Разработчик: Illwinter Game Design
Описание
Dominions 3 is a turn based strategy game taking place in a fantasy world with world altering magic rituals and horrors capable of destroying nations.
A large variety of spells, monsters and special abilities is something this game definitely has. There are more than 60 different nations, 1500 different units, 600 spells and 300 magic items in the game. The game also features a medieval musical score by Erik Ask Uppmark and Anna Rynefors, both awarded the title of Musicians of the Realm by the Swedish Zornmärkeskommiten. Dominions 3 is a highly detailed game and a 300 page pdf manual is included in the download.
Features include:
- Many monsters (1500+) and many many special abilities.
- Over 60 different nations to choose from, varying from Marignon with paladins, witch hunters and inquisitors to under water nations like the Lovecraft inspired R'lyeh.
- Three Eras to play in, Early era is most magic and the late era is more technologically advanced with good steel weapons and armors.
- Design your pretender god and how his dominion influences provinces and his sacred units.
- Multiplayer with simultaneous turns (up to 23 players).
- Network or Play by E-Mail for multiplayer.
- AI opponents for single- or multiplayer game.
- Random maps.
- An extensive magic system with over 600 spells.
- Blood magic, power your rituals with human sacrifices.
- Global ritual that affect the entire world.
- More than 300 magic items.
- Unique magic artifacts that all players compete for, once forged no one else can make it.
- Mercenaries are bought on a global market.
- Scouts, Assassins, Spies, Seducers, Corruptors, Werewolves, Illusionists and more can be sneaking in your provinces.
- Build Castles, Temples and Labs.
- Permanent battle afflictions.
- A 300 page pdf manual including a tutorial and a spell and magic item reference.
- Easy to Mod (2d graphics)
- Playable on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows XP/Vista/7
- Processor: 1 GHz
- Memory: 512 MB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL capable graphics card
- Storage: 350 MB available space
Mac
- OS: 10.3 or later
- Processor: Any PowerPC or Intel cpu
- Memory: 512 MB RAM
- Storage: 350 MB available space
Linux
- OS: Any GNU/Linux distribution
- Processor: x86, 32 or 64 bit, 1 GHz or faster
- Memory: 512 MB RAM
- Graphics: OpenGL capable graphics card
- Storage: 350 MB available space
Отзывы пользователей
Meh- Fun game, but very very slow. Also the newer versions seem to be the same thing but better.
This game has so much depth, don't let its oldschool graphic style trick you. The beauty of this is in the depth, variety of options, and strategy. The reference booklet is almost 300 pages. And its fun to read because you begin to realize how many factors are at play here.
I know the newest one just came out, Dom 6, but I wanted to start with an older version, and get to know, before progressing forward through them.
I've never seen a strategy fantasy game with this much depth that is from this vantage point of kingdoms.
There are so many unique units, spells, gems, items, buildings.
My favorite part was in completing the tutorial save, there was one troll that I had surrounded, he had mages that summon spectral wolves, and he's nearly immune to my damage, so I lost 4 battles against him. It was like 120 units on 5, but he was the last bastion in the west. Eventually, I overwhelmed him but the theme of this Troll holding back my armies was very cool.
Fantastic, bit buggy with windows 10 and 1440 res but still works.
Get Dominions 4 runs better and is worth the extra few $. :)
There are a lot of fantasy kingdom managing/strategy games. Too many. This one seems harder than most. During my 30 plus hours of play I never came close to winning. Play a god any way you want. Clunky controls and ancient graphics nearly killed the game for me. A decent tutorial would have helped, but I don't usually read tutorials. Playing god my way resurrected my interest in the game.
This is a strategic fantasy war game with RPG elements where players assume the role of a pretender god. It has great depth, fantastic lore and immense replay given the huge diversity of factions, pretenders, and units. Random maps, many different commander types, spells, rituals, it's full of good stuff to explore and it keeps me coming back.
The game is really unique in many ways, so it's hard to compare it with others. The pretenders, factions, and units are mostly based on ancient historical myths, not Tolkien or traditional fantasy stereo types. I found this extremely interesting and fun to learn about. These old forgotten legends come to life in this game. An age of when Titans walked the earth, Krakens rose from the seas, and the giant great wolf howled in the north.
Games can be setup with many different options, including eras which change many aspects of the game. The main objective in all though is to spread you're faith all over the world. This mechanic has several methods but ultimately when you're pretender has full world faith, he/she becomes the god.
Spreading faith will require a military with soldiers, priests, mages and monsters. Or for the more diabolical pretenders, demons and the undead. Magic may be a tool that you can source, and with nine levels in each of the eight schools, you could write a book on the different tactics you can use.
The artwork, music and overall style generates a pleasant themed atmosphere. The game can suffer from heavy micromanaging late game as you allocate armies with many commanders and soldiers. But its turn based, and there are tools to aid in managing things, and notifications.
Yeah so this is an old game now and there is a version 4, and 5. So what. Doesn't change anything that i listed here. It's still worth you're massively devalued currency. One more turn, at its finest.
I really struggle to understand everything that is going on here and tutorials are not as helpful as I would like. This is the kind of game that I would typically enjoy, but I am at a loss on what good strategy is for this game. Sometimes, it looks like I'm doing well, but something outlandish happens and I instantly lose with no real explanation. Maybe if someone sat me down and walked me through every aspect, I could get better, but that shouldn't be the threshold for simply being able to play the game! The lack of decent graphics and sound doesn't do the game any favors either. You'll need to invest lots of time to learn the game, and by then, you may find out that you don't enjoy it very much.
Overall: 2/5
It's a fun mix of Risk and Heroes of Might and Magic with just a touch of Medieval Total War. Way too much micro management late game in really large maps. And definitely a time sink. But, a pleasing one at that, with a fairy original concept closest in style to Masters of Magic. Might not be a 10/10 but glad to buy it on a sale any day and spend hours on it in a lazy Saturday.
PS: really really easy to mod. Great thumbs up for their support for easy mods, and generally great documentation!
Excellent little game well worth the money. By now, they have just released Dominions 5, I found this series with Dominons 2, and have enjoyed all of them through 4. I have yet to pick up 5, but so far it looks promising. I just need more hours in my life.
As I said in the Conquest of Elysium 3 review, in spite of being a strategy and open-world game fan, I've just never been able to enjoy the 4X genre. All of the promise of customizing your civilization to suit your own fantasy gives way to cold calculations and optimization strategies, and all the exploration is just for finding more resources to exploit. Worse, by the end game, 4X games are just bogged down in micromanagement to maintain your war machine. It's just as the armies of my enemies are broken and victory is assured that I find myself entirely bored of the game and unwilling to bother completing it.
Dominions manages to be something of a split between a 4X and... well, the best I can come up with is a deck-building style of game. Compared to a game like Civilization, where all cultures are basically the same except for a couple unique units and one bonus or two, Dominions pits a stand-in for ancient Greece, led by Zeus or Athena or Aphrodite or some other Greek god with hoplites and such up against a stand-in for ancient Egypt filled with lizard-people and led by a dracolich against R'Lyeh, an entirely subaqueous civilization of D&D aboleths and Lovecraftian horrors.
Although the game definitely pushes you to optimize your god, the game's god-creation system is also probably its best and most interesting feature. You can be anything from an obvious stand-in for mythic deities like Thor or Kali or Quetzcoatl to some of the monsters of myth, like Tiamat or a gorgon or a straight-up demon from Hell, to a stone statue or fountain that pours the blood of virgins and demands blood sacrifice through taking possession of mortals, to just some jerk human Caeser of Rome claiming he's God-Emperor of Mankind, and out to make that claim real. Deities can craft and wear magical items based upon their magical powers, and in deity creation, you can set their magical talents (I.E. standard fire/water/air/earth, but also "death" (necromancy), "astral" ('pure' magic stuff like counterspells and magic resistance), "nature" ("druid" magic like growing plants or barkskin or regeneration or summoning fairies), and "blood" (murder slaves for magical power - based upon Aztec blood sacrifice). Beyond this, there is dominion power (higher means your religion evangelizes more successfully) and "scales", which are an alignment with different factors that affect your lands. ("Order" gives income bonuses and reduces random events, while "Turmoil" gives penalties and increased randomness. You gain more points to spend on other things taking Turmoil scales, so "Order" is always better.)
In spite of the fact that you can play as a fountain of blood that demands blood sacrifices so that you can twist the souls of your followers into horrible abominations to throw at your enemies or a straight-up angel with a flaming sword set up to bless her followers with peace and prosperity, there isn't any real acknowledgement of morality in this game (beyond "might makes right"), and there is no real sense of whether any particular cultures or peoples you conquer have any particular opinions of your religion, outside of a randomized chance of revolt (which seems to have more to do with your "misfortune" scale than anything to do with how you reign, other than pillaging the land to take slaves for blood sacrifices.)
Gameplay is basically "stack mashing", where you pile up a giant glob of units and lob it at the enemy and hope for the best. This doesn't mean it lacks strategy, however. Unlike many games like this, it actually simulates the battle. This is outside your direct control, although you can set a very basic script of actions for your units, like "attack archers" or "attack rearmost", or script up to 5 specific spells for casters, so that you can tell a gish to cast stoneskin and quicken before rushing the enemy in melee. Combat is fairly deep, with some units having light or heavy armor, weapons having bonuses against shields (which boost dodge chance rather than armor), morale and terror attacks being common, elemental attacks, and effects on the battlefield from dominion scales all taking place, there is a lot of strategy in battle.
Combat is somewhere between an RPG and a traditional RTS. Units gain experience and leaders can gain special abilities, but they can also gain permanent injuries. Leaders can also be given magical items you forge to greatly improve their combat performance, and can gain permanent (as long as they live) improvements to their magic-casting capabilities. On the other hand, death is super-cheap in this game, and you basically just churn out units as fast as your castles can muster them to throw into the meatgrinder. Common infantry units, in particular, tend to die by the dozens even in victory (and there's tons of friendly fire in this game, since friendly archers tend to aim at enemies in melee, and have poor aim).
Empire management is massively streamlined to the point of practically nonexistent compared to most 4X games. The only thing you build are castles (which dramatically increase how many units you can build), temples (which spread your religion - "Dominion" is the area where your religion is dominant), and laboratories (which let you transfer magic items). None of these need to be unlocked through research, so what you see at the start is what you get (although high-level magic can let you magically create castles where you otherwise couldn't, such as underwater if you are a land-based civ).
Those who love empire management in Civilization or even Total War may be disappointed in being "dumbed down to just combat", but there's something to reccomend it in the fact that, once you're up to "steamrolling" power levels, you can just stop caring and steamroll away instead of having an ever-more-complex empire to manage as you attain more lands. In this sense, this balance between a 4X and RTS actually appeals to me more than either those those genres do on their own.
That said, I do have to warn prospective players that there ARE things that need a form of micromanagement: Leaders (like wizards and army generals) default to "defend province/castle", but that's basically the order of last resort because it's never useful. If you have wizards you want researching magic any time you're not making magic items, then you have to remember to babysit the wizard's tower to make sure anyone who just finished a magic item goes back to research. Remember where the priest searching for holy sites is, and give new search or move orders every turn. As with a 4X, this starts to become somewhat tedious the larger your empire, and the more laboratories with wizards to manage you have to keep track of, although it's thankfully not as terrible as constantly managing a build queue since you tend to have relatively few major centers to check.
Like with "defend" as a default, I also get annoyed with how the game has a lot of bad default options, forcing a lot of constantly needing to click the same commands. Army management suffers from this frequently. The UI could be brushed up in just plain telling me how many soldiers I have total in a province, rather than making me add it up per leader. (Sure, there's consumed supply, but some troops don't eat, giants eat more than humans, and units that provide supply subtract from supply consumed rather than add to total supply, making that a false image for many circumstances. I might have 500 troops but only see 200 supply consumed.) This leads to it being rather difficult to tell just HOW strong a very large army actually is.
In all, it's far from the best strategy game I've played, but it's a very interesting one, and on sale, it's definitely worth picking up just to see what it does differently from other strategy games. (Especially since its sequels are more expensive, but better-polished games, buying this on sale makes for a good way to test the series out on the cheap.)
I own Dominions 3 and 4. Started playing Dominions 3, few monts later Dom 4 came out - moved to it.
Now I'm playing Dominions 3 and enormousely enjoying it. Less spells, less magical items than in Dom 4 - somehow even more fun.
Why I like Dominions:
1. Very interesting fantasy setting (not just elfes and other copies of Tolkien imagination) with Valkiries, armoured gorillas, ghouls, giants, chariots, eagle-men, bat-men, spider riders, raptor riders, fiery salamanders, armoured or undead elephants, giant ants, tiny dragonflies, barechested warriors, tritons with amber armour, hydras, halfblind cyclopes, nagas, twoheaded giants, liches, krakens, dragons, mechanical dragons, trolls, tengu, ghosts, lamias, jaguars, werejaguars, powerfull but insane gods, mages of various kinds,assasins, shark knights, Vikings with glamour, Aztects with flying ability and many, many more...
2. Ingenious balancing of nations. Other games do balancing + variety this way: one side gets a sword and shield the other axe and a shield. Dominions does it like this: one side gets a sword and a shield the other gets a catapult and a sharpened stick :-) and it works!
3. No researching of buildings, basically there are only 3 buildings you can build in a province: castle, magical reaserch lab and a temple. Less hasle with buildings and a refreshing change from the industry standard.
4. Spells, spells, spells :-) starting from minor ones like fire flies (weak and available with no reaserch) to fire storm (burns everything on the battlefield that does not have full fire protection, requires a lot of reaserch and a powerfull fire mage).
5. IT'S DIFFRENT.
6. Challenging single player even after hundreds of hours of play.
7. Great and athmosferic music.
8. The battle set up: give orders to commanders, mages and units before battle; later during the battle you just watch how your orders interplay with orders given by your oponent: surprises guaranteed, especially in multiplayer battles. Many a time I was watching biting the nails, seeing how my main force was pummeling the enemy but my oponents flanking party was going for my commander - battle of Gaugamela all over again.
9. Great community - higher IQ average than the many other games out there :-)
10. Small developer firm with dedicated staff. Basically like Creative Assembly before they were bought with Total War series by Sega. Upgrades are free and regular, game works like a clock on day one, patches fix some mechanics you never even new existed, developers behave on forums like your friends: nice, profesional, informative and surprisingly patient towards the odd troll or idiot :-)
11. Depth. 3 eras with circa 20 nations in each one, every nation has different soldiers (is hydra a soldier?) and commanders, some very usfull, some meh and some ridiculosly usless until that day when you find a use for them :-) Hundreds of spells that can be divided in 3 categories: battlefield spells that have effect on a particular battle (relevant mage has to be present), rituals used on strategical map (for example ritual that summons wywern or mechanical men that you can use in later battles) and global rituals that have a major effect on the strategical map and the battles (for example global ritual that calls darkness and gives penalty to all units in battle that don't have the special ability darkvision). Hundreds of magical items (dwarven hammer is so much better in Dom 3 than in Dom 4).
12. The distinction between strategical map and tactical map and how both are working.
13. The ideas inherent to the game and seen nowhere else e.g.:
A. units get tired on battlefield and that makes possible for an army of pitchfork fielding peasants to overwhelm a small group of knights (even though initially the knights cut them in heaps) IF (very big if) there is enough of the peasants.
B. bless effect that changes sacred units into even stronger ones and you can choose the bless effect at the start of the game.
C. Dominion which is like the population strenght of faith in you, the Pretender God. Has effect on how many sacred units you can buy, how strong some global rituals are and on morale of your troops. Also as you are pretending to be a God (one of many) in the game, the added benefit is that no fundamentalist muslim can play the game :-)
D. the way afflictions affect the units - especially extremal cases when you see a unit that is blind, cripled, weakened, with a chest wound and battle fright but still on the battle rooster.
Could go on and on but 13 is my lucky number so...
Here http://www.illwinter.com/dom3/ you can find link to a manual - try to read a few pages at least.
Here http://www.moddb.com/games/dominions-3-the-awakening/forum/thread/dominions-3-demo1 you can find link to OLD DEMO OF DOMINIONS 3 - not sure if still works but it was great back in the days to get a taste of the game. Word of warning: do not play Kaliasa as nation unless you looking to get frustrated ALL the time, Arcosceptale is much better (chariots, massed chariots until you meet some giants)
Dominions 5 is going to be available from November so try Dominions 3 and if you like it, buy Dominions 5 in November and see you in multiplayer - watch out for my chariots :-)
One of the best games ever!!!!
2023 edit: it's actually crap same as the whole series.
.
.
.
.
JUST JOKING!!! Dominions are f.... best !!!
A game of master strategy... Played for about 10 hours straight and I barely scatched the surface of this game.
On first glance, This game have sloopy graphics and looped music. They can be quickly overlooked once you get past the learning curve of the very basis of the game.
Everything you heard about or seen in other fantasy based strategy games are featured in this game. Magic, Ranged combat, autocast spells by unit, wound, exp leveling, leadership(command army size), summoning creatures, under sea combat, worship war and many more features are involved hidden behind this mask of basic interface for you to discover.
Many races of people to choose from with unique feature for each race. This well hidden strategy gem and I am sure I will discover a lot more interesting things in the days to come. Each games are not short at all once you setup on a balanced map with some AI or even human players.
9/10 for a wonderful strategy game and it only lost score on graphics, interface and music.
This is a very enjoyable fantasy strategy-sim. It's plays very similar to a Total War series game, but with a more hands off approach to the battles (you don't directly control units, but you can give them pre battle formations and priorities, like telling your cavalry to wait a turn before going to attack the enemies archer units).
There is kind of a big lack of explaination for a lot of things in the game itself, so you'll have to refer to the manual or the wiki, but I figured out 95% of it on my own. One example is the game lets you give magic gems (that are a resource for casting global spells and making magic items) to your commanders, but it doesn't explain anywhere ingame the benefits of doing that. Turns out it improves their magic casting abilities of the associated gem/magic type by 1 level for having the gem equiped. But some characters also generate magic gems for you and they get put in their inventory until you retrieve them.
It took me about 4-5 games to explore how the various mechanics work, like how faith spreads, how you research magic, how building good armies and giving them the right orders to increase their effectivness. Experiment and read the ingame hints about the things that are described and it's easy enough to catch on.
The learning curve is similar to dwarf fortress, and like dwarf fortress once you've passed the barrier for entry it's entirely worth the trouble.
>Download warhammer nation pack
>For Skaven Blight!
>Start a game on a 1500x1500 map with 1000 provinces and max nations (Game crashes several times just rendering)
>Early game micro, min maxing armies to steal land from independents.
>Encounter first oposition, some purple guys with fancy armour
>Push army groups into land rush along newly developing border
>Ratmen sneak sneak into enemy territory for deep strike attacks
>Launch premetive stike against stupid man things
>Stupid man things suffocated under waves of clan rats
>Begin sending armies to their stolen provinces
>Assassins hound commanders every step of the way
>First real battles of the war kick off with my armies of clan rats scattering to the wind in face of their Heavy Infantry
>Hurl more ratmen, delay enemy, lose more battles, push them back, more enemies appear, rinse and repeat
>This continues on for hours, about 68 of them
>Finally drown their capital under the bodies of tens of thousands of ratmen.
>Decisive Victory.jpeg
>Only 1/20th of the map is under my control
>Scoregraph put me at 7th place among the 19 remaining nations.
10/10 Would never finish a single game again.
Cons:
- The worst flaw of this game is that most of the cryptic game mechanics cannot be accessed in game and you have to rely on google search to find out. For example, while researching the "construction" school of magic, you are given no clue on what you can craft from it. Even after researching the spell, you have no idea what you can craft because many of the craftable items are not visible because the mage you select do not have the required paths in magic.
When summoning a monster, you have no idea what stat and abilities that monster will have and will need to trial and error to find out. To make an informed decision in a strategy game like this you really need detail info that the game does not provide. Is a summoning a giant turtle better or a sea serpent? Who knows? Just toss a coin to decide!
- Really dated graphics
- No control over the actual battle itself. You really need good understanding of the games' mechanics (which are cryptic and inaccessible) to script your troops to do combos and perform desirably.
Pros
- Huge variety of customizations.
You can design your avatar, a pretender god in multiple ways that will drastically affect your game. Your god might be good at combat, single handedly defeating whole armies, support your faction by providing various faction wide bonus or give your troops powerful buffs in battle. The possibilities are endless.
Not only can you customize your avatar, you can customize your heroes by giving them various crafted artifacts while a variety of effects. The kind of artifacts that you can create are limited by your god's and your mages' power in the different schools of magic, so careful planning is needed.
- The game mechanics is excellent once you grasps the basics. The the variety of tactics and combos that can be pulled off are almost limitless.
- Many factions to choose from that play very differently from one another. The lore of the game is refreshingly different from standard fantasies.
Note: This review only reflects single player. Some of the concerns should be equally valid in multiplayer tho.
Pro:
- lots of nations and spells to play with
Contra:
- no upgrade path except for magic, you start and end the game with the exact same troops
- larger empires are micromanagement nightmares (commander limits, picking up scattered units, managing troop supplies for fronline armies etc on a 45 province map is already horrible)
- tedious mopping up of beaten opponents (hopefully you didnt pick low dominion while trying to assault a water fortress with Shamblers ...)
- hands off battles
- almost non existent province development
And just as a side note there isnt really a steep learning curve, its just that you have to memorize spells and units or you will be looking up those all the time. Games like Chess and Go can offer a deep strategic experience without overboarding rule complexity. Dominions while initially fun becomes tedious and boring very quickly.
Superb in depth TBS game with a lot of lore and content. Don't let yourself fooled by the graphics, the gameplay of this game is actually amazing.
I highly recommend this game to any strategy enthusiasts or fans of mythology out there. I'll go ahead and get the (tiny) amount of bad out of the way - the game has an unusual user interface, and selection of units can be especially tedious sometimes. With that detail out of the way, I only have good to say about Dominions 3. The writing in the game is top-notch, and very detailed. You often have to play multiple races to get a fuller picture of the history, but it's rich and satisfying once you put it together. The Tuatha and the Fomorian Giants are a good example. The game plays in a standard fashion with territories and movement, much like other turn-based games. However, to locate the useful goodies in a territory, you'll have to cultivate a few powerful mages, to find hidden sites that can provide mana gems, unique units for recruitment, or unique effects once unearthed. You'll need them (and magi once again) for the forging of magical items to equip your agents, priests, mages, generals, and your Pretender God. But the true meat of the game is in spreading your dominion (aka faith) across the map. It is the source of your power, and since it can flow into enemy territoy, it can also hamper their efforts to withstand your (inevitable) attack. Be sure to build lots of temples in your own honor! Put those puny mortal mages to work researching powerful magic that can affect the whole world. Turn day to perpetual night, bring on and endless winter, kill someone anywhere in the world, dispach the flying monkeys! Last Pretender God standing wins the prize - true Godhood. Sounds simple, right? Think again. It's a deep and complex game, and can be quite the challenge at times. So join in the fun, weave your own epic tale! Smash vampires with giants, bitch queens (yes, its a real pretender) with a midget masher, run from Cthulu! It's all in there, and waiting for you!
Possibly the most indepth, unique strategy game i've played. People may be put of by the visuals, but if you enjoy playing a game that just gets deeper and deeper with completely and utterly unique factions then this game is for you. Each time i think i know it all i'll then find another method to use.
Dominions 3 stands as one of my favorite strategy games of all time. It's not really that similar to anything else; the combat is all automatic, and your main job (as a god) is to manage your empire, build armies, build forts, research and cast spells, and plan out where your armies will go.
The graphics are sufficient for the job they do, and there's a plethora of addtional mods and maps and what not available for it.
All told, i quite recommend it to any fans of strategy who are looking for something a little different.
Don't let the graphics fool you, beneath its dull exterior lies a creamy center full of Strategic goodness.
Strategies center around the nation you choose and how you design your Pretender God. Battles are decided by how you form up your troops and the orders you issue to them before each fight.
If you like strategy games and a fantasy setting, you really should not pass this one up.
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Illwinter Game Design |
| Платформы | Windows, Mac, Linux |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 17.01.2025 |
| Metacritic | 82 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 82% положительных (85) |