Review: Dominions

I downloaded Dominons after it appeared on www.tuxgames.com in a news item. I didn't expect much - I've downloaded a lot of games, and this was another one from a small, independant group - Illwinter Game Design. I wasn't quite sure what the game was about - but I'll try almost anything. So I downloaded the demo (20 meg!) and played with it a little...

Dominons is a sort of turn based strategy game. You control a pretender god, and a race of people. Your aim, as is traditional in computer games, is the obliteration of all other pretender gods. Destroying their followers and laying waste to their lands is optional.

Of course, it all sounds so simple put like that, but you have a massive array of methods of achieving said objective. Herein lies the game's true strength - it's sheer depth. The range of troops between all the races is massive - literally hundreds of different units if you include variations on a theme - and each territory has a different set of troops that can be recruited from that area - so while barbarian hoards are recruited from some areas, a host of lizardmen will be in others, or rugged heavy infnatry will be produced elsewhere. The key to your armies success in battle is picking a good balance of what is available - while an army of archers will devastate a troop of light infantry, they'll barely touch a charge by the Black Knights of Ulm. And a hoard of undead zombies can be put to rest quickly by a set of well defended priests.

However, the game is more than just hiring the best troops and sending them into battle, or even hiring the best mix of troops. Carefully chosen leaders - warriors, priests and wizards - can make a world of difference, as they destroy the enemy's expensive hydra with a lighning bolt, and populate your army with magic troops that require no food. Magic can make a world of difference, and does, with a fine variety of global enchantments to do everything from revealing the contents of every territory, to giveing all your units everywhere extra hit points, to slowly reducing the population in all the regions of the world.

There is also an interesting system of "dominion". A god's dominion is an indication of their power in a region - should you build a temple, your dominion will spread, as will preaching, or the presence of a god or prophet. And a powerful dominion has all sorts of implications - if you are based in cold areas, you may decide to make the temperature drop in your dominion... if your race is undead, the population may as well die under your dominion...

Well, that's the game described. At least a little bit. And I've already mentioned some of the good points. Lets go on to some bad ones.

Firstly the game has a very very steep learning curve. When I first started the game I was utterly confused. There is very little in the way of on-line help, so everything requires you to have read through the manual in some detail - and there's a lot of manual. Tool-tips would be so much use - as would some slightly more intuative controls - right clicks in some places will cancel, other places will give help, other places will bring information up, and you have no real way of knowing what until you try. The only way to get to some menus is to click on them - the only way to scroll the map is to use the cursor keys.

The other feature that is very poor is the graphics. Admittedly, they are relatively speedy, but the sprites for the battles only have two poses - standing and attacking. It's quite strange to see your troops not moving, then you get some details on them you can find out they're actually unconsious. The troops do all look slightly different, so it is possible to tell them apart by type, but not possible to tell two opposing sets of barbarians apart... The maps are quite pretty, but it is impossible to zoom in a bit to see what's really going on in some of the smaller regions. All in all, they remind me shareware - the graphics look amateur.

Sound is never something I really concentrate on - I always play my own music in the background (hence all the pages on lyrics on this site) - so I didn't really take much notice... they mostly sounded like generic sounds from battle games, and there is no music. Dominions is not a game that needs sound, and it really doesn't lose anything from having uninspired effects.

Back to the good points... One of the best points is that the computerised players are an interesting challenge. It took me a fair while to beat the computers with any one of the races, and I'm still unable to beat it under quite a lot of the initial starting conditions. The computer players do suffer from some stupidity, but it's rare that I've got into a situation where it gets stuck in some stupid loop, or the computer player has failed to press an advantage to some extent.

Dominions also has the benefit of supporting all sorts of platforms - as well as my own linux system, it is supposed to work on both Windows and Solaris - although I've not tried this out... and the latest version seems very stable, although some of the earlier versions suffered a little from the odd bug. The game has an interesting set of multiplayer modes - both play by email and using a game server, and the game is well suited to multiplayer, with all the actual actions taking place at the end of a turn, hence you can spend a day or so deciding on your moves, then commit them to the game and await the results.

On other "technical" (for want of a better word) aspects, the game suffers a little - some of the English is a bit poor (not that I can talk!). The game also can take ages to play the turns (although I'm only running a K6-2 400), especially on a big map with lots of players - although I'd guess this is related to the quality of the AI players.

What else can I say? All in all this really is a great game. It's not a top of the range game with pefect graphics and more bells and whistles than you would ever want, but its good, clean fun. It's worth the effort to learn, and certainly worth the money. One of these days I'll pluck up the courage to play the multiplayer version... hopefully I'll see you there!

Gameplay	5/5	-	Great depth, very interesting game to play. Good variety of ways of playing the game. Challenging AI.
Graphics	2/5	-	Very amateur, but quite functional.
Sound	2/5	-	Nothing special, although it really doesn't matter.
Implementation	3/5	-	Ported to three systems, worked very well under linux. Confusing interface, lack of online help.
Replayability	5/5	-	The game does get a bit repetative once beaten, but theres always one of the other races to try, or another game option.
Overall	4/5	-	Look through the coal, and theres a real diamond of gameplay.

This article written by mrsneeze on the 12th of November, 2001.

Buy Dominions from Tuxgames.

Download a demo for Linux, Windows or Solaris from Illwinter Game Design