I'm evaluating to buy Dom3

[Loren]

Quit evaluating. Buy. It's worth it even in single player mode.

[Tuidjy]

I would call the AI 'decent' at best. But place yourself in the middle of
six aggressive, impossible AIs, and you will have a good game even if you
use every dirty trick in the book. And trust me on that one, after you
play the AI for a month or two, you will adventure on-line, and there
you will be lost forever... MUHAHAHA! ahem.

By the way, Dominions II was the second game that I played on-line. The first
one was Dark Reign, a looooong time ago. I considered myself a single player
before I picked up Dominions II, and ended up playing it for an year or so
to the exclusion of everything else... until I left when the player from whom I
learned the most turned out to be cheating.

[SafeKeeper]

MP is the way to go, unless you get one of those pesky players who so need to win that they resort to dirty tricks, cheating, lying, semi-lying, and so on.

[StrictlyRockers]

This is the best turn-based MP game out right now. It is possibly the best strategy game, period.

[Gandalf Parker]

Luckily its also a great game for those who dont find MP enthralling. Otherwise it would be another of those games that turned me off because any question about one thing important to me (ai) got me a rash of answers about something else (MP).

[PvK]

AI isn't brilliant but I find it plenty fun to play against (after years of playing the previous versions of Dominions, too), and challenging with the right settings. I think it mainly disappoints players who for some reason want to be impressed with its intelligence even after analyzing what it does. I'm actually pretty impressed with how well the AI plays, considering how complex the game is! Certainly it does some dumb things and could in theory be improved in many ways. I just make the scenario as challenging as I want it and then apply a little imagination and suspension of disbelief, and I have great fun playing against the AI, especially from a roleplaying perspective rather than a chess-like analytical problem-solving perspective.

PvK

[Gandalf Parker]

Most of the problems with the AI seem to be its linear code. Its basically one AI for all of the nations with very few "if" routines slowing it down checking for every unique nation situation. Most of the "better AI" games are ones where all of the nations are basically the same wearing different colors.

Improving the AI in Dom3 would be very difficult without going external with lots of hooks written into the code, or writing a complete AI for each nation plus various subthemes. Maybe Dom4

[Sombre]

One thing to remember is that there are a lot of mods already for Doms3 and more around the corner. These add new spells, units, nations etc to the already massive lineup.

From what I understand MP dominions is not something that you're likely to get tired of and with all the original content and mods it's unlikely that the game will get stale for you any time. In my opinion if you're getting it purely for SP then you have to consider how much value you're going to be able to get out of it. You can certainly create a more challenging game by giving the AI more resources, having maps where they're allied, giving them overpowered mod nations etc, but you're still not going to have the fun of a human player using a trick like stealthy troops or coordinated overland spells on you.

This is true of many games, although Dom3 is missing a big SP feature in that there's no 'campaign' structure to play through.

It's an expensive game, so read the reviews and play the demo first. But you knew that.