Review: Dominions 5
Dominions 5 puts you in the shoes of a god. Well… not quite, but you do have divine aspirations. You see, in Dominions, the real god — the capital S, capital B, Supreme Being — has not been showing up for work. After a week moving paper around, trying to look busy in case it’s all a test, and with no explanation forthcoming, his underlings are wondering who should take over.
Unfortunately, we’re talking powerful wizards, giant titans and many-headed monstrosities chained up in the basement here. They’re not going to sort this out in a calm and rational manner over coffee, no. They’re going to go out, find their own nations of loyal followers and have an enormous war. Welcome to the Thunderdome.
Every Dominions match starts out the same way. You pick from a roster of 80 different nations and then select a suitable deity to be their champion. You could play as a terrifying manticore, strong in necromantic magic, ruling your subjects through fear. Or perhaps you’d prefer to be a benevolent terrifying manticore, whose domain is imbued with order and prosperity. Or maybe you’re not a manticore at all; maybe you’re an inanimate golden cow.
As well as giant monsters and holy statues you’ll be seeing some familiar faces. This is a game where you can equip Dagon with a knife so he can assassinate Quetzalcoatl, or lead legions of goblins, tengu and spectral oni against bands of big, blue Niefelheim ice giants. Its creators, the two-man team at Illwinter Game Design, have assembled a fantasy world from the greatest hits of mythology and history, mashing them all together with some added twists to make the setting their own. (The fall of Rome probably involved fewer zombies IRL, for example.)
Despite a basis in reality, Dominion’s lore, told through item and unit descriptions, and requiring you read between the lines to grasp the full picture, is surprisingly unique. This chaotic world of warring gods could provide a kick-ass setting for a tabletop RPG, and it’s easy to get into the role-playing spirit while playing. Of course, Dominions 5 is a 4X turn-based strategy game, not an RPG. The real story you’re here for is the one you will forge yourself, the tale of how you destroyed your enemies.
You’ll have plenty of ways to do so: Dominions 5 is an astoundingly large game. As well as 80 playable nations, there are more than 900 spells to research and cast, 400 magic items to forge, and thousands of units to recruit or summon. Big numbers always make the lizard part of my brain happy, but having this much variety is particularly satisfying because there are so many ways to combine different spells and strategies. Being able to unleash a mighty earthquake is one thing, but what if, just before you did that, you cast an enchantment that gave all your troops magical flight?
In a typical game of Dominions, players engage in a tug-of-war of moves and countermoves. You imbue your arrows with deadly fire? Well I call forth a mighty wind that makes projectiles useless. You enchant your infantry to make them stronger than mine? Well here’s a giant cyclops with nigh-impenetrable armour, an aura of paralysing astral flames, a frost sword and — Oh, you’ve mind-controlled him. There’s always a way to respond to your opponents and, more often than not, a tactic that is ruining you can, with the right tools, be nullified completely or even turned to your advantage.
Battles in Dominions 5 are auto-resolved, but you do get to see a replay of what went down. Each turn you’ll decide unit formations and the actions of your spellcasters, then sit back and watch your devious plans unfold. There are plots to be hatched outside of combat too. If you can’t beat your enemy’s armies, you could sneak heretics into their lands and wipe out their religion instead. You could give a disease-spreading “bane venom charm” to a ghost, and decimate their population and economy. Or you could send seductive dryads (with water elemental bodyguards) to convert their mages to your cause.
In the late-game, rituals can be cast which dramatically alter the map. You might freeze the entire ocean or drown the coasts. You might make every unit age rapidly (that’s right, the age of every single unit in the game is individually tracked, alongside wounds and xp), until everyone, except your hordes of the undead, gets weak and sick. You might snuff out the sun, just to give your bat people the edge in combat. When gods go to war, they really make a mess. There is a downside to wielding this kind of power: if you die, the rituals you cast die with you. In multiplayer games, some of these more destructive tactics can easily make you the target of a dogpile.
Not in singleplayer games though, sadly. That’s an issue with designing a strategy game this complex: it’s not possible, especially for a small studio, to teach a computer how to play it well. Even on higher difficulty settings the AI, despite receiving a whole heap of bonus resources, struggles to put up a decent fight. It seems to suffer from the same problem you’ll have in your first few attempts— choice paralysis. The AI fields armies made up of a little bit of everything and struggles to come up with coherent strategies. At some point in every game, you’ll find a tactic that works well, and there’ll never really be a reason to switch things up significantly. While you can certainly have fun in singleplayer, and it’s a good way to learn the game or try new things out, you never get that sense of satisfaction that comes from outplaying a smart opponent, or that frustration when you, yourself, are outwitted.
Micromanagement is my other main gripe. In longer games you’ll often have several hundred generals, priests and mages running around. There’s a lot for them to do, including spreading the good word, searching for sites of magical power, building fortresses and claiming thrones of ascension (powerful artefacts and the main objective through which the game is won) and each must be given orders separately. To that, you add ferrying troops from province to province and selecting spells and formations for battles every turn — it can start to feel a bit like work. On several occasions I’ve caught myself half-arsing my turns once I’ve reached a commanding lead, dealing with the AI through brute force rather than strategy.
I’d therefore recommend PBeM (play-by-email) as the best way to experience Dominions 5. Not only does this play-style give you the benefits of multiplayer, it also allows you to tackle Dominions in short bursts (game speeds vary, but most go for one turn a day), avoiding its more frustrating aspects while still putting sufficient effort into each turn. PBeM also adds a whole new layer to this many-layered onion of a game — diplomacy. In between turns I’ve often contacted players to discuss, plan, wheedle and beg. When it comes to being the dominant deity, there is no prize for second-place, which leads to temporary alliances and the kind of cut-throat negotiations where eventual betrayal is not just likely, but guaranteed. Propaganda can be vital to surviving: you want to paint someone else as a major threat while seeming weaker than you truly are, but not so weak that another nation tries to swoop in and pick you off.
Dominions 5 is not for everyone; you could probably guess that from the screenshots. If you weren’t put off by the crude graphics and functional UI, however, then I hope I’ve given you a glimpse at the sheer depth and variety that’s on offer here. Don’t be too intimidated by the complexity. Certainly, Dominions 5 is an intimidating game, with a hefty manual and a steep learning curve. But, as with so many obscure games, it also has a small but passionate community — spread out across unofficial Discord channels and Reddit subreddits — that is only too happy to share its knowledge and enthusiasm with new players.
This game has given me hours upon hours of entertainment and, despite its clunkiness, it’s one I recommend wholeheartedly. At its best, when you’re running down your enemies with an army of marble centaurs, summoning arch-demons through mass-sacrifice, or kitting out your god to make them an unstoppable bad-ass, Dominions 5 can be truly divine.
