WOW!!!

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There is singleplayer and it still can be fun. However, fun in different way.

Dominions are really complex game. There are over 1000 spells, each faction have dozen of different unit types, dozen of different commander units and there are also plenty of neutral commanders/mages.

However, you don't just pick faction, you design your pretender god as well. You can pick some mythological monster, titan or even one of the human mages that tries to became a god. You can even play as statue or pillar that became "alive" after people started believing in it. For every faction, you have choice of around 30-40 gods. Each god has different properties and different magicpaths, by increasing magicpaths, you can get "bless", such as more HP, magic weapons, regeneration or damage reversal, on your "sacred" units. Additional to god and magic paths, you are taking "scales", which are global bonuses to nation (i.e., more resources for which you buy units, gold for which you buy everything, magic scale that makes your mages research better...). You have huge amount of choice and a lot of choices can be quite bad for some nations, while good for other nations. A lot of choices make some strategies better, while other worse.

For example, with a good expander, you can expand your starting provinces having more money. You can snowball from this.
With a good scales, every province that you will get will give you more money. Although you will have less provinces than expander, you will have much stronger late game.
With a good bless, you can make your sacred units (if your faction have a good ones) into killing machines, killing much more gold-worth of units or even mages. Although later you might be a bit weaker, after enemy has time to find particular spell and strategy to counter this, you might be able to destroy several enemies with your uber sacred troops, get their land, get their capital cities (which brings a lot of gold) and try to snowball from there.

AI doesn't understand any of this.

Now, as I said, there are dozens of units for each faction. The problem is, that some are good, some are medicore and some are situational (but in that situation, they are good) and counter particular strategy. AI doesn't understand this.

There are over 1000 spells. As with units (or even more so), you can build strategy around 10, 20 are very good, but expensive, 50 are good in specific synergy... rest are situational, but situational in the sense that they can counter specific strategy, or they are good thing to cast for specific type of mages (i.e., low path) or when you are doing certain research path... and a lot of them are also bad. And AI doesn't understand this either.

So while MP is usually around counters, anti-counters, trying to screw around other player, predicts what he would do and create anti-strategy to his moves...

SP is usually playing with your nation and trying various stuff that screws AI hordes of units. You can play much more inefficiently. Doing stuff that you like, testing strategies and trying to find something new. But its different game than against players.

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Quoting: iniudan

Quoting: ColomboNo newts, no bucks.

But there is already newts in the game.

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Or you meant a robot version ?

Huh, always thought that this is lizard.

no robot versions, common...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_with_the_Newts [External Link]

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No newts, no bucks.

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"There's a brand new Humble Bundle with all games on Linux, oh my"

Could be read as "All games that are for linux are in this humble bundle"

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Steampunk, yes! RTS, yes!

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Got Attila. Can someone explain to me why do this game look worse than Medieval 2?

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Spud13y: Cossacks is AoE-like in the same way that Company of Heroes is AoE-like. Both are historical RTS... And there similarity ends.

Cossacks 1 and 3 relies on much more massed units, specific mechanics for base destruction and spots generating resources in form of mines. This, plus rather shallow tech tree (but I mostly play as Algeria, which has basically no tech tree and is rush faction) makes it quite different from AoE. But note that even AoE 3 is not AoE-like game as, from what I remember, the change of mechanics was rather drastic.

Now, if you throw Cossacks 2 into the mix, it is completely different (even more so than AoE1/2/AoM/AoE:O from AoE3), Cossakcs 2 is much more tactical game, it is still fun, but it scratches totally different itch.

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Its basically remake of original Cossacks. With mod support. And its a bit broken on Linux since it freezes often and it takes few minutes to unfreez. At that time, civilians mine, build, but don't move. Barracks work as well, but units don't move from them. After while, it unfreezes as horde of units gets out of barracks. This is quite serious issue probably in engine since you can't really throw this on graphics card.

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Quoting: TeodosioI am saddened and disturbed that a decent company as Paradox, creator of great games (spend more time on them than on all else combined) and BTW offering outstanding support for GNU, should receive so much flak (no doubt demoralizing to staff) because of what basically amounts to a 'gimme gimme' attitude.

I see that we continue the game...

Seriously, how you can even write something like that when most of what I said is about design choices and like two sentences is about pricing?

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