Dominions 6 - Rise of the Pantokrator

Picks Rock as Pretender God, chaincast earthquake. Kills my units, kills my enemies, but doesnt kill my enjoyment of the game. 10/10

There is nothing else quite like it and I doubt any other 4x franchise will ever be able to hold a candle to it's scope. This game gets a lot of comparisons to Dwarf Fortress and a lot of that comes from the more you play the deeper it gets. You don't directly control the units in a battle but you do all of the planning leading up to it. The manual is 450 pages. A bulk of which are like the army books for something like Warhammer. Unique rules, unit breakdowns, history, lore. Each nation has it's own quirks and features. These nations changes depending on the age in which you play. Each commander in each nation can be tweaked and outfitted with hundreds of magical items that drastically change their abilities. Each god has it's own strengths, weaknesses and playstyles that can completely change the strategic options of any given nation.

It would've taken 5 seconds to add some QoL and better UI - I mean seriously, the price is a lot especially for an older game ($45), so where are those extra costs coming from? The description "The first Dominions game was released in 2002 and was well received by strategy gamers. Since then Dominions has been much refined", does not add up; it still looks and plays like a game made in 2002. And don't get me wrong, I love when games don't do too much handholding, but this is on the opposite end of the spectrum in a bad way: to actually play this game, you'll be stuck learning the mechanics for hours, and not just due to depth, but rather a mix of complexity and poor game design. The premise is cool, but I'm not gambling $45 on what might end as sunken cost fallacy if I don't actually like it, something that the poor explanations could cause to happen.

Obtuse gameplay, hidden mechanics that are never explained, and an AI that cheats right in front of you.

Sometimes I just put it on in the background and listen to the music play while I do something else. I think the devs have incredible taste in music.

This game seems intimidating at first with its obtuse UI and low quality graphics, mountains of text boxes, stats, items, weapons, and characters to use. And it is... But the game is also relatively intuitive once you learn a few of its core systems. You may need to watch a few videos or read a few guides to fully "grasp" what you're doing. But, once inside, there is a deep strategy game with tons of customization and an almost endless list of factions to play as. You also get to choose and somewhat customize a Pretender God who will act as your factions supreme leader, with nearly endless combinations to experiment with. Steam workshop and multiplayer are available, although I have not played a campaign online yet. Pro-tip: Don't forget to go in the menu and change the function of Right and Left click, as they are backwards in this game for no reason. Seriously. Once you change right click to left click the game becomes 98% easier to play. Hopefully they remove this archaic control scheme in future titles. 8/10 needs quality of life updates, tool tips, massive UI changes, etc to really shine as "a videogame" That being said this is looking to be one of the best strategy games ever invented. Developers, if you're reading this: Rebuild the UI from the ground up. You can keep all the game mechanics, just make the menus work better. Every menu should have a back, close, and confirm button. Saves should have the dates of the save and the hours played. Half the things in the game have tool tips and half do not. Enemies health bars are only visible when reading their unit description. You can honestly fix all of this or hire modders to do it for you. Especially if there are only a handful of people working on this.

An incredibly deep game with a ton of replay value. It is pretty rewarding and even after all my playtime, I am still finding and learning random new bits as I go along which is impressive. The game itself is not all good however. It takes a good amount of time investment to figure out and grasp a lot of the mechanics. The UI is pretty poor and in need of some QoL features. Despite how it looks, performance is not all that great, and that goes doubly so if you decide to use mods that add custom units or pretenders and such (which can nuke your fps at certain times). I also have a bunch of other minor gripes and small feature requests that could make this my ideal game, but it is not quite there. Still if the game hooks you like it did to me, you will easily get a lot of fun out of it if you are willing and able to get past the learning curve. It is a really unique game that is worth checking out. Score: 8/10 if you get it on sale. Base price of $45 seems too much to me.

Significantly worse than dom5 in every way that there's a difference. You're paying a lot of money for a strict downgrade of an already pretty bad game (that can only be played multiplayer in play-by-email).