More than two years ago, as I did often at that time, I was travelling back home for the weekend in an InterCityExpress train in Germany and started the demo of Dom2 on my laptop. I had been greatly disappointed by WarlordsIV, which I had anticipated for soooo long, and someone on the Warlords forum had recommend Dom2. This led me to download the demo before I went on the train, so that I had some amusement during the four hour train ride. Little did I know about what awaited me in this file...
The amazing music and the cool descriptions of the pretenders kept me immediately spellbound. I was captivated by the non-tolkienesque mythology and read each pretender's descriptions with delight before playing at all. My first steps then as clusmy Ulm were quite pathetic, but I liked the interface and the graphics of the Aran map. It was all so refreshingly different! So deep! There was always more to explore and behold! I also liked the simultaneous PBEM turn concept: I had tried PBEM with WarlordsIII with my friends who also liked strategy gaming, but it was hopeless since it took to too long for a turn to return to oneself (I also despise the awful mixed realtime-yet-turnbased network play of WarlordsIII ). Now Dom2 was at last a fantasy strategy game that could be succesfully played against my friends. Hence I immediately decided to order the full game...
When it eventually arrived I was at first disappointed by the lack of additional music tunes and the crappy manual (Who needs all those stupid item descriptions anyway, where you cannot find anything you are looking for, if you can have Zen's formidable MagicItemQuickReference document?!). However, my tries as Caelum became fruitful. Caelian magic suited me well. With the help of the scribes of this forum, my power steadily increased. Spell after Spell was researched and mastered. Eventually, my Blood-Fountain incarnation lead a Frozen-Blood-Caelum to utterly defeated my enemies (five strategy-gaming friends I had recruited meanwhile). Even their Alliance right from the start of a game could not defeat the electric wrath of my caelian storm troops! Ascencion was mine...BUWARHAARHAAARHAAAAR!
PS: Nowadays, I do not like that bloody GUI of Dom2 anymore. I also play without music. However, sometimes I like to put on the Falsobodorne CDs that I now own and revel in the memory of that train ride through a dark rainy afternoon, where everything was flavor and not just stats and probabilities...