Move Along, Nothing to See Here

[Fyron]

After having played the demo (edit: of Dominions 1! Oops! ) a bit...

Dominions is too complicated in areas that should be simple, and too simple in areas that should be complicated. The interface is one of the worst offenders. Most of the game's information is not presented in a very well designed manner. Too many times am I left wondering "what the hell just happened," "what the hell does this do?" or "how does this work?" There are no global reports to be found, at all. There is no way to tell a territory to repeatedly build some units. You have to click many many times to do so. I have no idea at all how the tax incomes are figured out, and there is nothing in the game to indicate how such is arrived. It seems loosely based on population, but that is obviously not all there is too it. I also have no idea why they seem to vary from turn to turn. The resources my territories have vary over time, for no reason that I can see. Often, I will have some territories that NEVER recruit any units, no matter how large of a gold surplus I have. And yes, they do have some resource production. A lot of the log Messages the game sends are lacking in useful information. There is no way I can figure out to match the name of a nation to its territory, flag, or anything it possesses. This is just poor game design. There should at the very least be a window you can access that displays all empire names next to their flags. Starting a new game just to figure out which empire is which is an absurd solution. Even with maximal useage of gold income and as much expansion as can be done, the AI still manages to ammass several times as many units as I ever can. Even when I manage to defeat their forces that are attacking me, they just bring in 2-3 times as many as they just lost, in the next turn or two. I am thinking it has hidden cheating bonuses to income and such so over used in games... The unrest level of territories doesn't seem to be very consistent. There are too many undefined options for the orders for your troops in combat. There is no simple indicator telling you whether you have troops in a territory or not on the map. There should also be a separate indicator telling you whether you have heroes or not there. I could go on, but I shall stop here. All in all, Dominions 1 come up lacking to me. It does have some nice ideas, but the game seems rather unsophisticated.

[ January 07, 2004, 03:09: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]