Sell me without saying "more"

[Saxon]

Dom III is deeper than Dom II. You have to think things through to a greater degree than before. I also held off buying for some time, but eventually did and have been very pleased.

The random map generators are very nice and you have new options regarding the setting of victory conditions. This allows you to customize how your game runs.

The pretender design function is also really, really nice. You can set up a pretender for a nation, then save it. This allows you to experiment and fiddle with your pretenders in a way you could not before.

The game has been finished to a higher polish than Dom II, the little touches are evident.

Finally, I will use the dreaded “more” word, as there is one area which you should consider. The three ages system and the large number of nations really does qualitatively change the way the game is experienced over time. It is not like some games where “more” means the same unit with a different graphic or “more” similar missions that have different names. These additional nations play differently and require you to truly adjust your mindset and approach.

[tibbs]

Stealth commanders are now represented with a triangle icon at the province they are at.

[Sombre]

tibbs said:
Stealth commanders are now represented with a triangle icon at the province they are at.

I've never noticed that.

[B0rsuk]

Nations are now quite a bit more diverse. For example instead of Sorcery/Elemental/Everything randoms you now have arbitrary random magic. In addition, all independent mages got nerfed, so your initial choice of nation matters much more.
Many nations now have nation-specific spells. Pythium and Marignon can summon angels, Mictlan got variety of crazy demon summons.

No nation/variant is now required to have specific scales. You don't have to take Turmoil as Spring&Autumn.

Random map generator creates very enjoyable maps, and they even look decent.

About 2x more gold and reasources = much bigger conventional armies. Magic research 2x harder.

AI now builds castles.

[Sombre]

Who could resist B0rsuk's badgery charm?

[Morkilus]

With NONE of the new nations, spells, and random stuff, I would still not go back to Dom2 after the improvements in this new version. Since it's a given that I play Dominions quite a bit, it's been the best computer game buy since... Dom2 for me.

Before 2004, it might have been Master of Orion 2, Master of Magic, or Warlords Battlecry 2. So you know where I'm coming from.

[llamabeast]

Re the "dead water" request - how about setting income, resources and magic sites for all water provinces to zero? Should be easy to do with map commands I think, and also I think it would be easy to write a script to automatically make the change to any map.

Of course, amphibious creatures could still walk across the sea floor, but that seems like it might be okay? If not, you could quite easily just mod out all the amphibious creatures. In fact, that would also be easy to do and even to automate, using Edi's excellent database.

Let me know if you'd like me to have a go at doing these things, it might be an interesting little thing to do. Not that I'd want dead seas myself.