I tend not to finish them as well. I think I just like the exploration and learning part, then I get bored when it comes time to apply what I learned and power through content.
I think the PC vs. console divide is relevant here. I’m not sure how advanced text entry on consoles is these days, but I imagine PCs have the advantage with keyboards. Maybe if they use voice recognition on the consoles? But AAA games usually target both, and if interacting with the model is clunky for a big chunk of your market then the big developers might not use the technology.
Of course, indie devs that only target PC can go wild.
Whisper from OpenAI is pretty solid for speech recognition (at least English), and it is small enough to deploy on mobile devices. If I recall correctly, both PS and Xbox controllers have mics built-in, so input device is covered.
AI could also generate dialogie options for players, though. It could operate as traditional dialogue, with AI generating responses and possible doalogue paths ahead of time so you get a “normal” experience that just changes every time
Hmm. “Strategy” is pretty broad. Most of the new stuff you have is turn-based, but you’ve got tactics stuff like X-COM and strategy stuff. If we’re including both real-time and turn-based, and both strategy and tactics…What do I enjoy? I tend to lean more towards the milsim side of strategy…
https://store.steampowered.com/app/394360/Hearts_of_Iron_IV/. Another Paradox game. I think unless someone is specifically into World War II grand strategy, I’d recommend Stellaris first, which I’d call a lot more approachable. Real time, grand strategy. I haven’t found myself playing this recently – the sheer scope can be kind of overwhelming, and unlike 4X games like Stellaris, it doesn’t “start out small” – well, not if you’re playing the US, at any rate.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1489630/Carrier_Command_2/. Feels a little unfinished, but it keeps pulling me back. Really intended to be played multiplayer, but you can play single-player if you can handle the load of playing all of the roles concurrently. Real-time tactics.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2008100/Rule_the_Waves_3/. Lot of ship design here, fun if you’re into gun-era naval combat. Turn-based strategy (light strategy), with real-time tactics combat. Not beautiful. There is a niche of people who are super-into this.
I agree with the other user who recommended Steel Division 2. If you’ve played Wargame: Red Dragon or earlier Eugen games, which are really designed to be played multiplayer, you know that the AI is abysmal. I generally don’t like playing multiplayer games, and persisted in playing it single-player. Steel Division 2’s AI is actually fun to play against single-player. Real-time tactics, leaning towards the MOBA genre but without heroes and themed with relatively-real-world military hardware.
XCOM-alikes. I didn’t like XCOM 2 – it felt way too glizy for me to tolerate, too much time looking at animations, but I may have just not given it a fair chance, as I bailed out after spending only a little time with the game. I have enjoyed turn-based tactics games in the X-COM series and the genre in the past – squad-based, real-time tactics games. Problem is that I don’t know if I can recommend any of them in 2024 – all the games in that genre I’ve played are pretty long in the tooth now. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1620/Jagged_Alliance_2_Gold/ is fun, but very old. https://store.steampowered.com/app/254960/Silent_Storm_Gold_Edition/ is almost as old, has destructable terrain, but feels low-budget and unpolished. There were a number of attempts to restart the Jagged Alliance series after 2 and a long delay that were not very successful; I understand that https://store.steampowered.com/app/1084160/Jagged_Alliance_3/ is supposed to be better, but I don’t think I’ve played through it yet. https://store.steampowered.com/app/240760/Wasteland_2_Directors_Cut/ and https://store.steampowered.com/app/719040/Wasteland_3/ aren’t really in the same genre, are more like Fallout 1 and Fallout 2, CRPGs with turn-based tactics combat. But if you enjoy turn-based-tactics, you might also enjoy them, and Wasteland 3 isn’t that old.
If you like real-time tactics, you might give the Close Combat series a look. I really liked the (now ancient) https://store.steampowered.com/app/2916170/Close_Combat_2_A_Bridge_Too_Far/. The balance for that game was terrible – it heavily rewarded use of keeping heavy tanks on hills – but it was an extremely popular game, and I loved playing it. There are (many) newer games in the series but they started including a strategic layer and a round timer after Close Combat 3. These improved things in the game (and if you like a strategy aspect, you might prefer that), but I just wanted to play the tactics side, and don’t feel like the later games every quite had the appeal of the earlier ones. Still, they’ve certainly had enough to make me come back and replay them.
For some reason, Warno didn’t grab me and Steel Division 2 did. That being said, I may not have given it a fair chance – I bailed out on it after a short period of time, probably because SD2 was also available at about the same time. It is true that it’s one of the few options out there with a late Cold War setting, like Wargame, so if you like that setting over WW2 – which is refreshing – it’s certainly worth looking into.
IIRC, one thing that was a little disappointing was that the unit database was a lot smaller than in Wargame: Red Dragon – I’d kind of taken that, which had been built up across multiple Wargame games, for granted.
I’m getting into the Dominions series, recently picked up Dominions 6. You take control of a faction and try to spread your pretender gods influence enough to ascend to be the one true god. Combat is auto resolved but you can watch the combats and the mechanics are very detailed. I made a god that was a sentient glyph that bestowed fire resistance and flaming weapons on my faction of desert dwelling spider riders. Another time I was a sentient fountain of blood with innate abilities to raise an army of mindless skeletons so I could stack troops in masse.
Its a little clunky in the interface but once I learned what did what it because very engrossing
I can’t get over the UI, in sure it’s good like with Dwarf Fortress, but I would ask how long it took you to feel like you had a bearing on what was going on/fun?
I mean, it’s not beautiful, but for strategy games and other high-replayability games, I don’t find that eye candy buys that much. Like, I feel like a good strategy game is one that you should spend a lot of time playing as you master the mechanics, and no matter how pretty the graphics, when you’ve seen them a ton of times…shrugs I think that eye candy works better for genres where you only see something once, like adventure games, so that the novelty is fresh. But what you like is what you like.
If it’s too complicated – and the game does have a lot of mechanics going on, even by strategy game standards – Illwinter also has another series, Conquest of Elysium, which is considerably simpler, albeit more RNG-dependent. I personally prefer the latter, even though I know Dominions. Dominions turns into a micromanagement slogfest when you have a zillion armies moving around later in the game. Especially if you have one of the nations that can induce freespawn, like MA Ermor. Huge amounts of time handling troop movement.
It might be more tolerable if you play against other humans – I mean, if you’re playing one turn a day or something, I imagine that it’s more tolerable to look at what’s going on. But if you’re playing against the computer, which is what I do, it has more micromanagement than I’d like.
Trying to optimize your build is neat, though. There are a lot of mutually-exclusive or semi-compatible strategies to use, lots of levers to play with, which I think is a big part of making a strategy game interesting.
I think that Dwarf Fortress has a higher learning curve, but if you’re wanting a strategy game that has a gentle learning curve, I agree, Dominions probably isn’t the best choice. It also doesn’t have a tutorial/introduction system – it’s got an old-school, nice hefty manual.
Oh not as long as original Dwarf Fortress, that’s for sure!
I had a friend who has some experience explain how to navigate the interface, and generally what each resource does, and after an hour or two of fussing about I got used to it. Some times I will misclick, because right click is sometimes “go back” and sometimes “show more detail” but aside from that its easy enough.
The core mechanics are very easy. Conquer provinces to increase your domain, build stacks of units to fight battle and test different strategies for what works against what.
In Iran we always pirate games (except PlayStation games) because US sanctions has banned trades with Iran. Back when I was a kid instead of buying CDs with one game I bought packages which had 100 smaller games and I didn’t buy often because I couldn’t buy games on my own. There are some famous ones among these 600 games (I bought 6 CDs over the years) like peggle, plants vs zombies, chicken invaders, and some others. Despite having fun with many more games, these are the ones I remember the most. Despite not getting a lot of chances to play computer games with others these games where the most fun to play with others
That’s an awesome story (not the trade ban part but that you made the most of the situation)! Those games are always the best, the memories always matter most.
I think that Tetris is probably the oldest game that I’ll play some implementation of occasionally. I don’t know if I’d call it my favorite, but it’s aged very gracefully over the decades.
I dropped Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire for the time being. It’s good, but I just don’t feel it right now. The ship travel does suck though.
Then more coop Baldur’s Gate 3. We are now in Act 3, about to go into the city.
BG3 is part of the reason I stopped playing Pillars 2, since I got a lot more into it than I thought. That’s why I started another solo run, trying to make it through Honor Mode. So far, I died twice in Act 1. First time was the three Intellect Devourers shortly after the tutorial. Second time was to the Gnolls that siege the two dudes in a cave. That one, I could have survived, but did some dumb misplays and paid the price. The current run is going pretty good, although I had some really close moments. The Spectator fight almost took out my party, same with the Robots in the Underdark Tower. If I die again, I’ll probably change to a custom difficulty, where I can save, just to learn the game and fights more, before I try again. I severely overestimated my game knowledge.
I also beat Windblown a few more times, and moved up to the final difficulty, but barely did any attempts since then.
Woohoo!! 💛 I’ve been curious, I know some of them didn’t make it until the new year. How’s it been? They recently asked devs if they wanted to test web request support so it’s exciting times!
My partner and I got Baldurs Gate 3 and it has been a delight. We pass the ps5 controller so we each get an npc during combat and do splitscreen for the world. She’s a dragonborn paladin and I’m a tiefling warlock, we spent the weekend clearing out a dungeon of goblins!
We pass the ps5 controller so we each get an npc during combat and do splitscreen for the world.
Is local coop different from online coop? I’m playing through the game with a friend right now, and we both have our own small party, and control two characters in a fight. Or maybe I just misunderstood what you meant.
It is different, at least according to the threads I found! In split screen they’re all from Player 1’s party and the second player only controls their character. local multiplayer is a little janky, sometimes player 2 turns invisible and the only way to fix it is to force a cutscene
It’s been awesome! Despite seeing videos and images I was seriously not prepared for how small and cute it is 😍. The crank is so awesome too haha. Mainly I’ve checked out the 2 Season 1 games I have access to off the bat, and I obviously had to buy Mars after Midnight. Damn that game is awesome. Also wow web request support that’s so cool! It definitely seems like a really vibrant community :)
MAM is charming and so well put together, the dev’s interview on the podcast was a fun listen too, if you’re into that! Enjoy the rest of the season 😄 you’ve got a looot coming up
SpaceBourne 2 is a single-player, open-universe RPG and third-person shooter game with an abundance of features, including role-playing, mining, trading, piracy, crafting, and deep exploration. The story picks up where it left off in SpaceBourne, but now the player’s goal is to build a new empire in the galaxy, with the methods of doing so being completely up to the player.
Why not? Seems like a fun adventuring game that lets you travel from planet to planet solving problems/doing tasks for people. Seems similar to what the OP is looking for.
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