The Old God has left the world and the pretenders are awakening and coming out from hiding. You start the game by designing one of the pretender gods that will compete for true ascension to godhood. The type of god can range from a magically powerful arch mage to an ancient kraken or a mystic monolith that people pray to. Your pretender controls one of over sixty different nations and with the help of that nation he will spread his word and battle the other pretenders. Dominions 3 is a turn based strategy game. You can play single- or multiplayer (1 - 23 players) with simultaneous turns. There are more than 1500 different units, 600 spells and 300 magic items in the game. The game also features a medieval musical score by Erik Ask Uppmark and Anna Rynefors, both awarded the title of Musicians of the Realm by the Swedish Zornmärkeskommiten. Dominions 3 is a highly detailed game and a 300 page pdf manual is included in the download.
Dominions 3 is quite literally the most interesting strategy game ever created in my humble opinion. If you are looking for a deep, complex, multiplayer strategy game with epic scope and almost endless variations of play, this is the game you've been looking for. The learning curve is tremendously high, but if you climb it you'll be rewarded with a game experience that surpasses the best that the Civilization series offered.
Be warned that the single player version is really just an extended tutorial for multiplayer and that the latter is played through a blind email based turn system similar to PBM / PBEM (play by mail / email) games. So if you are looking for RTS style game play, this may not be the game for you as you won't be starting and completing a match in a couple of hours - a typical game of Dom3 might take a couple of months to finish and you may wait 2 - 3 days between game turns.
But don't let that scare you off! If you truly get immersed in Dom3, you'll find that you are filling the hours and days between turns with out of game diplomacy with other players, planning and testing new strategies in single player mode and researching things like Communions, Thugs and Global Enchantments on the various Dom3 forums. You'll find yourself playing in half a dozen multiplayer games and spending all your "free" time thinking about new strategies before you know it.