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Benjamin Franklin posted:By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail. Welcome to the Strategy Games Megathread!!! This thread is for your strategy game posting pleasure. If you have a question about a certain game, what game to play, or just want to regale the thread with tales of how you imprisoned your cheating wife and repeatedly raped her in a dungeon, leaving her nine children to die with her in a cell. Crusader Kings is hosed up. This OP is very much a work in progress, and I plan on spicing it up with pictures and stuff. If you have suggestions, PM me or post them or something. Strategy game? What’s that? Wikipedia posted:Strategy video game is a video game that focuses on skillful thinking and planning to achieve victory. It emphasizes strategic, tactical, and sometimes logistical challenges. Many games also offer economic challenges and exploration. They are generally categorized into four sub-types, depending on whether the game is turn-based or real-time, and whether the game focuses on strategy or tactics. 4X 4X stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, and eXterminate. These games are typically highly complex, with the player usually having to intensely micromanage things like economies, how cities are built, composition of armies, diplomacy, technological advancement, and fighting wars. There’s a lot of flexibility in this genre with some games being ridiculously complex (the aforementioned Crusader Kings/anything released by Paradox), and some being more streamlined or focused on one aspect, such as Sins of a Solar Empire. These games are typically turn-based, but some are real-time with optional pausing. It depends on the game. If you like taking hours of your life learning complex game systems and crafting a strategy and watching things fall into place/horribly fail because you didn’t scout your enemies, this genre is for you. Notable entries/series Civilization, Master of Orion, Crusader Kings/Hearts of Iron/Anything by Paradox, Endless Legend, Galactic Civilizations, Sword of the Stars, Dominions, Sins of a Solar Empire, Heroes of Might & Magic, Master of Magic Grand Strategy Grand strategy games are similar in a lot of ways to 4X, but have some key differences. Most notably, in a 4X game, you start in a randomly generated world with no idea of what’s out there. In Grand Strategy, you’re usually taking the place of a historical nation, starting in the same place in the same time frame, with the same people around you. Forums user and part-time third world neo-fascist dictator StoryTime elaborates: StoryTime posted:Not to be super anal about this, but people usually distinguish between 4X and Grand Strategy or Map Games. The major difference is that in 4X you start with a single settler/planet/whatever, and you eXplore and eXpand through a fog, and the world is randomly generated. In a Grand Strategy game you start (usually) within a historical scenario, and proceed from there. A good example is Stellaris vs Europa Universalis 4. Both are similar paradox games, but Stellaris is 4X since you start with a single planet and know nothing about the randomly generated galaxy. In EU4 you start in the year 1444 in a historical setting, and with an established nation. Notable entries/series Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron. I don’t play these games so suggest more in the thread or something if I missed a huge one. RTS RTS stands for Real-Time Strategy. These games typically focus more on building a quick economy and churning out armies, using micromanagement and skill to defeat enemy armies. Generally much faster paced than an RTS. A 4x game can last dozens of hours, whereas an RTS match usually takes 20-60 minutes based on which series you’re playing and how much you suck at it. These games focus on quick decision making and even faster reaction times. At the professional level, one minor misclick or poor decision can cost you a game. Don’t worry, most people don’t reach that level. Most people just get mildly competent and enjoy blowing poo poo up. Some games, like the Supreme Commander series or Planetary Annihilation: Titans, focus more on the macro over micro, and let you queue up orders while you focus on the killin’. If you like fast-paced decision making, keeping track of 5-10 things at once while managing a battle, and changing your strategy on the fly based on what your opponent is doing this genre is definitely for you. Notable entries/series Starcraft, Warcraft, Command & Conquer, Supreme Commander, Stronghold, Rise of Nations, Total War (which is awesome), Age of Empires, Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, World in Conflict, Freedom Force. Tactical Tactical games tend to focus either much less or not at all on unit production, and instead focus on the usage of a limited number of units and resources. These can be turn based or real time, are usually super intense and, on higher difficulties, very punishing. Interesting to note is that while a lot of previous genres are mostly on PC, you’ll find a lot of these on consoles and handhelds. I don’t play many of these, so if you have a better description then post it! Notable entries/series Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, Valkyria Chronicles, Final Fantasy Tactics, Commandos, Ogre Kingdoms, Fire Emblem, X-Com, Into the Breach, Advance Wars. City Builders Everyone’s played one of these. You boot it up, wondering how the hell it could ever be entertaining, and then next thing you know it’s 2 am and you just have to get that sewer system working properly and god dammit I have to work today. You build and plan a city, making sure your citizens are happy and paying their drat taxes so you can keep building. Some games, like Tropico, place you in the role of dictator, and then you can just imprison your people if they don’t like you! Notable entries/series SimCity (duh), Anno, Cities: Skylines, Tropico, Evil Genius. Talk about strategy games! Talk about how poo poo/good you are at them! Tell us how you wasted a couple dozen hours on a game of GalCiv 2 only to get completely hosed by an AI who totally outplanned you! Challenge each other to a 1v1 and then post the replays! Find a co-op partner for that old game nobody plays! MOBAs gently caress MOBAs. Pretty sure they have their own thread anyways. J.R.R. Tolkien posted:It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.  Effort posts worth reading! Mordja educates us about Total Annihilation! Jossar focuses on construction in Age of Empres 2! Jossar ascends to the Astral Plane and teaches us about Eador: Genesis! Jossar has too much time on his hands and tells us about The Impressions City Builders! Jossar conquers the thread and posts about Empire Earth! Jossar reveals he’s a Confederate sympathizer and fights in Sid Meier’s Gettysburg!  FREE STRATEGY GAMES Star Ruler 2 Zero-K Luminous Cow fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Jul 5, 2020 |
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Sep 26, 2018 03:36
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This post reserved for upcoming strategy releases to get hyped about, pre-order, and then be utterly disappointed by.
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Sep 26, 2018 03:37
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Does anyone still play Planetary Annihilation: Titans? That's my current strategy jam. I can't seem to unlock more commander loadouts in the Galactic Domination mode or whatever it's called. I know I beat Metrarch the Machinist pretty soundly, and went on to complete that campaign, but his loadout is still locked. Did I miss something?
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Sep 26, 2018 03:40
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Mordja posted:RTS games are extremely my poo poo, basically the first genre I ever really played. I've got my particulars though. Pretty apathetic towards Starcraft/Warcraft, they just feel so artificial. Total Annihilation just blew those games completely out of the water, imo, and even Command and Conquer due to the very simple fact that units can miss one another with their shots. The former of those two is still definitely one my absolute favourites and it's aged amazingly well and has some pretty drat impressive mods still being worked on. I've played all of its spiritual successors, but none of them have that same tactile edge that TA still has. Zero Hour and its mods are the best C&C game, fight me. Also big into Relic's style of Strategy (DOW3 never happened dammit), and COH2 and to a much lesser extent DOW2 are the only RTS games I've really put any time into PVP. Not gonna lie, the majority of my experience with the genre consists of skirmish matches and compstomps and playing mods and if you're noticing a trend, I am big into mods. I might do a write up of TA: Escalation and Mental Omega one of these days, because they've got a type of variety that commercial games could only dream of. Please do write ups for TA because I have never played them and I want to live vicariously through you. I'm the same way with RTS, I never do multi unless it's some weird map or comp stomp. I tried doing ranked in SC2 for a while but I don't think I ever even climbed out of bronze
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Sep 26, 2018 05:39
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StoryTime posted:Cool, I like me some strategy games! Thanks for the suggestion. I'll mess with it when I'm at my computer
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Sep 26, 2018 19:12
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Jossar posted:Would it be worth importing my writeup of Age of Empires 2 here? That thread's probably going to get lost to history and since it's tangentially relevant i'd prefer if it lived on in some form in a more general thread. In either case, I might consider writing up some of the old Impressions Games city builders. I'm catching up on the thread right now but I'm putting a section in the OP linking to effort posts, so yeah do it. I'm also putting a section in for free games, so keep posting those!
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Oct 2, 2018 18:36
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OP is updated. Jossar is thread MVP for effort posts. Please check my links for dumb mistakes and stuff.Firos posted:Rome 2 is the best TW game don't @ me. It's not even the best historical TW. Don't get me wrong, Shogun 2 is starting to feel a bit clunky, but it's still an awesome game to play, and if you tire of it, you then load up Fall of the Samurai and just mow down hordes of sword wielding maniacs with tons of guns.
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Oct 2, 2018 19:04
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Jossar posted:Funny thing is, I only used Union screenshots for the actual battles in commemoration of that campaign. That is the Confederacy difficulty select screen, but if you were playing as them, the troop buttons would be in brown/gold rather than blue. Honestly setting is 60% of TW. If you're super into Rome era and just don't really care about Japan that Shogun won't do anything for you. I've been told napoleon is fantastic but I just hate lining up gun lines. Kind of ironic that I played Dwarfs so much in Warhammer 
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Oct 3, 2018 01:51
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God I haven't played command & conquer in so long. I had a ton of fine LAN matches with zero hour back in the day. Chinese nuke general owned hard
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Oct 15, 2018 01:19
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SALE ALERT Supreme Commander and Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance are on sale on Steam for $3.99! LINK
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Oct 22, 2018 20:19
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Samopsa posted:The Terran and Zerg campaign of SC2 are free, the Protoss one and the short final DLC campaign (Nova's missions) are not. For Co-op you can play all commanders for free but you cannot level them past 5 (of 15 total). You'll get a bunch of commanders when you buy the 'full game', and the rest are unlocked for 5 bucks each, and they rarely go on sale. I want to try co op real bad but I am so, so bad at twitchy rts like starcraft
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Nov 22, 2018 00:29
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I recently tried playing Dane of War 2 again and I just couldn't get into it. It's probably a lack of skill at the game, but I just found it super tedious. 1 was extremely my poo poo, and Dark Crusade remains one of my all time favorite games. I've gotten so much mileage out of it it's not even funny.
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Jan 10, 2019 02:48
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WHY BONER NOW posted:Also it appears Wargroove is getting good reviews...what good timing, I just got all the achievements for Into The Breach most of which were gotten on easy mode My dick is so hard for wargroove but I'm so broke
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Jan 30, 2019 23:13
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Luminous Cow posted:This OP is very much a work in progress, and I plan on spicing it up with pictures and stuff. If you have suggestions, PM me or post them or something. I have spare time due to being quarantined. Any suggestions?
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Jul 5, 2020 23:03
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