Dominions 3 : Yes or No?

[Syt]

Is the UI working? I didn't try 3 because a bad UI is a suck game. Or something.

Supposedly they improved it. At least that's what the guys at P'dox are saying.

[fhdz]

Dominions 4 is out, price point €24.99:

http://www.illwinter.com/dom4/

One of my favorite fantasy strategy series ever.

[Grallon]

Dominions 4 is out, price point €24.99:

http://www.illwinter.com/dom4/

One of my favorite fantasy strategy series ever.

I remember you introduced me to it.  I enjoyed it but the lack of tools to customize and the poor graphics became too much.  Last weekend however I found something on Steam that is very reminiscent of D3 - yet even more in depth and quite pleasing visually - Eador: Masters of the Broken World ( http://www.snowbirdgames.com/eador/?lang=en ).



G.

[Josquius]

I'm playing that one on and off at the moment. Quite a serious time devourer.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Yeah, I always liked D3 but it's very boring on single player. If you aren't into the heavy multiplayer aspects it's questionable if it's very worthwhile. It's a very deep game, but once you get to "decent" proficiency it's pretty obvious what sort of nation/god configuration and expansion strategy make the game effortless to win every single time you play it.

MP on the other hand is very deep, some of my best online strategy MP experiences have been with D3. But you really need to be heavily involved on the official Dominion forums, these used to be hosted on Shrapnel Games back when I played. Although last I heard Dominions contract with Shrapnel had expired so I dunno if they still have a presence there. The key with the official forums is a college student in the UK set up a server (iirc called the Llamaserver) that you could email game save files to, and basically it creates a self-managed PBEM aspect to the game. This is key to really having a good time with multiplayer, because D3 is so complex that once you get about 30-40 turns in you're going to spend 1-1.5 hours a day just working on a turn if you want to really succeed.

I estimate probably only 5-10% of turn-based strategy gamers (already a small crowd) actually will enjoy playing this game FWIW. If you enjoy it, it will be something you sink an immense amount of time into, almost MMO level time sink. If not, you'll hate how user-unfriendly it is. The graphics are obviously atrocious as well, note that the development team all this time has been I believe two guys. One of whom does all the back-end code development and the other who works on the game balance and pixel art (which isn't great.)

[Admiral Yi]

What is UI?

[Syt]

User Interface.

[Syt]

Btw, there's MP communities over on Paradox (Peter Ebbesen is a big fan), and there's an active community over on Rock Paper Shotgun, too.

[Cecil]

Btw, there's MP communities over on Paradox (Peter Ebbesen is a big fan), and there's an active community over on Rock Paper Shotgun, too.

No surprise there. He likes games where he can find one aspect that is horribly unbalanced then abuse the crap out of it. I generally do that as well but I tire of it quickly after that while he seem to have this weird idea that its how games are to be played.