This fantasy strategy game might not be a looker, but it's unique, deep, and incredibly varied
Unlike most turn-based strategy games, there's almost no "butter" here in terms of the typical "guns or butter" management. You don't have any city building or imperial development. Cities sit in the background, and geography is little more than a stage. The stars, in fact pretty much the only actors here, are the armies. At its core, this is a game about gathering them up and moving them around a map. For this reason, Dominions 3 would sit comfortably under the classification of an old-school wargame.
There's also no real combat. You don't even fight the battles, which are waged by the AI between turns. You can watch replays of the battles, which is admittedly half the fun, but it's all after-the-fact. There is a fair bit of tactical management in how you arrange your armies, and you can even give limited orders if you want to be hands-on. But Dominions is almost entirely a game about managing your armies between battles.
This might sound dry, but it's not. The armies are made from, literally, hundreds of different units. Your choice among the nations, which are a strange and generous collection of the alien and the familiar, determines which armies you can build in your strongholds. On top of this, each province can recruit its own types of units. By the time you've gathered even a minimal empire, there are dozens of different units you can recruit. To move an army around, it needs a commander unit, which can either be a generic leader or a powerful hero. You can make magic items for your heroes, and many of them can cast spells that you've researched for them.
Besides the army management, the other major facets of Dominions are the magic and religion systems. Before a game, you create a divine leader who will have an effect on the provinces you control. This involves setting a series of scales for things like population growth, climate, and productivity. But your divine leader also has a "dominion" rating, which determines how much your divine influence spreads. Think of this as a matter of how well he can convert the locals. A big part of the game - and hence its name - is establishing dominion over territory, which is entirely independent from military control. This trade-off is a fascinating part of Dominions 3, almost like culture in Civilization III and IV.
The magic system slowly unfolds over the course of a typical game, because you have to hire mage leaders and put them to work researching categories of spells. This is probably where Dominions 3 is the most overwhelming, because you have to make decisions early based on choosing among all the spells in the game. It's not like having to deal with armies, where you've only got a few available to you at a time. Learning the magic system is like trying to catch an avalanche.
The graphics are pretty primitive, but they get the job done. And it's really cool to see your little army scattered across the terrain during enormous battles. The interface takes some getting used to, but once you've figured out the basics, it's pretty easy to get around. A comprehensive tutorial in the manual works wonders in terms of giving you a boost up the learning curve. In fact, the manual goes a long way to making Dominions 3 easy to play. The spiral bound tome looks daunting at first, but it's broken down into several sections that you can browse at your leisure once you're ready to dig into the mechanics of the game.
There's a lot of detail here. In fact, the amount of detail is almost absurd. For instance, it tracks the age of each hero and will even afflict elderly heroes with diseases and infirmity. There are stats for each unit, and dozens of ways for these to be modified, from spells to magic items to morale to injuries to home court advantages. But Dominions is made so that you don't necessarily have to drill down into all of this to enjoy the game. Instead, you can just play it as a game about accumulating large armies and moving them around to conquer territory.
Still, Dominions 3 certainly isn't for everyone. A lot of casual players, particularly those who aren't familiar with turn-based strategy games, are probably going to be bored or confused, or some combination of the two. To them, this won't be much more than a spreadsheet. But if you like fantasy, and if you're ready to graduate beyond the must-haves like Civilization and Heroes of Might & Magic, then Dominions 3 is a unique game you won't want to miss.