Forum Overview :: Reviews :: Why make zero choices when you can make nine thousand?

[quote name="Bananadine"][quote name="Jerry Whorebach"]I can't believe they make me pick a car before each race. How about this, Namco: I pick whichever one is the best, and furthermore I pick not to have to figure it out myself. WHAT AM I <b>EVEN</b> PAYING YOU FOR? >:([/quote] The Dominions 3 version of that choice: Should your civilization's pretender (the would-be god for whom you are fighting) be a giant half-naked woman whose great beauty shocks enemy troops into standing helpless while she crushes them with her fist, or a spirit residing in a fountain of blood that just kinda hangs out in your capitol researching magic, or something completely different? Should faith in the pretender spread unrest, growth, and cold weather--or should you spend your design points on magical paths instead, so that your rampaging giant demigod will be able to blast enemies with fire and poison? Or should the pretender stay at home instead, spending its turns gradually summoning an army of magical creatures? And if so, what kinds of creatures? (If they're going to be cold-blooded, better make sure you <i>don't</i> spread that cold weather!) This is one of the coolest parts of the game, it seems: At the start of each game, you go through this character-design sequence that will heavily influence the flavor of the expansion and battles to come. That, combined with your choice of civilization and the extent to which you research magic and forge magical items throughout the game, seems to be what determines which subset of the hundreds of available units and spells become available to you... unlike in Civilization or whatever, wherein you always know what abilities you will eventually gain, even if you don't know exactly when you will gain them or how well you'll be able to use them. It's pretty interesting! I mean for a person who likes sitting at a computer making explicit, distinct choices for a really long time. (Is Master of Orion 2 very much like that? I only played the first and third one.) I'm only into my second game though (this one quite lengthy), so I don't have a good sense of just how different two games of Dominions 3 can be. Also I'm doing pretty well at the moment and that worries me since by rights I still ought to be getting my ass kicked, if the game has a decent AI--which it's supposed to, but who knows. My canonical experience of being disappointed by limited AI, and also of being tricked by the exaggeration of Penny Arcade's Tycho, came when I bought the game Massive Assault (an unusually pretty turn-based wargame) based partly on Tycho's claim that the choice of difficulty levels in this game amounted to being asked whether you wanted to be "kicked, stabbed, or shot in the balls", and partly on my experience of being crushed by the enemy in that game's demo--only to find myself winning consistently on the hardest level after just a few hours. So I am wary. :([/quote]