, how about using something like Natarayaja...he has four arms so you can equip four different magic weapons, plus armor, boots, rings etc, that you create from a list of hundreds of different potential items.
Troops and Spells: Every civilization has a set of basic troops (8 - 15 types per civ) plus a set of leaders (generals, mages, etc)...and the heart of the game is finding ways to make them interact. So for instance, in a great LP on the SA forums from a few years ago, the player (I'm sorry I can't remember the name) chose the civilization Arcosephale, which is analogous to ancient Greece. His strongest troops were Elephants, which can do a ton of damage but have very low morale and will run if injured much. So his general strategy was an army of a dozen or so elephants supported by several mages proficient in Air and Water magic. These mages would start each battle by casting spells to make the elephants ethereal (so very hard to hit) and give them flight. You can imagine how well this force did against a standard infantry army from there. This was not a standard RTS-type game where he's just clicking on a unit's preset ability, it was finding a strategy organically from combining one of the hundreds of units available with the hundreds of spells and effects available.
There is so much more (summons, battlefield leaders, stealth units, etc) but hopefully this has peaked a little interest in this awesome series.
IOS Game Center ID: Isotope-X
So, given 4's incipient release (and the changelog looks pretty tasty), should I really be buying 3 at this point?
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
It's a strategy game with roguelike elements that is set within the same world as the Dominions series. It is quite good and I'd love to learn more about what distinguishes one series from the other. Obviously the Pretender aspect of Dominions is a big differentiation. Army set up and battle sounds very similar.
There are kind of a lot of them.
Maps are divided into provinces that you move armies between, like Risk. The NPC armies that guard them are static. Turns are resolved simultaneously. When two armies end up in the same province, they fight automatically according to their prior scripting. Battles are simulated instead of being just abstractions (physical positioning and movement across the field matter).
You have a lot more control over your units. Troops are organized into squads, given specific placements, and given general orders (like "hold two turns and attack closest" or "fire at cavalry" or "guard commander". Mages can be scripted to cast up to five specific spells before they go rogue and start casting whatever stupid thing they feel like.
Spells are researched for your whole nation instead of just one mage. There are hundreds of spells. Not nearly as many spells are prone to backfiring. You end up with dozens or hundreds of mages instead of, like, three. The economy is very different and supports massively more units. You can build your own castles. You have to lay siege to enemy castles. There's way more equipment, you can forge it, and some creatures (mostly summoned ones or Pretenders themselves) can kill whole armies single-handedly if you gear them well (enemy mages have lots of tricks to counter this, though).
It's basically the wargame to CoE's 4X. Everything is bigger and more zoomed-out and more complicated.
Unless you are really strapped for cash, I'd say absolutely not. I've played a fair amount of Dominions 3, and the quality of life changes in 4 are fantastic. I don't think I could go back. Beyond that, there are some mechanical changes/balance tweaks in Dom4, some of which are a little controversial for some people, but overall, I like the changes. And Illwinter is good about patching throughout the game's lifetime, so I'm not too concerned about balance issues anyway. Basically, the quality of life changes in Dom4 are worth the price of admission alone. Any new and improved content is a bonus. I say try the Dom3 demo, and if you like that, grab Dom4 on Desura. I'm pretty sure (but don't quote me) that the devs said they want to bring Dom4 to Steam as well and get Steam keys to Desura customers.
Yeah - I played the Dom3 demo a long time ago, said "Yes - this is a thing I would buy," saw the price, said "Maybe when it goes on sale."
Now it's on sale, but 4's coming out! He has made my decision tougher - but you made it easier. Thanks! I'll wait for 4 to be available on Steam.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
I bought Dom3 back when it cost $60. Twice. Once digital, once physical (for the glorious 300-page, spiral bound manual). Best $120 I've ever spent on gaming.
It's so cute to hear the little people scream when my chariots roll over them.
And I see it is five thirty in the morning.
That's just magical.
More magical is discovering that I can summon all sorts of giant mages that can cast different spells and manufacture different items depending on their magical traits! Neato!
And I guess my Fountain of Blood can cast some neat spells? I have not entirely grasped the significance of the Blood Magic portfolio, but it looks interesting.