[Saber Cherry]

My favorite part is, as mentioned by Jasper Phillips on the IBM strategic games forum, the adult treatment of mythology. The spell descriptions are wonderful, the battle wounds are annoying, nasty, and realistic, items have amazingly cool effects and imaginative descriptions - no Swords of +3 here!

Things have drawbacks - spells cause fatigue, armor adds encumbrance an lowers evasion, long weapons are unwieldy. Crossbows pierce armor, but destroy your own valuable heavy troops. Single, vast armies starve and get hammered by spells, small armies get defeated en detail, and blood hunting destroys your tax base.

Well, those are all nice. But what I really like is the epic, realistic feel, where a lone soldier is just a lone soldier, and all units risk death... not cute death by falling of the screen or being cartoon-flattened like mushrooms in Super Mario Brothers, but horrible, bloody death, the kind you read about in non-childrenized mythology, and non-super-happy fantasy or SF books.

There're no good guys or bad guys - religiously zealous Marginon can pillage as effectively as Ash Ermor or Pangea, and paladins can rack up as many human kills as undead unkills.

I think that as a mythology simulation, Dominions is ideal. If some improvements could be made to the strategic/tactical and economic components to make them deeper (without adding MM), and of course AI, I think it could be much better... to be specific, I think it is already the best strategy game ever, but it has the potential to become the perfect fantasy strategy game, rendering all others obsolete.

-Cherry

[ November 17, 2003, 20:50: Message edited by: Saber Cherry ]