Strategy games

[Juice the Bunglerman]

I've always kinda had a soft spot for strategy games. I think it all started when I was pretty young playing Civ 3 on my family's shitty PC constantly looking at pic related cause I was young just terrible at the game.

That would be my main strategy game up until about high school. Then I would pick up Warcraft 3 and StarCraft Brood Wars. I loved playing these for hours on end. So I'll cut right to it what are some good strategy games?(Grand, city builder, RTS, etc.) I'll start off with some I've played recently.

Goblin Commander: Unleash the Hoard

This really feels like baby's first RTS, but I still have really enjoyed playing it. Fun enough to keep your interest but simple enough to play drunk.

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

I just recently picked this game up so I haven't played it extensively. So far it's just been a pretty solid city builder especially for the price, about $3.

 

[Chuffed]

I'm pretty sure Civ3 had a balance problem, they had like 7 or 8 difficulties and I think I only won level three difficulty once (and I was into this).

 

[Juice the Bunglerman]

I'm pretty sure Civ3 had a balance problem, they had like 7 or 8 difficulties and I think I only won level three difficulty once (and I was into this).

I bet you were right about that balance problem, I could definitely see that. I remember when I won for the first time I was so surprised cause I had just been used to losing at that game for so long.

 

[Doctor Dirck]

Civ 5 is really the only reason I ever made a steam account. I picked up one of those disc CD keys from my local Walmart years and years ago because it looked cool but when I put it into my PC it was like "Create an account and login to claim this game." I have like 1500 hours in that game but it's not really accurate, I'd leave my PC on with the game running for days at a time so I didn't have to re-fire it up every time I wanted to play it because it took like an hour to start.

I've been playing Solium Infernum lately and it's pretty cool. The story is one day in hell Lucifer just up and disappeared and the other 7 (8 tomorrow with a new DLC) lords of hell are all battling one another to become the new ruler of hell. I've been playing through the scenarios first which take you through campaign focused around that Lord and I'm doing them in order so so far I've done a economic focused playthrough, and a small wars focused playthrough. I'm dreading the next scenario though because it focuses on rituals which fucking suck imo. You basically pay resources to either buff or debuff a specific tile (building, unit, base). I don't like it because it's temporary and the turn order moves forward every turn of which there are 50. So to make it really simple let's say I cast a ritual on a space and because of the turn order the enemy moves twice and out of the way before I cast my ritual; it wastes my resources and uses up my turn. It's just a game, but rituals suck. My last game was about initiating a bunch of small wars so I ended up performing a ritual (I know) that let me summon this big ass titan that swallowed every building he killed and I got to control him for as long as I paid his upkeep (expensive). Really cool game, not worth $50. Pick it up around $20 maybe.

I like Wargroove but the last time I played it I was getting kind of sick of the Campaign so I stopped about 2/3rds of the way through it. I want to get into a game like Fire Emblem without getting into the dozens of games Fire Emblem is at right now and I tried to make it Wargroove but it just wasn't doing it for me. The thing I don't really like about this game is that there's really only one right answer to beat a level which turns it into more of a puzzle game than a strategy game. Like we'll say the solution to level 8 is to build your army for 5 turns of pikeman and archers and then rush the enemy immediately. There's no B solution for say biding your time longer and building a bigger army, or starving your enemy of resources, or trying a different army composition. Again, probably mad because bad, but I just don't like strategy where there's only one playstyle which is what the campaign shoehorns you into. The Leader abilities thing is really cool, lets your leader play on the front lines to varying success depending on if your leader has offensive, defensive or utility abilities.

Banner Saga 1-3 was really cool too. It's kind of broken down into 3 or 4 different management sections for your strategy. The first of which is managing your army and the food and combat items they have. A hungry army is a dying army. You've also got the ability to buy tools of battle or relics of the now-dead gods like say a lucky arrowhead that ignores armor, or a fleece jacket that gives your attacks a burning effect. The second part is managing how your army approaches battles. Unfortunately that part always comes down to trading or sparing your big army for making your upcoming tactical battle easier or harder. Then the third part is the tactics battle where you manage your squad vs different kinds of armies like humans would be basic units, varl (a different race) would be high in damage and in HP but slow and vulnerable to fire and low armor, or a horseborn who are fast and have unique attacks but are very weak. The final segment is making little and big decisions about the well-being of your caravan. Should you stop the caravan with injured and dying people while the enemy army is only days behind you? Or try to push to safety? The story is fucking sick too I really need to replay this one soon.

 

[alCannium27]

Well the usual, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, C&C, Red Alert 2, even Dawn of War...

But might you consider the Stronghold franchise as a good contender? I think it set itself apart in the way it blends the typical base-building elements with a city management sim. I never played 1 and crusader much so I can't comment on those, but in SH2 you have what buildings that I'd categorize as resource extraction, industry, agriculture, military, and entertainment. Togethre, you need to manage the security of you stronghold (hence the name), the happiness of your serfs (whom you need to staff the various buildings and equipped for both defense and offense).

Here's an example: you start the game, and place the mandatory stockpile and granary -- well you didn't think too much about it and just set it on an empty flat. Great, now you HAVE TO feed your filthy peasants. You put down an apple farm near the granary so one of your idle peasant strides lazily yonder, sire. He waited until the fruits grow before harvesting them into a basket which his holds in his arm, before leisurely walk over to the granary -- there, your first batch of apples for your subjects.

The more complex resources usually require more buildings. For example, bread requires a wheat farm to produce wheat for the stockpile, a windmil which takes the wheat from the stockpile to be grind down into flours, and a bakery to take the flours from the stockpile and turn into bread. Bread is the best food when it comes to output, but it requires a good supply chain or else all your bakers will just stand idle due to shortage of wheat.

And you gotta take care yourself -- a blue-bloodied... Yeoman? How you got a castle to yourself is anyone's guess. But you gotta climb up the aristocratic ladder; and for that, you need honour, sire. Build statues, host tournaments, hold feasts and dances, you will need to retain entertainers, chefs, tailors, turn a peasant into a woman and marry her, build vegetable gardens, ponds, and raise pigs for pork, etc.

Oh and don't forget you need to keep those mud-twirling villeins in-line; station guards near your granary and build the courthouse to hold them in jail, and then, build nothing but the gallows once you unlock it because they free up the occupied peasant spot the quickiest.

And speaking of dung, you need a dung gatherer, to keep the place free of... dung. (this is the most bizzare one actually, and annoying, as they often have trouble getting to the spot before it causes diseases; mostly there to incentive you to plan your castle better.)

Then there's the battle segment: you get your mercenary camps, which you can use in the early parts of the game to put up some defense. They are expensive, they are poorly armored, and they are usually shit. But they still beat your armed peasants. To get better units you need to build an armory, use lumber and mined ores to craft weapons and armors in various weapon worshops and armorers, put them into the armory and recruit them from the barrack.

You need to mine stone to build up your defenses, you need to build camps to hire engineers to take down you enemies' wall. Raise your own knights, build corrals to give them spurs and they are nigh inivicible -- they cost you much, including honor.

They've got a fanatsy version of 2, and made the industry side of things more streamlined (the stockpile no longer has a storage cap so you need only 1 of them, ever, like the granary, for example). 1 is most praised tho, it's got the AoE style graphics and as far as I've seen, hasn't got the crime or sanitation system from 2.

 

[cheesebunger]

I've always kinda had a soft spot for strategy games. I think it all started when I was pretty young playing Civ 3 on my family's shitty PC constantly looking at pic related cause I was young just terrible at the game.
View attachment 95865
That would be my main strategy game up until about high school. Then I would pick up Warcraft 3 and StarCraft Brood Wars. I loved playing these for hours on end. So I'll cut right to it what are some good strategy games?(Grand, city builder, RTS, etc.) I'll start off with some I've played recently.

Goblin Commander: Unleash the Hoard
View attachment 95866
View attachment 95867

This really feels like baby's first RTS, but I still have really enjoyed playing it. Fun enough to keep your interest but simple enough to play drunk.

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom
View attachment 95874
View attachment 95873

I just recently picked this game up so I haven't played it extensively. So far it's just been a pretty solid city builder especially for the price, about $3.

gonna buy dis game for my ps3, had it before but as a kid I never finished it or actually enjoyed it
(tom clancys endwar)

 

[Ross_Я]

Age Of Mythology. For your own good, ignore the relatively recent chinese campaign.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWmOMcuXbvM

Homeworld series. The only true 3D-strategy I saw. Ships in space move not only horizontally, but vertically as well, allowing for truly unparalleled tactics. Also a rare case when I've liked the remastered version.

Ground Control. Another attempt at making the third dimension actually meaningful. The height of the units actually means a lot. Quite a unique, interesting and often overlooked game. Very slow though, especially for an RTS.

Heroes Of Might And Magic V. The best HOMM game in my opinion. Yes, even better than the third. Bite me.

Rome: Total War. I will soon finish the mod for it, as I promise to myself every year...
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. It's good. Oh, boy, it's so good. But it is Civilisation, therefore it is very slow. Even for a strategy.
Pharaoh with Cleopatra expansion. The best city builder.
Dawn Of War series. Pretty much all good, if we will pretend DoW 3 never happened.
MechCommander series. Awesome stuff. Capturing enemy mechs is incredibly satisfying.
Metal Fatigue. Pretty much same stuff as the above one, just without Battletech brand.
Star Wars: Empire At War and Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds. In case you like Star Wars, I guess. I mean, they are good, but not as good as Dawn Of War or MechCommander, which is both Warhammer/Battletech and awesome strategy.
Warhammer 40000's Chaos Gate and Rites Of War (from 1998 and 1999 respectively). For the good, old school fun. Though they might be a pain to make them work on modern systems.
Final Liberation: Warhammer Epic 40000. The most massive official WH40K strategy out there. Includes all-out warfare with titans and other monstrously sized units. The feeling is quite unique... or so I think, at least.
Aliens Versus Predator: Extinction. A PS2/XBox exclusive! Mad stuff. But, surprisingly, quite playable. I've enjoyed it a lot. Aliens in this game are nasty. It is quite cool shooting one's legs off and then seeing the damn xeno still crawling towards your troops. It is also quite cool to see an android losing his head and then standing up and keep on fighting after a repair... Cool stuff, really. I was quite impressed, since I've expected an unplayable eldrich horror of a game from the console-exclusive strategy.

There are a number of modern alternatives to the games above which are usually praised, but I haven't tried none of them. Still, here they are:
Civilization: Beyond Earth, a more modern alternative to Alpha Centauri.
Mechanicus and Gladius: Relics Of War are modern Warhammer 40000 strategy games which I haven't tried.
BattleTech (it is named just like that) is modern alternative to MechCommander.
Do note that I call them modern alternatives, and not really spiritual successors or anything of that kind. Ultimately, these are different games which will give you a different feeling; not better or worse, just different - or so I've read, at least, as, once again, I haven't tried them yet.

I also want to try Age Of Wonders III one day.

I like Wargroove

Another one I wanted to try out. Though the Steam reviews discouraged me. Mostly they say that the game is very linear. Like, you have to play it exactly the way the developers wanted you to play it. So it's more like a puzzle wrapped into a strategy. Doesn't sound good to me, though even if it is true, it is definitely fixable with some Cheat Engineering, so... not a big deal, I guess? I will try this one soon enough, methinks.

Finally, Re:Legion is obscure stuff... Actually, it's really bad and glitchy as a strategy, I think. But I enjoyed it with a trainer and I think it has a good story if you can read between the lines... Because if you can, there are many interesting questions to be found. And I like how the main character changes throughout the story. Overall, definitely an interesting concept, but really not explored as much as it could've been explored and overall very rough. Heck, I'd even say unfinished. Not for everyone. Worst strategy I've enjoyed. But I still feel like metioning it - I don't know, as an underdog. Maybe someone else will find it enjoyable with a trainer.

Enjoy.

 

[Juice the Bunglerman]

gonna buy dis game for my ps3, had it before but as a kid I never finished it or actually enjoyed it
(tom clancys endwar)

I had this game for PSP, before my psp completely shit the bed. Honestly don't remember much about it, but thought it was cool to have a strategy game on it though.

Heroes Of Might And Magic V. The best HOMM game in my opinion. Yes, even better than the third. Bite me.

I'm gonna have to give HOMM V a try cause 3 totally didn't click with me. I wanted to get into it so bad but just couldn't.

Well the usual, Starcraft, Warcraft 3, C&C, Red Alert 2, even Dawn of War...

But might you consider the Stronghold franchise as a good contender? I think it set itself apart in the way it blends the typical base-building elements with a city management sim. I never played 1 and crusader much so I can't comment on those, but in SH2 you have what buildings that I'd categorize as resource extraction, industry, agriculture, military, and entertainment. Togethre, you need to manage the security of you stronghold (hence the name), the happiness of your serfs (whom you need to staff the various buildings and equipped for both defense and offense).

Here's an example: you start the game, and place the mandatory stockpile and granary -- well you didn't think too much about it and just set it on an empty flat. Great, now you HAVE TO feed your filthy peasants. You put down an apple farm near the granary so one of your idle peasant strides lazily yonder, sire. He waited until the fruits grow before harvesting them into a basket which his holds in his arm, before leisurely walk over to the granary -- there, your first batch of apples for your subjects.

The more complex resources usually require more buildings. For example, bread requires a wheat farm to produce wheat for the stockpile, a windmil which takes the wheat from the stockpile to be grind down into flours, and a bakery to take the flours from the stockpile and turn into bread. Bread is the best food when it comes to output, but it requires a good supply chain or else all your bakers will just stand idle due to shortage of wheat.

And you gotta take care yourself -- a blue-bloodied... Yeoman? How you got a castle to yourself is anyone's guess. But you gotta climb up the aristocratic ladder; and for that, you need honour, sire. Build statues, host tournaments, hold feasts and dances, you will need to retain entertainers, chefs, tailors, turn a peasant into a woman and marry her, build vegetable gardens, ponds, and raise pigs for pork, etc.

Oh and don't forget you need to keep those mud-twirling villeins in-line; station guards near your granary and build the courthouse to hold them in jail, and then, build nothing but the gallows once you unlock it because they free up the occupied peasant spot the quickiest.

And speaking of dung, you need a dung gatherer, to keep the place free of... dung. (this is the most bizzare one actually, and annoying, as they often have trouble getting to the spot before it causes diseases; mostly there to incentive you to plan your castle better.)

Then there's the battle segment: you get your mercenary camps, which you can use in the early parts of the game to put up some defense. They are expensive, they are poorly armored, and they are usually shit. But they still beat your armed peasants. To get better units you need to build an armory, use lumber and mined ores to craft weapons and armors in various weapon worshops and armorers, put them into the armory and recruit them from the barrack.

You need to mine stone to build up your defenses, you need to build camps to hire engineers to take down you enemies' wall. Raise your own knights, build corrals to give them spurs and they are nigh inivicible -- they cost you much, including honor.

They've got a fanatsy version of 2, and made the industry side of things more streamlined (the stockpile no longer has a storage cap so you need only 1 of them, ever, like the granary, for example). 1 is most praised tho, it's got the AoE style graphics and as far as I've seen, hasn't got the crime or sanitation system from 2.

I've been dragging my feet for so long on trying Stronghold but I think this finally pushed me over the edge. Sounds too fun, I gotta try it now.

Some other games I remembered recently or this thread reminded me of:
Supreme Commander

Boiled down version is you control a huge mech making an army of smaller mechs to defeat another huge mech(s) with another army of smaller mechs. Definitely a fun game from what I remember of it, played the campaign a few years ago.

Hearts of Iron 4
This one I'm not even gonna talk about really cause I'm so bad at and just have very little time in. From what I have played it seems really cool to be able to kind of make history different with a Fascist USSR or a Democratic Germany. This is another one that I really want to get into and have tried but, I would definitely need someone who has played it before to help get into it.

 

[Caspar]

• Dawn of War and especially the Ultimate Apocalypse mod were a mainstay with me for a long time. Dawn of War 2 is fun, but very different. Never tried DoW3, don't want to, either.
• Total War is pretty good; Warhammer is good for mindless entertainment while Medieval 2 / Rome are actually good games with good mods. Stainless Steel and Europa Barbarorum are my favorite mods.
• There's a game by the same people who made S.T.A.L.K.E.R. called Heroes of Annihilated Empires which I've had since it released; I play that every couple years. Kind of like Cossacks or Age of Empires. No real unit caps and you can scale your hero character to become absurdly powerful. Either play it as an RTS or RPG, fun either way.
• Supreme Commander I mostly played SupCom 2 for the spectacle in multiplayer with friends. Forged Alliance Forever is also pretty fun.
• Joint Task Force is another rather obscure title I remember playing a lot when I was younger. I enjoyed it, but have long since lost one of the disks, so it's entirely rose-tints for me. If memory serves, it's like proto-Men of War.

Hearts of Iron 4

It's not as complex as it seems. Paradox games are good for learning geography and, to a limited extent, history, but are incredibly mind-numbing experiences past a certain point. I've only done a little multiplayer; it's not easy to find people willing to set aside the disgusting amount of time required to finish one game. Play their games at your own peril.

 

[microbyte]

Personally, I think that video games, especially for strategy, always miss a charm that physical games have. Nothing beats seeing stuff happen in real 3D, and setting it all up yourself. Axis & Allies was probably the first real strategy game I ever played, and it's still one of my favorites. It's a strategy game about WW2, that's really fun. After a while it's pretty solvable tho, and the Allies will always win if they play correctly.
Squad Leader is also a pretty fun tactical level game, where you control squads of just a handful of people on a small map(s). It's really complex though, as Avalon Hill tried to model everything that impacted infantry and armored tactics in WW2, from Artillery to fire to rubble to all the machine guns and flamethrowers and demo packs.
And then I also can't mention the Strategy & Tactics magazine, which I'm planning on subscribing again to, after finding a bunch of old copies from the 80s and 90s. It comes out quarterly and has a separate game in each one. I'm currently playing the battle of Hastings which I got from it, after finishing a game about a Soviet attack on the Germans in WW2, based on paratroopers and gliders called Kanev.
I personally have trouble with video games, because they tend to have all these complicated system to try to model technological development and whatnot, but they're still so limited. Unless they manage to model actual innovation, I'm not really gonna be interested in them.

 

[cheesebunger]

I had this game for PSP, before my psp completely shit the bed. Honestly don't remember much about it, but thought it was cool to have a strategy game on it though.

I'm gonna have to give HOMM V a try cause 3 totally didn't click with me. I wanted to get into it so bad but just couldn't.

I've been dragging my feet for so long on trying Stronghold but I think this finally pushed me over the edge. Sounds too fun, I gotta try it now.

Some other games I remembered recently or this thread reminded me of:
Supreme Commander
View attachment 96311
Boiled down version is you control a huge mech making an army of smaller mechs to defeat another huge mech(s) with another army of smaller mechs. Definitely a fun game from what I remember of it, played the campaign a few years ago.

Hearts of Iron 4
This one I'm not even gonna talk about really cause I'm so bad at and just have very little time in. From what I have played it seems really cool to be able to kind of make history different with a Fascist USSR or a Democratic Germany. This is another one that I really want to get into and have tried but, I would definitely need someone who has played it before to help get into it.

I got the psp version for endwar, I should've had it coming but it was an entirely different game lol

 

[Doctor Dirck]

(tom clancys endwar)

I had this game for the Xbox 360 but the cover implied I needed I microphone to play and control my troops so I said "fuck it" and never played it. There was another one of those Six Siege tactics games that had a lot to do with mobilized infantry units that had the worst fucking controls I couldn't get a hang of either.

Supreme Commander

I watched someone play this once and it looked really good. There's just some games I like watching someone else play more than playing it myself.

Hearts of Iron 4

Everybody says Hearts of Iron 4 is really good and I'd like to get into it one day if for no other reason than to play some of the cool mods like the Fallout mod. I like Stellaris but they change the core gameplay of it once every 6 months and I don't feel like re-learning the same game differently over and over again.

Personally, I think that video games, especially for strategy, always miss a charm that physical games have. Nothing beats seeing stuff happen in real 3D

I do like playing physical strategy games sometimes. When we were kids some friends of mine and I played some kind of 40k-ish game without knowing what that would be for another like 15 years. We used to set up these huge battlefields and play with hard and fast rules to make it more fun and interesting. I've got some this and that copies of board games around too but none of the traditional or big strategy board games. The RISK legacy edition looks sort of cool to me but I couldn't imagine going straight into another game after playing your first one.


Another strategy videogame I liked was Universe At War. The story is that this red alien robot species one day comes out of nowhere and handily decimates the world's militaries and are setting up to harvest the natural resources of the world and the human race. Then this blue alien robot species comes in from another dimension at the 11th hour as the last remnants of the US military make a final stand and join the humans in the war against the red robots.

There's 3 different factions in the game the red aliens, the blue aliens, and the green aliens. The red aliens can consume any local resources from buildings, to people, to enemy units, and they use this plethora of resources to construct these giant mobile fighters/troop transporters/command centers. It's up to you what add-ons you want to give them for the kind of war you want to wage. Then Blue aliens can consume non-biological resources like buildings and some enemy vehicles. Blue's strong suit is adaptive combat with "patches" you can apply to your troops that give them sudden bonuses like improved move speed, HP, or damage; for if you need your troops to run, last longer, or turn the tide of a crucial battle. They also have the bonus of the fastest troop movement through these nodes you can hook up like power lines throughout the map, and your troops move through them almost instantly. The green aliens make their own resources through the aether slowly but consistently. They can switch between two modes at any time but with a cooldown; a light and a dark mode. The light mode allows them to move quicker, attack faster, and boost their building's production with units. The dark mode made them way slower but with much more HP and Damage.

 

[Ross_Я]

Boy, this reeks of The War Of The Worlds. In a most positive way though, looks hella cool. Gotta add this game to my list, I think.

Supreme Commander

Yeah, I wanted to mention this one as well... Good thing everyone else did it, I guess.
The reason I didn't mention it, is because it is very, very, very slow. Much slower than Ground Control I've tagged as slow. But, heck, Ground Control is fast compared to Supreme Commander where skirmishes can last actual days.
I've only completed it with a trainer that broke the whole game by allowing instant unit building. So, well, can't even really say I played it. But I enjoyed it, for whatever that playthrough of mine was. Blowing up giant enemy robots surely was fun. They go up in a cool atomic kind of explosion as enemy commander gives his final speech... Yeah, bet defeating an enemy legitimately gives tons of satisfaction, but I just can't spend that much time and it was cool enough as it was.
Still haven't tried the second part so far.

I had this game for PSP

Ah, yeah, PSP.
Warhammer 40000: Squad Command - a PSP exclusive WH40K strategy, which is simply awesome. Darn, it's... awesome. I'm done.

 

[dorgon]

I had this game for PSP, before my psp completely shit the bed. Honestly don't remember much about it, but thought it was cool to have a strategy game on it though.

I'm gonna have to give HOMM V a try cause 3 totally didn't click with me. I wanted to get into it so bad but just couldn't.

I've been dragging my feet for so long on trying Stronghold but I think this finally pushed me over the edge. Sounds too fun, I gotta try it now.

Some other games I remembered recently or this thread reminded me of:
Supreme Commander
View attachment 96311
Boiled down version is you control a huge mech making an army of smaller mechs to defeat another huge mech(s) with another army of smaller mechs. Definitely a fun game from what I remember of it, played the campaign a few years ago.

Hearts of Iron 4
This one I'm not even gonna talk about really cause I'm so bad at and just have very little time in. From what I have played it seems really cool to be able to kind of make history different with a Fascist USSR or a Democratic Germany. This is another one that I really want to get into and have tried but, I would definitely need someone who has played it before to help get into it.

The mods definitely carry the game, imo. the vanilla game seems kind of bland to me.

It's a similar experience with Europa Universalis 4, but I believe you can do much more in EU4 than in HOI4. But again, the mods are the best parts of both of these games and I think they're the reason why both games have decent playerbases.

 

[RealTomCruise]

Played the shit out of Age of Empires 3 and StarCraft 2 when I was younger, but to be honest I got a bit tired of the rts genre as a whole but would like to get back into it.

Civ 5 is probably my favorite turn based strategy game from what I've played, tried 6 but the emphasis on districts and adjacency bonuses sort of sucked, would like to try the older ones.

EU4 is pretty fun and has some interesting mechanics but my machine can only handle paradox games (god forbid with mods) at a slower speed so it's even more of a slog then it usually is. HOI4 seems to have a really strong take on the focus trees so if my hardware ever permits I'll check it out.

An old strategy game I use to play was Lords of the Realm 2, quicker games with a mix of turn based management and real time combat, sort of like a smaller scale proto-total war. Best parts was upgrading strongholds and absolutely fucking over the enemy with pouring burning oil. Never got super into it but it was fun, managing units in the rts sections were hell though.

 

[keep]

I used to play a lot of Command and Conquer along with Age of Empires.


On the topic, but did you know that there exists a Star Wars version of Age of Empires called Galactic Battlegrounds? Along with it getting an expansion and a fan made patch that adds in new factions and upscales it to 1080 ala Forgotten Empires? The base game has a Wookiee faction, and it was made before Revenge of the Sith. It's quite interesting and I'm pretty sure Disney took some vehicles and troops from the game and made them official

 

[Juice the Bunglerman]

I used to play a lot of Command and Conquer along with Age of Empires.

Hail fucken yeh! Love Command and Conquer, haven't tried Age of Empires but looks good.

 

[Juice the Bunglerman]

Heroes Of Might And Magic V.

I have played this now and I have to say this is how Heroes of Might and Magic should be. So much more enjoyable to 3 in my opinion.

I like Stellaris but they change the core gameplay of it once every 6 months and I don't feel like re-learning the same game differently over and over again.

I've really looked into Stellaris and it looks interesting, but I'm afraid it would possibly be another HoI4 for me and I'd never set the time aside to learn it especially if it kept changing.

I've also been enjoying city builders more than usually recently. One of the first city builders I remember playing was Sim City 4. I'm man enough to admit that I played the Sims 1 and 3... A lot and I mean a lot. Never really played 2 not for any reason just skipped over it. Anyways I'm not really sure how this game came to be in my household as a kid but never the less it showed up. I've played it more recently and as aggravating as it is to me, with constantly losing money and poor management skills, I still always love to see a huge city get built. Maybe that's just this my 'tism though.

On another note has anyone played or heard about Dune: Spice Wars?

 

[Ross_Я]

I have played this now and I have to say this is how Heroes of Might and Magic should be. So much more enjoyable to 3 in my opinion.

That's what I say, yeah!

I've really looked into Stellaris and it looks interesting, but I'm afraid it would possibly be another HoI4 for me and I'd never set the time aside to learn it especially if it kept changing.

That's a major problem with Stellaris. And the reason I never managed to get into it.
The only hope is that the devs will finally finish this game one day and will stop the constant torrent of updates.
Well, either that, or you can stick to one of the earlier versions. People have been praising Stellaris 1.9.1, for example, saying that after that update game has never been the same. Never tried any of the early versions myself and cannot vouch for those words.

As for Dune...

Well, I don't know nothing about Spice Wars, but Dune II has been pretty cool back in the days. Wasn't it also the first strategy that allowed us to use a mouse? Do not remember. But if it is true, it also was quite revolutionary.

You're right, it was revolutionary. It totally defined the real-time strategy genre.

 

[LiraTirsoCaduceo]

Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom

Hey if you liked it you might like Nebuchadnezzar, it's a fun game. Similar to those old city builders but set in Mesopotamia.
It's pretty straightforward but polished.

It's not as complex as it seems. Paradox games are good for learning geography and, to a limited extent, history, but are incredibly mind-numbing experiences past a certain point

Yeah they can be intimidating at first, but once you figure out how to go through the menus they are pretty easy. You start having to tie your arm behind your arm to have some sort of fun, but then the run can become so rng heavy it's not fun at all. I think my hardest accomplishment in Victoria 2 was forming Indonesia from Bali(I think it was in the HPM mod), and it involved a lot of savescumming and resetting the run, it was fun once I had the ball rolling but getting there was painful.
But if you play as one of the "intended" states you will be able to do virtually anything you want after a few runs of the games, they are pretty easy.