Dominions 5 - Warriors of the Faith

I came to Dominions 5 sideways, mostly because strategy regulars kept insisting it was the game that made Civilization look shallow. They were not wrong, and I kind of hate them for it. This is a turn-based 4X where you design a Pretender God from scratch, pick one of over 80 nations spread across three historical eras, and then spend the next several weeks fighting for divine supremacy on a hex-province map that plays more like Risk on steroids than anything resembling a traditional empire-builder. The pretender creation screen is where the game immediately separates itself. You choose your god's physical form, whether that is a towering titan, a frail arch-mage grandma, or an immovable stone monument, and that choice dictates how many points you have left to invest in magic paths and dominion strength. Investing in earth magic at level four, for instance, unlocks four points of earth-themed bless effects you can distribute to your sacred troops. Those bless synergies cascade through your entire military strategy: the nation you pick has to match the bless you build, or you are wasting the design. That depth is real and it is the game's best hook. The spell roster is enormous, and late-game ritual spells cast from the world map can reshape entire regions or summon monsters capable of cracking sieges. Combat itself is hands-off: you set pre-battle scripting for your commanders and formations for your troops, then hit end turn and watch the results. Either your planning was good or it wasn't. Here is where honesty matters. The UI is genuinely dated. Not charmingly retro, not pixel-art nostalgic. Just functionally old in a way that defies modern conventions: right-click to select, left-click to move, menus inside menus inside menus. The graphics are similarly blunt, and the solo AI, while serviceable in early turns, starts to feel thin once your strategy takes shape. The single-player experience is more of a practice lobby than a complete product. You are here to play against humans. Multiplayer is where this game justifies itself entirely. Most games run on a one-turn-per-day async format, sometimes stretched over weeks, with six to twenty players depending on map size. There are dedicated community Discord servers built specifically to onboard newcomers, and the modding scene adds even more nations and units on top of an already overwhelming base. That said, the async structure is not casual-friendly. Dropping out mid-game without warning is considered a serious breach of etiquette and can get you blacklisted from communities. You need to commit. Also worth knowing: Dominions 6 launched in early 2024, so the concurrent player count for Dom5 has dipped considerably. The core community migrated, and if multiplayer pool size matters to you, that is a real consideration before picking this one over its successor. For the right player, none of that is disqualifying. The faction variety is almost absurd: underwater civilizations, all-undead rosters, nations based on Cthulhu mythology, giants, angels, demons. Each plays differently at a mechanical level, not just cosmetically. The workshop support extends that variety even further. If you treat the UI friction as an entry fee rather than a dealbreaker, what is on the other side is one of the densest strategy sandboxes available on PC. Fred, Scout Team