How difficult is this game?

[Tichy]

There's also the active participation of the game developers on the forums, and continuing active development of the game in the form of relatively frequent free patches with new content, often incorporating features requested by players and modders.

SP can be challenging, but in different ways than MP. I can reliably beat Impossible now as long as I don't fall to an early AI rush. In SP on impossible you need to contend with the AI having orders of magnitude larger armies than you, but know that it doesn't effectively use the magic system or item crafting, and often makes mistakes in battlefield strategy.

In MP you have to contend with extremely talented players who will drop a house on you and your mom without trying...but then you can oftentimes diplomatically attach yourself to a different talented player and learn a lot about the strategy of the game by watching the titans battle each other.

[Fenris99]

Well, I picked up a copy.

[DonCorazon]

I can give you the noob perspective as I bought the game a couple months back. I consider based fantasy war/empire games by far my favorite genre, and while I missed Master of Magic, I have tried most everything else: HOMM, AoW, WarCraft and Warlords. None of those comes remotely close to capturing the “epic” nature of the genre the way Dominions does. The game plays out like a Steven Erikson novel and like Erikson, manages a subtle sense of humor. Its quite dangerous for your personal relationships, so make sure your significant other has something to occupy their time while you waste away the hours trying to figure out how to stop the Shinuyaman hordes from overrunning your Ulmish empire…

[LoloMo]

Dominions 3 is the best turn based strategy game I have ever played. And I don't think we have yet seen all that can be done with the "engine", which the patches are uncovering bit by bit. So Dom3 is the best turn based game I have ever played, and is still improving with every patch.

Oh, and I will also credit the decline of my fencing career to this game. I used to fence 4 hours a day 4 times a week before I met Dom3. Now I'll be lucky to get in a session once every other month. My gf might be next. Wahahaha

[Fenris99]

Hmm I just loaded it up and I don't know how to do anything. Obviously I need to read the manual first.

[Micah]

Check out the tutorial as well, though I would recommend reading the manual at some point as well. One caveat to that though, is that some things in the manual have changed since it was written (that's a nice way of saying that they're buggy). So take everything with a grain of salt and chalk it up to learning when you find something that diverges from the printed material, it'll save you some frustration to keep that in mind (speaking from personal experience here).

Some things off the top of my head:
Your rate of dominion spread does not increase with every 5 temples you build.
The morale system is (I'm pretty sure) much more complex than the rulebook explanation, you don't get random routing of elite units due to a bad morale roll. (Which I'm glad is the case)
Critical hits due to fatigue do not simply halve the protection value of the unit when they occur, the effect is much more severe in practice.

There's other stuff in there I'm sure, but that's a sampling. Don't mean to scare you off, as this is without the doubt the best money I've spent in my life on a game, just wanted to keep you from taking everything in the book as gospel.

[HotNifeThruButr]

The first... maybe five games that you try (yes TRY) to play will make you feel like you're on some kind of crazy pills.

Don't worry, everybody goes through this. The coolest part of this game is discovering what every nation has to offer, what every spell and summon does, and every item you can construct.

I advise just throwing away your manual (seriously. Who can even remember all that junk?) and going headfirst into the game.

[Wokeye]

Ummm is there a list of 'deviations from the manual' somewhere?

[Ironhawk]

Fenris99 said:
I've seen it being sold at a local game store.

Dom3 is sold in stores? I thought it was only available to order online?

[SlipperyJim]

Yeah, just play through the tutorial. Then stick to Early Age for your first few games. Middle Age and Late Age games are slightly more complicated due to some ... unique ... nations with hostile dominion effects.

I have to agree with HotNife: Your first few games will probably be overwhelmingly complicated. Don't worry about it. Dom3 has a steep learning curve, but that learning curve is a direct result of the unbelievable amount of STUFF in the game. Once you start to get the hang of it, everything will start to make sense.

As soon as you've exhausted the "vanilla" races and gameplay (which will be a few years from now), then hop over to the "Scenarios, Maps and Mods" subforum to download some user-created content.