Dominions 3 is basic world view/belief system/religion/philosophy vs same. It's 2 gunfighters at high noon, and they both draw iron and one drops dead. That in and of itself precludes a lot of economic complexity if not city-building, because you can't easily establish trade between the witch-hunters and the witches. Their *are* ways to make the internal system more complex, probably without destroying any of the Dominions integrity, but as a game designer with lots and lots of experience designing games that don't get off the ground because they're more complex and interconnected than I can quite get my mind around so far, it's not easy. You'd be talking a game where "magic" levels and other factors affected the very world around you in prime ways, because everything except combat would have to come from your god and end with your god. There wouldn't be Pretender "nations" as such, because all nations would be independents that the Pretenders would influence about as much as Rome was influenced by Christianity. Dom 3 is very complex and very deep, and has the capacity, if taken to it's ultimate extreme, to be the equivalent of playing several dozen games of civilization at once, where the players in one game can fight the players in another game, where each nation got it's own highly specialized tech tree, where your Leader could be Jesus Christ, Adolf Hitler, or Shiva, destroyer of worlds, and where the special units numbered in the dozens per nation. Ofcourse, the tradeoff here is how much one wants to hassle the designers to get them to keep redesigning the basic elements of Dom 3. The greatest thing about Dom 3, for me anyway, is that it opens up so many possibilities, not only for what can be done in the game, but what can be done *with* the game. Other games are limited to a single reality. Dominions pits reality vs reality (or atleast perspective vs perspective). So yes, you can compare Civilization to Dom 3 in terms of gameplay and come up with some useful insights, but Dominions has it all over most other games when it comes to potential.
Ok, I'm not sure if this post is all that useful or not, but since potential-realized and otherwise, vs concreteness, is kindof the theme of my post, I'll let it stand.
