compaired to SEIV

[Emperor Fritsch the Dense]

how does this game compair? i love SEIV for its replay value. This game on par?
Emperor Fritsch the Senseless

[Gandalf Parker]

Seems to be so far. I know, you already have my opinion multiple times over in the SEIV area but I thought Id post this anyway.

I went the other direction (dom2 to seiv) and feel they are similar in that respect. I played Dom1 for years, been playing Dom2 for years. 17 nations that are all very unique in their abilities with many variables to personalize them further for your own method of play. Support for many different styles of play (armored buildup, swarming, defensive, stealth, etc etc).

Not so much range on player controlled variables when you make your nation. But the base-nations being more individually unique gives you equal overall territory to explore different settings IMHO. The modded nation add-ons are there also though I havent felt a real NEED to extend that way.

Oh yeah, and adding the 3rd party random map generator has helped also. Definetly anoher of those "well worth the cost because it lives on my machine forever" games.

[deccan]

Hmm, interesting...

Yes, I'd say that this game has plenty of replay value. However, SEIV has far more modability than Dom2, so likely SEIV has more long run replayability.

I find that Dom2 plays faster (though this impression is likely exarcebated by the fact that currently I only play SEIV Proportions). For reference, turn 50 is considered late game, while in SEIV it's likely when things actually get moving. An SEIV game takes months at least and likely a big game with lots of players can take over a year to complete. My experience with Dom2 is that a typical, not too big game, takes just over a month to complete, while a really big one might still take less than three months or so.

Dom2 is a game of hard counters, which is also unlike SEIV. In SEIV, if you have a big enough fleet, you can beat anything, even something your fleet is not optimized to defeat. It might not be efficient, but it's doable. In Dom2, there are situations in which a single super combatant can defeat a conventional army regardless of size. This can be a very frustrating experience.

In stock SEIV, races end up looking more or less similar to one another because certain race picks are better than others (berzerker trait, reduced maintenance, advanced storage techniques). Except for racial techs (but those show up relatively rarely), anyone can research and build anything in SEIV. In Dom2, the choice of nation restricts your development path a lot more.

In SEIV, static defenses (minefields, satellites, weapon platforms, bases etc.) can be quite potent. In Dom2, static defenses (provincial defense, fort arrows) suck, so people go to war far more readily than in SEIV and provinces change hands very quickly and very often. Real battles in SEIV tend to be few and very decisive between large fleets due to the chokepoint effect of warp points. In Dom2, battles are very frequent and can happen all over the place. In SEIV, backwater planets are usually safe and there is a definite "front" in a war, but because of the extreme mobility of forces in late game Dom2 and the widespread availability of distant-attack spells, no province is safe. This is something that some types of players hate I think.

The focus of Dom2 is more on combat, while in SEIV, the focus is more on developing your economy and infrastructure. In Dom2, there is no option to improve a province, except for building a fort / temple / lab in it. In SEIV, you can choose to build specific facility types on a planet, and continually upgrade the quality of those facilities over the course of the game.

The micromanagement for Dom2 is better than SEIV, though SEIV has better tools for handling them (SEIV's lists are sortable by column, unlike Dom2, and Dom2 doesn't even allow waypoint movement so you can forget where you were planning to send an army). In Dom2, you might need to ferry about magical items and gems, but this is still a lot less than worrying about resupplying ships, building / deploying specialized transports for mines, fighters, troops, satellites, ferrying the different population types to the most suitable planets for them etc.

The diplomacy system for Dom2 is quite poor. You can't sign a non-agression treaty with anyone. If two armies occupy the same province (unless one is stealthed of course), they fight and that's it. Naturally, no trade treaties either.

Luck has a bigger effect in Dom2 and in SEIV, IMHO. SEIV is more like a chess game, with chance and randomness reduced to a minimum (and many players reduce it even more with symetrical maps that have fixed starting positions). In Dom2, a single die roll can totally change the course of a battle and starting next to the wrong nation and totally screw a player's ability to win the game.

And finally, the world in Dom2 is entropic. In SEIV, as the game progresses, planets get more and more populous, new planets come into being etc. Sure, people glass planets and blow away entire star systems, but they can still recycle them to productive use. In Dom2, at the end of the game, the world is likely a bLasted wasteland.

Overall, I like Dom2 a lot, despite its many many faults, and I think it clearly deserves the title of best fantasy strategy game in the market. It's very different from SEIV though.

Hope this helps. Everything is IMHO of course. I'd like to see what other SEIV players think.

[Crash]

By replay value, if you mean single player, then I think it has more replay value. Multi is probably about the same.

Check out the Demo, if you like it get this game for your fantasy fix and use SE for your sci-fi fix.

In my opinion, this game was 50 bucks well spent. Of course, so was SE.

About long run replayability... since both Dominions and SE are coming out with another incarnation next year, I wouldn't worry so much about that. The important thing, IMO, is that both games have a fan/modder base that has already made some mods that you can use if you think the game as sold is lacking something.

[Rasorow]

I have played all the SE Versions on only (several months ago) picked up Dom 2. My observations are...

Dom2 has alot of replay due to the number of nations and pretenders that can be created

high level of fustration because of the higher learning curve (though keep in mind I played SE since SE II was first released so this is probably not valid)

Is very deep due to the number of magic artifacts, promotable chars, magic spells

Fickle - luck has a large part of this - Like someone said a supercombant pretender can own the board with no other army . This can be fustrating because the piece can become so powerful that other pieces cannot effect it. (This happened to me a number of time) where in SEIV the smaller ships (destroyers, cruisers, frigates even) still can play a role (though this gets debated regularly).

Having said all that - I am in turn 127 on my Dom2 game number 12 and control half the board while 2 other AI opponents control the rest

Paul

[Taqwus]

I played SE IV (original Version, not Gold). I find that quite different from Dom II. For instance...

...SE IV has a much more detailed economic/industrial model. Worlds have facilities, and certain technologies let you get FAR more out of them than you would otherwise (Atmosphere Converters, System Computers come to mind) so there's much more to optimize. In addition, building it all up is expensive, so the loss of a world can be quite a setback -- especially if the attacker decides to turn a highly-developed world into an asteroid field. There's more micromanagement because of the level of detail. Dom II has far less building (every province can have a temple, lab, castle; and tax rate can be set. That's it) and tends towards global population -decline- (slow growth rate, random events that cause pop decline, spells that kill pop, sacrifice of pop, dominions that kill pop).

Individual units in SE IV are far more robust than Dom II. Many units in Dom II can be reasonably expected to die in mass, and can often be replenished very quickly. The use of magical transport means that reinforcements can be moved up pretty rapidly. Conversely, SE IV ships operate on a comparatively larger map, in fewer numbers, with slower reinforcement (and while warp-point generators are possible, they're expensive and rather advanced tech) so there's a greater need to keep them intact. Repair ships become quite important, and supply is critical; in Dom II, being out of supply means a risk of starvation, while in SE IV being out of supply prevents movement and firing.

SE IV has a greater transition between a decent possibility of turtling (minefields, weapons platforms, combat satellites, choke points; compare to weak Dom II province defense) to the eventual Hammer of God technology (ability to generate own warp links giving insane mobility past even deep defenses, ability to detonate stars wiping out all ships and planets in the system, ability to smash planets) which guarantees that stalemates are remarkably unlikely to be permanent. Dom II tends to reward offense and growth, but it's harder to pull off the extreme scorched-worlds policy that SE IV lets you eventually do. A raid can smash a temple if there's no castle protecting it, but to ruin a province takes more doing, while the destruction of an entire star system and the sixteen worlds that you meticulously constructed out of asteroids can eventually be done with alarming speed.

SE IV has no equivalent to the concept of Dominion; possession is everything. In Dom II, you have to worry about religious influences, in that even conquest of a province doesn't mean you've changed its belief system. And if your pretender is no longer worshipped anywhere, you die, regardless of how powerful your armies are.

Dom II magical sites can make certain provinces more valuable than others, and there's a heavy element of luck in this. A site that makes blood magic 40% cheaper to use, for instance, makes that province VERY valuable for certain nations. Choke points are relatively few in most maps, and it's easier to bypass them (flight, magic, stealthy armies) than in SE IV (until very late in SE IV).

Dom II races tend to differ more, with different selections of national units. OTOH, they're less customizable, which means that they may be more predictable. SE IV races generally have a broader range of possibilities (access to a large variety of technologies, including the special tech trees you pay points for) and can therefore use a wider range of unit classes (carriers, mine ships, biowarfare ships, capture ships, missile ships, heavy-beam ships {heavy beams firing occasionally}, fast-beam ships {lighter beams fire every turn}, dedicated PD ships, planetary assault {speed, shields, bombs, cargo space for troops}, warp-link ships, planet-smashers, star-smashers, recon ships/satellites, killer satellites, supply ships, repair/construction ships, etc) which leads to less potential predictability. If you research it, you can try to build it, whereas in Dom II in any one game you'll probably research many spells that it's not practical that you'll ever use because of a lack of mages strong in the relevant prerequisites. You don't expect Abysia to slam you with lots of lightning/air spells, for instance, nor for Ulm to make heavy use of death magic, or Atlantis to rain Flames from the Sky upon you.

Dom II has far more limited in-built diplomacy. AIs don't trade, for instance, or warn you away from border provinces, or make treaties. However, in MP, the relative difficulty of defending it all (weak defenses, difficulty countering all likely attack forms everywhere) and the general specialization of national mages (making it harder for one side to build all the items that would be useful for it) encourage diplomacy among humans. Treaties/NAPs make sense, as does item trading.

[deccan]

Taqwus said:
SE IV has a greater transition between a decent possibility of turtling (minefields, weapons platforms, combat satellites, choke points; compare to weak Dom II province defense) to the eventual Hammer of God technology (ability to generate own warp links giving insane mobility past even deep defenses, ability to detonate stars wiping out all ships and planets in the system, ability to smash planets) which guarantees that stalemates are remarkably unlikely to be permanent.

There are system gravitational shields, no? So you can turtle indefinitely if you want.

[Taqwus]

Hm, were there? Don't recall that facility; maybe it was added in the expansion pack or a more recent patch.

There was an exploit in which one could theoretically have a disconnected component of systems, each of which had the maximum number of warp links to each other however. Took a bit of work to do, but it was the only way to be espionage-proof even against concerted attack, IIRC. Of course, at that point you couldn't expand, either. Wonder if it was ever fixed.

[PvK]

System grav shields were in the original game, though they don't always come into play.

I think both SE IV Gold and Dominions II are great games, with different strengths, of course. Not everyone loves both, for their own reasons in each case, but they're both great games with years of replay value, at least for me.

PvK