I think that the main difference is in the amount of options you have. Once I explore all the options and get a hang of most of the tricks in the game, it loses much of its appeal. In AoW, it was pretty easy to do. The main tactics become apparent very soon, and the variety is very limited. All the battles play out the same way, and start to look the same fairly soon. In other words, after about 10 days, there was nothing else to do, and nothing new to discover. In Dominions, the amount of options and their combinations is vast. There is always something new to try, especially if you're not just sticking to the optimality recipes, and I don't see the game getting stale any time soon. To achieve this, a game doesn't necessarily have to have 1000 unit types (chess doesn't), but it can help nevertheless.
Plus, there is a notable difference in design intention. In Dominions, some things are there just because they would be cool if they are (at least that's how it seems; you can always find a way to use them), while in most big-studio games no effort is put into anything that is not immediately and overly useful and gives good returns while at the same time being easy to grasp. This again means reduced variety, and reduced replayability, and I don't really consider myself as target audience for those games, even though I buy them from time to time. I guess I could boil it down to market requirements vs. ars gratia artis.
SP experience of Dominions II is still great, and I hope it's going to be even better in the future, and production values, even though not as high as something like Morrowind, are still more than satisfactory. There are some things that I'm not exactly fond of in Dominions, and some that I would create differently if it was my design, but that's true about every game that exists, since we are all different. In the end, it all depends on what you want to see in your games. Do you want just another product, or do you want something to really boggle your mind when you explore it. And no, Civilisation games are not a good example of the latter.
ps.
Yes, the manual could be better in explaining gameplay nuances.
[ November 25, 2003, 21:27: Message edited by: HJ ]