Answering the Critics

[Mortibus]

I don't really "get" the complexity of the Dominions magic system yet, I'm still learning it. It's the most complex magic system in a strategy game I've seen.

As to the graphics complaints, I think Dominions would do well do just ditch them completely and go boardgame. I'd rather read a more extensive report and dodge the battle graphics, using simple army and character counters.

More detail and complexity and less graphics would be fine by me.

[alexti]

A lot of good reasoning was posted here, but my observation about people complaining about Dominions bot being "deep" is really about its "shallow" micromanagement. For example, to control research, Dom has just on/off switch for every mage. Compare it to something like Civ system when you can move the worked tiles around, tweak research rates, set specialists etc... Other areas (and in other games as well) are set up similarly. There is many more opportunity to achieve more or less the same goal objective by doing wide variety of clicks. For example, Dominions could have set up magic gem collection in a similar style: Let's consider the following model: each magic site needs to be worked to collect gems. For that we would need special cheap worker unit. It would be possible to let a real mage to work the site which would yield small bonus (let's say 3% per corresponding magic level). Then the mage proficient in another path could have collected gems of that type (with some conversion penalty of course). I don't think such scheme would change the game significantly, but now everybody would have tons of option to setup the most efficient gem collection (that would need to change every turn, of course).