Strategy Games

[TheNewbie]

I am three hours away from finishing a forty-eight hour biography of Ulysses S. Grant I've been listening too via audible. The biography is excellent and it has kept me interested throughout the majority of it.


One thing the book has done is rekindle my interest in strategy games. Years ago I played games like Side Meier's Gettysburg, Waterloo:Napoleon's Last Battle, the Close Combat games, and Medieval Total War.


Later on I tried to play Empire Total War, but the nation building aspect of it had become too complex for me. The original Medieval Total War was a fine balance between the battles and the diplomacy, but the new stuff seems awfully complicated.


Does anyone here play strategy games?

Any suggestions on games to try?

Can you make these old games work on new computers?

[Grey]

I'm playing civ 6 right now. Google has been my friend for navigating some of the more nuanced parts of the game.

XCOM enemy unknown is a classic that runs on new pcs and is available on steam.

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[Robinson]

I pretty much stay away from anything that is turn based, but I have always been a fan of the Close Combat series. The latest entry, "The Bloody First" is the first game in the series to use a 3D engine and it is a lot of fun. Definitely worth buying if you are a fan of the series.

[Guerrero]

"Firefight" by Sean O'Connor, available on Steam, iOS, and Android. I played the really, really, old Windows version and loved it.

[Grey]

Also try the Black Powder Red Earth game on Steam, been meaning to pick it up.

[Hieronymous]

Does Risk count? If it does, don’t be the guy who just camps out in Australia ‘til the end. ;)

[JSGlock34]

My son is addicted to Hearts of Iron IV. It looks...complicated. The foundation of the game is a WW2 simulation, but the modders have adapted it to just about every conflict. The mod community is vibrant, and some of the mods (based around alternative histories - Kaisereich is probably the most popular) have impressive followings of their own.

I'm a fan of just about every XCOM iteration, dating back to the original. Combat Mission is another favorite, though I haven't played in quite some time.

[Sanch]

Xcom is fantastic. I never played the first one but I played the second one, terror from the deep. I’ve replayed it a few times as an adult and it still holds up for me. I think the first one is called ufo defense and I got into the series as a teen with Terror one so that’s my nostalgic hit. I think the terror one may be better since there’s some research improvements.

[JSGlock34]

XCOM Enemy Within is available for the iPad for about $5. Sometimes they drop it lower. Either way it's a bargain. Probably one of the best iPad games available. Tons of replay value. Personally I like it better than XCOM 2, which is also outstanding. XCOM Chimera Squad was just released last month for the PC; hoping other platforms come available shortly.

[Guerrero]

XCOM Enemy Within is available for the iPad for about $5. Sometimes they drop it lower. Either way it's a bargain. Probably one of the best iPad games available. Tons of replay value. Personally I like it better than XCOM 2, which is also outstanding. XCOM Chimera Squad was just released last month for the PC; hoping other platforms come available shortly.

Speak to me of this XCOM game. I've heard of them, but don't really know anything about them. I might finally have a computer soon that can run current (i.e. within the last 10 years) games.

[Grey]

Speak to me of this XCOM game. I've heard of them, but don't really know anything about them. I might finally have a computer soon that can run current (i.e. within the last 10 years) games.

It's probably the greatest turn based strategy game to ever exist... at least that is what my boyhood nostalgia is telling me. Basically, the earth is being invaded by aliens and your job as the UN funded anti-alien force is to intercept alien craft, fight their invasion force, while building your base and researching their technology so you can ultimately take the fight to their home base on mars. At least that is the first game. The second game is about some underwater aliens. Totally worth playing, are probably about 5 to 10 bucks a piece. Some of the best games I have ever played.

[Guerrero]

It's probably the greatest turn based strategy game to ever exist... at least that is what my boyhood nostalgia is telling me. Basically, the earth is being invaded by aliens and your job as the UN funded anti-alien force is to intercept alien craft, fight their invasion force, while building your base and researching their technology so you can ultimately take the fight to their home base on mars. At least that is the first game. The second game is about some underwater aliens. Totally worth playing, are probably about 5 to 10 bucks a piece. Some of the best games I have ever played.

What about this modern remake "Enemy Unknown"?

[Grey]

What about this modern remake "Enemy Unknown"?It's good. Tons of mods. I have it. Not as nostalgic as the original.

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[Wise_A]

XCom: EW was pretty good. I didn't gel with XCom 2 quite as much, I should probably go back to it and try again. The missions later on were just...awkward? I felt like I was just being punished for not knowing the enemy spawn points in advance, than anything else. But those are more tactics games.

Total War Series: Definitely try Shogun II, and you may also really like Warhammer. Shogun is sort've magical because of how similar all the faction rosters are. Warhammer is notable for its diversity in playstyles. Anyways, post-Empire TWs introduced the concept of unit replenishment, so you no longer have to constantly stream reinforcements to your armies, or have your main stack tailed by an "occupy and reinforce" stack. I personally did not care for Three Kingdoms (so much clutter and surprise enemies), and never tried Britannia. I kinda liked Atilla...I have to go back and try it again. Although there was a lot of hate for Rome II, I thought it was pretty good, and matured nicely. Even just the base game is pretty good, without any unit packs or DLC.

Stellaris: There's a ton of DLC (but frequent sales). I think you could really get away with just picking up Utopia and Synthetic Dawn to start. I think, though, that it might mirror your frustrations with Empire--planet management requires a lot of tinkering, and if you're not experienced and careful at reading tooltips, it's easy to crash your economy with a few buildings. That said...after winning a 100-year war with my galactic rivals, I claimed half their empire and was left with a huge population of their citizens who were, trait-wise, inferior to my people, lived on the same kinds of planets, and who were very unhappy with me. Rather than force them to leave, I took the "livestock extermination" genocide option, which converts pops to food. This left me with a truly massive food surplus that I could never use or even store. My vanquished enemies were now starving, as I'd taken all their best food-producing planets, so I gifted them my food surplus. They were so grateful, they eventually agreed to become my vassals.

I fed them their own people, and they loved me for it. Stellaris is free-to-play this weekend and 75% off until the 18th.

Mount and Blade II: Bannerlord is out on early access. It is definitely not $50 worth of game, but it's pretty decent. If you've never tried the series before, start out with Mount and Blade: Warband, as a lot of the features in Bannerlord are missing/broken. M+B might be a bit less strategy than you're looking for. Controlling troops and formations is awkward, and it's usually more satisfying to just wade in and hack away.

Battletech is pretty good--another game I might have to swing back to--but again, it's very much a tactics game.

[Baldanders]

I dig 4x games, need a PC gaming rig.

Old school : Master of Orion 2 is awesome. 1 is pretty good too. I wasted years on the second one. 3 was a buggy disaster that only was playable with mods. I always ignored the victory conditions and went for "beauty." A new version came out a few years back, I have no experience with it.

I have played a teeny bit of Civ VI on XBox One, but they kept the interface the same as the PC and it is too annoying on a contoller for me. I still play Civilization Revolutions, which is pretty much simplified Civ.

It's tower defense, but Defense Grid 2 is the only game where I check my leaderboard rankings. (I am in the top 10 on quite a few minor boards, going for some top 10 scores on the story mode now). Enough depth to keep me occupied for a few more years.

[JSGlock34]

Speak to me of this XCOM game. I've heard of them, but don't really know anything about them. I might finally have a computer soon that can run current (i.e. within the last 10 years) games.

So the original XCOM UFO Defense was a Microprose game released in the early 90s. It is generally considered one of the best games ever made and routinely tops the all-time lists for numerous publications. It has spawned a number of descendants - the immediate sequel was XCOM 2: Terror from the Deep. The underlying strategy element of these games holds up well for being nearly 30 years old, and if you want a taste of the original game, you can use an emulator or try the homage Aliens vs. Humans on an iOS tablet. In many ways I think the original game is deeper than the remakes, but considering you could run it on x386, the graphics are quite dated.

Firaxis rebooted XCOM in 2012 as XCOM: Enemy Unknown, updating it with modern graphics. A significant update followed, called XCOM: Enemy Within, and this version is available on numerous platforms, including iOS. By any measure, the rebooted series was a huge success. XCOM 2 followed, along with a beast of an expansion called War of the Chosen. XCOM 3 is rumored in development, but XCOM: Chimera Squad was surprise released last month. The series remains vibrant.

All XCOM games function on two levels - the first is a squad level tactical simulation, and the second is a strategic resource management game. The story is largely unchanged - aliens are invading the Earth, and you are in command of a multinational effort to stop them. You must balance resource allocation - will you invest in research, engineering, or deployable forces? Where will you base your forces? Which countries will you protect?

When the aliens attack, it leads to a tactical game where you command the XCOM squad in the field. This is a turn based tactical game, and don't let the sci-fi elements fool you. Sound infantry tactics rule the day here, and even in the original x386 era game, you could successfully use tactics right out of FM 7-8. XCOM is also known for its unforgiving difficulty - and the permanent death of your soldiers, who grow in experience and tactical proficiency.

Personally I'd recommend the 2012 reboot, XCOM Enemy Within. It is cheap for the amount of content you get, still looks great, and has deep gameplay. Every few months I return to it on the iOS. But there's no wrong decision here.

[Grey]

So the original XCOM UFO Defense was a Microprose game released in the early 90s. It is generally considered one of the best games ever made and routinely tops the all-time lists for numerous publications. It has spawned a number of descendants - the immediate sequel was XCOM 2: Terror from the Deep. The underlying strategy element of these games holds up well for being nearly 30 years old, and if you want a taste of the original game, you can use an emulator or try the homage Aliens vs. Humans on an iOS tablet. In many ways I think the original game is deeper than the remakes, but considering you could run it on x386, the graphics are quite dated.

Firaxis rebooted XCOM in 2012 as XCOM: Enemy Unknown, updating it with modern graphics. A significant update followed, called XCOM: Enemy Within, and this version is available on numerous platforms, including iOS. By any measure, the rebooted series was a huge success. XCOM 2 followed, along with a beast of an expansion called War of the Chosen. XCOM 3 is rumored in development, but XCOM: Chimera Squad was surprise released last month. The series remains vibrant.

All XCOM games function on two levels - the first is a squad level tactical simulation, and the second is a strategic resource management game. The story is largely unchanged - aliens are invading the Earth, and you are in command of a multinational effort to stop them. You must balance resource allocation - will you invest in research, engineering, or deployable forces? Where will you base your forces? Which countries will you protect?

When the aliens attack, it leads to a tactical game where you command the XCOM squad in the field. This is a turn based tactical game, and don't let the sci-fi elements fool you. Sound infantry tactics rule the day here, and even in the original x386 era game, you could successfully use tactics right out of FM 7-8. XCOM is also known for its unforgiving difficulty - and the permanent death of your soldiers, who grow in experience and tactical proficiency.

Personally I'd recommend the 2012 reboot, XCOM Enemy Within. It is cheap for the amount of content you get, still looks great, and has deep gameplay. Every few months I return to it on the iOS. But there's no wrong decision here.

God the permadeath made me save every turn so I could reload and save my really skilled up units...

[JSGlock34]

God the permadeath made me save every turn so I could reload and save my really skilled up units...

Gotta play Ironman!


XCom: EW was pretty good. I didn't gel with XCom 2 quite as much, I should probably go back to it and try again. The missions later on were just...awkward? I felt like I was just being punished for not knowing the enemy spawn points in advance, than anything else. But those are more tactics games.

I agree with this...the end game missions in XCOM 2 were really frustrating. I haven't replayed XCOM 2 the way I've gone back to Enemy Within. I really liked the addition of the Advent missions, and the various Second Wave options add so much replay value. Plus I'm a big fan of the portability of XCOM on a tablet; my understanding is that XCOM 2 is just too big for tablet adaptation considering the randomized maps. Still, I understand XCOM-2 is coming out for the Nintendo Switch, so I have hope that it'll migrate to other platforms.

XCOM: Chimera Squad looks interesting, if a bit different from the recent releases. A bit of an homage to the original XCOM: Apocalypse (the third game in the original Microprose series), which significantly deviated from its predecessors as well, going to a city based environment and adding a real-time element

[Wise_A]

I dig 4x games, need a PC gaming rig.

Depending on what kind of performance you want, now is not the time. Intel and AMD are both releasing new generations of CPU Soon(TM). On the GPU side, nVidia is going to drop some cards better-optimized for ray tracing to negate some of the performance hit of ticking that box. Which is currently absurd. Fortunately, 4X games tend not to be massive performance hogs, and any kind of discrete graphics solution should run many of the oldie-but-goodies pretty well. The flip side is that some of them--notably, Stellaris--are heavy on the computational side. And on that note, it makes me realize how old I've gotten to see that XCOM: EU is now an old game.

Looking back over my swollen Steam library:

Company of Heroes and CoH: 2: I remember really liking it when I was in college, but I tried rebooting it and I couldn't get that big into it again.
Frostpunk: Excellent for at least one playthrough. I had a great nailbiter trying to keep all my little guys alive through the last big blizzard.
Banished: Neat little city-builder.
Rimworld: I get frustrated because I can't manage any of the really big, impressive endgame bases, but I still love it.
Minecraft: God help me, I just started playing this.
Into the Breach: Kinda meh for me, but it's a solid game.
FTL: Faster Than Light: Space roguelike. Venting atmosphere puts out fires and kills boarding parties!

Non-strategy-ish picks for P-F:

Arma 3: PvE multiplayer can be hilarious. Singleplayer campaign is much better and less frustrating than Operation Flashpoint.
Subnautica: Just play it.
Snowrunner: The Spintires fiasco left a bad taste in my mouth, but against my better judgement, I picked up Snowrunner. There are a great many irritating bugs that made me put it down temporarily, but it's solid.

We need a Steam group or some shit.

[Baldanders]

Anyone up for online Catan? It's free.

[Wise_A]

As a heads-up to everyone, Civ VI is free on the Epic Games Store today. EGS has not been bad to deal with. I have a couple exclusives and an early-release or two with them (Snowrunner, MechWarrior 5, Borderlands 3, and Surviving the Aftermath) but I will admit that I've been more cautious about investing money in the platform than I have been with, say, Steam.

In other news, TW: Warhammer II got a new lords DLC yesterday, with unique campaigns and mechanics. Price is $9, which is in-line with some of the other legendary lords DLCs, and much cheaper than the faction DLCs like Pirates of the Vampire Coast. Or was it Vampires of the Pirate Coast? Whatever--it's an undead faction that leans very heavily on ranged units, zero cavalry, and a bunch of interesting monstrous and giant units.

[JSGlock34]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf6iQckXYKo

[MistWolf]

God the permadeath made me save every turn so I could reload and save my really skilled up units...

Life insurance (saving the game) is your friend, especially before launching a Can Opener. Sometimes the Can Opener would make each pre-programed turn without a hitch. Sometimes it would go horribly wrong and explode in the middle of your squad and wipe out half the squad.

Another good game was Syndicate. You were a crime boss that controlled troops on the ground from an airship. Your troops were people modified with cybernetics and programmed to obey your every command. It had a research tree to improve the troopies, weapons & gear. The most amusing piece of tech was the Persuadatron, a device that persuaded people to become a mindless slave that followed the troopie that Persuadatroned them. The number that can be Persuadatroned was limitless. And you could fit all of the into a car no bigger than a Prius. The goal of the game was to take over the world one territory at a time.

Between missions, you had to manage funds, research, upgrades and purchase gear. Play during the mission was in real time, not turn based.



My favorite was the Yuri's Revenge the expansion pack for Red Alert 2. It was fun packing different troops into a Battle Fortress or an IFV to see how it would work. My favorite faction to play was the U.S. Paratroopers for the win! Everything is in real time- research, resource management, attacks, defense, staging, build up, getting a superweapon online first and so on. I loved that game.