Helton said:
edit: Dominions 3 is a great game to learn. Really fun going through the manual and trying to make a nation strategy that seems flawless. But then:
Maybe I'm just an idiot, but having so little control over how a battle progresses really blows. For normal units, sure it's easy. But for mages? Which, I gather, are the focal point of advanced play. Too many wasted gems! Is there a way to make them just stop casting? Say I want him to cast a battle-wide precision buff every battle so my dwarves can hurl stones like good lil' archers? After he casts that, he'll just decide to cast uber-wind-of-death and use up all his gems.
Or I'm prepping for an important battle, so I tell him to cast uber-wind-of-death and then get hit by a random scout and have wasted the spell. It sucks.
So I say screw gems and big spells like that and play Mictlan with bless strategy. But that's only fun for so long.
Still, not to deter you from the game, I played it for tens of hours before I hit the point where this started to bug me. Definitely worth the $50 or $60.
There are some things you can do to make your armies fight better and your mages do what you want. I think that's one of the more brilliant things about the game. The combat system is really pretty simple and it seems like there isn't much you can do to control the flow of a battle, but in reality, army placement and orders can make or break entire conflicts easily.
I'd recommend you designate some gem carriers. It's common practice in multiplayer to have scouts roam around with your major spellcasters to function as carriers so that the waste you describe doesn't occur. Script the few power spells that you want to go off in the first couple turns, and then let the AI do its thing without worry that piles of gems will be wasted. The turn after the fight, transfer a couple more gems to your guy and you're good to go for the next one. It's micromanage-y and kind of a pain, but it's a sure way to insure no gems are wasted. You can also script those few spells and then Retreat, but you will have to move him back with your main force next turn. Finally, you could script an Attack after those big spells, but then you risk him in combat, and he won't be casting anymore damage spells.
These are all high-level-multiplayer-type strategies. Most of this isn't necessary against the computer except on the highest difficulty levels.
The scout situation you described is rare, and I'd chalk that up to bad luck as much as anything.
Overall, I'd say the main weakness of the game is in the interface. The depth of play, especially in multiplayer, is phenomenal. But unfortunately, there's a lot of extra work the player has to do to really fully utilize their forces, such as what I described above. And as much as I love Dom3 multiplayer, setting up and getting in a game is an onerous process, since there's no internal matchmaking software within the game. Plus, a game can take months to complete, and requires constant attention or else you risk missing turns and possibly getting booted from the game.
It really is a fantastic game, though. Kitting out your supercombatants, planning massive artillery mage strikes, teleporting in army-smashing golems, unleashing Iron Dragons to trample your foes into dust, building a perfect bless strategy... there's a depth here that just isn't present in any game I've played. You could spend hours figuring out what pretender you want to use.
Plus, the mythology and setting of the world is original and interesting. No orcs or elves here (I admit some dwarves snuck in somehow
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