As the Robot Turns

    Round here at the Robot Factory, we like to keep our gears turning over lunch breaks and after our daily work is completed by playing some games.  Some people like to run a quick heroic in World of Warcraft, or join up with their pod mates and kill each other in Battlefield 2.  Still others jump in their mining barges and harvest some Crokite in Eve-Online.  As for me and a few others, we get our kicks with some turn-based strategy games like Dominions 3 and the newly released Solium Infernum.

The draw of turn-based strategy games at the office, is that they can be played throughout the day, since everyone can take a turn on their own time, and then once everyone has taken their respective simultaneous turn, the game server rolls us over to the next one, and we can make our next moves.  Some days we get a 10 or more turns in, and then on others 1 or even none depending on who is in the office or everyone’s workload.  This is great because you can spend a lot of time thinking about your next moves without really holding up anyone else (to an extent, there are always all caps emails of a certain players name when he is holding everyone up).

Dominions 3

Dominions 3: The Awakening is a game created by Illwinter and is set in a fantasy world of magic, the undead, dragons, angels and demons.  It’s mostly focused on army vs. army combat with just a bit of management of the economy.  Each player has a Pretender-God whose goal is to defeat all of the other players using whatever means necessary.  Dominions 3 has a unique game mechanic called Dominion, which is how much influence your Pretender has in each province of the game.  If a player has no dominion left at all, he automatically loses.  So it is possible (although difficult) to win without ever fighting another player.  You gain territory by building an army and leading it into battle, although you can only give basic commands to your armies, as the game does battle calculations itself.

It’s a very complex game, there are lots of winning strategies.  I like to use out-of-game diplomacy to my advantage, bribing my in-game neighbors with candy and sodas so that they will agree to a non-agression pact while I capture all of the neutral territory around me, then later in the game I am unscathed by battle and am usually in a powerful position.  Others do not go this route, and get involved in long drawn out wars with their neighbors, giving them experienced troops that are significantly better than normal ones.  Still others go for a late-game strategy of using a very powerful magical spell that takes a very long time to research.  It’s also possible to create a very powerful leader, equip him with magical items and have him run around winning battles singlehandedly.

Playing with coworkers also makes it interesting.  One of the designers enjoys agreeing to certain terms, such as giving up some territory in one place to gain it in another without really going to war, and then totally backstabbing you.  And another, knowing he has lost, will engage in a guerilla campaign against you, making your life miserable.

Our current game is in turn 53, with one player having been defeated, and another switching over to AI control.  We’ve been playing the game since late October.  I am probably in the most powerful position, but I’ve never won a game, and our Dev Support guy is still a thorn in my side preventing me from ending the world in waves of fiery Angels.

We're always on the look out for new  games to play here at the Factory, so let us know in the comments if you have any hot leads for us!