Dominions 3: The Awakening

I have a spreadsheet that tracks how many hours I've burned on obscure turn-based strategy games, and Dominions 3 sits near the top of that list with a question mark next to it because at some point I stopped counting. Built by a two-person studio at Illwinter, this is a simultaneous-turn god-wargame where you design a Pretender deity, pick one of over 60 nations spread across three historical ages (Early, Middle, and Late), and then grind your divine will against up to 22 other players or AI opponents in a fight for total religious domination. The framing sounds whimsical. The decision depth is not. The pretender design screen alone should tell you what kind of game this is. You spend a point budget choosing a physical form (a fire dragon, a Cthulhu-adjacent horror, an animate monolith that just sits there generating faith) and then distribute magic affinity across eight paths: fire, water, air, earth, astral, death, nature, and blood. Every choice propagates outward into your whole campaign. A blood-path pretender unlocks blood sacrifice rituals to fuel late-game global spells; a death-dominion pretender slowly spreads decay and lowers population growth in conquered provinces, which shapes your resource economy for the entire match. Whether to awaken your god at turn one or start dormant for a point bonus is the kind of decision the community has debated for two decades without consensus. That is not a knock. That is the value proposition. Combat is resolved automatically each turn, calculated simultaneously for all players before you see results. You set pre-battle orders for each unit stack and commander, assigning divisions to charge flanks, target archer lines, or hold formation while your mages blast from the rear. Once you confirm, it is done. No take-backs. There is effectively no save-scumming here since the game overwrites its save at turn end, which some players find brutal and others find correctly brutal. Watching a 200-unit battle play out according to orders you issued blind two minutes ago, with permanent wound afflictions stacking on survivors, is tense in a way that real-time games rarely achieve. The tactical AI running your units is serviceable but not brilliant, which is why scripting your commanders carefully matters far more than it looks like it should on turn three. Single-player against AI is a legitimate way to learn the game, but the honest read from long-time players is that it functions as an extended tutorial for multiplayer. The real experience is Play-by-Email or network games with humans, which can run for months. That is not an exaggeration. A full game on a large map with 20 players is a months-long commitment measured in 2-to-3-day gaps between turns. If that sounds like a lifestyle choice, it is, and the dedicated community built around it is substantial. Modding support is deep enough that nearly every unit and spell can be replaced or overhauled, which has kept the game alive well past its 2006 original release and its 2013 Steam arrival. Mac users should note a compatibility warning: the Steam version does not run on macOS 10.15 Catalina or above. The graphics are genuinely old. The interface carries the scars of a two-person indie team that prioritized systems over UX. Newcomers will bounce off it without the 300-page PDF manual, which ships with the game and is not optional reading. The flip side is that once the systems click, the combination space is enormous. Over 1,500 unit types, 600 spells, 300 magic items, unique forged artifacts that vanish from the pool the moment one player crafts them, a global mercenary market, province-infiltrating assassins and seducers, world-altering ritual magic that reshapes temperature and luck scales across the entire map. There is no universally dominant strategy. Spending an afternoon testing a late-game Astral theurge build is not wasted time; it is the game.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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