So, Dominions 5
We are in an age of huge budgets. If you are making a game, you quickly realize how much every single thing you create costs. Both time and money. If you make a character, it has to have a model, a texture, a voice, lines...this all adds up.
What this means is that most of the time, every single part of the world you produce will take several hours to create. This includes silly easter eggs, lore contents, joke characters...everything. This boils down to a simple thing: There is an upper limit of content you may have in a game of certain budget. You can mitigate this by not including some features (for example voice) allowing you to focus on others more. But all in all, you can find this in most games. There is a total amount of content and not a bit more.
And then there is Dominions. Dominions is a hack. Usually games are developed over several years and then released, maybe improved later, but that's it.
But not Dominions. It is a game perpetually developed from early 2000's and for the most part, the only thing that's been being done is stuff being added. Sure some systems have been changed or reworked, but other than that, the game has been continually being added to.
It has a little caveat tho. It isn't a "deep" game. In fact, I'd describe it as a very wide game, with occasional layers of depth. To be specific, the game features around 50 nations across three different time eras. Each nation has about 8 unique units on its own. Add other units and special units and you come up at around 2000 different units in the game, each with it's own ONE sprite. Yes. There are no animations, no 3D models and for the most part, no voices. Instead, you get a sprite and you are happy if you can distinguish your axe wielding infantry from your mace wielding infantry.
It also has 500 something spells and similar amount of magic items. It's bonkers. Mostly, if you can think of it, it's there somewhere in the game. And while not talking about the gameplay, I think this is a spectacle of its own.
Now for the gameplay. It is a turn based 4X game.
What makes it special is that turns go out simultaneously. So you click whatever you want to do on a said turn and click end. All others do the same and then the game goes through it. Little caveat is that combat is done automatically always. You can watch it afterwards, or just go through a text to see how it ended, but some may have a problem with this.
I personally find it amazing, because combat tends to slow down 4X games down to a crawl and that doesn't happen here. You can literally push two biggest armies against each other and at most it takes a minute. I can see how some would find this bad, but I find it pretty amazing. Of course, you do have some control over combat. You can issue orders for units before the combat, specify their position on the field and so on and hope that you will destroy your opponents.
Now this kinda combat allows for tricky combat configurations, which in a realtime game would never work.
For example, undead units require a caster to control them. If their commander dies, they dont do anything. So to beat undead units, you can come up with crazy methods how to kill the commanders quickly to minimize losses. And as necromancers, you can instead come up with methods how to avoid getting your commanders killed by a stray arrow.
All in all, it is very similar to Dwarf Fortress in some aspects. It has a very custom feel, lots of content, two developers and a dream behind it. No publishers pushing for features and nothing of that sort. Only dreams of making a game. In fact, I feel like these two are one of the only true "indie" games out there.
What this means is that most of the time, every single part of the world you produce will take several hours to create. This includes silly easter eggs, lore contents, joke characters...everything. This boils down to a simple thing: There is an upper limit of content you may have in a game of certain budget. You can mitigate this by not including some features (for example voice) allowing you to focus on others more. But all in all, you can find this in most games. There is a total amount of content and not a bit more.
And then there is Dominions. Dominions is a hack. Usually games are developed over several years and then released, maybe improved later, but that's it.
But not Dominions. It is a game perpetually developed from early 2000's and for the most part, the only thing that's been being done is stuff being added. Sure some systems have been changed or reworked, but other than that, the game has been continually being added to.
It has a little caveat tho. It isn't a "deep" game. In fact, I'd describe it as a very wide game, with occasional layers of depth. To be specific, the game features around 50 nations across three different time eras. Each nation has about 8 unique units on its own. Add other units and special units and you come up at around 2000 different units in the game, each with it's own ONE sprite. Yes. There are no animations, no 3D models and for the most part, no voices. Instead, you get a sprite and you are happy if you can distinguish your axe wielding infantry from your mace wielding infantry.
It also has 500 something spells and similar amount of magic items. It's bonkers. Mostly, if you can think of it, it's there somewhere in the game. And while not talking about the gameplay, I think this is a spectacle of its own.
Now for the gameplay. It is a turn based 4X game.
What makes it special is that turns go out simultaneously. So you click whatever you want to do on a said turn and click end. All others do the same and then the game goes through it. Little caveat is that combat is done automatically always. You can watch it afterwards, or just go through a text to see how it ended, but some may have a problem with this.
I personally find it amazing, because combat tends to slow down 4X games down to a crawl and that doesn't happen here. You can literally push two biggest armies against each other and at most it takes a minute. I can see how some would find this bad, but I find it pretty amazing. Of course, you do have some control over combat. You can issue orders for units before the combat, specify their position on the field and so on and hope that you will destroy your opponents.
Now this kinda combat allows for tricky combat configurations, which in a realtime game would never work.
For example, undead units require a caster to control them. If their commander dies, they dont do anything. So to beat undead units, you can come up with crazy methods how to kill the commanders quickly to minimize losses. And as necromancers, you can instead come up with methods how to avoid getting your commanders killed by a stray arrow.
All in all, it is very similar to Dwarf Fortress in some aspects. It has a very custom feel, lots of content, two developers and a dream behind it. No publishers pushing for features and nothing of that sort. Only dreams of making a game. In fact, I feel like these two are one of the only true "indie" games out there.
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