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Robo-Slap posted:It's still very Might And Magicish, but less so than the previous iterations. There's more complex city building and it's possible to win via megaprojects, but the focus is the tactical combat. Thank you very much! Definitely not my cup of tea, then.
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Jul 5, 2020 06:18
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I haven't played any of the Age of Wonders games, but I hear they're spiritual sequels to the Warlords series. Can someone break them down for me? Is one of them in particular considered the best of the series?
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Jul 7, 2020 02:34
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Warlords? I'd say it's more of a Master of Magic game than Warlords, with a robust city-building layer while all the real depth and focus are in the units and combat.
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Jul 7, 2020 04:31
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Hannibal Rex posted:I haven't played any of the Age of Wonders games, but I hear they're spiritual sequels to the Warlords series. Can someone break them down for me? Is one of them in particular considered the best of the series? Mix of the strategic layer of the Warlords games, spells and city building like Heroes of Might and Magic, and the tactical battles in Master of Magic. The games are very good but the higher difficulties can be brutal if you are not always conquering cities and rushing for level 3/4 units.
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Jul 7, 2020 11:53
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Rappaport posted:There's a modern remake of MoO 1 in the works (public beta) with an updated UI available, if anyone is into that sort of thing. There's also another one that makes a few more changes to the system, but keeps the slider-based bones of MoO1 intact if you prefer. Dominus Galaxia I think people have started catching on to the goodness of moo1's design.
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Jul 7, 2020 12:04
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The previously mentioned fantasy 4X Warlock 2 is on sale for -75% on Steam.
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Aug 18, 2020 17:15
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:It doesn't help that Space 4X can't spice things up with terrain. It's far more engaging when you can move units behind a hill or cross a river or get higher ground, but in space all you can do is... drift through the featureless void Well, kinda. Stellaris, for example, has black hole, pulsar and nebula systems, so you can fight an enemy in a system where there's no such thing as shields (pulsar), ensure a crushing victory as long as you win since the enemy can't retreat (black hole), or hide a fleet and lay an ambush (nebula). That said, I've never actually seen a battle decided by the use of such terrain, so it could be better implemented in that game.
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Aug 18, 2020 20:11
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Xcited to be on the ground floor of all the bad AI horror stories.
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Aug 18, 2020 23:24
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Gonna start with my personal favorite the space empires series where in V (the last game in the series) the AI was genuinely incredibly stupid and would fall for tricks again and again.
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Aug 19, 2020 00:11
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Fuligin posted:Fall from Heaven 2 deserves an entry under Fantasy imo This +1. Fall From Heaven is still the peak of the Civ franchise in my opinion, and I regret that the later iterations were less modable. Hannibal Rex posted:I haven't played any of the Age of Wonders games, but I hear they're spiritual sequels to the Warlords series. Can someone break them down for me? Is one of them in particular considered the best of the series? There's a dedicated thread here: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3857341 I post a lot there, and I'm unabashedly biased, but AOW is fantastic. Don't approach it as "Civ meets X-COM" though, that's not a fair comparison. It's closer to "X-COM meets Civ", or even better, "Total War with turn-based combat". The highlight is the tactical play, the strategy map is generally just an excuse to make interesting fights happen. I personally think Planetfall is the best, but if you want a cheaper starting point try out AOW3. In both cases, I'd suggest skipping the campaign (except maybe the tutorial) in favor of a couple skirmish maps first. Mostly that's because the campaigns don't get updated with the significant changes that came in post-release patches. Those changes are, by and large, very positive and necessary but it does tend to break stuff a bit. I believe they're still technically playable, but maybe not balanced or enjoyable.
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Aug 19, 2020 05:16
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Some other 4x's I've recenty downloaded and in the process of learning are Imperiums Greek Wars and Shadow Empire. One's greek, the other's post apocalyptic. Both are spergy. My contribution to the thread!
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Aug 19, 2020 05:43
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I keep wanting to dive into Shadow Empire, but I get super intimidated by the interface when I first boot it up. Is there any getting started guide that can help acclimate?
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Aug 19, 2020 06:01
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Lawman 0 posted:Gonna start with my personal favorite the space empires series where in V (the last game in the series) the AI was genuinely incredibly stupid and would fall for tricks again and again. My favourite stupid AI moment was the computer happily buying your highly specialised ships in GalCiv2, then you crush them with new ships built specifically to counter the ones you sold them. 
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Aug 19, 2020 08:23
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I love this genre, but it makes me sad that so many games hamstring themselves by adding in needless systems that wind up being unfun time sinks. Spicy hot take, in 90% of space games the ship designer is the biggest offender for this and they'd have been better off with predesigned ships rather than expecting me to change out my armour mk.3 to mk. 4 every 15 minutes.
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Aug 19, 2020 09:31
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Hot take? Jesus, is that a minority opinion? I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they wanted to design units. I assume there are some grognards out there who are excited to manually retrofit all their units from bronze to iron on turn 40 of every game, but surely they're a negligible portion of the target audience.
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Aug 19, 2020 10:03
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Beamed posted:I keep wanting to dive into Shadow Empire, but I get super intimidated by the interface when I first boot it up. Is there any getting started guide that can help acclimate? I don't know enough to be a master, and I don't have the patience to put together a proper guide. But I will be happy to answer any basic questions you have about Shadow Empire. Might be better in the main thread for the game, though. I will say that as someone who has played for a while, the most intimidating thing about the interface is how much you have to dig to get some information. Like how to see the loyalty of captured cities, or whether or not the militia is capable of growing new units with proper support. Also in response to the above posts: play Master of Orion 2 as an uncreative race before you complain too much about ship design. Developers who can't exceed that experience should give up.
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Aug 19, 2020 10:42
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Ragnar34 posted:Hot take? Jesus, is that a minority opinion? I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they wanted to design units. I assume there are some grognards out there who are excited to manually retrofit all their units from bronze to iron on turn 40 of every game, but surely they're a negligible portion of the target audience. A lot of people - both devs and players - learned the wrong lessons from Alpha Centauri and/or Master of Orion. Unit designers are one of those erroneous lessons.
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Aug 19, 2020 14:33
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Node posted:My biggest concern with 4Xs is noted in the title of this thread: the AI. Distant Worlds seems to manage. But is that truly a 4X?
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Aug 19, 2020 15:04
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I think Ascendancy handled ship design pretty well. Even the biggest ships only took a minute or two to design, and you didn't need to constantly update them. Shame about the AI though, it was particularly awful even for this genre.
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Aug 19, 2020 15:11
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Ragnar34 posted:Hot take? Jesus, is that a minority opinion? I don't think I've ever seen anyone say they wanted to design units. I assume there are some grognards out there who are excited to manually retrofit all their units from bronze to iron on turn 40 of every game, but surely they're a negligible portion of the target audience. I would say it really depends on what happens in the rest of the game, as it were. Already mentioned was Master of Orion 2, and in that specific game I do like designing ships, but here's the thing: Until you're already steamrolling over everything, you tend to get just a handful of ships to use, so it's more like making 'heroes' or RPG characters even. But in games like SMAC/SMAX or the new MoO, for example, I just ignore the unit design thing and use the default designs the game vomits at you. New MoO is even nice about this in that you can just completely abstract away the ship combat bits, and it's just 'number go up'. Depending on what you like, this can be a pro or a con  And then there's absolute game mechanic disasters like the ship design in the original Master of Orion, that entire thing is just infuriating.
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Aug 19, 2020 16:07
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Unit designing where you have multiple viable options to choose from is fine, unit designing where it's just "number go up" or "what colour number do i want" is just crappy busywork.
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Aug 19, 2020 17:59
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Bug Squash posted:I love this genre, but it makes me sad that so many games hamstring themselves by adding in needless systems that wind up being unfun time sinks. It would probably be better imo if the convention shifted to a wide variety of predesigned ship and support craft types and then you only designed big stuff like space stations and planetary fortresses above a size threshold.
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Aug 19, 2020 19:50
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Unit customization is usually a mood for me. I really like Endless Space 2 and their ship designs, but most of the time I just want something less involved and pre-designed like Civ 6 
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Aug 19, 2020 20:08
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Gort posted:Well, kinda. Stellaris, for example, has black hole, pulsar and nebula systems, so you can fight an enemy in a system where there's no such thing as shields (pulsar), ensure a crushing victory as long as you win since the enemy can't retreat (black hole), or hide a fleet and lay an ambush (nebula). I've had a couple of games where I built a massive starbase backed by a specialized shieldless fleet in a pulsar system, it's utterly unbreakable if you've prepared yourself properly.
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Aug 19, 2020 20:11
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One game I go back to every year or so is Civilization 4: Colonization. It's an official total conversion of Civ4 that's a remake of the the much older Sid Meier's Colonization. It's a refreshing and innovative take on a 4x where you play as a European expedition to the New World in 1492. You set up a colony, establish an economy, manage relations with the natives and rival colonies, export trade goods to Europe, import colonists, weapons, and tools, and the end game is to eventually declare independence and weather the resulting invasion from your distant king. It's heavy on economics and logistics, no research tree at all, and all in the hex-free Civ4 engine. I like that it feels compact, deep, and laser focused on a particular historical era. Other than it's graphical and mechanical similarities, the rules are almost entirely different from Civ as well. I can't really think of another game quite like it!
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Aug 19, 2020 20:20
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Ms Adequate posted:I've had a couple of games where I built a massive starbase backed by a specialized shieldless fleet in a pulsar system, it's utterly unbreakable if you've prepared yourself properly.
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Aug 19, 2020 21:23
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Poil posted:You managed to luck into the starbase not deciding to gear up with about 75% anti-shield weapons and the shield capacitors? I usually play with mods that let you influence that sort of thing, but even absent that, I just design an armor-only anti-armor/hull defense platform and build as many as I can, they will absolutely wreck the shop when anyone tries to come in.
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Aug 19, 2020 21:39
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One thing I would like space 4x's is to try and incorporate both recent exoplanet science and thoughts about space settlement in general. There should be a clear dichotomies between civilizations that develop on regular terrestrial planets and those that develop on super habitable super-earths, ditto with contrasts between civs that start on regular planets and those that start on a moon of gas giant. There also should be some sort of representation of the ways to get your population actually motivated into actually replicating civilization on new worlds instead of just having them do their 4 hour shift controlling some asteroid mining drones and then smoking space weed and logging into a virtual paradise for the rest of their down time. It should actually require societal effort to build a stellar empire instead of something like a space city state or whatever. You shouldn't be able to just map paint.
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Aug 19, 2020 21:44
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The Bramble posted:One game I go back to every year or so is Civilization 4: Colonization. I got into it last year and it was so god drat addictive. I really liked it, especially the balancing interests of dealing with native civs, other colonising civs, and the homeland.
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Aug 19, 2020 23:01
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Galactic Civ series is probably the most goofily granular with its ship editor, you can make nearly any visual design you like. I was rollin around in GalCiv 3 with Klingon ships for instance. I second the opinion that AoW Planetfall is a really good AoW game, its really fun.
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Aug 20, 2020 05:16
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Funnily enough, the one game I would pick above all 4Xs as the platonic ideal of "game that is too complex for its AI to play legit," I would pick Sid Meier's Colonization. I love it for going all management/logistical sim in a civ-like, but lmao if the AI even experiences a semblance of what the player does in that game
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Aug 20, 2020 06:37
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I’ve never had another 4X click with me like Civ IV did. Stellaris is the closet but isn’t really comparable. Civ V and VI just don’t do it for me like IV did.
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Aug 20, 2020 14:36
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Another game to add to OP: https://store.steampowered.com/app/489630/Warhammer_40000_Gladius__Relics_of_War/ I haven't actually played it though. To anyone who has: is Gladius any good?
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Aug 20, 2020 18:33
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Bloodly posted:Distant Worlds seems to manage. But is that truly a 4X? Distant worlds is my all time favorite strategy game and I would definitely call it a 4X. It ticks all the boxes, just in real time. The AI doesn't even need to be smart to completely gently caress your plans up. The AI taking one refueling station could make or break your war campaign. The private economy is awesome and needs to be a thing in more games. Watching your empire actually spring to life with space trucking is so satisfying and every single little civilian space truck is actually transporting poo poo to feed your war machine. It makes your empire feel alive. Seriously guys if you like complex as gently caress grognard level games, try distant worlds. It is the most mechanically complex space 4x on the market, maybe even the most complex 4x period. So complex they developed AI to help you run every aspect of your empire if you want.
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Aug 20, 2020 20:28
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I'm definitely intrigued by it but at £45 it's gonna take one hell of a sale before I dip my toe in that. I'll add it to the OP though for sure. e: ok, turns out I already had it there but hosed it up with a typo. Also got a bit confused between Distant Worlds (2010) and Distant Worlds: Universe (2014) (turns out the latter is just the steam version, and includes all expacs) Microplastics fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 21:17
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:I'm definitely intrigued by it but at £45 it's gonna take one hell of a sale before I dip my toe in that. I'll add it to the OP though for sure. I played a whole lot of it back in the day. It's got some incredibly good ideas in it, but it's just lacking some little bit of crunch to make it really excellent. The main thing I wish more games would borrow from it is the civilian economy. It makes having a reactive and dispersed military essential to protect your freighters from pirates, and it's just drat satisfying to see a live universe growing under your protection. Getting past the early game resource bottleneck is massively tedious though.
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Aug 20, 2020 22:51
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possibly unpopular opinion: 4X in general should have the 'board' be more of a player and/or should be more willing to jostle the player's house of cards with events outside of their control. it's likely a tough balance to strike, you don't want a player chugging along just fine to have their empire drop into a hole suddenly, but at least in my experience games are a bit too afraid to have the player(s) forced to react to something that isn't a war declaration. a good example of this might be the grand menances from Sword of the Stars.
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Aug 20, 2020 23:06
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I don't play 4x games much overall but I have enjoyed Polytopia on my phone for many years. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.com.midjiwan.polytopia Its a stripped back/minimalist take on the genre with just enough to keep you coming back for another game. I can usually get through a 30 turn game while taking a dump. It just got a PC release via Steam too.
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Aug 20, 2020 23:09
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:I'm definitely intrigued by it but at £45 it's gonna take one hell of a sale before I dip my toe in that. I'll add it to the OP though for sure. I was going to give you my old keys for Distant Worlds since I bought universe on steam and don't use the old copies but they hosed me over and removed the download to the old version. Pretty hosed up if you ask me. If you happen to find the download for the old version of the game I have legit paid for keys for the base game, Legends, and Return of the Shakturi you can have.
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Aug 21, 2020 01:52
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Relax Or DIE posted:possibly unpopular opinion: 4X in general should have the 'board' be more of a player and/or should be more willing to jostle the player's house of cards with events outside of their control. it's likely a tough balance to strike, you don't want a player chugging along just fine to have their empire drop into a hole suddenly, but at least in my experience games are a bit too afraid to have the player(s) forced to react to something that isn't a war declaration. a good example of this might be the grand menances from Sword of the Stars. Since I'm a MoO fan, I'll keep tootin' that horn I suppose Master of Orion does this a little bit, there are random events, some of which you can mitigate and others not. They strike at the player's colonies either outright killing population and buildings, or just making a planet permanently crappier. A more extreme version (I guess) would be the Antaran mechanic, where a super-powerful fleet shows up and more or less destroys your fleet and/or a planet until fairly late in the game. These are decent-ish mechanics I suppose, but it does piss me right off if I get some kind of planetary disaster early in the game, on a new/low-population colony, that I can't fix, and the colony just randomly dies because gently caress me, that's why. The Antarans are supposed to pick on the top dog of the game board, so that might be more 'balanced' in that sense.I guess it's the 'barbarian' mechanic turned up to 11, but in SMAC the Planet definitely can become your active enemy, and that I do find a more compelling mechanic.
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Aug 21, 2020 02:16
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