The pretender gods are at it again, duking it out all across the world, trying to become top god by killing everyone else in the race. God-killing grand strategy game Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith has been announced, with a tentative November release window, and a development post details some of the new features that will, if you’re lucky, allow you to ascend to godhood.
If you’re not familiar with the Dominions series, it’s a grand strategy affair where you lead a nation as a pretender god, running the gamut from talking monoliths to fire deities. The goal is to defeat the other pretender gods using armies and magic before becoming a true god.
New features in the fifth installment include things like real-time combat, instead of the tactical, turn-based battles from the previous games. “Now all units do their actions simultaneously, so units will move at the same time as enemy arrows and spells are flying. With the simultaneous move it is no longer important who reaches whom first, the units reach each other simultaneously and it is random which one gets to strike first.”
Bless effects have also been tweaked. These are your divine spells that you design when you make your pretender, and they depend on the skills of your chosen would-be god. Choosing a broad number of skills means you’ll be able to choose from many minor bless effects, while a pretender with one high path skill will be able to cast a single, powerful bless effect or a bunch of minor ones.
Here are all the announced new features:
- Real-time combat
- Per unit combat logs
- Design your pretender's bless effect
- Priest's banishment and smite spells will depend on what type of god he follows
- History playback when game is over
- New random maps with bridges and better looking terrain
- New resource system with recruitment points that encourages recruiting in highly-populated areas
- Fortifications built by starting at the basic type, and upgrading later
- New research queue, researching is now one school at a time
- New movement system
- Winter shown on map and affects movement
- Dominion overlay on map to clearly show its boundaries
- New retreat system, good leaders can prevent units from dispersing in all directions
- Updated UI with information presented more clearly than before
- New 3D engine with better looking terrain, huge performance increase for good graphics cards
- More reliable network, now works on less perfect connections
- New nations
- Some old nations have been reworked and updated
- More spells, magic items, special abilities, events, monsters, titles, thrones...
I recommended Dominions 4 for anyone feeling ambitious in our How to get into grand strategy guide, so I’ve got high hopes for this one. And if you’re interested in what a game of Dominions looks like, check out Tom’s Dominions 4 diary.
