The Gaming Den

If you're going simple turn based with a levelling system why not try Fire Emblem games?

Fire Emblem: Awakening is pretty nice, I have to admit. I don't think you can play any Fire Emblem games on PC without emulation, though.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:Fire Emblem: Awakening is pretty nice, I have to admit. I don't think you can play any Fire Emblem games on PC without emulation, though.

You can't. It's a Nintendo console/handheld exclusive.

Also, quite a few of the games are absurdly difficult, even on the easier difficulty settings.

I suppose I could just get my own TV and a PS3 and get back into Disgaea games. I mean, they're turn-based tacticals, and that's close enough. And each battle is its own distinct thing, sitting there and not building up while it waits for you to finish building your forces up.

The fact that D4 lets you actually place facilities around the place and elect people to various cabinet positions (and you can't actually do worse than the cabinet of the current Australian government!) even lets you pretend it's a big-picture strategy game.

Admittedly, there isn't much space in my room as it is, I'd pretty much be limited to either haphazardly setting everything up on a set of drawers, or perhaps putting it on my painting desk. And then never buy another PC game again!

I'm really enjoying Endless Legend right now, but it's in alpha. Half the content and about a third of the features are not even in the game yet and there are still some dumb bugs.

It really does live in that halfway space between complexity and simplicity. It uses a small number of units and few cities, but it feels very complex in how you use those.

That being said, check this art:

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is also another game that I somehow forgot to mention.

Also, for just strategy turn-based combat, Banner Saga is notable and free if you don't buy the campaign.

Ugh, Fallen Enchantress.

Since it's been brought up, did they actually do something in their 3rd rebuild of the Elemental game that was worth installing it for?

Lokathor wrote:

tussock wrote:Agree with the others here too. But there's one they're missing, Galactic Civilisations, it's a Masters of Orion clone that doesn't have all the crippling flaws of that game. Just strait fun to play and pretty quick to get through and win on a small-easy game. No Bulrathi though, so again, kinda lacking the charm.

In MoO2 you can play "strategic" mode and then you don't have to fiddle with all of your ship designs and crap, they just work.

I think I vaguely recall the option, but, I don't understand. The game is designing ships. That's the only bit that makes it any good, everything else is just seeing how your ship designs are working out, and not letting them fall behind, and inter-design tactics. Which is just rather busy once you've got full-screen fleets. Ugh, and the auto-combat is terrible because it can't use your custom ships properly, and manual is sooo slow. Man that game's old. Strategic, you say. Hmm. Nah.

Both GalCiv and GalCiv2 seem to lack this option, and they require you to design your own ships and keep producing new designs and switching your build orders to new designs and all that. I thought it seemed much clunker than MoO2 ever did.

I recall everything seemed rather more logical and sensible, intuitive if you will. A half-built big ship couldn't trivially be retrofitted to a new design, or the points invested casually reassigned to population growth or general taxation or something. That made all the choices leading up to there a bit more interesting and connected to each other. For me. Well, for 2003 me.

Wait, how old is my computer? I must be able to play newer games than these.

Alpha Centauri is still the king of 4x games for me, and the one with most personality. But may be a bit too complex for first timers.

Age of Wonders 1 would be a better intro to the genre, I think, even if fundamentally more a wargame than a true 4x.

Koumei wrote:If I wanted to Zerg Rush, I'd just play a Real-Time Strategy. Already I'm regretting the expenditure, but I'll just cheat like a motherfucker and start the game with assassins, succubi, void walkers and your mum.

So clearly I need to amend the search query: are there any games that fulfil the above criteria and reward you for settling down, exploring a bit for resources, developing your cities and making the best units rather than running ahead with Zerglings in the first three turns?

Try an random Map game. Rushing is not so necessary there.

Somewhat related, there's a 4x RTS space game I played around 10-15 years ago that I've been trying to find again. It had orbital minefields, customizable player species, and limited terraforming. It's a shot in the dark, but does this ring a bell to anyone?

By the power of google, I bring you this one. It or its sequel potentially fits the timeframe, high customization, apparently some degree of terraforming, no word on minefields.

Oh, that's it! Thanks, my own attempts at searching only brought up Masters of Orion, Sword of the Stars, and Gal Civ.

Edit: The sequel, Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain was exactly the game I was looking for. Hah, I didn't know Blizzard had a hand in making it; it was pretty good from what little I remember.

tussock wrote:

Lokathor wrote:

tussock wrote:Agree with the others here too. But there's one they're missing, Galactic Civilisations, it's a Masters of Orion clone that doesn't have all the crippling flaws of that game. Just strait fun to play and pretty quick to get through and win on a small-easy game. No Bulrathi though, so again, kinda lacking the charm.

In MoO2 you can play "strategic" mode and then you don't have to fiddle with all of your ship designs and crap, they just work.

I think I vaguely recall the option, but, I don't understand. The game is designing ships. That's the only bit that makes it any good, everything else is just seeing how your ship designs are working out, and not letting them fall behind, and inter-design tactics. Which is just rather busy once you've got full-screen fleets. Ugh, and the auto-combat is terrible because it can't use your custom ships properly, and manual is sooo slow. Man that game's old. Strategic, you say. Hmm. Nah.

No way. I play MoO2 as a space colonization game with occasional warfare elements. In Strategic mode, all your ships always have a loadout of your civ's best weapons, with the specific loadout being based on the ship's size class. Then they just smash your fleet into the enemy fleet until one fleet has no ships left. There's no designs at all, and it never goes to the battle map view. It's like a battle in a civ game. It's great.

I mean sometimes I'll play a game with tactical combat and ship designing and all that, but usually I want to just play in Strategic mode and focus on other parts of the game.

Korwin wrote:

Koumei wrote:If I wanted to Zerg Rush, I'd just play a Real-Time Strategy. Already I'm regretting the expenditure, but I'll just cheat like a motherfucker and start the game with assassins, succubi, void walkers and your mum.

So clearly I need to amend the search query: are there any games that fulfil the above criteria and reward you for settling down, exploring a bit for resources, developing your cities and making the best units rather than running ahead with Zerglings in the first three turns?

Try an random Map game. Rushing is not so necessary there.

You could also try setting up a random map or scenario map where you start as part of a team. Economic investment becomes more attractive the larger the game is.

Koumei wrote:So clearly I need to amend the search query: are there any games that fulfil the above criteria and reward you for settling down, exploring a bit for resources, developing your cities and making the best units rather than running ahead with Zerglings in the first three turns?

Civilization 5 is completely winnable with only 1 city, and while you're probably better off with more than one, the optimal number is at least not obviously "as many as you can". I recently won a game where one AI had over a dozen cities and I only had 3 (on difficulty 6 out of 8).

I'd tentatively put Civ 5 as my favorite Civ game, but it is truly very complicated (especially with the expansions) and I don't know if I ever could have gotten into it in the first place if I didn't have experience with previous games to use as a crutch.

Also, my overall experience (at least on higher difficulties) has been that I can easily grow faster than the AIs, but I still get crushed if they decide to make a massive surprise attack against me before (roughly) the renaissance era. This is probably partly because I pathologically over-invest in growth at the cost of defenses, but I'm pretty sure a large chunk of it is that the higher difficulties give the AI players mostly starting bonuses instead of growth bonuses.

I've just decided to go ahead and look into the cost of a PS3 and TV. I'm setting my budget at $500, and so far it looks like I can totally do that with a basic HDTV (relatively small screen) if I go for the old 12Gb PS3.

Given I won't be downloading much, I think 12Gb is fine.

Yeah, small drive to start should be fine even if you need a bigger one later. You could just replace the drive in the PS3 if you feel like swapping them out later, unless they removed that feature in later hardware and I missed it. Or you might be able to save / run content from an external usb drive as well. Either way expansion costs are pretty small.

Koumei wrote:So clearly I need to amend the search query: are there any games that fulfil the above criteria and reward you for settling down, exploring a bit for resources, developing your cities and making the best units rather than running ahead with Zerglings in the first three turns?

Alpha Centauri.

Its light-years better than any Civ game at this, because its AI do not treat the game like a silly boardgame and attacks you out of nowhere with stacks of DOOM just because youre high up a "rank" and thus is a threat for them to "win the game". Indeed, its the most "roleplaying" you will get out of a 4x game. Each faction in the game is driven by ideology - war, commerce, science, religion, free flow of information, etc. - not silly "gaming goals", and their actual in-game behaviour reflects that (when you meet Sister Miriam, you will know what Im talking about). Thats a feat unequalled till today in the genre.

There's more to turn based strategy than 4x games.

You should check out Panzer Leader (or Panzer General if you want to go cheap). You build your own army, your troops gain experience, there's plenty of strategy...and you don't have to peruse a wiki to figure out tiny little minmax optimizations.

Not that SMAC isn't fun if you want an ollllld but good 4x game. Seems like there's a clone that came out recent, darned if I can remember the name. Okish game, but no SMAC.

Given it has the word Panzer but doesn't follow it with the word Dragoon, can I assume it's a WWI-or-II game? I'm really not interested in little British men and little German men shooting each other and rolling ugly-looking tanks around.

But I have a PS3 now. I have no fewer than three Disgaea games, so I have all the tactics/strategy I require.

name_here wrote:Civ 5 is actually moderately good about territory rushing as well as military rushing. There's a number of reasonably powerful one-per-nation buildings that require you to have a certain building in all of your cities and get more expensive the more cities you have, the cultural policy trees get rapidly more expensive with more cities, and there's a bunch of other systems that make having only a couple cities pretty practical. The latest expansion also introduced Venice, which can't found additional cities or fully occupy conquered ones, though they can expend a Great Merchant to buy out a city state. They get bonuses with the new trade system that let them make a ton of money.

This, but only because the game NEEDS to cripple your economy to keep you from paralyzing the map with unit traffic jams. In my opinion Civ 4 is the better game and it is very complex, but you don't actually need to know everything, just remember these points, expand or die, don't crash the economy by expanding farther than you can afford and hold, two movers are better than 1 movers, don't attack into entrenched units with inherent defensive bonuses unless you have a tech level on them or are willing and able to absorb massive losses.

If you want to see an example of high level Civ 4 play Sullla helped design Civ 4 he knows the game backwards forwards and inside out. But he prefers to play things kind of slow, you can just rush axes early and turn a neighbor into a red slick on the map.

For a couple pointers remember that certain points on the tech tree are good for attacking, axes, knights (before longbows are discovered), cavalry (before infantry), tanks (before anti armor), and some are bad for attacking, after your opponent gets Longbows, machine guns, anti armor ect. Attacking is difficult in Civ 4 (unlike 5 where it's super easy, in part due to the AI being fucked) you need to be thinking about how to tip the odds in your favor.

Manxome wrote:Also, my overall experience (at least on higher difficulties) has been that I can easily grow faster than the AIs, but I still get crushed if they decide to make a massive surprise attack against me before (roughly) the renaissance era. This is probably partly because I pathologically over-invest in growth at the cost of defenses, but I'm pretty sure a large chunk of it is that the higher difficulties give the AI players mostly starting bonuses instead of growth bonuses.

I think you're probably just bad at the game, because Civ 5's combat is super easy, the combat AI is entirely incompetent and literally all you have to do if you get caught with your pants down is cash rush a few units and proceed to destroy the entire attacking army.

The arguments that Civ 5 is better for beginners than Civ 4 are... confusing. Sure Civ 5 is easier and less complex, but it is also full of beginner's traps where Civ 4 isn't. A basic trap you can fall into in Civ 5 is building your infrastructure you want to build an armory in your cities to make your units better? Fuck you you've just crashed your economy, want to build a road network to take advantage of the tactical movement that is the whole draw of the game? fuck you you've just crashed your economy, want to build buildings to allow your cities to grow faster? Fuck you you've just crashed your economy. Civ 4 is a game about building your empire up, you might waste your time by building a stable in every city, but the game won't actively punish you for it otherwise. Civ 5 is a game about NOT building up your empire every choice you make is punitive in nature, you have to weigh your options between having infrastructure and possibly ruining your whole game because your empire is too well supported.

darkmaster wrote:Civ 5 is a game about NOT building up your empire every choice you make is punitive in nature

Yeah that's basically Civ 5's giant glaring and much repeated flaw. Constantly kicking you in the nuts for doing things that should feel like achievements. 3rd city? Oh hell no you think this is the medieval era or something, kicked in the nuts. More than 4 cities? Have you built ALL your national wonders yet? Oh hell no, kicked in the nuts. You want to be an early game military power, ahahahahaha, good luck on even getting the army without the nut kicks, but if you DO, then you had better not go, conquering any cities because you can't absorb them economically until at least the industrial era, oh yeah and also fuck you the AI will never forgive you for conquering ANYTHING.

Etc... Civ 5 has a plan. And it it makes you stick to that plan. Few cities, no upgrades, no agressive war, no aggressive land grabs, at LEAST until renaissance, trickle in the upgrades, build your national wonders which are less "consolation prizes for small empires" and more "fuck you if you MUST have the great library, oxford university, that monument one, and maybe the Colosseum one, minimum, oh and later on you'll be wanting the opera house one, barracks one? ahahahahahaha loser you took the baracks one available since the stone age any time before industrial era? ahahahahahahaha". Then eventually FINALLY around the industrial age you can play it like an actual civ game and start to pump out reasonable units and actually grab land and conquer cities. FINALLY. All on the safe time table that ensures most games run up to just about the end of the tech tree give or take and end nicely on predetermined schedule.

You can try and subvert it, easy enough on the easy difficulties. Even at "normal" difficulties you can stack massive happiness bonuses to try and function. You wouldn't know it but if you want early expansion you avoid the early expansion options and take the Tradition tree for the early happiness boost, if you want to be a crazy military conquest power (relatively) early on... you invest heavily in religion and religion options that give happiness. You can play as a wonder rushing empire lite Egypt if you like infrastructure, because while wonders are often sucky and about as bad as a regular building they don't cost upkeep and crash your economy (indeed much of the game is "rush moar wonders bitch, no options!"). And if you REALLY want choice and function play as a trade/cash related faction so you can roll in the cash that lets you break a lot of the bullshit limits on how you are allowed to play.

But doing all of that locks you out of many options you might need or want, and it's frankly a stupid way to have to play in order to feel like you have expanding developing civilizations before the dawn of the coal powered factory.

Of course Civ 5's OTHER ram it down the players throats sin was "City States". Which the designers decided to "give" to players despite NO ONE ever wanting the fucking things, certainly not in their current form, and then repeatedly rammed down everyone's throats with every mechanic, patch and expansion since. The throat ramming FINALLY as of the last expansion managed to produce a game mechanic that actually IS important rather than just stupidly annoying (it's still stupidly annoying, but with votes city states now actually DO matter as well). But they are still basically needless road blocks to expansion that if you EVER conquer even one of will give you a stupidly bad diplomacy rep for all time for no fucking reason.

City States basically exist so the world doesn't feel as fucking stupidly empty with large amounts of prime real estate unclaimed like it WOULD with those stupid mechanics and default numbers of players on maps thanks to the stupid highly limited early expansion game play. They are there so that when your scouts go looking for bonuses on the map they don't exclusively find large swathes of empty land you aren't allowed to even touch for another 2000+ years.

Yeah. This was meant to be a short agreement post... Civ 5 still disappoints me a fair bit...

Don't know if it's been mentioned yet but:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnz0OIg18rU
It's basically a remake of Alpha Centauri with modernized graphics and a Isometric Hex-Grid as seen in Civ5 instead of the Isometric Squares in Civ1-4.

I am guessing M.O.R.E is too complicated for you, and it's not out yet anyway.

Horizon has a very not much saying Trailer, so nothing can be said about that as of yet either.

Well, some quick thoughts about what I saw from that video, the resources and terrain seem to look a lot more distinctive which is good, the idea of a randomized tech tree is... interesting, but probably not the best idea for a game, the barbs look more interesting in this than in Civ 5, but they seem to not have taken out a number of the random aspects of Civ 5 which is not so good, beyond that I can't really say.

what random aspects?