Video Game / Dominions

Made by Illwinter Game Design and published by Shrapnel Games. An unusual Turn-Based Strategy game series in the classic 4X and Grand Strategy style. The first game in the series, Dominions: Priests, Prophets and Pretenders, was released on September 22, 2002; a sequel, Dominions II: The Ascension Wars, followed on November 14, 2003. Dominions 3: The Awakening was released on September 29, 2006, and Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension on October 10, 2013. The fifth game, Dominions 5: Warriors of the Faith, was released November 27, 2017, and the sixth game, Dominions 6: Rise of the Pantokrator, was released on January 17, 2024.

In the wake of the apparent death of the one true high god, various entities (Pretender Gods) attempt to attain the vacant position through the expedient method of wiping out all competition.

Dominions is a turn-based game on the continental scale, but a very extreme form of simultaneous resolution for tactical battles: You aren't actually allowed to give any orders when battle (and sometimes hilarity) ensues. Instead, you can only give standing formation and conditional tactics orders to a unit of soldiers in the strategic view, then sit back and hope for the best whenever they come into contact with the enemy. This allows the game to be played by email, or over longer periods of Real Life time.

Not to be confused with the Board Game Dominion or the tv show Dominion.

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Dominions provides examples of:

• A.I. Breaker: The computer is completely incapable fighting against poploss/domspawn (dominion kills population and spawns free units) nations like MA Ermor, LA Lemuria, and LA R'lyeh. The endless mook hordes and lack of supplies render it completely unable to launch effective attacks against those factions.
• All There in the Manual: There's very little in game documentation for the basics, including an instructive tutorial. But the manual is incredibly useful (if wildly inaccurate at times — read the forums, seriously!)
• All Trolls Are Different: Earth and Sea Trolls can be both recruited and summoned, to say nothing of the regular trolls... or the Jotun giants, which are trolls in Norse myth.
• Almighty Idiot: Extremely powerful Pretender "chassis" who can move are generally portrayed as such; they merely do what their followers believe they would do. These are found at the top of the Pretender selection menu, if your faction has one.
• Amplifier Artifact: Many magical items help their user cast magic, reinvigorate them or can provide a penetration bonus against their targets' Magic Resistance.
• Angels, Devils and Squid: All three make an appearance, particularly as summonable beings, alongside a variety of celestial or infernal beings from other pantheons. Angels tend to be associated with Astral magic, and Devils with Blood magic. The Squids meanwhile get their own faction, R'lyeh, which is exactly what it sounds like — a realm ruled by eldritch beings that spread madness wherever they go.
• Animal Mecha: The Iron Dragon summon, a mechanical automaton in the shape of an iron dragon that is available through the Construction school.
• Animate Dead: Death magic allows mages to create and command undead. Also undead priests have the ability to create zombies, ghouls, skeletons, etc based off of their priest level.
• Ancient Tomb: Some Magic Sites are Ancient Tombs. Also, one might be found in a random event, which can provide both gold and a magic item.
• Ancestral Weapon: Some warriors and heroes carry ancestral weapons.
• Annoying Arrows: Most of time a single arrow will kill an unarmoured human. Tower shields, heavy armour and certain spells can turn them into their annoying variants.
• Artifact of Attraction: Certain magical items can provide negative effects and some of them are cursed, meaning that there is no way of getting rid of them.
• Artifact of Doom:
  • The Gift of Kurgi, which provides sizeable physical powers but destroys its carrier's mind.
  • Pretty anything with a chance to inflict a horror mark or insanity, however special mention goes to the Dimensional Rod, the Boots of the Planes, the Tome of High Power, and The Horror Harmonica. Almost all of them require astral or Blood Magic to forge.
• Author Avatar: Bogus and his adventurer pals, taken from the game designer's home-brewed Earthdawn campaign.
• Barbarian Tribe: Early Era Ulm, Marverni and Sauromatia are nations that are examples of this. In the Early Era most independents are barbarians as well. Some random events can cause barbarians to attack one of your provinces.
• Back from the Dead: Pretender gods can be called back from the underworld (or whatever Heaven or Hell they were sent to), one-of-a-kind summons can be re-summoned without issue after their defeat, and mummification can call back commanders who made it into the Hall of Fame. There are also the Twiceborn and Katabasis rituals, which prepare the user's soul to walk back from the underworld in the event of death (with a new body in the case of Katabasis), while immortals don't really "die" and just reform back at home.
• Badass Normal:
  • Alongside such pretenders as underwater squids, lords of thunder and dragons, you can also be a crone. Granted it's bad sense not to give her magic powers, but you can theoretically have a Badass Normal goddess.
  • Human nonmages try for this. They don't measure up, though, and almost never become One Man Armies, especially when compared to giants and summoned Super Combatants.
• Beneath the Earth: Agarthans, who are an ancient people, rather than exiles.
• The Berserker: Many nations can recruit units capable of going berserk. Certain spells and magical items can also grant berserk.
• Big Bad:
  • In the Back Story, the Rimtursar ice giants, ancestors of the Neifel race. The Illwinter that accompanies their reawakening is supposed to be the ultimate catastrophe, though that should be taken with a grain of Gameplay and Story Segregation.
  • One of the four Heliophagii, light-hating demons, has been corrupting Abysia from start and teaching them blood magic. The innocents murdered for it started to corrupt the source from which Abysians were being born.
  • Arguably Middle Age Ermor and Late Age R'lyeh could also be considered strong candidates for this trope, with seemingly endless undead hordes coming from the former and Lovecraftian astral horrors from the latter.
  • Lemuria takes over Ermor's role in the Late Age (Lemuria's undead are ghosts instead of skeletons, but it's still undead legions with a descent hailing from the old empire of Ermor).
• Big Damn Heroes: The developer's pet adventurer group from Earth Dawn can infiltrate dungeons of players, freeing innocent girls kept for Blood Magic.
• Black Cloak: Various Blood and Death mages wear these. Interestingly enough, so do Marignon's Friars.
• Blood Magic: Involves hunting down special virgins to sacrifice for magical power. Or, for the particularly crass,powerful magic items.
• Book Ends: The game starts with the One God disappearing all of a sudden. The winner likewise abandons the world after ruling for a few centuries, when one day he/she/it hears a song in the void, and abandons the world to look for it.
• Burn the Undead: Most undead (except the Dust undead from Hidden in Sand) are vulnerable to fire, and fire magic is one of the main sources of anti-undead spells.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: If a unique unit is wished for by another nation, the unit will be transported to their laboratory no matter where it is. Your own version of the unit will then go poof.
• Celestial Bureaucracy: Tien Chi is this in MA, with the Jade Emperor as a pretender choice.
• Chill of Undeath: Most undead are associated with cold, and tend to have a resistance to it or even a cold aura.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe:
  • Although there are a few sacred units that can be recruited on the map or through summons, by and large they are Sacred because your nation's population believes they are — lore-wise, that is. Mechanically it is just a matter of putting the "holy" tag on a unit.
  • The Machaka Colossal Fetish is a mindless "god" that came to life after hundreds of years of worship and does whatever its worshippers believe it would do.
  • And then there's the titular concept: the more the people of a given region believe in you, the more you influence what happens there. Conversely if there's nobody left in the world to believe in you because everyone's converted to another religion it's game over, man.
• Clockwork Creature: The Clockwork Soldiers and Horrors summons.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: Many mage orders wear specific color to display either an elemental affiliation or a political association.
• Cool Versus Awesome: This is basically the game's main selling point. You want Ancient Egyptian Lizard Folk Necromancers ruled by a half-man, half-scorpion god-king fighting evil monkeys who worship a sentient blood fountain? You can do that!
• Corrupt Church: Late Era Marignon. They've abandoned their Knight Templar roots, since it's cheaper to pay the Infernal Lords off with blood sacrifice than to wage a neverending war to keep their society pure.
• Crapsack World: The world of Dominions is not a nice place to live.
  • The Late Era. More and more factions are using death and blood magic. The last remnants of Ermor have become Lemuria, a realm of the free roaming dead. Ulm is a realm of vampires and wolves. R'lyeh is a land of insanity and death, where the Veil between reality and the madness of the Void is breaking down. And then you and the rest of the Pretenders come along and start unleashing supernatural monsters and undead horrors over the land. Not to mention that magic is fading from the lands as a whole. That said, there's evidence that this is a A World Half Full. Jomon has fully thrown off the grip of their Oni oppressors, and Patala is just on the cusp of a Golden Age under the benign rule of the Naga. Humans are also gaining ascendancy in other kingdoms as well, by virtue of the fact that their divine protectors / oppressors are growing less powerful and numerous as a result of the magic gradually fading from the world. Capitalizing on that hope depends on who wins.
  • The Early Age is a hellish world for a different reason. The magic of the world is in full bloom, completely untamed by human hands, and those without magical powers or enhancement are helpless before terrible creatures that prey on them freely. The humans themselves are often little better, from the Androphags of Sauromatia to the savage, blood-sacrificing Druids of Marverni. And the greatest bastion of human strength in the world, the New Faith of Ermor, is destined to become the Ashen Empire.
  • The Middle Age is less of a crapsack, with the only real horrific evil being Ermor, but that doesn't make it a nice place by any means. Here, you see where many of the terrible evils of the Late Age started.
• Critical Existence Failure: Played with; on one hand individual units have hit points, and units only die when their hitpoints run out. On the other hand units have a chance to acquire wounds whenever they are damaged. Additionally armies do not usually fight to the death, instead they will flee the battle field after being injured or sufficiently frightened.
• Critical Hit: Handled by a variation on "exploding dice". If an attacker rolls the maximum value on one of its attack dice, it rolls the die again and adds that value to the damage — and if that roll maxes out, you can roll again (and repeat as applicable). This gives even relatively inconsequential characters a very small chance to kill gods (assuming the latter can't simply No-Sell all the damage somehow).
• Crutch Character: Pretty common. Niefel Jarls come to mind: they're awesome bless rushers, but if you have nothing but Niefels in the late game, they'll be overwhelmed. The community term is "thugs", which refer to easily-recruited low-end One Man Armies. Highly useful in the early and midgame, but they don't usually have the staying power to fight the real Super Combatants that get summoned in the endgame.
• Crystal Ball: There are are both items and spells that allow Scrying. Also, certain magic sites provide the ability to Scry.
• Dark Is Not Evil:
  • Explicit in some units, such as the C'tis Sauromancers, who practice the magic of death responsibly. Implicit, if you're a particularly nice god who just happens to have undead generals. Can be argued to be the case even of Mictlan's virgin sacrificing priests. Generally not the case in the the Late Age. Definitely not the case for Middle Ermor, Lemuria, and Late R'lyeh.
  • The embodiment of this would be Well of Misery, a world spell that creates Death gems by siphoning all the misery and pain in the land into the Pretender's body, resulting in death, disease, and old age being much less painful. The congratulatory text implies that this is a minor Heroic Sacrifice on your part.
• Deader than Dead: "Soul Slay" undoes the glue between the body and the mind — presumably the soul — and forcibly tosses the soul into the afterlife. This prevents immortals from reforming in this world. It also prevents the soul from responding to summons, so it can't be dragged back in the mummification ritual. A handful of beings can recover from this with sufficient attention, however, notably Pretender Gods and one-of-a-kind summons.
• Deal with the Devil: Several blood magic items such as The Protection of Greyon are this. The cheap ones just require sacrifices, not dragging the owner's soul to hell upon death.
• Defeat Equals Explosion: Graphically, defeated units explode in a burst of blood, though most will still leave corpses. In gameplay, specific constructs are designed with this function, a certain blessing will cause sacred beings to explode, and the trait can be self-applied by Fire mages.
• Deity of Human Origin: Quite a few possible Pretender Gods are mortal mages, sages, shamans, and scholars who aspire to leverage a lifetime of magical study to attain true divine power and immortality.
• Demon Lords And Arch Devils: Five Arch Devils, six Ice Devils, and four Heliophagi, along with the six Demon Lords. The Demon Lords are, in order of addition to the series:
  • Pazuzu, a headless chicken-man who holds command over the west wind, who plagues ten percent of his local "teammates" with deadly disease each month
  • Belphegor, a colossal being who rules the Inferno, and who ensnares lazy people into his thralldom with heretical promises
  • Belial, a green devil who corrupts the hearts of men and beasts alike, and whose very presence causes unrest and unfortunate events
  • Buer, a five-legged lion head who is actually a second sun barred from the sky, quite uncomfortable to fight alongside or against
  • Geryon, a chimeric dragon with an honest man's face, whose lies ruin faith and sow bad luck
  • Ashmedai, who incidentally looks like a youthful Ba'al, and who's a magnet for conflict and lustful beings
• The Determinator: By the Late Age, Atlantis has suffered two civilization-ending apocalypses and are now teetering on the brink of ruin. What do they choose to do? Train special insanity resistant units for the specific purposes of grinding R'lyeh into the dirt.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • Can happen with pretender gods, if they die particularly ignominiously. Particularly embarrassing is losing to blood slaves... which are roughly the weakest unit in the game and really only exist to give Blood Mages something to sacrifice in combat. The way the damage calculations work is that a "die roll" from 1-6 is made. Every time the computer rolls a 6, it makes another roll, adding the result to the damage total. This means that it's quite possible, though extremely rare, for "David and Goliath" events to occur, where, say, a lowly militiaman with a sling kills a dragon with a single hit.
  • Certain mods allow you to pick Cthulhu as a Pretender, making it possible to literally do this.
• Direct Line to the Author: The game manual is written from a perspective that paints the game as a simulation of in-universe events and "might-have-beens" based on historical research. This also handily allows updates and patches to be justified with a convenient External Retcon, as the "researchers" are constantly uncovering new evidence and tweaking old ideas.
• Divine Conflict: The games have a variant of this. You're one of a number of pretender gods, all warring against one another to become the one true god.
• Dual Wielding: Several troops. Of particular note are Early Tien Chi's sacred kung fu masters, although technically any unit with two or more arms can wield multiple weapons (or shields). Dual-wielded shields are a semi-popular tactic for kitting out thugs, who need the survivability more than any actual ability to kill things.
• Dying Race: Most of the more powerful races of the Early Age are this by the Late Age, as humanity takes their place. For example, the Vanir had their own nation in the Early Age and started taking on human inhabitants in the Middle, but in the Late Age, Vanheim is replaced by human-ruled Midgard and the Vanir are now rare.
• Easy Logistics: Strongly Averted. There are tons of ways to circumvent the supply or resource limit — but all of them are expressly magical. However, arrows are always free. While each province has its own supply limit that can't be manually transferred, fortifications send out supplies to nearby provinces, with those farther away receiving less. This being in addition to greatly increasing the supplies in the province of the fortress.
• Eldritch Abomination: Multiple kinds, actually. The spell "Horror mark" allows you to draw Soul-Eating Starfish Aliens from the Astral Plane to attack your enemies' commanders, the most powerful of which are the brutal Doom Horrors, and Dominions 5 adds a Cataclysm endgame condition that floods the map with Horrors until either a winner is declared or the world is destroyed. R'lyeh in later Ages is explicitly aligned with monsters from the Void, allowing you to play as the King in Yellow (Hastur). In the Late Ages, they also gain access to The Uttervast, essentially a Yog-Sothoth analogue whose form distorts reality so badly that any attempt to do harm to it risks rebounding upon the user.
• Elemental Embodiment: Each of the elements (Fire, Water, Air, Earth) has six different sizes of elementals, as well as royalties (Queens for Water and Air, Kings for Fire and Earth), to be summoned.
• Elite Mooks: Many nations can recruit soldiers that are the best of the best mortal races can provide. This doesn't really raise their life expectancy by a lot.
• Emotion Eater: Horrors of all levels feed on the emotions of lamentation, suffering, and fear.
• The Empire: Any state ruled by a Pretender God, but in terms of the lore, Ermor between the Early and Middle Ages was a quite successful example, with no less than five successor and break-away states confirmed after the Fall of Ermor: the now-undead Ermor itself, the splinter empire Sceleria, Pythium (which rules over the territories that were once Sauromatian), Marignon (the province that once had the Marverni tribes) and Ulm.
• Escaped from Hell: Being banished to the Inferno or Kokytus is not necessarily a one-way trip — powerful (or just plain lucky) units can escape. They may end up somewhere other than where they started, however, such as in the ocean.
• Ensemble Cast: Dominions, as of Jun 10, 2023, has around 100 different iterations of various nations, split between 3 eras (Early, Middle, and Late), and with hundreds of different unit types, including unique hero units, non-unique and unique summons, and units unique to each nation, that means that going through all of the different characters involved in Dominions would take a long time, especially since no nation has particular focus outside or inside of gameplay. Fortunately, many are Fantasy Counterpart Cultures or Expys, and there is only so much variety in unit and magic types, so understanding each nation is possible.
• Every Japanese Sword is a Katana: Surprisingly averted. Although there aren't the many variations listed, there are still Wakizashis for most of the villains, tanto for Late Age Ninjas, and Tachis and Nodachis for some of the bigger Oni and Bakemono.
• Evil Is Deathly Cold: The Niefel giants, and their ancestors the Rimtursar.
• Evil Is Not a Toy:
  • Wishing for a Doom Horror will give you one with a 50% chance of it turning against you. The Eater of the Dead, if allowed to consume enough corpses, will eventually break your control.
  • The Demon Lords and the lords of the hells are not as prone to outright turning on you, but they tend to cause unrest and other problems in whatever province they occupy.
  • The results of the Agarthans breaking the seal, the God Vessels are truly powerful units, but they kill over a thousand population each month between the three of them. The destruction of their vessels doesn't make things any easier for provinces either.
• Evil Tower of Ominousness: The Dark Citadel constructed with the Three Red Seconds spell.
• Evil Versus Evil: With certain nation combinations this is unavoidable. Also, most of the really powerful endgame summons aren't exactly nice folk.
• Evil Versus Oblivion: Some factions are out to either kill the entire world's population (such as MA Ermor) or twist the very fabric of reality (LA R'lyeh), which is obviously beneficial to none of the other factions. Even other overtly evil factions will go out of their way to stop these from happening so they can have some sort of meaningful population to oppress.
• Exponential Potential: There are thousands of magic spells, rituals, and artifacts, even before you factor in each faction's unique abilities and mechanics. Figuring out the best way to kit out your thugs and super combatants is practically an art in itself.
• The Fair Folk:
  • Many nations boast summons and recruitables that fit this role. Also, you can summon actual Faerie Queens, plus entourage. Finally, the nation of Tir Na N'og (added in an early patch to Dominions 3) is based on that particular mythology, with Sidhe commanders, banshees, etc. This applies even more strongly to the Norse nations of Helheim and Vanheim, considering their use of Blood Magic and Human Sacrifice.
  • Dominions 6 added straightforward Fair Folk, known as the Fay Folk, for factions with both Glamour and Nature magic to summon. Most of them fit the mold set in A Midsummer Night's Dream, if one can call an eclectic mix of little guys with different childlike or animal features "a mold", but there are also fay beings who've assumed human-like form to be better footmen and knights.
• Face–Heel Turn: Mind control spells force this on units that fail their magic resist roll.
• Fallen Angel: The generic fallen angels Late Era Marignon can call, and the Grigori that Early Era Hinnom can obtain. Both are released from their hellish prisons by blood sacrifice: of particular note, releasing even one of the six Grigori requires the largest single sacrifice of blood slaves in the entire game.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Applies to every nation in the game to a certain degree, some more, some less. The rest are mostly Fantasy Counterpart Cultures to other well-known fantasy cultures. However, one big difference is that these cultures are not necessarily human; both the Norse and the Canaanite cultures, for example, are giant races (at least until Late Age, where both cultures are mostly composed of assimilated humans). For a detailed list:
  • The human nation state of Arcoscephale is based on Ancient Greece, adding elements of Macedon in the Middle and Late Ages.
  • Atlantis start as generic frog-people from the crevices of the ocean, but in later ages take on a fantasy Inuit feel.
  • Berytos is an expy of Carthage and Phoenicia, complete with a dark-skinned ruling class and war elephants as their ultimate unit.
  • Caelum has a strong Zoroastrian and Persian influence.
  • C'tis is an ancient kingdom with an epic history spanning back millennia, populated by Lizard Folk, that takes cues from Ancient Egypt and Babylon.
  • Ermor is an vast cosmopolitan empire with legions of Hastati, Triarii and Principes, united in the worship of a benevolent healer prophet who sacrificed themselves and came Back from the Dead — a dead ringer for the Roman Empire. When their obsession with Necromancy goes horribly wrong, Ermor goes from a magnificent empire envied of the world to a barren wasteland of undead Omnicidal Maniacs, mirroring the Fall of the Western Roman Empire (though of course not even the real Rome imploded quite so spectacularly as Ermor did).
  • Hinnom/Ashdod/Gath is Ancient Canaan and the Biblical Israelites.
  • Ind has strong Indian influences in its palace courts culture and names, but interestingly it also has strong Central Asian influences, borrowing elements of the Khwarazmian Empire (a medieval empire centered on modern Iraq that was completely destroyed by the Mongols).
  • Kailasa/Bandar Log/Patala is another Indian-inspired civilisation, but one that borrows exclusively from Vedic and Indo-European mythology.
  • Machaka borrows from ancient African cultures, and by the fourth game is an expy for the Zulu empire.
  • Marignon is medieval western Europe, specifically the kingdoms of Spain and France.
  • Marverni are essentially magical Gauls with a strong druidic tradition like the ancient Britons.
  • The kingdom of Man is medieval Britain, blending the English, Celtic and Arthurian influences together.
  • Mekone is an expy of ancient Sparta, and also a nod to the story of the Greek Titans — it is a kingdom of deformed and militaristic giants who rule over an underclass of human slaves, leading a divine war against the gods who defeated them long ago.
  • Mictlan is the Aztecs.
  • Nazca is the Inca empire with Winged Humanoid people and a ruling caste of mummified undead kings and queens.
  • Pyrène borrows a lot from Basque mythology, but there are also elements of prehistoric humans too. Middle Pyrène is a lot more Spanish in flavor.
  • Pythium is the Byzantine empire in early ages, but interestingly the later ages add a dash of pre-Christian Rome.
  • Ragha is a nation of red-skinned humans with a culture much like pre-Islamic Iran, or the Seljuk Turks.
  • Rus/Vanarus/Bogarus is heavily inspired by Slavic Mythology and the history of the Kievan Rus. Rus is more like Ancient Finland with its Baltic leanings and reverence for bears; while Vanarus is more like the realms of the Varangians, the legendary foreign bodyguards of the Byzantine emperors. Bogarus meanwhile is more like a contemporary portrayal of the Russian principalities, possessing gunpowder weapons and strange astral magics.
  • Therodos is the Greek city-states with a hint of the Cretans and Minoan island peoples.
  • T'ien Ch'i is generally influenced by the history and mythology of ancient China; specifically, the Han Dynasty in the Early Era, the Tang Dynasty in the Middle Era, and the Mongol-dominated Yuan Dynasty in the Late Era.
  • Ubar/Na'Ba are based on pre-Islamic Arabia, down to having captive genies as their ultimate fighting units in their armies.
  • Ulm, while initially based on Cimmeria in the Early Age, begins to more resemble medieval Germany in later ages. By the Late Age, Ulm transitions into Romania if it really were dominated by vampires.
  • Ur/Uruk is inspired by the myths and stories of ancient Mesopotamia and Sumeria.
  • Vanhelm/Midgard borrow from Norse Mythology and Norse culture. But Vanhelm also has Tolkien-esque Noldor elves as soldiers for her armies.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: Nations draw from pretty much every imaginable mythological source. As a result, a war between, for example, the Nephilim of Jewish apocrypha, the Fair Folk of Irish legend, and Japanese oni with a side of Mesoamerican blood magic-run technocracies with Lovecraftian horrors leading the seas is pretty par for the course.
• Fisher King: The properties of a province (such as crop growth, or ambient magic) will change depending on which Pretender has dominion over it. Some dominions may even change the terrain type.
• Fish People: The Ichthyids independents and Atlantians.
• Flaming Sword: Fire Brand, which is literal flaming blade. Frost Brand burns with cold flames, Shadow Brand burns with shadow flames and Demon Whip is burning whip. There is also a Flaming Arrows spell that applies this effect to your archers and if you build your pretender right you can apply it to your sacreds.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: The Trample ability allows units which have it to crush smaller units that fail to resist it and displace the rest.
• Food Chain of Evil: Two examples:
  • In Hinnom, Rephaim eat Avvim. Nephilim, meanwhile, eat Rephaim.
  • Among the Doom Horrors is the aptly-named Umor, Eater of Gods.
• Foregone Conclusion: Middle Age Agartha is about the seal of the earlier age being broken. You can do this yourself if you play early age Agartha, releasing three insane beings to the world that will start murdering the world every month they are free... As consolation, you earn an incredible number of powerful mooks.
• Frazetta Man: Hinnom's Horim in the Early Age are Frazetta Giants. There are also the independent Cave Men.
• From Bad to Worse: Ulm, Pangaea, Atlantis, R'lyeh, and Ermor (the later of which has gone straight to hell... and then came back to murder everybody else).
• Full-Circle Revolution: In many cases, the Middle Age introduces changes from the Early Age status quo, and then the Late Age empire reverts back to many of the abolished practices of the Early Age:
  • Mictlan abandons blood sacrifice in the Middle Age, then goes back to it under Atlantean influence in the Late.
  • Likewise, Marverni practiced blood sacrifice to their gods, while Middle Age Marignon's witch hunters banned it. In the Late Age, Marignon now practices blood sacrifice to infernal powers.
  • Ashdod abandons Hinnom's cannibalistic practices (except for the Zamzummites, who voluntarily feed themselves to their ancestors). In Gath, survivors of Hinnom's priesthood decide that humans are just as delicious.
  • The Sauromancers of early C'tis were stigmatized in the Middle Age, but returned to power in the Late Age through the clergy.
• Full-Frontal Assault: The Nephilim, Maenads, and succubi. Among the Pretenders, the Annunaki of Love and War, Great Mother, Titan of Love, and Son of the Fallen also engage in this.
• Ghostly Chill: Many ghosts have a cold aura.
• Giant Flyer: Many summonable units. Boots of Flying and spells can make anyone or anything fly.
• Giant Spider: Machaka's sacred units, among others.
• Glass Cannon: These are typically averted in melee combat, but some guys are very powerful and quite vulnerable. For instance, the Cave Kobolds in Dominions 6 are tiny and aren't very good at dodging, but they do enormous damage with their pickaxes and fit five-to-a-square.
• God-Emperor: The pretenders are basically this to their respective nations. In addition, according to the description for the Divine Emperor pretender, the nations for which it is available used Roman-style post-death deification before the Divine Emperor leveraged the technical status as a Son of God that granted him to become a pretender god (and therefore immortal).
• Godhood Seeker: Some of the Pretenders who can become your civilization's patron are powerful humans seeking to ascend to godhood by becoming the Pantokrator.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The faith of people in various provinces is represented by a candle. This affects the knowledge you have of the province, the level at which you can affect it and, should you move it into the area, the hitpoints of your Pretender God. Any God who loses all their belief is eliminated from the game. Then again, considering that regions with 0 population can still hold dominion, and omnicidal factions like MA Ermor and LA R'yleh thrive on them, it seems that dominion involves a more generic "divine influence" rating rather than outright popfaith.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Clockwork Horror summon is based in-universe on a design for a magical threshing automaton meant to help farmers harvest their fields. They worked beautifully, but when they ran out of crops they started "harvesting" the hapless villagers, too...
• Grey-and-Gray Morality: With some Black thrown in, like Middle Age Ermor. No single faction is unambiguously good, and all of them have the potential to research and use spells with horrible effects.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Many nations that have both fantasy races and mortal races boast half human hybrids.
• Have You Seen My God?: The whole reason for the Ascension Wars is that the old Pantokrator, the supreme god of the setting, has vacated his post for reasons unknown, opening the way for other divine powers to fight over the top spot themselves. Constant references to "a previous Pantokrator" (rather than "the previous Pantokrator") imply that it's happened at least once before, as well.The victory message in 4 has it happen to your god, where after eons of rule, it leaves the world to the void, causing another Ascension War among those who are left behind.
• Healing Magic Is the Hardest: Fixing up flesh wounds is simple for Nature mages, as long as certain organs aren't mulched, and Astral mages can also do some healing; mages in both paths are even better. Curing an Incurable Cough of Death, however, often requires a master of Nature magic and a mountain of nature gems. There are some gifted Nature mages, fay beings, and Pretender gods who can do it for free, but then there's the task of fixing structural harm to the body; that requires an act of god, if you don't live in Hinnom, Gath, or Arcoscephale...
• Heaven: The Celestial Spheres, which is apparently home to Judeo-Christian angels, Zoroastrian divinities, Chinese and Hindu deities.
• The Hecate Sisters: The Middle Age Man can recruit the Daughter, the Mother and the Crone of Avalon.
  • The Kindly Ones are summonable, they hunt down blood mages rather than follow orders.
• Hell: You have the Inferno, a realm of fire, Kokytos, a realm of ice, an an unnamed realm of darkness, an unnamed realm of storms, an unnamed realm of something. There's also Tartarus, which acts as a prison for defeated pretenders.
• Hellfire: The Hellfire spell, where blood magic is used to open a channel for the flames of Inferno to scorch foes, and banefire, the corrupted fire of the underworld that decays those touched.
• Hell on Earth: MA Ermor, Lemuria, and Asphodel are all undead factions that have breached into the realm of the living and are trying to take it over.
• Hero Killer: The Hunter of Heroes is one of the beings that will deal with especially stubborn horror-marked units. Give that it's a Doom Horror, it's quite up to the task.
• He Who Fights Monsters: Late Age Marignon's hat. In order to fight the threat of the malevolent undead of Ermor, they started making pacts with demons.
• Hidden Elf Village: Various magical sites provide recruitable units, but most of these must be found by magical searching before they provide their secrets.
• Hobbits: Hoburgs are about a meter tall, can't fight to save their lives, and live only in farmland provinces. The again, in the fourth installment there are Hoburg crossbowmen who cost half as much as normal human soldiers, with crossbows that are statistically identical to those used by humans.
  • The second major update to Dominions 5 added Little Horned Men of Piconye, Hoburg-like beings distinguished by their horns, as vassals of Ind. They received their own faction in Dominions 6, distinguished from previous little-guy factions such as Shinuyama and Vaettiheim by their lack of "giant" oversight.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: With friendly fire in full effect, this is entirely possible. Special mention has to go to the spell Shock Wave, with an area of effect that is larger than its maximum range. As the spell description dryly notes: "This is a very dangerous spell to cast, as an unlucky caster might also be killed by the electric shock."
• Holy Is Not Safe: Angels and their equivalents, as a general rule, have been heinously expensive since Dominions 3. Even with liberal use of Gem Alchemy, getting the Astral Pearls required for significant amounts of them is far from practical, typically because they either come in large quantities or alongside piles of lesser Angels. The standout examples are the Seraph and the Chayot, both of which are ultimately less expensive to Wish for, but come with also-powerful Angels as subordinates.
• Horrifying Hero: Your pretender can be a manticore, a skeletal dragon, a two headed serpintine dragon, a vampire, a giant, flaming head, a scorpion centaur, and other even more bizarre entities. Of course, the 'hero' part is largely dependent on your playing style...
• Hot as Hell: Blood nations can summon Succubi and various other seducers from Hell. Notably, one of the Demon Lords can seduce both men and women.
• Ho Yay: In-Universe, Middle Age Arcoscephale's Hearth Companions, who are big gay Theben men, are described as "liv[ing] and fight[ing] side by side with their lovers and brothers-in-arms". They also can't be seduced.
• Human Sacrifice: Blood Magic is fueled by sacrificing virgins with especially pure blood flowing through their veins.
• Humongous Mecha: The Iron Dragon and Siege Golem summons.
• Hyperspace Is a Scary Place:
  • The travel spell Stygian Paths allows travel to distant provinces, but exposes anybody doing so to attack by the spirits of the dead. Also, beyond the Veil lie the realm of Horrors.
  • The nature equivalent Faery Trod uses paths of faeries rather than the dead but is no safer, with soldiers being lost forever in the magic forests on the way.
• An Ice Person: Nifelheim's frost giants, the Frost Devils from Cocytus, and the Eskimo-influenced Atlantians of the Late Era. The winged people of Caelum also fit the bill to some extent - while their magic mostly revolves around lightning, they wield weapons and wear armours made of ice. Magic ice.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Very common, but special note goes to the Rephaim and Nephilim of Hinnom. They eat giants.
• Immortality: Units with the immortal tag will resurrect in their capital if they die — provided they die in friendly dominion.
• Jerkass Gods: This can certainly apply Pretenders, but it seems to have been the case for the previous Pankrator as well. A number of Pretenders' backgrounds involve them being sealed away by the Pankrator for perceived slights or simply because they were no longer useful. From the description of the Titan of War and Wisdom: She was eternally imprisoned for her impudence of giving the Pantokrator a headache.
• Keystone Army: An army comprised principally of the undead, demons, or other magical beings can be this. Without any commanders capable of handling them, they will either rout, or fall apart. Never, ever attack an army of mind-blasters with an army of mindless undead unless your commander is also a mindless undead.
• King in the Mountain: With the right spell the player can summon "Sleepers," ancient heroes of incredible strength and charisma awaiting the ultimate Final Battle.
• Knight Templar: This is Middle Age Marignon's hat.
• Lensman Arms Race: With magic rather than technology. The endgame generally consists of fighting between various One Man Armies magically dredged up out of various kinds of Hell and armed to the teeth with ancient magical artifacts.
• Let's You and Him Fight: Some rare spells don't technically summon allies. They just add a third side to a particular battlefield.
• Light Is Not Good: And how! Astral Magic, among other things, can allow the mage to lobotomize the subjects of an enemy Pretender and force a rebellion among the populace. Astral Magic is also the magic that one uses to call forth Horrors (although they need astral magic coupled with blood magic, so it's kind of a mixed case in this situation).
• Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Acknowledged in the manual and intended. Although melee combatants can use some pretty incredibly powerful magical equipment, ultimately magic will be the decisive element if the game goes on for any extended amount of time.
• Lightning Bruiser: Most giants, especially the ones with armor. Not as fast as cavalry, but much faster than equally well equipped humans. They don't generally have a better to-hit or number of attacks than a comparable human unit, however. Perfectly applicable to high-end summons, though, which are tougher, smarter and more agile than any regular unit.
• Living Statue: The sacreds of middle age Agartha are this, also some summons. But not the Chekhov's Gun version.
• Make a Wish: "Wish" is a high-level spell, giving you roughly whatever you wish for, with some dangers if you're too ambitious.
• The Magic Goes Away: As Eras change, both the number of magic sites and the number of magically powerful national troops decreases. Several factions that were originally composed of nonhuman races become predominantly or exclusively human, though their cultures remain influenced by the magical races that they replaced. Also, if a pretender god has magic draining scales, magic gems might lose their power in a random bad event.
• Magic Meteor: The Star shard that fell in the ocean before the Middle Age, replacing R'lyeh's Aboleths with the Illithids, devastating Atlantis and flooding the caverns of Xibalba.
• Mecha-Mooks: The Clockwork Soldiers, Clockwork Horrors, and Mechanical Man summons.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Blood magic (and the factions that rely on it) requires fine-tuning to effectively pull off, as you'll need to devote time and effort to cultivating effective blood slave hunters.
• Medieval European Fantasy: Somewhat. Though it's a more elaborate example than most, many factions in the game are based on European myths and legends and the cultures which created them, with many Middle and Late Age factions being inspired particularly by medieval and early Renaissance societies and their folklore. Those closest to the common image of the trope are Marignon, Ulm, and Man — inspired by Germany, France / Spain, and Arthurian Britain respectively.
• Mental Fusion: Astral communions (for Astral magic) and blood sabbaths (for Blood magic) allow groups of mages to link their minds and abilities, providing a boost to the communion / sabbath master's spellcasting and sharing spellcasting fatigue among the group as a whole.
• Mineral Macguffin: Magic gems, which are generated by magic sites and have a variety of uses, either in casting ritual spells, forging magic items, or helping mages "power up" their spells in battle.
• More Dakka: T'ien C'hi utilizes a myriad of bow-users, including cavalry. Using hundreds of them can be an impressive sight.
• Named Weapons: Most magical weapons.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • Middle Age Ermor has an enormous amount of these. A quick grab includes Leprosy, Carnage, Childslay, Venomspew, Plaguestorm, Hopevoid, Quickdeath, Soulrend, Skullbreaker and Wormfeast.
  • The doom horrors that will hunt creatures with especially strong horror marks are: the Abomination of Desolation, the Eater of Dreams, the Eater of Gods, the Hunter of Heroes, the Maker of Ruins, and the Slave to Unreason. All are aptly named.
  • Depending on his or her titles, a pretender can be an example.
• Nature Hero: Sort of the point of Early Age Pangaea. Wild Man seems more fitting.
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: This game loves it.
  • The Skratti, giant werewolf mages.
  • Also quite a bit of Hinnom. Jewish Giant Cannibal Mages.
  • Ermor: Ancient Undead Roman Ghosts.
  • Pythium: Ancient Byzantine Hydra Tamers.
  • Late Age Atlantis: Water-Breathing Eskimo Necromancers.
  • The list goes on and on, really.
• Obviously Evil: Middle Age Ermor and Late R'lyeh. Various pretender gods as well. And the various breeds of demons, of course.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Middle Age Ermor and Late R'lyeh, again, both of whom slowly kill those in their dominion. Ermor seeks a world ruled utterly by the undead, while R'lyeh wants to haul the world straight into the Void.
• One-Man Army: Given some time, experience and magical equipment, your pretender god can grow from a powerful unit into what the community terms a "super-combatant". When you've put enough time into the game to appreciate what constitutes a large army (more than 200-300 living soldiers are difficult to field without either magical assistance or constant starvation) and have become resigned to the inevitability of attrition in any significant battle, few things are more satisfying than seeing an after-battle report like this:
  • Enemies killed: 378 of 574. Friendlies killed: 0 of 1.
  • Most triumphantly, the legendary Neifel Jarl. One such giant, with the proper blesses, can go forth and slaughter the independents of the world, in a weird inversion of the Zerg Rush. (Once the game gets going, they can become Awesome, but Impractical due to lack of numbers.)
• Our Angels Are Different:
  • Three factions get to summon the sort of Angels most would think of, but each of them have their peculiarities:
    • Angels of Fury (the easiest to summon) are covered in the blood of sinners they previously beat the crap out of, and manifest damage they take onto their attackers through sheer guilt.
    • Harbingers are basically copies of the Archangel Gabriel, complete with horns that delete hordes of evil with their volume and excellence in Air magic.
    • Arch Angels are basically copies of the Archangel Michael, with flaming swords and the ability to be summoned on top of foes, aided by hosts of lesser Angelic soldiers and master of Fire magic.
    • Seraphim are six-winged Angels considered titanic due to their wingspan, who have to cover their bare skin with their wings so that no one bursts into flames by accidentally looking at them. They lead the Heavenly Choirs, they're virtually impervious to nonmagical damage, and few are brave or mindless enough to even try swinging at them.
  • Another three factions get to summon Angels from the Old Testament, specifically from five of the top six ranks in Maimonides's rankings; Seraphim, the fifth rank, were unfortunately co-opted by other factions:
    • Malakhim (the sixth rank) are the most-normal Angels in the game, so normal that they can pass as regular folk in enemy lands. They're also the cheapest.
    • Hashmalim (the fourth rank) are essentially Fire Elementals who went to Sunday School, grew arms that are real, and partially-manifested A Form You Are Comfortable With to teach you faith.
    • Arelim (the third rank) are the gentlest of the Angels, despite being Arch-Angel-sized. They're also the best Healers in the entire game, and excellent Nature mages to boot.
    • Ophanim (the second rank) are the wheels of God's chariots, made of solid brass, with eyes painted onto the rims. They hide their forms with their four wings and the perpetual aura of flame about them, only revealing themselves to set fire to giants and roll over anything smaller.
    • Chayot (the first rank) are the frames of God's chariots, four-winged tetramorphs considered titanic due to their wingspan, so powerful that only a quarter of themselves may be seen at a time. Each quarter of the Chayot has its own life and its own magical mastery (first Astral, then Air, then Fire, and then Earth), and the Chayot's splendor rivals that of the Sun. It even spreads its summoning Pretender's Dominion.
• Our Archons Are Different: Dominions 5 adds Ialdaboth the Demiurge and Abrasax the Great Archon as possible Pretender forms, for the "Mediterranean" nations. In-game text describes the Demiurge as a very-powerful mistake who mistook himself for the Pantokrator, and the Great Archon as someone who mistook the Pantokrator for the Demiurge. The Archon descended from Uranus to Earth to try fighting the Pantokrator, only to be handed a literal Idiot Ball by him in the form of Shackles of Ignorance, while the Demiurge was always an idiot.
• Our Demons Are Different: There are five basic units that can be summoned, devils, frost devils, strom devils, fiends of darkness and demon knights, not including the various nation-exclusive summons.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: A few of the Norse mythology themed nations can recruit dwarves that are capable Earth magicians and crafters.
  • While they're technically humans, MA Ulm has a lot of traits common to more typical fantasy dwarves: they are strong and tough but slow, have heavy and expensive but high-quality weapons and armour, focus on making magical items rather than direct combat magic, and hamper enemy magic (it is advantageous to use a heavy Drain scale when playing them, as most of their spellcasters are unaffected by it).
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Dominions is practically "Our Giants Are Bigger: The Game".
  • Most of the tier 3 pretenders are "giants of divine heritage" and expies of various deities from real-world myth like Zeus (Titan of Heaven), Guanyin (Bodhisattva of Mercy) or Heimdall (Keeper of the Bridge).
  • Hill and Forest Giants are mid-tier summons that are big and strong but also clumsy and stupid, making them easy prey for swarming smaller units.
  • The Niefel giants and their Jotun descendants are essentially oversized Horny Vikings with some witches and werewolves mixed in for good measure.
  • The Nephilim-descended giants of Hinnom, Ashdod and Gath are based on ancient canaanite and hebrew myth. More civilized than other giant breeds, they fight in ordered, well-equipped armies but are plagued in the early and middle ages by an unnatural hunger that leads them to devour each other and anything smaller than them.
  • Fomorians are a Dying Race of deformed, cursed giants with powers over death and air.
  • The Pale Ones of Agartha are one-eyed, amphibious giants living in caverns under the earth.
  • The first major content patch for Dominions 5 introduced Mekone, an early-age nation of giants (and their human slaves) based on ancient Sparta (including some usually glossed-over aspects of it, such as the Krypteia). Unlike most giants they prefer to fight in tight, disciplined Hoplite formations.
  • Dominions 6 released with Pyrène, a faction with a wide variety of giants. These are the hairy Basajuanak, the relatively common Mairuak, the uncivil Tartalo, and the metalworking Jentilak, from smallest to largest.
• Our Hydras Are Different: Hydras are available units for the serpent-worshippers of Pythium and their Sauromatian ancestors. In the Late Age of Pythium, they have sacred status. Sauromatia and Late Age Pythium can also summon a unique hydra known as the Daughter of Typhon.
• Our Kobolds Are Different: Kobolds are played completely straight in Dominions 6, far closer to the ones in Germanic folklore than most interpretations. The household Kobolds aren't currently in the game, but the grumpy Cave Kobolds and the sailor-imitating Water Kobolds are. The game interprets Bluecaps, little mining spirits in English folklore, as Cave Kobolds with magic powers.
• Pirates: Can be recruited as mercenaries. There is also Global Spell that makes undead pirates raid your enemies' shores.
• Person of Mass Destruction: High leveled mages can, with the research to go with their skill, annihilate or simply dominate the minds of armies consisting of hundreds of soldiers. With some preparation time (one turn/month) and the majority of magical gems in your nations treasury, make a second sun to screw up the races who aren't used to heat, plunge the world into eternal night, accelerate time to kill all living beings in a few years and call on armageddon.
• Physical God: While pretenders are "only" fighting to become the new true god, many of them have magical powers capable of creating another Sun, or plunging whole world into darkness or doing magic mortal mages can only imagine.
• Place of Power: Magic sites are scattered across the map, giving players who control them access to extra magic gems, special recruits, or other benefits (though a select few are actually malevolent). Every player starts with at least one magic site of their own that gives them access to their higher-tier nation-specific units. Thrones of Ascension in the fourth game serve both as amped-up magic sites with their own special benefits and as objectives for a particular victory condition.
• Playing with Fire: Abysia. In the early and middle ages they can actually set people on fire just by standing near them.
• Poisoned Weapons: Both mundane and magical weapons can be found in poisoned variants. Special points for lizardmen of C'tis that use poison gas slings.
• Poke in the Third Eye: The Fate of Oedipus, which will cancel the enchantment and blind the caster.
• Position of Literal Power: Pretender Gods can grant one of their commanders the title of Prophet, which basically grants even the most mundane of mortals the ability to claim Thrones of Ascension on their behalf and essentially turns them into a souped-up priest capable of granting powerful boosts to their nation's elite sacred troops in battle.
• Post-Climax Confrontation: Long games can turn into this, if the losing side isn't willing to surrender.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child:
  • The fountain spirit Pretender Gods apparently demand that a little girl be blinded and possibly crippled (rendered unable to do anything but speak) so that the spirit can give commands through her. When she reaches 13, they kill her and get another little girl. Makes you want to play one of the nice gods, doesn't it?
  • Blood Magic is an entire discipline that gets its power from abducting and sacrificing magically-attuned virgins to channel and harness raw magical potential from their blood. Some of its most powerful spells involve sacrificing upwards of a hundred victims for each ritual.
• The Power of Blood: Can have some of the most intense spells in the game, at the low low cost of hundreds of virgins.
• The Power of Creation: How the "Wish" spell gets its answers.
• Professional Killer: Some nations can recruit assassins while everyone else can get access via various Magic Sites, mercenaries and summonables. Also, every commander capable of stealth can be turned into an assassin through the Black Heart, at the cost of getting a permanent Affliction.
• Programming Game: Tactical combat is essentially a Programming Minigame. Rather than directly controlling your soldiers in combat, you assign them formations and orders on the strategic map that determine their behavior in battle.
• Public Domain Artifact: With the many mythologies this game draws from, eventually some of them end up in it.
  • The Ark of the Covenant is available in-game as the Ark, a high-level magic item that spreads dominion and diseases to those not holy.
  • The Cauldron of Dagda as as the Enormous Cauldron of Broth which can feed a hundred men on its own.
  • The Fountain of Youth dried up, but a barrel of its water is enough to halt aging for a whole province.
• Puff of Logic: Certain Pretenders, and commanders equipped with the right items, can "disbelieve" illusions from a mile away, "instakilling" them because they're not real. Otherwise, this is the fate of illusions that are mortally injured or done existing, since they can't leave bodies.
• Religion is Magic: Divine magic, which is only accessible to holy commanders, i.e. priests.
• Really 700 Years Old: Many human looking fantasy races look very young compared to their real age.
• Right Under Their Noses:
  • Most magic sites must be searched and found before their effect, be it magical gems, gold, recruitable mages or cheaper magic can be used. Negative effects are always active.
  • Some pretender gods are Stealthy, meaning that they could be hiding in an enemy's capital without them knowing.
• Rising Empire: Fluffwise, Early Age Ermor is this; a young and vital Rome Expy dedicated to spreading their New Faith to the world. It doesn't exactly work out (unless a player takes control, of course).
• Robot Religion: The closest thing is found in Middle Agartha, whose solid statues of the old Oracles silently move about and pray on their own. Middle Agartha's religion makes its constructs far more resilient than anyone else's.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: While some nations' royalty cannot be seen anywhere (probably because you took over their job), other nations' royalty can be seen to be excellent warriors, great generals and powerful mages. A few nations have the Divine Emperor pretender available, who is both the legitimate monarch and a pretender god (his claim to pretender-hood is based on his father, the old emperor's, post-death deification).
• Savage Wolves: Winter and Dire Wolves are enemies.
• Sealed Badass in a Can: Dormant and Imprisoned pretenders.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • The spell Tartarian Gate allows you to summon dead gods imprisoned in Hell. An imprisoned pretender can fit too.
    • Exaggerated with Unleash Imprisoned Ones. Basically a combination of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero and Godzilla Threshold, the spell takes an enormous amount of resources. It breaks a seal keeping three... things (God Vessel= basically souls of lost gods sealed in bodies) that will rampage around the world, including yours. You get a massive army of invincible creatures who were tired of keeping the seal shut, rolling over everyone else.
  • Blood magic spells that summon unique Arch-Devils, Ice Devils, Heliophagi and Demon Lords also count.
  • Ermor's lore in 5 is basically this, too. In the Early Age, Jesus just died and they're spreading his message. In the Middle Age, they tried to resurrect Jesus but messed up and released Death instead. Not the concept, the entity. Ermor becomes a land of the dead, and a splinter empire called Scelaria forms a cadre of death mages in an effort to fight fire with fire. By the Late Age, Scelaria has repeated Ermor's mistake and become Lemuria, a realm of ghosts and wraiths pouring through one massive Soul Gate.
  • The Rimtursar ice-giants. They can't be fully unsealed within the context of the game, but even opening the can and starting to reawaken them is enough to bring about a Class 1 Apocalypse How.
  • In the expansion patch, the Grigori, the ancient Lords of Civilization who sinned by mating with the Avvim giants. Reviving even one of them requires the single largest blood sacrifice in the game.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: The most common long-term consequence of taking damage is "Battle fright", a permanent Morale penalty. Those with 30 Morale or higher are immune; this includes Pretender gods, the Mindless, and Berserkers while they're Berserked.
• Shown Their Work: The game designer is a social sciences and religion teacher, and the game references many relatively obscure mythologies in loving detail.
• Siege Engines: While most mundane siege engines cannot be seen, some nations can recruit siege engineers to help bring walls down. Magical siege engines, Siege Golems particularly, can be very effective during both sieges and battles.
• Slave Race: Humans serve this role in a number of different factions, particularly in the Early Age. Their divine masters traverse the entire spectrum from benevolent to abusive. As the ages pass, humans begin to gain more independence, either (rarely) by an explicit takeover or (more commonly) simply by default as their former masters decline in power and numbers.
• Squishy Wizard: Normal human spellcasters are often physically weak, unarmoured and armed only with a dagger or staff. There are exceptions, though.
• Succession Crisis: A divine one, no less, as the Pretender Gods fight to decide which one of them gets to be the supreme god of the world.
• Suffer the Slings: Slingers are available as the cheapest, weakest form of ranged unit. The C'tissians use poisonous bullets that explode on impact for extra effectiveness.
• Summon Magic: Temporary summons that only create allies for the duration of the battle, and permanent summons that last until they die — or even longer.
• Superpowered Mooks: Sacred units can be empowered by blessing magic, turning them into this.
• Surveillance as the Plot Demands: The global enchantment spell The Eyes of God allows the caster to see detailed information about provinces outside his or her dominions. Inside it's even more effective, giving reports on hostile armies and reducing the effectiveness of enemy stealth and illusion. All for the low price of fifty astral pearls. It can be countered by...
• Shout-Out:
  • Early age Ulm is basically Conan the Barbarian, with Conan(s) serving as the nation's Sacred unit.
  • Also, there's R'lyeh and Horror marks.
• Soul Jar: Some magical items contain the essence of a powerful warrior or mage, which helps the carrier both in and out of combat. In one case, this is actually the essence of a poisonous snake.
• Star Power: Astral magic, among whose heaviest users are the Illithids of R'lyeh.
• Storming the Castle: Necessary every time you want to take a province with a fortification.
• Technology Levels: Rather than researching individual spells, factions research levels in different schools. Whether or not a particular mage can cast a particular spell depends on their individual skill with the required path(s). Dominions 6 requires Level-9 things to be individually researched, however.
• There Can Be Only One: Only one pretender can ascend to true divinity. The game mechanics literally do not allow for allied victories. In 4, a new game mechanic has been introduced that allows for allied victories. Still can be only one, since it involves pre-existing alliances where all players except one play as "disciples" instead of a Pretender God (your Dominion is for most purposes your master Pretender God's Dominion. On the plus side, that does mean you can put all your points in making your Disciple powerful instead of diverting some to modifying your Dominion's effect...). Story-wise, only the Pretender ascends to true divinity, while his/her Disciples presumably gets rewarded for their loyal service with power and influence.
• The Time of Myths: Ages long past, often referenced in spells, which summon creatures common in that time. In the Late Age, the Early Ages of some of the nations can feel like this.
• Top God: The Pantokrator used to be one. His disappearance opens the way for the newly-free Pretender Gods to compete for the spot.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: When created, a Pretender gets titles assigned to them depending on their magic and scales, and buying a higher base dominion score cause the game to select more titles (up to a maximum of 6, with a maximum base dominion of 10 and a lucky roll). A pretender's full name can easily end up becoming something like "Wercrata, the Leaflord, Patron of Soldiers, the Divine Shepherd," "Odia, Queen of Darkness, Goddess of Fires, Persecutor and Destroyer of Youth," or "Phil of all Young and Growing Things, the One who Purifies Everyone by the very Utterance of His Name, First Born of Gaia, the Beginning and the End, the Hammer of Gaia, Enemy of Infants".
• The Undead: Most of the entries on this list (and then some), though Frankenstein's Monster is simply a souped up zombie.
• The Wild Hunt: The level 9 conjuration spell of the same name unleashed The Lord of The Hunt and his armies of animals on the priests, mages and pretender gods of the world, sans the one who cast the ritual..
• The Worm That Walks: The Unit "Worm Mage" summoned by the spell "Call the Worm that Walks".
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Gold, which is global to your empire, and the abstract 'Resources', which represent the ability to make things. Gold generally represents the cost to train a unit and its raw statistics, Resources generally go up with armor and weapons and represent survivability.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Averted with Commanders, whose magical equipment (partly) drops on death, and played completely straight with the rank and file. Not that their stuff would be very usable, after some of the spells you can sling.
• Video Game Caring Potential: It's amazing the lengths you can go to keep your particularly famous commanders alive. Also rank and file who have reached the third experience level. A number of global enchantments such as Fata Morgana, Well of Misery, and Gift of Nature's Bounty are geared towards making the lives of your subjects easier.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Aside from pillaging and blood sacrifice, there are some truly nasty spells that you can use. Raging Hearts, Tidal Wave, Hurricane, and Volcanic Eruption all come to mind.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Making a Commander stronger in Blood Magic requires a large, but not ruinous, amount of Blood Slaves... and it sometimes marks them for death by Horrors. The "horror marks" only diminish in death, and even then they never fully disappear.
• Virgin Sacrifice: Only virgins are acceptable sacrifices for Blood Magic (and even then most aren't good enough).
• Warrior Monk: Since the game is a war for godhood, a great number of factions can field "sacred units", warriors that are culturally holy, need half maintenance, but can be fielded slower per month. They can be blessed mid-combat for fantastic powers reflecting the god's initial magical power. Certain combinations can be a Game-Breaker, such as granting haste and additional strength to sacred Niefel giants, turning them into Lightning Bruisers on steroids.
• Warrior Prince: Middle Era T'ien Ch'i can recruit Prince Generals. C'Tis has Lizard Heirs to go with their Lizard Kings.
• We Can Rule Together: Averted. While temporary alliances and co-operation are pretty much needed to win multiplayer game, there can only be one victor in the end. In 4, there can be multiple victors, but alliances are set-up in advance, and storywise only one player gets to be top dog and ascend to true divinity — the others are his/her/its disciples, who presumably get rewarded with power and influence after their master ascends.
• We Have Reserves: Some units are only useful to wear down enemy units and be killed in large numbers. This is particularly true of units that spawn for free in your provinces (the undead of Ermor, Polypal Spawn for early R'lyeh, etc.).
• Wheel of Pain: In Dominions 3, Early Ulm has it as one of their national sites. Orphans are sent there, and those who survive are made into Steel Warriors, often called "Conans" by the fans.
• When Trees Attack: Nature mages can recruit Treants and various other tree people. Pangaea can summon units made from roots and other foresty bits (including tree zombies).
• Wizards Live Longer: Most mages start noticeably older than other units, some have much longer life spans and others just don't die. Averted with Fire mages, who actually lose maximum age as they grow in power.
  • The embodiment of this trope would be the Crone pretender, who starts out at 650 years of age.
  • T'ien Ch'i has access to a ritual spell called Internal Alchemy, which takes 15 years off the age of the caster. Their mages effectively have the potential to bestow Immortality on themselves relatively cheaply.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Horror Marks and Curses cannot be removed by any means. While neither is immediately lethal, Horror Mark summons Horrors that will cause more Horror Marks, meaning more powerful Horrors. Sooner or later the carrier of Horror Mark is killed. Particularly unfortunate if the poor bugger is your pretender god, because even death won't remove the mark.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Dominions 6 adds "false damage", caused by illusions and other Glamour effects, and it can kill people unless they randomly realize they weren't actually hurt. Before Dominions 6, this trope was played far straighter; these sorts of attacks couldn't be undone by the target later realizing they were bamboozled, and illusions could actually cut a man in half if his brain thought the attack was real.
• Zerg Rush: Generally averted or inverted. Due to the way combat and morale work, using large numbers of weak units generally means they get slaughtered and cause your better units to rout with them. The standard rush tactic is the bless rush, which uses a small number of divinely empowered elites.
  • Sort of. It's both averted, in that the rush strategy involves elites, and played straight. Each iterative attack in a turn penalizes the enemy's defense and attack (For purposes of repelling enemy attacks), so if you have enough cheap units surrounding their experienced sacreds, you stand a good shot of killing one.
  • Also, played dead straight with undead armies. Since mindless undead are immune to morale effects and can be created by the bucketload, you can literally send multiple armies of thousands each to their destruction without having them break. Less effective than it sounds, though, since your average longdead has 4 hp and no protection worth mentioning (the basic human militia has 10 hp). Only really works against independents, early in the game.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Ermor by the Middle Age is the embodiment of this trope. The Late Age nation Lemuria is a Ghost Apocalypse.

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