Recs.
Updated
Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension is a 4X strategy game with a fantasy theme.
SpecsUpdate
Pros
Pro Radically different factions taking inspiration from multiple sources
Most of the factions draw their inspiration from historical empires or from mythological factions and creatures from different cultures.
For example, Ermor is based on the Roman Empire, Ulm is a nation of barbarians which is heavily inspired from the Conan stories, Rlyeh is filled with abominations not unlike those from H. P. Lovecraft's stories and many, many more factions that draw these kinds of parallels.
All these factions have different flavors and different (sometimes radically different) styles of play.
Pro Amazing scale and diversity
The game starts out small. Your troops are people with weapons. Or monkeys with weapons or bats with weapons or whatever (the nations are pretty different from each other, inspired by the mythologies of different nations).
By the end of the game, you could have armies of made of units that could single-handedly kill hundreds or thousands of early-game units. And that's just troops. Magic can make your whole army flying and intangible. Spells effect everything in the game, up to and including rewriting the rules of the magic system.
There's nine different kinds of magic that your mages can know, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and you research different schools, which have various spells in each path. Holy magic is an exception to that, and Blood is a different kind of exception.
But that magic, and the things you summon with it, are a big part of the game. And yet, just one big part. You've also got to manage your dominion – your worship, for you play as an aspiring god – which changes the bonuses you get from provinces where you're worshiped depending on what kind of god you are (there are scales, each of which goes from 3 to -3). That also determines how many sacred units you can recruit, and though the type depends on your nation, the blessing you give them depends on what kind of god you are. All those details are determined by you at the beginning of the game. And a game, incidentally, lasts a while. Three months is a typical multiplayer game, and some last years.
Pro Excellent depth through in game lore and faction selections
There are over 80 factions available in the game that can be played. Each has their own lore and story behind them, which will change as the ages (of which there are 3, early, middle, and late) progress through time spent in game. This depth in lore and story telling gives a sense of involvement that may be difficult to match in other less story driven games.
Cons
Con Among the harshest learning curves in a 4X game
There's dozens of spells and ways to customize units through stats. It takes a lot of time to get comfortable with all the gameplay mechanics and with the UI itself.
The in-game help is also lacking or not available at the right time, forcing players to look elsewhere for help.
Con Shallow empire-building
As a pretender god, you're waging war and thus are fundamentally destructive. You can build forts, temples, and magic labs, and forts can be upgraded, but aside from magical things like global spells, or positive effects of your divine influence, you don't really affect positive change in your people's lives.
Most infrastructural changes are abstracted to random events, and this level of the game is abstracted to a necessary back-end.