Hmm... that reminds me. I wanted to do an AAR on dom 3. Maybe I should work on that.

Nice AAR. Doms 3. is one of the best [if not the best atm] MP fantasy TBS game. It has it's weaknesses however...

1. The singleplayer part is bad because of the weak AI.

2. Unbalanced races & spells.

3. Most of the units & spells are not used at all in MP games, because they are worthless basically.

2. + 3. > Enforces powergaming.

I've played the demo, never could get into it because of the graphics (or was it the interface?). I love Master of Magic for goodness sake so I know it can't be graphics alone that turned me off from it. But I have to say, this makes me want to give it another shot. I think its because I never knew you could set up your troops before the battle, and have your pretender forge items and the like. I know Elemental isn't going the way of this game, with the complexity and all, but I think it would be neat to make an in depth mod with the graphics of Elemental and the gameplay of Dominions. AARs for me always make the game sound more interesting than it really is to play though I have no clue why. Only games I can't say that about are MoM and X-com.

It took me an hour or so but I went through it. It's pretty good. I picked up a copy of Dom3 a while ago but I haven't had the time to play it so this helped a lot. Now I have some idea of what I'm jumping into.

Elemental will definately be more Master of Magic than Dominions 3 in gameplay terms. Dominions 3 is one of those games that you can either get into in which case you love it, or you just won't get it. In the AAR I found that it was too wordy to follow all his troop movements from around turn 30, what it is good for is to see his use of summons and forged items. Also mercenaries, I always forget them when I play.

I don't like micromanagement games, for me my greatest friend in Dom 3 is the "n" key. It scrolls through all commanders who are doing nothing much. If you don't use this its too easy in the mid-late game to forget about commanders.

I think these are true, but you can have a good time against the AI while learning so the single player game is not absolutely useless. The races are unbalanced (ie early age good monkeys "Malaka" vs early age heavily armoured volcano people "Abyssinia". Unless Malaka gets "fire arrows" they are at a big disadvantage. Also Joton PD rocks!) but thats both flavor and fun.

I'm very interested in Elemental long term. I suspect I'll try and mod something like the strange and unique races like Dom 3, which most I can recognise from world mythology. Hey, how about a sea race in Elemental?

It was the interface for me. Well, that plus the buzz that the game was built for MP and I prefer solo sandboxes (with legos, modeling clay, and maybe the occasional Micronaut).

Edit: Should also say that I wanted to get into Dom 3 on account of other buzz like the OP here and the AAR it mentions. Lots of the Dom 3-inspired talk around here suits my tastes very well.

The frost giants? Big guys? I think 1 for 1 they are top quality PD.

There are alot of great ideas in Dom 3, but I won't argue that it lacks something in the implementation. I didn't like it the first time I played it, I hated the combat and the interface was clunky. After a lengthy uninstall I tried it again and something just clicked.

Fair enough.

What would you say is a noteworthy PD nation?

Oh, the AAR webpage is down..... Apparently that fairly common with the wiki.

Yes, thats a "Plover". Actually they are called "Masked Lapwings", from the the Lapwing family of birds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lapwing

I'm just being picky, I called them plovers growing up and spent too many days harassing them so they would swoop us, oh the days...

No, I didn't take the pic myself, not for the lack of Lapwings in my neighbourhood. Just about every roundabout has their family of Lapwings, crazy birds.

In response to this, I actually captured a Elemental AAR... unfortunately, I can't figure out how to convert the files and such.

LOL

And btw, the DOM3 wiki seems to constantly go down... anyone else experience this? I cant even finish that aar its soo bad

Ulm, midddle age.

Crossbowmen and armored infantry. If you optimize your kingdom to get much money, spend it on a few tens of PD (with a good priest and a mage) and it can defeat even some impressive enemy armies.

hehe...poor little things, we used to have them nest on the property but the poor buggers lay their eggs on the ground. Hard to believe they've endured here with all the foxes we have.