Dominions 3: The Awakening [PC]

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Dominions 3 isn't your typical strategy game. It's got a bare bones look and feel, like something that would have been perfectly comfortable running in DOS back in the 80s. And for better and worse, it bucks a lot of the trends in recent turn-based strategy games. But it's nevertheless a fun and compelling game that deserves its way onto any strategy gamer's hard drive.

Unlike most turn-based strategy games, there's almost no "butter" here in terms of the typical "guns or butter" management. You don't have any city building or imperial development. Cities sit in the background, and geography is little more than a stage. The stars, in fact pretty much the only actors here, are the armies. At its core, this is a game about gathering them up and moving them around a map. For this reason, Dominions 3 would sit comfortably under the classification of an old-school wargame.

There's also no real combat. You don't even fight the battles, which are waged by the AI between turns. You can watch replays of the battles, which is admittedly half the fun, but it's all after-the-fact. There is a fair bit of tactical management in how you arrange your armies, and you can even give limited orders if you want to be hands-on. But Dominions is almost entirely a game about managing your armies between battles.

This might sound dry, but it's not. The armies are made from, literally, hundreds of different units. Your choice among the nations, which are a strange and generous collection of the alien and the familiar, determines which armies you can build in your strongholds. On top of this, each province can recruit its own types of units. By the time you've gathered even a minimal empire, there are dozens of different units you can recruit. To move an army around, it needs a commander unit, which can either be a generic leader or a powerful hero. You can make magic items for your heroes, and many of them can cast spells that you've researched for them.

Besides the army management, the other major facets of Dominions are the magic and religion systems. Before a game, you create a divine leader who will have an effect on the provinces you control. This involves setting a series of scales for things like population growth, climate, and productivity. But your divine leader also has a "dominion" rating, which determines how much your divine influence spreads. Think of this as a matter of how well he can convert the locals. A big part of the game - and hence its name - is establishing dominion over territory, which is entirely independent from military control. This trade-off is a fascinating part of Dominions 3, almost like culture in Civilization III and IV.