[Endoperez]

People here will probably tell you that the game is very addictive, and that it's well worth the price, and that the tutorial and GUI that has been improved from DomII will make the learning curve much smaller.


After quickly introducing the game to new players, I'll say that it takes a long time to learn the game. The first game or two is a game of armies, a game where you conquer independents, where your armies destroy other armies. Then you'll meet the AI, whose armies are often bigger than yours. You will hone your army management skills a bit, but will also learn to use some kind of magic to help your armies. Perhaps you summon some creatures to help there. Perhaps your mages accompany your armies to cast battle spells, or your mages protect your armies from whatever magic the AI brings to battle. Perhaps you take a blessing which gives your nations' sacred units an edge over the enemy.

If you want to play in multiplayer, you have to learn many things again. Armies can be good, but not good enough, because few mages and good spells can deal with big armies of normal units. Some strategies could still work, but those probably aren't the ones you used against the AI. Mages are good, and that makes research very important. You'll learn how to build utterly devastating combatants with the combination of different spells and items, and how to kill these monsters. I'm not sure what comes then, since I'm still in this phase. I've been playing from the days original Dominions, but only started following MP strategies with DomII, and didn't really try it myself before Dom3 had gone gold.

The game of armies is pretty simple. The game of demo magic without the big spells is manageable. The game of all paths and all school up to 9, where one must be ready to fight super-combatant pretender your opposition might have from turn 1, will take a long time.