Played the Civilizations PC game which I believe is the pre-cursor to this game. It was a hit then, having had several versions/updates, so hope fans of that game (like myself) will also play this game.
A big difference between Civilization and more direct precursors to this game like Age of Empires (and BHG's first game, Rise of Nations) is that the earlier games were what are now called "premium" games, as opposed to free-to-play. Since the developers of premium games got their money up front, the only way they were going to get more was if players liked the game so much they enticed their friends to buy a copy and/or generated a groundswell of demand for a sequel. That gave them every incentive to make the games as entertaining as possible.
Unfortunately, widespread piracy made it very difficult to make money off of premium games, so now we have F2P. The financial incentives for the developers of F2P games are very different from those you get with premium games. Developers still need to make the games fun enough that people will play them in the first place, but at the same time they can't make the game
too much fun for free players. They also have to work deliberately
unfun features into gameplay so that they can frustrate and annoy us into buying premium currency (in this case, crowns) in order to bypass them.
Gamers who are old enough to remember the premium games that inspired DomiNations may not be interested in games whose primary design goal is be as irritating as possible while being
just fun enough that you don't ragequit. Or they may play them only reluctantly, from a lack of better options. Neither case is likely to generate a lot of enthusiastic word of mouth.
