[Micah]

I'm not so sure I agree with your basic premise...A game can have a lot of depth in terms of successfully managing resources, as opposed to selecting which resources to pursue.

For example, I don't think that anyone would say that Warcraft is a broken game because it forces you to buy harvester units to go gather gold and lumber. It's a mandatory strategy, but there's plenty of wiggle room to decide how much investment you put into your harvesters vs your offense vs your defense vs your tech-tree development. All of these elements are essential to almost any strategy in the game of Warcraft.

In Dominions the late game will sooner or later converge on tartarians, but you can determine their research priority and how many gems to devote to them versus other uses of D gems. Most successful late-game strategies will include at least SOME usage of tartarians, but th exact proportions are left up to the player. They're kind of the cap-stone of the Dominions "tech tree" since they require a bunch of research in different paths to summon in appreciable quantities (Normally conj 9 to cast them, cons 6 for boosters, enchant 8 for liches and thaum 5 to cast Gift of Reason.) Since they're the top unit it does kind of make sense that they appear in the end game.

Hopefully this helps...If you want to narrow down your question some more I might be able to address it a bit better. =)