Imperial Domination

I think this could be the best turn based strategy game on yoyo games, but I'll never know for certain until memory problems with the game are corrected. While simply sitting there doing nothing the game continues to gobble up more and more memory (memory leak). In slightly less than an hour it reaches near 256meg of memory usage. At that point it returns a small amount of memory to the system and forever hangs.

There is also a bug in the calculation in the amount of money you receive per turn. If you have paid the $4000 to develop minerals in the country you receive the $500 per turn for it. However, it also deducts that same amount from what it calculates as your total income from taxes. This gives a net of zero for the mineral development.

One part of the game play that in my opinion is a mistake is random events that are completely outside the users control. For example, in this game, buildings will spontaneously catch fire and burn down, without any possibility of the player affecting this. On the other hand, random events that the player can control are good for game play, for example in this game, many citizens can die and random times, unless you build a hospital.

One problem with the interface, is that it forces you to click a button every time a computer player makes a conquering move, or a random event occurs. This is mildly annoying. The good part about that is that while waiting for you to acknowledge this with a click the memory leak stops.. until you make the click... then the memory leak continues.

For game play, the key is to make the citizens happy so you can raise taxes. You can raise taxes even higher for 2 town countries than 1 town contries given the same happiness buildings per capita. The german's might be the easiest to play as you recieve about 10 free army men per 5 turns.

The positive side is that the decision making is classic for turn or even real time strategy games, should resources be build to increase offense, defense or develop better resources(which in this game equates to a higher tax rate, or faster growth rate, or transistioning the country to another town with in it).