Dominions 2 Demo Review

[Fyron]

So after having played the Dominions 2 demo...

The addition of some global report windows certainly help this game out a lot. So is the ability to disable those unnerving fade effects for when windows pop up and go away.

The game's interface is definitely better than Dominions 1. However, it is still fairly clunky. It took me nearly 5 minutes to figure out how to issue orders to my commanders (other than moving). Click on the displayed order to change it? Odd.

The game still lacks a display of the name of the nation that owns a territory when you select that territory. It is rather annoying to have to have to go to the scores window to match up the flag to the nation name. Plus, this is very non-intuitive. Adding the display of the nations' name to the territories they control will help a lot. So would an option to display the exact number of commanders and troops in every territory you control on the map, instead of just a box that varies in size. The box is nice, but the numbers would IMO be vastly superior for gauging your troop strengths nation-wide at a glance.

Friendly fire is far too much of a problem in this game. Half of my troop losses come from my own archers and mages missing their targets far too often. The game needs a strategy that makes archers stop firing on units that are in melee combat with your own melee units. The fire 3 rounds and flee option is not good for this purpose at all. Neither is combining it with the "hold 2 turns and attack" option you can give melee troops. That is just a clunky solution that does not work well. Mages miss way too often in this game. They need much higher precision scores. All of them. Unless right next to their targets, my mages tend to hit targets less than 20% of the time.

The automatic casting choices are a bit strange. My mages will sometimes cast low level weak damaging spells, rather than higher level ones that can do a lot more damage. Sometimes they make smart choices.

Storming castles is rather strange as well. I attacked Pangaea's castle with 10 commanders (some mages, some priests, some chiefs) and nearly 100 troops while playing as Machaka. I had 60 archer type units, the rest light infantry or spiders (the expensive ones). The enemy had 2 troops (a minotaur and a centaur) and 4 commanders. I lost 20 troops and 4 commanders, they lost 2 troops. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You'd think that repeated storms of arrows would do something to these guys, but apparently not.

The mountain citadel is 100% useles. It is the same as the dark citadel in every way, except that it has only 10 admin instead of 20.

The way some of these units have costs scaled is not very well designed. Often, there will be very small increases in a few stats over the cheaper troop, for 3x as much gold and 2x the resources. Balance and a sense of scale seem to be lacking. The game designers seemed to be far too concerned with having more types of units than necessary, while not paying enough attention to the purpose of all of the units, or the balance between them.

Battles tend to end after only killing a small amount of the enemy and then they just run away, even when they have roughly equatable forces. The morale system is more of a hindrance to this game than a benefit.

The loss of the ability in Dominions 1 to target enemy mages and/or enemy commanders specifically seems rather strange...

[edit]
Almost forgot... the game devs could have definitely chosen a better image pattern to make the basic game interface with. If you don't have an art budget, keep it simple.
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I shall delay my final judgement on the game until after reading some responses...

[ January 11, 2004, 23:27: Message edited by: Imperator Fyron ]