Now I played a bit of both, Dom3 and AoW1, I can make a first comparison. Two interesting games, but rather different genres. AoW is definitely in the homm category, there's even numerous details very similar between homm and AoW. In AoW the difference are mainly, group of units in an army are replaced by a unit in a party, most units are anonymous and you can have multiple parties but there's no commander equivalent. The battles use a classical turned base RPG approach, for example a sort of simplified Temple Of Elemental Evil. It's simplified by the rules a bit but a lot because most units in a party don't has much choices of skills/spells.
Dominion has no links with that approach and not more with homm. It's a large scale game and it focus on territory control. It's because just own a province even without army to defend it brings multiple advantages and allow scout well the progression of an enemy plus it slowdown this enemy, I'll skip the detailed explanation.
Moreover you can build forts and it require a minimum of 2 turns to take the province, even without any army in the province/fort. Also you can just buy a local defense for the province, you pay once and no need bring a paid army. It could stop a small army of an enemy that try enter your territory. And it gives a chances to detect enemy spies scouts.
So it's really about area control, and not controlling frontiers nor strong points like in homm or AoW system. And that Dominion approach is just more complex and more about grand maneuvering and using terrains, managing and planing armies movements and so on. Moreover the turn based system is typical to strategy wargames, you prepare all orders, all enemies do the same and at end they are executed simultaneously and at begin of next turn you can check the results.
So overall Dominion 3 approach is much more strategy oriented and potentially quite deeper. But for AoW1 if the combats didn't appealed me, it's too much very simplified ToEE and a bit repetitive, but the maps are quite tuned and it generates a very good strategy game, for what I already played. At first when using constantly auto combats I believed I would get a sort of casual cool homm. But since second map, it's tunned map design and for third map it's even an impressive design. And despite the game basics aren't as much oriented to strategy than Dominion 3 is, I'd say that this third map of the campaign is so well designed and tuned that it generates a rather interesting strategy gameplay.
But overall there's no links between AoW1 and Dom3, really two different types of games. In short:
- AoW1 it's homm with a unit in a party replacing a group of units in an army, plus combats that are sort of simplified ToEE. And there's ton of big winks to The Lord of The Rings.
- Dominion 3 it's Civilization with a Fantasy setup and more oriented to war and more wargame.
EDIT: Both share partly one element I don't remember in homm, there's some links in the approach of magic:
- Both has a magic research, in AoW you search one spell after another, and I suspect it's only relative to the avatar unit. In Dom3 you search a level of a magic category, 8 category and 9 levels for each, and each enable multiples spells for all the units, spells enabled could be lower or higher level than the magic category level researched. For example, magic category Alteration, searched at level 3, enable multiple spells including the level 1 Astral spell, Body Ethereal.
- Both has large effect spells usable out of combat, it's pushed very far in Dominion 3 for example you could summon a permanent Storm on the whole global map, and during fights it makes long range attack less precises, supplies are reduced a lot on the whole map, the gold incomes are also reduced a lot, flying and sailing is impossible, and some more.
- Both use a resource to limit the spells, it's a magic resource in case of AoW, and for Dom3 it's various kind of gems you get mainly through magical sites you need search and find. But also for Dom3 the more powerful spells cost gems but it's for any units that can cast the spell, not only for the avatar.
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