In Dominion 3, your success is extremely closely linked to what you do. You can't simply leave default orders and expect a good battle if you have a custom strategy in mind. In turn, you can't expect to have a good game if you didn't have a custom strategy in mind in the first place because even the default races have one. It is all about immunities or about that little special thing which make up your God.
If you don't make up custom orders then your minions could really mess up about what they are doing. Like using gems or whatever they should not. Also, since combat in Dominion 3 can be extremely complicated and that you have no control whatsoever about it once it begun, the potential for mistakes or bad moves is humongous. I mean, I do play games in which battles are automatically waged and I don't mind. In fact, if you do a comparison you might think that STARS!, which is a game I'm extremely fond of, is pretty similar in many aspects to Dominion 3... Except that in STARS! there is no "special abilities" which can trigger and make or break your battle. In Dominion 3, it kind of happen every single frigging battle if you have casters or special abilities... And like I said before, you
should have special abilities or spells if you want to win.
Then, about movement... This is kind of lessened against humans because humans are not as predictable but against computer based players you are
always better off [/i]not[/i] moving your armies and using them as defense when there is a sizable force around because it will
always move in when you move out. And since Dominion 3 is so ridiculously flawed in the movement phase, you could actually end up with taking their territory as they take over yours even though both armies originate from the same territories. They simply "get past" eachother... And then you are mostly screwed as the computer will then branch off to every single of your own "core" territories. And that would happen even if you actually had a crushing advantage in forces to begin with.
I felt that those two options were really putting the game off from me. If at the very least the battles could be controlled it would have been way, way better. The thing is, of course, that this game was entirely meant to be played humans VS humans in a TBEM scheme so it makes sense that all battles are automatically resolved every turn otherwise it would take ages simply to end a battle... But it does end up like I described in the end. Try to imagine winning Master of Magic with having auto combat on at all time and you'll understand what I mean.
