God I love Fantasy General, and MoM.  I feel that AoW:SM and HoMM are both very "messy" feeling in their systems.  Currently, Elemental also has this problem, and I'm hoping they clean it up like crazy, fast.

 

Can someone tell me more about this Dominions game?  Does it have turn based tactical combat?  Is 3 the best one?

Nope. You can give orders to your troops outside of battle, but once it begins it's entirely AI controlled. Best thing to do would be to try the demo.

Dominions is great if you don't mind sprite based graphics (I do not). You can script your combat in Dominions, but as far as controlling it directly you cannot. I still prefer scripting and it being auto resolved than just auto resolve

Kings Bounty is really good too. I prefer it to HOMM5 by large margin. There is no multiplayer, but SP is a lot of fun.

Battle of Wesnoth is decent and free. Never played AI only friends.

Any of the RPG mods for Civ 4

MoM from GoG

Age of Wonders I/II/SM are supposedly coming to steam next week (I will be buying, hopefully they do a bundle deal for all versions)

 

Dominions 3 is a strategy gem. Very deep. Tons (i mean tons) of spells, units and items. I've had it for a long time, and it's one of those games that's on the computer to stay. There are just so many tactics you can try that it boggles the mind.

wow, thanks for all of the great ideas. I looked up Eschalon and really like what I see! It seems to have that ultima online type of feel to it, I just hope the turn based combat is involved. Should I do book 1 before 2, or just jump right into 2 (my preference).

If that doesnt scratch the itch, I think I will check out Kings Bounty. I really did like HOMM5, but the campaign just felt kind of flat. There also seemed to be something with the momentum in HOMM5. Its difficult to explain, but basically just winning a couple battles early on gave you enough momentum to destroy things later. This is because since your not losing units, you have way more to spend on new ones, and the larger army size makes it that much more unlikely to lose units in later battles. This adds up exponentially, so I'd either be rampaging through the game, or bleeding out rather quickly. Dunno how to fix this issue.

How hard is it to learn how to play Dominions 3? I almost bought it an hour ago but its 60 bucks and I worry ab0ut not knowing how to play and giving up.

For a turn-based combat RPG try Wizardry 8. I only played it a couple years ago, and it hasn't aged that badly graphically for me at least, (well it's aged, but I still found it drawing me in regardless). It Worked on WinXP, not sure how it performs on Vista/Win 7. Be sure to get a mini-mod that speeds up the walking animation of enemy units to 3x-5x otherwise enemy turns take long as they walk real slow by default.

Wizardry 8 Fastmod:

http://wolfie.wiz8.de/Wiz8Fast.html

I won't lie to you, Dominions 3 has a steep learning curve. The game is deep. If you really love strategy war games then I really think you'll like it. My recommendation would be to start as one race and stick with them for a bit (I think Niefelheim might be a good race to start with-strong military units and decent mix of magic abilities from the start)

Check out their forums too. People there are real friendly.

It got one of the best manuals out there, so even if you could not figure something, you could look it up in manual.

Its not an 'easy' game (and 4X should not be), but neither its too complex.

Definitely worth a buy, its one of the few games which I play over and over for years.

As Supronar said, Dominions can take a while to get a handle on but it is well worth it. Pick a single race but make sure you read the guide for that race in both the manual and also in the Dominions forum. Your choices in the setup make a massive impact on the game. Also play against only a few other races initially rather than filling the world.

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Fall From Heaven 2 is a free mod for Civ4 and this also has a fairly steep learning curve but is a wonderful gaming experience. Each race/faction is rich and diverse and must be played according to its specific strengths. Once again, it is best to pick a single race and get used to it. In the early days of Elemental's development the two games were often compared as it sounded like they had similar design objectives. I hope that one day Elemental even just gets half the real racial differences that FFH2 has. Perhaps this will come with modding and expansions.

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Age of Wonders Shadow Magic (plus the community patch and mods) is a really immersive experience for such an old game. The AI is not all that difficult but it still sometimes can be surprising. The best thing about this game is once again the races. The world also feels so much more alive than the world of Elemental. It feels like a magical world rather than a nuclear wasteland. AoWSM has much better tactical battles as well.

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Battle of Wesnoth is a fun free game that can wile away a few hours before you know it. This game is primarily about levelling up your armies. Once again, solid races that play differently.

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Third Age Total War is a free mod for Medieval 2 Total War. It plays out the Lord of the Rings war using the TW engine. Nice game but I find it starts to drag a bit after some time.

I really didn't like Disciples III... Even II was too simplistic for my tastes.  Some neat ideas, but overall, played a few times then it languished and I eventually uninstalled it.  C4 has a lot of nice mods for it, depending on your taste, but most of them are either dry, or flawed, good for playing for a while* but then they unravel, and you get to wait for the next patch/upgrade/modmod to come out.  FFH2, The Three Kingdoms mod and Rhys and Fall are probably the best (Rhys and Fall isn't very fantasy), and the Dune mod is cute (that's kinda fantasy! 8D).  But back on point, I'm also a big fan of Dominions 3.  There is a Zen to the game which can take a while to pick up, as well as different strategies based on faction you choose.  The AI will happily stomp on your ****s without pity or remorse, and the game switches up strategies and play styles from the opening, mid and late games rather interestingly.  I quite like it.  Once you get the Zen of the game, though, you can learn quickly to win as anyone.  It also has some mods, some of which are fun, in the form of new factions with odd playstyles.  If you have a PS2, you could play Brigandine, which is one of the best turn based strat games I've played.  Warsong from Nintendo days.  Also Cryptic Comet has an interesting but overly luck based turn-based "fantasy" game called Solium Infernum (You play a Prince of Hell).  Amageddon Empires is better, but it's post-apoc "fantasy".  Overall it's pretty slim pickings, imo.

I've played the other games mentioned so far as well, but I think they've been pretty well covered.  As for RTS's, I'm not really a fan of the genre.  The best two I can recall (for my tastes) are the original Majesty, and the original Kohan games.  Both had sequels, both sequels were disappointing.

 

Alright I just bought Dominions 3. If it sucks i'm going to strangle all of you