This game is worth every penny: Despite its archaic look, it offers hours upon hours of deep strategy and incredible replayability due to its vast number of different units, objects, and possible interactions as well as its creative implementation of so many aspects of fantasy warfare. What's more, the game is kept in excellent shape with lavish attention from its two creators -- this is no run-of-the-mill "product" from a big-name studio out to make big bucks, but a work of devotion. For a game of this incredible complexity and scope, it's astounding how few glitches and bugs exist. This game gives you excellent strategy at the cost of eye-candy; if you can live without the latter, you won't want to live without the former.

In Dominions 5, you (role-)play one of an infinite number of customizable Pretenders: A deity who wishes to become the One True God of the world and who thus fights against rival Pretenders for earthly Dominion. Your devotees (your "nation") will attempt to help you in your earthly cause by attempting to preach in your favor and to put disbelievers (and particularly proponents of the enemy faith) to the sword, or to the bludgeon, or to the claw, or the receiving end of a nasty spell, etc. You play the nation, you train and recruit the priests and mages, and your God can lead armies or stay at home and bask in godhood, as you see fit. You can play almost literally anything: A nation of monkeys worshipping a stone monolith or perhaps a phoenix, a nation of sapient lizards who worship, say, a divine glyph, a nation of angry elves who worship a sphinx or a nation of vikings who worship a divine dragon -- anything is possible, from underwater Cthulian aliens to Arthurian knights.

There is absolutely no diplomacy. This is not a game to trade and build cities. Thus, this is not every person's 4X. The focus is on the last X: exterminate. The game focusses excellently on this last piece, almost entirely eliminating city-building (yes, you can build forts, but there are no improvements in classic Civilization style). After that, the focus gets a bit fuzzy as the game's possibilities expand into the limitless: You'll need to focus on religious zeal, on military might, on magical research, and each of these areas has a few billion permutations. There are hundreds upon hundreds of different spells to learn from different spellbooks available to greatly differing commanders with very different capabilities, there are hundreds of items to forge (once you research how to do so) and give to your commanders, the possibilites are almost endless.
Not all of this is always good news: The two drawbacks to this (in addition to the quaint and outdated sounds and graphics) are micromanagement issues (finding that commander who had that magic rod which let him lead those troops who needed healing, and switching the rod to some other guy and moving the troops about etc. etc.) and an incredibly steep learning curve. The good news to this is that the learning curve is very fun: Discovering how things work while playing against the AI is fun before you get your pants beaten off you in multiplayer with the very fine community.

Check out the manual, it is online here (http://www.illwinter.com/dom5/dom5manual.pdf). It's 380 pages or so are full of information that should give you a feeling of what you will be purchasing. It is a finely-written document that should answer most of your questions as to what to expect, even if it is not nearly as good as the 450-page manual that was the Dominions 4 documentation in the last iteration (http://www.illwinter.com/dom4/manual_dom4.pdf). Still, you'll see how much you are actually getting with your game: pages upon pages of interesting stuff with very little fluff.

Dominions 5 is not very different from its predecessors (I have played them all since Dominions 2), but different enough to warrent a new iteration. If you like playing a strategy game with the pace of chess over that of starcraft, then you won't regret Dom5.

This game is worth every penny: Despite its archaic look, it offers hours upon hours of deep strategy and incredible replayability due to its vast number of different units, objects, and possible interactions as well as its creative implementation of so many aspects of fantasy warfare. What's more, the game is kept in excellent shape with lavish attention from its two creators -- this is no run-of-the-mill "product" from a big-name studio out to make big bucks, but a work of devotion. For a game of this incredible complexity and scope, it's astounding how few glitches and bugs exist. This game gives you excellent strategy at the cost of eye-candy; if you can live without the latter, you won't want to live without the former. In Dominions 5, you (role-)play one of an infinite number of customizable Pretenders: A deity who wishes to become the One True God of the world and who thus fights against rival Pretenders for earthly Dominion. Your devotees (your "nation") will attempt to help you in your earthly cause by attempting to preach in your favor and to put disbelievers (and particularly proponents of the enemy faith) to the sword, or to the bludgeon, or to the claw, or the receiving end of a nasty spell, etc. You play the nation, you train and recruit the priests and mages, and your God can lead armies or stay at home and bask in godhood, as you see fit. You can play almost literally anything: A nation of monkeys worshipping a stone monolith or perhaps a phoenix, a nation of sapient lizards who worship, say, a divine glyph, a nation of angry elves who worship a sphinx or a nation of vikings who worship a divine dragon -- anything is possible, from underwater Cthulian aliens to Arthurian knights. There is absolutely no diplomacy. This is not a game to trade and build cities. Thus, this is not every person's 4X. The focus is on the last X: exterminate. The game focusses excellently on this last piece, almost entirely eliminating city-building (yes, you can build forts, but there are no improvements in classic Civilization style). After that, the focus gets a bit fuzzy as the game's possibilities expand into the limitless: You'll need to focus on religious zeal, on military might, on magical research, and each of these areas has a few billion permutations. There are hundreds upon hundreds of different spells to learn from different spellbooks available to greatly differing commanders with very different capabilities, there are hundreds of items to forge (once you research how to do so) and give to your commanders, the possibilites are almost endless. Not all of this is always good news: The two drawbacks to this (in addition to the quaint and outdated sounds and graphics) are micromanagement issues (finding that commander who had that magic rod which let him lead those troops who needed healing, and switching the rod to some other guy and moving the troops about etc. etc.) and an incredibly steep learning curve. The good news to this is that the learning curve is very fun: Discovering how things work while playing against the AI is fun before you get your pants beaten off you in multiplayer with the very fine community. Check out the manual, it is online here (http://www.illwinter.com/dom5/dom5manual.pdf). It's 380 pages or so are full of information that should give you a feeling of what you will be purchasing. It is a finely-written document that should answer most of your questions as to what to expect, even if it is not nearly as good as the 450-page manual that was the Dominions 4 documentation in the last iteration (http://www.illwinter.com/dom4/manual_dom4.pdf). Still, you'll see how much you are actually getting with your game: pages upon pages of interesting stuff with very little fluff. Dominions 5 is not very different from its predecessors (I have played them all since Dominions 2), but different enough to warrent a new iteration. If you like playing a strategy game with the pace of chess over that of starcraft, then you won't regret Dom5.