Micromanaging the Future with Dominions
by Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor
Auckland is in lockdown again. I'm hopeful that the civic spirit that saw us through six weeks of suspended animation earlier in the year will carry the day. New Zealand's "go early, go hard" approach worked, but that was little comfort when it was the four of us, two adults and two kids under ten, in a two-bedroom apartment nearly 24 hours a day. It felt like time had stopped. As that interminable moment stretched into weeks, I needed something that could fully occupy my ability to think ahead, to plan, to imagine the future.
I found what I craved in Dominions 5 (PC), an overcomplicated, micromanage-y 4x (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) strategy game. Dominions is the most satisfyingly baroque game I've ever encountered, drawing on world mythology to offer dozens of "pretender gods" and over ninety nations to choose from. The premise is thin but sufficient: the tyrannical king of kings, the Pantokrator, has vanished, and those previously crushed under his heel are now at each other's throats. This Hobbesian “war of all against all” scenario is refreshingly free of 20th century Fantasy's endless, morally absolute war between “Good and Evil.”
We could use more games focused on cooperation and understanding. Dominions, with its minimal diplomacy system and winner-take all victory conditions, is not that game. In the politics of Dominions, New Zealand is an attractively functional neutral nation: at peace with its neighbors, lauded for a spirit of cooperation and evidence-based public policy, a beacon of hope that's ripe for the plucking now before a rival power takes it.
Dominions is all about preparation and contingency planning. Movement is blind and simultaneous, with combat resolved automatically based on standing orders, so there's no "fixing" a strategic blunder with quick reflexes or unit-level tactics. Micromanaging and keeping track of everything while planning for changing seasons and passing years make the game expansive in time as well as space. The arrow of time in Dominions bends toward decay.
"Everything ends" is the underlying motto, subverting the fantasy of power and control common to the 4x genre. The Civilization games exemplify the genre, equating military and cultural dominance and painting a progress narrative where power brings splendor. In Dominions, powerful mages grow old and die, quashing unrest or heresy comes with a body count, massive armies exhaust supplies, leaving soldiers and peasants to starve, and even your would-be god can suffer permanent debilitation. You can literally wind up with a "blind, idiot god," a figurehead, powerful as an object of worship, but incapable of appreciating its triumph.
Winning a game of Dominions "rewards" the player with a message briefly describing the ages of their god’s rule as Pantokrator, boredom, and an irresistible attraction to something beyond. The new king of kings vanishes into that mystery, and the stage is set for another game. There's nothing fair or kind about the cosmology of Dominions, but it feels like everyone gets their chance to mess it up and see it all go wrong. There's no restoration of (divine) order or an anointed rise to greatness. In Dominions, the player isn't anointed of god or even god. You play as a "divine order" attempting to assert itself.
That's what I find compelling about Dominons: playing as a "living," dynamic system of increasing complexity. For some, engagement in a game can be measured in the continual need to respond now. I can be equally bored as I fail miserably at bullet hell, rhythm, or FPS games, but give me an interesting setting, lots of variables to play with, and an element of uncertainty and risk-taking, and I can lose myself and become a thing which exists purely to plan and coordinate.
In that "flow" state, selfless, my only consciousness is that of an integrated expanding system building a sand castle that will inevitably be smashed and scattered, or washed away by a surfeit of victory. Dispersed into this system, I lose consciousness of the lockdown, stop worrying about relatives in the US, and lack the capacity to imagine the next disaster ... for a time. Then someone lets me know that they need a snack, have a video I must see, or want to play with me, and it is time to exist in the present again and appreciate being with loved ones.
Back in lockdown, I've started a new game of Dominions. This time, I'm playing as Lemuria, a once-great empire whose leaders betrayed it to Death itself, rendering it "a withering realm" of ghosts and plague-spirits. Lemuria is a nation overtaken not just by death, but by its past misdeeds, failure to plan ahead, and unwillingness to change resulting in the dissolution of society. Good thing Dominions 5 is pure fantasy. I'd hate to live in a world where the death throes of a superpower could doom us all.
