The Third Crusade

The Dominions series occupies one of the great niches in strategy gaming. Few games require you to make careful observations and take notes, then mix it all up for you when you decide to play a different race. Each game rewards repeated play and deep study. It’s not just one of the deepest strategy experiences you’ll ever have; it’s almost homework. And teacher is working on the next big assignment: Dominions 3: The Ascension Wars.
The premise of Dominions is some sort of Tolkienesque Ragnarok. God is dead, but instead of plunging into Nietzschean despair, your nation tries to set up its leader—a Pretender—as the new king of kings and lord of lords. The races are a mix of the fantasy familiar, like Elves, Satyrs, and fish people, with pseudohistorical nations based on Roman or feudal armies. As the name suggests, your power grows based on how well you can spread your religious dominion over neighboring lands. You have magic items, magic spells, magic gems… in other words, lots of magic. But this is a religious war, so you need armies of ordinary blokes to help spread the word.
The problem with the Dominions games has been twofold. First, they have been some of the homeliest great games on the market, with drab, two-dimensional graphics that are particularly uninspiring for a game about religious inspiration. Second, the archaic interface works against easy understanding of what exactly is happening and why. At times, the games seem not only to reward analysis but to demand it. If you fall behind in your alchemy class, there is no extra credit to help you catch up.
Dominions 3 certainly looks better than past entries. The grays and slate blues of Dominions II have been replaced by chestnut browns and vibrant greens. The maps still have a classic look that’s driven more by iconography and at-a-glance understanding than by detailed representations of wealth or power. You can see which leader is carrying which gems, which lands are under surveillance, and where the Word of your Pretender is being received as gospel. Some of the vague icons, like those comparing army size, have been replaced by better visual representations of what you will face just over the border.
The artistic overhaul continues on the battlefield. New backgrounds bring the world to life, and a battleground editor lets you create new settings for your warfare. The soldiers themselves are still two-dimensional midgets, but they will be easier to distinguish from one another. Even with a tripling of the number of races, some divided into three separate “ages,” there is no evidence of a blurring of factions or soldierly roles.
If anything, there will be greater variety with less overlap in the new Dominions than in the previous incarnations. You want monkey warriors? They will be here. Fish people and Norsemen? Present. What about a race based on Chinese dynastic warriors? Yes, the Tien Ch’i return, along with water creatures, aerial combatants, and the normal range of undead creatures.
The inclusion of a random map generator right out of the gate will avert those pesky multiplayer disputes over which standard map to use. You can set the parameters for a map, filling it with water and magic sites, or just trust the computer to know what is best. Since the multiplayer game is capable of supporting well over a dozen players, the maps can get very big and a little unbalanced—who wants to get stuck in a wasteland? So players will again be able to design their own maps with a more user-friendly map editor.
This leads straight to the most important issue: While the in-game information is easier to access at all stages of the war, what about the documentation problem? The manual for Dominions II was 100 pages of magic spells and items, with minimal information on how to actually amass those 100-fold armies that the AI would regularly smack down by midgame. Will there be “first steps” for new players? An explanation of how the “battle orders” system works? Illwinter has passed the manual off to Bruce Geryk, the author of one of the most comprehensive walkthroughs for the last Dominions game [and a contributor to this magazine. –ed]. Given how much Dominions III has to offer, and how inscrutable it can be at times, he has quite a job to do.
Dominions 3: The Ascension Wars will be available from Shrapnel Games sometime later this year. Developer Illwinter Games has taken the tried and true stance that it will only be released when it is done. Judging from the work completed so far, this latest war for the souls of the heathens will be happening on a range of new fronts.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #189