I don't think that anyone truly knows how the two games will compare... I would say don't even bother trying.  Dominions 3 is a nice little game that is good for multiplayer because there are so many options.  If I would hazard a guess, I would say that Elemental will be better, simply because Stardock has the financial muscle and the AI talent to make it more effective (in addition to being an exceptional company when it comes to turning out a quality product).  However I really think that you should take both games at their merits.  I don't think that Elemental will compare to really any other game, just like I don't think you can look at Dominions 3 and say "Dominions 3 is like ______."

I've never heard of Dominions 3, but it looks interesting to me. I'm not too happy about the $50 price tag two years after it was released, but I'm gonna try out the demo.

Dominions 3 kinda sucks, at least if you're into singleplayer, and I hate multiplayer 4x gaming so I couldn't tell you how that is.

There's a big wealth of different civs, all with a large variety of tools at their disposal, but they all go to one end: conquering everyone else. No builder victory conditions in D3. So to make that formula work, you need good combat. D3 doesn't have good combat. Battles between armies play out automatically, in battles where every unit is displayed on a battlefield, and they tear into each other. The actions of all these units including your own are automated by a crappy AI. There's the ability to script your troops to do specific actions in battle, but you can only script specific orders for the first 5 rounds of a combat, which is chickenshit in a large scale battle, then your units kind of flail around doing whatever and a large part of the outcome comes down to luck. It's also a tedious pain in the ass to do this scripting, and it only lets you pick what actions your troops take - not what they target with them. (They will, in fairness, always aim at the right side with attack or healing spells... though if they have areas of effect, you might not even realize that.)

D3 has a very neat, deep system of customizing and creating a pretender (D3's equivalent of Elemental's Avatar, a very strong unit that represents you, only you don't lose if the D3 pretender dies, he just gets suspended in limbo for a long time). You can not only customize what the pretender can do, but also passive bonuses and penalties it grants to your entire empire, and all thdse things draw from the same pool of points which means you have to make a choice - strong pretender, good bonuses to your empire, or some sort of mix? Its equivalent of culture, dominion, is also reasonably well done. Just, these are small consolations when the means by which you actually accomplish stuff and push towards victory in D3 are so flawed and frustrating.

Being an indy game developed by I think one guy in Sweden, D3 of course looks and sounds like shit. This isn't a flaw that I'd notice in an otherwise good game, but it's a nice sharp nail in D3's coffin.

I have to imagine multiplayer suffers based solely on the fact that unlike other multiplayer 4x games, it doesn't completely cut out the AI when players are having at it, due to the way battles work. Here, though, I could be totally off-base since I've never actually played MP D3 and am just theorizing.

Enough of that mini-review, now to compare it to elemental:

-Elemental will let you control your troops during battles. Fully, I believe. That alone is a huge boost. You won't HAVE to, but you'll want to for important fights.

-Elemental will have victory conditions other than "kill everyone", and diplomatic states other than "at war." So if Elemental's combat flops, there will still be ways to progress and win which involve the game's other systems. This can make a great game if the non-violent wins are varied and the mechanics they run off of are fun to use, even if the combat blows - see Civ4.

-Elemental will almost certainly start out with the same kind of dismal AI as D3. It can't be helped; modern turn-based strategy games are bloody complex and making an AI that understands them well right out of the gate with only the feedback of a few beta testers to go off of is pretty much impossible. Unlike D3, though, there is hope that Stardock's constant tinkering that they do with their games will fix it.

-Elemental will be as much of an eyesore as D3 IF the early screenshots of elemental are anything to go by. But they probably aren't, considering how far from release elemental is.

-Elemental will have far less factions than D3. It remains to be seen, though, if Elemental's factions will have less diversity, more diversity, or the same amount as D3's.

I don't think we can compare much else.

You can say who you want to attack in dom3. And the battle system force you to think. Yeah, you have to scout and adapt. Initial placement often make the difference between win or lose. The automatic combat seems at first a bad choice, but in fact it's a good one : it speeds up turns and you have to really plan ahead. The combat scripts let you do almost anything you would want to do in a turn based combat. The only drawback is the 5-turns-thing. After it's a "fire on will".But you can easily put your cavalry on the right or left, ask them to hold for 2 turns then charge the rearmost ennemy. You have to think "simultaneous". It's a bit hard in the begining, but when you get acustomed to it it's really a blast.

I agree about the UI. It's so awkward, and you really need the shortcuts to manage your empire when you have more than 10 or 15 areas.

There's the victory points condition, which relies to the dominion spread.

From a design point of view they made a wargame, not a civ game. You have to be the only dominion. So there's really few buildings and no way to an ally victory condition.

About the diversity : the factions really play differently. Ermor is an undead nations that don't "build" units. Some nations are underwater nations. You can add effects to your dominon. In fact you have to kill your ennemies, but there's so many ways to do it that it's not a great loss to not having diplomatic wins.

And dominions 3 get all its flavour on multiplayer.

So it's the kind of games you need to try before buy

Yeah, the undead mechanism was fun. Having thousands of undead spawn after large battles is a nice idea.

What I mainly didn't like about the battles was the controll over spellcaster. If you left them with too many magic gems they would waste them on the wrong spells, used on unimportant troops and didn't cast them on the right time. Or didn't use them while you wanted. All in all it was a mess.

Though hero customisation with items was much fun, especially the stone thingy you could implant in the eyes which, though blinding your hero (hey, you put a stone in his eyes, auch) gave a nice bonus.

As for multiplayer, can't say much about that because I'm not a multiplayer gamer.

They waste on wrong spells because you gave wrong stones. Morevoer the last patch (3.20) enhanced that a lot. If you want to have a better grasp on your heroes you need to specialize them, so they don't use spells badly. It needs time to get how to do it efficiently.

That's why you really need to scout. Moreover you can avoid the nasty things like a heros charging under YOUR arrows with proper placement. There will still be some situation where one will get backfired. But it's often, really often, beacause of a tactic mistake in the orders or placement. And i must agree with you that I made lots of mistakes due to the awkward UI.

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It has exploration, expansion, exploting and extermination. Not that your stupid semantical quibble has anything to do with anything.

They kind of do. But like I said, I can ignore this if a game has other things going ofr it that make it fun to play, which lots of NES games do.

For my own purposes: Sure I can. For the purposes of informing the guy who made this topic: I did note that I've never played MP D3, and that my post was about why SP D3 sucks and why elemental will likely be better.

And a lot of people don't want to play that way, so it's worth noting exactly what effects D3's decision to go with automated battles has to anyone who cares - and I assume the topic creator does, because he brought it up.

I too would rather swallow some .45 caliber medicine than micromanage every single battle in D3. But I'd like the OPTION of choosing to micromanage or auto-resolve. That way, I could use my hand on the battles that need it, and let the AI handle the boring squash battles that are a foregone conlusion, and the tiny scale battles whose outcome doesn't matter. For not having this option, D3 is a worse game, just as it would suffer for forcing you to micro every battle.

...that's what 4x STANDS for. Google 4x game and you'll see tons of confirmations.

And I'm saying it would be a GOOD difference.

Arguments like "that's how the game is", "that's how the game was meant to be played", and so forth are useless statements of the obvious that don't actually say anything. Game designers are fallible, they can make mistakes, and I'm trying to point out what mistakes D3's designers made. D3 is what it is and controllable tactical combat would make it quite a different game, that's obvious. You have yet to point out, though, why a game's state is some sacred thing that I shouldn't have the gall to bash.

You are, of course, free to argue why D3 in particular is made better by AI-controlled battles, but simply pointing out that it's a fundamental part of the game's design doesn't get you anywhere. You know, I know, everyone reading this goddamn topic knows. So what?

And while I haven't played RA3, all RTS games I have played have the option to auto-resolve individual battles. You do what you do in D3: Move your troops to where there are enemy troops then take your hands off and watch the AI have the two sides wail on each other.

You mean it didn't make sense to you? I actually have to spell it out for you?

Ugh, christ.

Okay. I acknowledged that the Elemental screenshots we currently have probably are a bad indication of what the final game will look like, yet you responded to my post as though I didn't. Like you didn't read that part and only saw the part where I called the current screenies ugly, and felt that you needed to explain to me that Elemental's graphics will probably change in a year.

Yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to tell the topic creator. That, and "Elemental won't be dominions 3. Instead, it'll be good."

I'm not trying to convince you that SP D3 is bad. I'm trying to convince someone who has never played D3 that SP D3 is bad. And I'm doing that by pointing out the serious problems I have with a fundamental design cornerstone that makes D3, D3.

Let's start with the fact that Dom3 has dedicated servers, supports Windows, Linux AND MacOS, ... something that Elemental clearly won't.

The graphics aren't as good as latest titles, but on the other hand it comes without any DRM and takes up about 400 megs on my hard drive instead of 20 gigs like Sacred2 for example. Saying 'it will be like Dom3 only good' isn't a comparison in any way. You can't honestly try to compare the two games, of which one isn't even in Beta yet...

To anyone looking for a good TBS fantasy game, I can wholly recommend Dom3. The genre isn't overflowing with alternatives, and the game really is good. The devs are constantly working on it, bringing new nations and content and interacting with the community much like Stardock.

The sounds are terrible, yes. But music ... that's the first thing that pushed me to buy it. It's just beautiful...