Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension

I have a rule: if a strategy game makes me read a manual before I touch the tutorial, I take that as a sign of respect, not a warning. Dominions 4 has a manual that runs over 100 pages, and every page earns its place. This is a turn-based grand strategy game built by a two-person studio, set in a fantasy world stitched together from real-world mythologies: Norse vanir, Roman legions, Aztec blood-magic, Kievan Rus spirits, and dozens more spread across three distinct historical ages. Each age carries its own roster of nations, and the total count of playable factions across all three ages exceeds 75. Before a single turn is taken, you design a Pretender God, choosing from arch-mages, colossal titans, dormant monuments, and stranger forms besides. You then allocate dominion scales covering order versus turmoil, productivity versus sloth, heat versus cold, and several others, each scale rippling through your provincial income, research output, and troop morale in measurable, trackable ways. That pretender-building screen alone has more decision weight than the entire mid-games of most 4X releases. The strategic layer is built around three victory conditions: total conquest, extinguishing enemy dominion by spreading your own faith, or controlling a threshold of randomly-placed Thrones of Ascension on the map. That last option is the headline addition over the previous entry and it does genuine work, turning the late game into a contested race for specific high-value provinces rather than a slow mop-up of every last territory. Armies operate through a commander-unit system where mages, priests, and martial leaders each direct squads, and all combat resolves automatically once you submit orders. You script battle formations and commander behaviours before the turn processes, then watch the results. For a numbers-first player, the pre-battle scripting phase is where the game lives: positioning sacred infantry for a bless-rush, scripting a thaumaturge to cast Darkness on turn one so your night-vision troops have the edge, deciding whether to hold a flying chimera in reserve or send it straight at the enemy commander. The magic research tree spans eight schools, roughly 800 spells in total, and the counter-strategy depth is layered enough that veteran players report never finding a single dominant build after hundreds of hours. Here is where I have to be straight with newcomers: the AI is the game's most significant structural flaw. In single-player, it struggles to translate the game's systemic richness into coherent strategy. It will recruit poorly composed armies, ignore useful magic options, and at standard difficulty it folds quickly once you understand province expansion timing. Higher difficulty settings compensate through resource bonuses and sheer numbers rather than smarter play, which keeps single-player viable as a learning environment but not as a long-term competitive test. The game earns its depth in multiplayer, where email-based and hosted asynchronous formats let games run over weeks or months. Diplomacy, betrayal, item trading, and coordinated disciple-nation alliances all emerge from player behaviour rather than system enforcement, which means the design relies on your opponents to supply what the AI cannot. If you have three to five patient, invested human opponents, Dominions 4 runs at a tier almost nothing else reaches. The UI and presentation are honest problems, not exaggerated ones. The interface was dated on release day in December 2013 and has not meaningfully changed since. Sorting through the spell list by school with no alphabetical ordering inside each school, cross-referencing unit stats across dozens of clicks, managing province scripting as your empire scales into the mid-game, all of this creates friction that cannot be dismissed as "part of the charm." It is a real cost of entry. The manual is well-written and thorough, community wikis and tutorial videos fill in the gaps, and the modding tools are genuinely open, allowing custom monsters, spells, and complete nations. But the first five hours will feel hostile regardless of your strategy pedigree. Budget for that explicitly. The payoff, for the right player, is a game you will still be learning after 300 hours.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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