Okay, let me pitch Dominions 5 to you

[Vitruviansquid]

"What is the Dominions series?"

Dominions is a series of grand strategy games where you play as competing Pretender Gods trying to become the ultimate supergod. To do this, you take control of a nation of more or less fantasy dudes and attempt to conquer the world. You can build a giant army, take over territory, build infrastructure (on a very basic level), and fight each other in a turn-based, hands-off, grand strategy way. While there are AIs and you could technically play this game by yourself, the AIs are not very strong or fun to play against. The reason for that is because the major and most fun mechanic of this game is an insanely massive and complex magic system. You will use all sorts of wizards to research and cast all sorts of spells, forge all sorts of magic items, and summon all sorts of creatures. Games will usually be won or lost based on how you exploit the magic system, which unfortunately the AI has never been good at handling.

"Why pitch Dominions at us?"

Dominions has always been the kind of game that is difficult to find, not to mention play. It has a steep learning curve, isn't a very pretty game, and although it's on Steam now, it's usually been distributed through some lesser known channels. I remember buying Dominions 2 by mailing a check. As a result, Dominions can be kind of intimidating to play multiplayer; the game is extremely deep, and it feels like every other player has been playing for forever. But now is a pretty good time to get into it. The release of Dominions 5 is liable to shake things up as a whole new iteration of the games, with brand new mechanics and changes. I fully expect more experienced players will have a massive advantage off the bat, but a bit less so than jumping into an older Dominions game. And, now that Dominions is releasing on a more mainstream platform, perhaps there will also be a larger base of newbies to the series that you could learn alongside.

I'd also expect GITP to make a pretty good Dominions community. We are gamers, we have a forum (with private messaging) to organize and discuss the games. So. Who's interested in starting a Dominions enclave on GITP?

Spoiler: Players for Dominions in the Playground

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People who are interested in Dominions in the Playground:

Manticoran - Mentor
deuterio12 - Mentor
Knaight - Mentor
Sen isSaqqara - Mentor. Is willing to help us run a dedicated server!
Hicks - Mentor

Olinser - Mentee
Nadevoc - Mentee
Ionbound - Mentee
Vitruviansquid - Mentee
Otomodachi - Mentee

The Hellbug - ?
Thrantar - ?

Currently looking to start the game on Jan 2.

Spoiler: First game roster and nations

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Glimbur/Olinser: Caelum and Jotunheim
Vitruviansquid/Sen isSaqqara: Vanheim and Ulm
Thrantar/Hellbug: Pangaea and Abysia
Ionbound/Knaight: Marignon and Pythium
Nadevoc/deuterio12: Ys and Agartha

Spoiler: Game 2 roster

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Team 1: Olinser, Knaight, deuterio12, lord_khaine

Team 2: Grif, The Hellbug, houlio, , Thrantar

[Driderman]

I tried to get into Dominions 4 but it never really worked for me, so I'm looking forward to seeing how Dominions 5 works out and will probably be up for giving it a shot

[Knaight]

I'd give it a bit of time before getting it - a few early patches can really help, particularly given how often these patches work out to borderline free expansion packs.

Also good riddance to some of those lesser known channels. Shrapnel Games and their insistence on keeping the $60 price point indefinitely was a load of nonsense.

[deuterio12]

You're seriously underselling the basic troops side. There's hundreds of units with lots of stats and actual individual equipment (including now shields that can break during combat if they take too much damage) and not only gain exp but can also gain permanent afflictions from wounds. There's giants and bat-people and lychantropes and deep ones and monkeys and demons and all kinds of exotic cavalry and placing them in the correct formation will win or lose battles, in particular in Dominions 4 where magic was reigned back quite a lot.

Then there's the strategic map where turns are resolved simultaenously so if you want to hit the enemy army you need to take in account where they will be moving next, not where they are now. And armies of fliers can fly and stealthy commanders with stealthy units can move unseen on the strategic map until they punch you out of nowhere or you find them with patrollers and then there's stealthy flying armies oh my.

And also the infamous Bless system, where each nation has "sacred" units that can gain extra buffs with the basic blessing spell if you invest the points during your pretender creation. Before those bonus were fixed by type of magic, but Dominions 5 greaty expands by allowing different options per type of magic plus some super effects that are only active if your pretender is actually active (instead of taking a nap or dead). With some nations is perfectly viable to go "screw mages" and just spam sacred units with a super bless and go all khorne in your enemies.

Sadly there's just no denying the very steep learning curve, between needing to keep in mind all the options while in late game you need to macro dozens of provinces and script your armies mage by mage, formation by formation. and since the most popular MP mode is ffa, it also means great risk you're ganked and/or other player tries to take you down with them out of spite. Doubly so if you don't dedicate great effort to diplomacy effort with the other players through PMs and whatnot, which can easily be more time-consuming than actually macroing your nation.

[Kaptin Keen]

.. deep ones ..

Frankly any game without deep ones is doing it wrong.

[deuterio12]

Another nice thing about Dominions is that it actually has quite a bit of underwater nations, including not-aboleths and not-mind flayers. Except in the last age in which not-mind flayers succeeded in giving maddenning dreams to everybody else underwater reducing every other sea faction to broken slaves, but several Atlanteans manage to run away to a colony on land besides other races taking atlatean refugees.

And if land Atlantis returns to the seas, they actually find a deep one resistance movement!

Spoiler

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Mother Hydra, the Once and Future Queen, is the last remaining Basalt Queen. She has slept for millennia under the pale light of a crystal shard. Recently her slumber was disturbed by eerie dreams. Rudely awakened, she emerged from her millennial slumber, never to sleep again. Mother Hydra is now traveling from ruin to ruin gathering her flock and teaching them how to resist the urge to sleep. With the sudden arrival of the Atlantians of the Forsaken Coast, her power and teaching has become instrumental in the conquest of the dream-ridden seas. Mother Hydra has slept for a thousand years. She need not sleep anymore. Her sleep under the crystal shard has prepared her for the dream war and she will not let herself be dominated by dreams or magical coercion.

Which is pretty damn awesome, but again creates its host of unique problems. First you need to make sure the map you're playing has the right number of water provinces for the number of underwater players, and even then most land nations have no way to attack underwater until mid-late game, and even then it's rarely worth the trouble (except if you're late Atlantis versus late not-mind-flayers in which case all your troops are good anphibians with greatmagic resistance tailor-made to fight the not-mind-flayers, but that just means Atlanteans take over the sea late age).

[Eldan]

Wow, didn't 4 just come out?

Also, is there much new this time? I felt at the time that buying 4 over 3 really wasn't worth it as it felt like a large patch, not a new game.

[deuterio12]

I would say the greatly improved UI alone was well worth Dominions 4.

There's a lot more mechanics overhaul this time:
-Combat is real time with everybody taking actions simultaneously. Spells take some time to cast and be disrupted if mage takes damage. Fliers need to spend some time flying up before they can drop to attack. All of this should help reduce the "1st turn alpha strike" problem of late game.
-Map movement also overhauled, now you can attack non-adjacent provinces with non-fliers if you have enough movement, snow from cold slows down most forces.
-New resource of "recruitment points", comes in troop and commander version. As resources each province has their own that renew every turn and don't accumulate. A fort can amplify recruitment points, but not to draw from surrounding provinces like resources. Scouts and non-mage commanders cost only 1 commander recruitment point while mages cost 2-4 so you can now buy multiple smaller commanders in a single turn instead of a big one.
-Forts always start at pallisade, and then you can upgrade them to bigger tiers by paying more. Main advantage now is extra recruitment points.
-Scales overhauled, Order now mainly grants extra troop recruitment points
-Yomi overhauled, oni are now freespawn, end of culture is a global that increases it.
-Immortality now comes in different flavors, several of which work outside of dominion, but have varying "delays", aka instead of getting the unit back right next turn, you'll need to wait several turns.
-Fatigue crits now only ignore 1/4 armor, making armor more valuable.
-New repel mechanics.
-Shields can break from big damage.
-Elemental resistance changed so that immunity is harder to achieve. Like c'tis can't just cast foul vapors and be immune to it anymore.
-Already mentioned, blesses are now build-it-yourself. Like where before Nature only granted extra HP and then some regen, now you can pick between regen, poison resistance, forest walk, recuperation and whatnot. Astral can give magic weapons or etherealness besides magic resistance. The best blesses are only active if your pretender is actually in the field.
-Holy spells also gain benefits from your bless, like Smite dealing elemental damage.
-Other stuff I can't remember/missed from the previews.

[Strigon]

Why is it that whenever I resolve to save my money, a new full-sized game comes out that I must get?

Well, it's because I have poor self-control regarding finances, and it's liable to get me into trouble one day, obviously. But this one's on you OP!

[Ionbound]

I'd be down for giving D5 a shot. I enjoyed D4 but I was never particularly good at it.

[Knaight]

I'd be down for giving D5 a shot. I enjoyed D4 but I was never particularly good at it.

The learning curve is long and full of overhangs - and as someone who put a lot of time in D3, I can say that I still couldn't keep up with the ridiculous shenanigans of competitive multiplayer.

[Cikomyr]

I always felt like I want to like that game, but i am always hit in the face by the level of complexity involved in the game. And the metagame.

[Ionbound]

Okay, let me pitch an idea here. First, we start a GitP Dominions Discord. Secondly, people get paired up so that new players can jointly run a nation with an experienced player in the first game or two as a kind of mentoring thing. How does that sound?

[Vitruviansquid]

Man, I've been trying to get Vanarus off the ground in these AI games, and both times I've run into AI Man or Eriu, and they always have amphipteres that just eat my mages alive.

If only there was a place I could get game advice...

Okay, let me pitch an idea here. First, we start a GitP Dominions Discord. Secondly, people get paired up so that new players can jointly run a nation with an experienced player in the first game or two as a kind of mentoring thing. How does that sound?

... oh.

Well then.

That sounds great.

[Knaight]

Man, I've been trying to get Vanarus off the ground in these AI games, and both times I've run into AI Man or Eriu, and they always have amphipteres that just eat my mages alive.

The thing about attack-rear scripting is that it's easily spoofed by putting a blob of durable* minions behind your valuable mages.

*For their price point; there are some counterintuitive competitive picks for this role, such as markata.

[Cespenar]

Okay, I got two things to ask here.

-Have they improved the UI?
-Are the tooltips actually helpful?

I had tried and couldn't get into Dominions 3 because of those two questions, so, here you go.

[Glimbur]

Okay, I got two things to ask here.

-Have they improved the UI?
-Are the tooltips actually helpful?

I had tried and couldn't get into Dominions 3 because of those two questions, so, here you go.

Dominions 4 (and then 5) have several quality of life improvements. The UI isn't hugely different, but for example you can see the paths a mage has from the main screen, rather than needing to right click on them to get more details. There's also something about multi-turn pathing now, but to be honest I haven't looked into it at all. Lots of other balance-type changes, fortifications take more than a month to build and they revamped the bless system. I liked Dominions 3, I liked Dominions 4 more, and I think I will like 5 even more.

I think the tool tips are pretty good, the '?' button gets you a lot of useful hotkeys.

Check out a game play video and see if it looks workable. In general, if you liked Dominions 3 you will probably like 5. There is a lot of depth to it, some people like it some don't. And game balance is... enforced by people ganging up on whichever nations are believed to be strongest, which does not always work.

Also, were I not already in another game I'd be up for teaching someone in a disciples game. Try me in a month or two? Depends if I stumble into another game after this one.

[Knaight]

Dominions 4 (and then 5) have several quality of life improvements. The UI isn't hugely different, but for example you can see the paths a mage has from the main screen, rather than needing to right click on them to get more details. There's also something about multi-turn pathing now, but to be honest I haven't looked into it at all. Lots of other balance-type changes, fortifications take more than a month to build and they revamped the bless system. I liked Dominions 3, I liked Dominions 4 more, and I think I will like 5 even more.

My favorite change in Dominions 4 was the battle screen - they actually tell you what troops were on each side, you can look at them without viewing battles, and you can look at troop specific losses without watching the battle and counting. It's a huge improvement.

[Manticoran]

Okay, let me pitch an idea here. First, we start a GitP Dominions Discord. Secondly, people get paired up so that new players can jointly run a nation with an experienced player in the first game or two as a kind of mentoring thing. How does that sound?

I'd be up for this. I have ~1400 hours in Dom4, and am racking up hours in Dom5 already, so I'd be happy to talk anyone through... Just about anything to do with the game. I'm also one of those crazy people who got good enough to not just play, but also win, giant multiplayer Dominions 4 games. >.>

[Olinser]

I played a decent bit, but the main thing about Dominions 4 that always bugged me was just the total lack of your ability to affect a battle once it started. I understand its not a RTS game, but a complete lack of ability to affect the outcome once a battle starts just bugs me in any game.

[Vitruviansquid]

There is a weird property with this game where, if I'm sitting down to just look at the spells and see what's out there, it feels like every element is powerful and every school of magic is great and there are so many things I could use so many mages for.

Then when I start up a game, like with Vanarus, I'm just staring at the mages and spell research screen going, "wow... I can't find anything helpful here."

What would I want to do with some of these mages that have many low paths like Vyedun and Vyedna? What do I do with the mages of MA Man? What are some common power spells that I should be researching or expecting from opponents in games?

At this point, I think it might be helpful to keep a running list of which players would want to be mentors and mentees, as it looks like the thread is picking up steam. I will be starting this list when I get home from work today. How many players do we reckon it would take to have our first game in the playground?

[lord_khaine]

I'd be up for this. I have ~1400 hours in Dom4, and am racking up hours in Dom5 already, so I'd be happy to talk anyone through... Just about anything to do with the game. I'm also one of those crazy people who got good enough to not just play, but also win, giant multiplayer Dominions 4 games. >.>

Wow.. that has my respect.. i just barely manages to win against Mighty Ai's. But i do kinda know that a lot of my favorite tricks, like sending in the hero army, is countered a lot easier by a human.

[Vitruviansquid]

I have started a list via edit of the first post for players interested in a Dominions game.

I only really want to include Manticoran and myself, as these are the latest posts that mention interest in an actual game, although I'd probably safely be able to assume Ionbound wants in as well, having made the original suggestion of organizing a game.

Still, I don't want to volunteer people who have not recently and explicitly decided to join, so if you want in, please post. I'll also want to know if you want to act as a mentor or mentee.

[Olinser]

I have started a list via edit of the first post for players interested in a Dominions game.

I only really want to include Manticoran and myself, as these are the latest posts that mention interest in an actual game, although I'd probably safely be able to assume Ionbound wants in as well, having made the original suggestion of organizing a game.

Still, I don't want to volunteer people who have not recently and explicitly decided to join, so if you want in, please post. I'll also want to know if you want to act as a mentor or mentee.

I mean i'd be down for a couple games, although I have a really weird schedule because I work swing shift from 2-11 PM Pacific time, so that may be tough to coordinate.

[deuterio12]

Wow.. that has my respect.. i just barely manages to win against Mighty Ai's. But i do kinda know that a lot of my favorite tricks, like sending in the hero army, is countered a lot easier by a human.

The AI may not be the best to practice long term since they're immune to diplomacy but get extra gold/resources, so at the end of the day they're quite a different challenge from human players. As in they can afford to rush you with bigger numbers and try to drag you down with sheer attriction while in mp your opponents will have an harder time recovering from mistakes, or afford to pay you attention if you attack them while they're busy with somebody else.

I strongly recommend joining a mp dominions game even if you don't feel that confident. There's often newbie games starting where everybody is learning the first steps. Even if you end up curbstomped you will get valuable experience. Make sure to spam scouts to watch what other players are doing if nothing else. Ally with somebody who seems to know what they're doing and gank somebody else. You'll probably end backstabbed, but will still learn. And with some luck you may manage to backstab them first! Also helps if you use simpler nations so there's less chance of tripping over yourself. For me I managed to win my 3rd mp dom4 game as MA Ulm with an awake dragon expander.

EDIT: Heck, if somebody here wants wants to try out mp, I'm also volunteering to teach to play with them and go easy.

[Sen isSaqqara]

Okay, let me pitch an idea here. First, we start a GitP Dominions Discord. Secondly, people get paired up so that new players can jointly run a nation with an experienced player in the first game or two as a kind of mentoring thing. How does that sound?

I'd be up for this. I have ~1400 hours in Dom4, and am racking up hours in Dom5 already, so I'd be happy to talk anyone through... Just about anything to do with the game. I'm also one of those crazy people who got good enough to not just play, but also win, giant multiplayer Dominions 4 games. >.>

I have started a list via edit of the first post for players interested in a Dominions game.

I only really want to include Manticoran and myself, as these are the latest posts that mention interest in an actual game, although I'd probably safely be able to assume Ionbound wants in as well, having made the original suggestion of organizing a game.

Still, I don't want to volunteer people who have not recently and explicitly decided to join, so if you want in, please post. I'll also want to know if you want to act as a mentor or mentee.

I'm definitely down. Exams just finished up for me and I'm rearin' to play some dom. I've played eons of dom3, so I can go in the 'experienced player' category. We aiming for a disciples game or something to do the pairing between experienced and inexperienced players?

[Knaight]

I'm provisionally in, and also done with finals - although my work schedule is a bit all over the place, and I'm going to be swamped for another couple of weeks.

EDIT: I lost hard when trying high level competitive multiplayer, but I've put a decent amount of time into the series and am fairly familiar with Dominons 3.

[Ionbound]

Definitely interested in a game as a mentee. I played a little Dominions 4, and really enjoyed it.

[Nadevoc]

I've heard good things about the series for a few years now; this seems like a good time to try it out.

I'd be interested in an MP game. Since it's a 4x, is multiplayer done in a 'play by email' style? What's the time commitment?

[Otomodachi]

I am recently and explicitly volunteering. :P

Here's the thing though... I've been playing since Dom3, I've probably got a total hours logged in the vicinity of Manticoran.... but I've literally never played an MP game. So I don't know how useful I'd be as a mentor, but I don't think I need a mentor as much as more raw players, like, I'm sure there's stuff I could learn but it'd be a lot more incremental than it'd be for a newer player.

But yeah, I'm in, I wanna dive into the world of MP.

EDIT: On second thought, I guess I do have SOME things to offer as a mentor. I really DO know how the game works, so I guess there's WORSE people you could pair with a really new person. I just have no idea how MP really works out in practice.