Dominions 6 - Rise of the Pantokrator

Tucked comfortably away in a stronghold built inside an active volcano is a society of Lava People. This is very suitable. As a species of Lava People, they need the blistering heat to maximize both their comfort and their power, and this heat spills out into the realm surrounding their home in turn. Things are going great for them. They experience years of prosperity and prominence until one day, deep in the caves burrowing to the heart of the earth, a society of Bat People show up and decide to Steal The Sun. They fly up, grab it straight out of the sky, and take it home to put on display as a fantastic mantlepiece. The Lava People find this more annoying than inconvenient, because a month after that they've simply made a completely new Sun and put it up as a replacement, so life goes completely normally. Months later, the Bat busy making sure the Sun STAYS on the mantle gets slapped in the face and falls over. The Sun promptly escapes captivity and goes back up in the sky where it belongs. Except the Second Sun is still up there and now the entire planet has started getting unpleasantly toasty. Some people don't mind this. The Frost Giants, however, not only mind it quite a bit, they take it as an active threat, so one of them instead tries to murder the sun. This doesn't work because the original Sun is simply too powerful for a living Sorcerer to really do anything about like that, and the Second Sun is simply too stubborn to get rid of. So instead they call their parents, who are so notorious that the mere act of getting out of bed starts bringing in a new ice age. This is making a lot of people very nervous. This is specifically including the Lizard People. The Lizard People are naturally cold blooded. A supernatural ice age sounds like it would be a pretty big inconvenience. They don't like that. So a large group of petitioners including priests and wizards starts marching across the land to go ask the Frost Giants to stop doing it. Their petition for doing so is an infinite supply of skeletons. On the way to get to the Frost Giants, the Lizard People have to go through Greece, but since they don't have a travel visa this only manages to make the Greeks angry. So about halfway through the march towards the Frost Giants the Lizard People receive a gift from the Greeks. Multiple gifts, even. Gifts from Heaven. Meteors, they're hitting the Lizard People with Meteors. The Lizard People immediately change course to deliver a permanent cease and desist order. The Irish Elves, who were perfectly content to keep to themselves and their gigantic information network, are thrilled with the new entertainment. Up until a couple Bat People get a little too close to their Stay Out sign. So after a brief consultation, the leader of their nation grabs the sky, rips it open, and lets the biggest thunderstorm the world has ever seen stop by for a visit. The storm immediately also goes to visit everybody else, which promptly covers the entire planet. Unfortunately, the Bat People were never taught how to fly that close to a tornado, and being grounded makes them angry. During all this chaos, sitting out by the coast, the Phoenicians kill a lot of people. A LOT of people. They kill so many people that the spilled blood stains the very fabric of the universe. The very essence of the cosmos is traumatized. The world bends. Something is wrong. Past the stars and the sky a hairline fracture breaks through an Invisible Wall between the world and a world that isn't. And now there's something inside. Something that was supposed to be kept very, very far away isn't just here, it's looking at me. Hungry eyes are looking at me and I don't know where they are but I know they're there because every time I try to open my book or work my crafts I can hear something scratching in the walls or at the window even if every time I check I haven't found anything but I know the second I don't stop to check it'll be inside coming after me and I don't know what will happen if it finds a way in I haven't finished my preparations I'm not ready I'm not going to go it can't have me I have to make it stop but there's something standing at the crossroads outside the walls that I desperately do not want to recognize even if I know its name written in the bones of stillborn celestials and forgotten gods It is at this point that one of the guests from outside the Invisible Wall accidentally tips over God's favorite chair and the game ends in a draw because everyone got distracted. This is a perfectly normal game of Dominions.

I have 7k hrs on Dominion 5 and currently 3k+ hrs on Dominions 6. Sure, some of those are from leaving the computer on overnight, but that's still alot of hours of endorsement.

Game too complicated. So good I bought it twice, but I still don't understand :(

Fantastic game if you prefer 4x games with a heavy emphasis on army tactics over building/excessive resource management and I would highly recommend it if you like 4x games or even war games. I would say the skill floor for this game is low and not as high as you would think, if you've played 4x games before, while the skill ceiling is insanely high. You can get a hang of the basics within 2 hours by literally just going in and using the '?' key, and win your first single player match within 10-20 hours of gameplay. I would seriously argue that shortcuts are the only real barrier to entry because of the old school UI (READ: *BARRIER* to entry). Once you figure out the shortcuts using '?', the game loop begins to make sense. To simplify it for a new player, and i mean REALLY simplify, maybe overly so, there are essentially three phases you need to figure out recruit, research, and movement - you do other things like craft, cast, build, organize your army, set their actions for combat, as well and these are equally as important but you'll naturally figure this out. In my new player experience, crafting, casting, and building fall into the research phase as they're sort of a trade off with that, and army organization and combat actions are a subset of the movement phase. 1. recruit 2. research (or craft, or build, or cast spells) 3. set army actions/scripts, organize its layout -> move. The complexity comes from nations and spell paths etc. Stick to one nation for the beginning as you learn its fundamentals and then you can move around easier. I just played MA Ind until I got the hang of it (but i think Ulm is recommended by veterans of the game). As an aside, the game fulfills a strong magic power fantasy, you can do things like cast hurricanes across the map and devastate enemy populations like Saruman in his tower. I got it on sale for about 15% or so off but I think it's worth full price. It's made by two guys and is worth supporting just because of that. Furthermore, it does not have a dlc train like other 4x games (such as paradox games) so ultimately, it ends up being cheaper overall. i think these days us new players are lucky as there are fantastic creators on youtube such as cairnbuilder who create these hour long rundowns of nations which help immensely. there's also a 400 page manual if you ever have any questions that google or youtube can't solve lol

Dom 6 is an iteration on Dom 5, and isn't meaningfully different. That said, you def want Dom 6 so that you can play multiplayer with the fanbase. Between the two games, I have an extremely embarrassing number of hours in the many thousands (mostly in dom 5). It is the most complicated (in a good way) multi-player strategy game out there by an extremely large margin. You can meaningfully learn and improve in this game, in ways that it is hard to do so even in complicated games like Chess. There's just so much to learn, and so many rock paper scissors mechanics. So many fun stats. So many fun and different nations. DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME SINGLE PLAYER. At least, don't play it single player as your final goal and only thing. It isn't a good single player game. Also don't play it through the built in multi player lobby in the game. That isn't well baked. Find the relevant discord forums and play through those.

[h3]Not a Dragon Force clone[/h3] In the past I had heard this franchise recommended as an alternate to the old Sega Saturn game Dragon Force; a very unique game that nothing has managed to replicate 30 years later. This is so little like DF though that I have to wonder why that recommendation was ever made. One thing that is not obvious until you play the game is that all those battles they show in the Trailers are Replays. You don't actually participate in the battles, you just set orders and then get to watch the replays. The gameplay loop is basically: map screen, issue orders/setup armies for combat, spreadsheet simulator, end turn, watch replay of battles (optional), map screen, Repeat. There's no in-game tutorials or anything, but there is a manual that is over 440 pages. And in that manual there is no controls page at all. There is 2 brief blurbs about [i]some[/i] of the controls but nowhere at all in the manual does it list all of the controls, or even a quarter of them. The game relies entirely on you pressing "?" to bring up an on-screen controls list, and those controls have [i]at least[/i] 5 different lists depending on which screen you are on. So if you are like me and like to make controller configs using Steam Input, good luck trying to figure out where you want everything mapped without going over the 2-hour refund limit. By the time you figure out and remember even half of the controls, it would be too late to refund. If it wasn't for the fact that I was looking for a very specific type of game, I would have spent all my time learning controls and missed the opportunity to refund. And that goes for if you were using Keyboard too; there is dozens of hotkeys because they are different on every screen and menu. The UI is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful. You can make the text bigger, and that's cool, I had no problem reading anything, but holy ♥♥♥♥ the buttons do not scale for ♥♥♥♥, and until you memorize all those hot keys you're going to spend a lot of time clicking the buttons in the top right corner of the map screen. Also text on the Army Setup screen didn't seem to scale, and the text is the buttons on the Orders screen. One other thing I noticed is that there was launch commands in the manual that don't seem to do anything. Like there is options to toggle gamepad support, for example. It makes me wonder what else the engine was used for and why they would list useless commands in the manual, but whatever. Maybe this game is for someone, but it's not for me, and if like me you've spent the last 25+ years looking for a modern Dragon Force, just keep going, this isn't it at all. And to anyone who thinks this [i]might[/i] be for them, I highly advise watching a lot of gameplay vids so you understand the trailers are a bit misleading. I genuinely mean it when I say it's easier to learn how to fly a plane than to memorize all these hotkeys, so I hope you have a wrist-rest for your mouse if you're gonna check this one out.

Confusing at first, highly addictive afterwards