Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension Reviews

UI is like total nonsense ... I cannot imagine that so many ppl liked that game...

Go play Dominions 6 if you can afford it.

Just way too complicated for me - this game has gathered dust in my library for years because every time I've tried to play it I've just landed up scratching my head trying to understand what is going on - even a tutorial video on YouTube took like an hour just to get past some of the starting options, before even really getting into any game play. Not helped by the fact that there doesn't seem to be a proper inbuilt tutorial (well there is in theory, but it directs me towards reading the manual and there is no on-screen help or tips that I can see). I like inbuilt tutorials because surely the people who developed the game should be best placed to tell us about all the mechanics and what is important, and if they don't see making the game comprehensible as being important then I'm kinda wondering why. Within the game I just feel like there is too much stuff - do you want your pretender to be a dragon or a tree, what types of unit (of the many many types on offer) do you want to build, keeping in mind that they all have quite complicated stats and features, and it's not clear to me at all where I get things like research from etc - like I just don't understand at all the decisions I'm supposed to be making and I assume the only way to properly understand is to spend many many hours on Youtube tutorials and playing the game through repeatedly. I think that one thing which I feel makes it harder as a beginner is that many of these decisions feel quite drastic - i.e. having a large potential impact - it's not like choosing a civ which will be slightly better at tech, or slightly better with military, some of these feel like very fundamental and major choices and I don't really understand them or their potential impact later in the game at all. I appreciate some people will read this and think I'm just lazy for not putting in more time to understand it properly but the simple reality is that I don't have the time or energy to understand something this complicated where the developers haven't really (in my view) made a bit more effort to ease me into it, with a proper tutorial and maybe a more user-friendly interface / hints, and some efforts to help me understand what the realistic impact of different decisions might be. I've played plenty of strategy games with various levels of complexity but for me this is complicated past the point where I feel like I will enjoy overall spending the time required to understand it. I have lot of other games in my library which I've played more (many of them cheaper than this one) because they are fairly easy to get into and have a good tutorial to get started, and I have a job where I'm expected to explain what I've done to customers rather than just sending them something overcomplicated and expecting them to work for hours to figure it out. So I just don't really see a good argument as to why this game couldn't be a bit more user friendly. p.s. I am not whingeing about the graphics here, I would still pick up Civ 2 and play it very happily if I had a copy right now I just think this game is too complicated for me to get into and the interface / lack of a proper tutorial doesn't help.