[BigJMoney]

I'm sure in a patch there will be a return of the "hide researchers" hotkey, because showing the names of the nations with [tab] is redundant; the [8] key does the same thing!

As for the AI, I have not noticed any improvements other than the ability to build castles, however I have also not run across any really stupid spell-casting except with regards to astral mages and communion master/slave. That spell should be DISABLED for the AI, please. When a lone astral mage chooses to communion master or slave (let alone, both!), something in the algorithm is broken.

Manual is fantastic, even with quite a few typos.

Ages system is very cool, but I'm not sure what you think you're missing. The nations are very different from age to age. Just knowing that there are another ~50 nations out there that you haven't played yet should be enough knowledge that the game has an extreme shelf-life. The only exception I've run across is early and middle Mictlan who are copies of each other, except that middle age spreads dominion with temples and prophet like other nations. It's like someone ran out of ideas when working on Mictlan.

Why do you need to get your hands on all the new spells? I'm sure there are some new spells available in the demo. Just knowing that there are n more spells than in DomII is telling enough. If you want to use all the spells in the game....buy the game. I will tell you that I haven't noticed any revolutionary spells added, like what people saw between DomPPP and DomII. It seems mainly that summoning was made a lot more fun and unique depending on which nation you play, sans Broken and Ashen Empire who are just like before (if it ain't broke, don't fix it).

It's really inter-relationships between all of these nations (new content made this possible) in the ages that makes the game worth it. For example, you wouldn't notice from playing middle age right away that it's different from early age. However, once you get deeply into a game with a bunch of middle age opponents, it will feel very different in perspective. In this way, it is nothing like DomII. I would say it's like playing Axis & Allies on a new game board with different nations, but mostly the same rules (maybe a few streamlined updates across the board). If you liked DomII, you won't dislike Doms3. Maybe your expectations are just very high because of all the wish-list compiling you've done in the past. I've done a similar thing with other games, and it ruined those games for me.

=$= Big J Money =$=