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.
Medieval 2 Total War. It’s the best Total War game and one of the oldest. It has a basic campaign map where you create and manage armies which you then use to go into a real time battle with thousands of units. There is nothing as satisfying as routing the enemy with a massive cavalry charge into the rear when they’re in hand to hand infantry combat.
While it might not fit the vibe (and you might already know it), I feel like Songs of Conquest needs to be mentioned, being a Heroes spinoff. It’s an interesting twist on the formula, with lovely graphics, some things streamlined and some interesting new mechanics (like the essences for spellcasting).
While it’s not exactly a good game, I had a lot of fun with Heroes of Annihilated Empires and enjoyed it even though parts of it can be difficult or clunky and I couldn’t even finish it. It was kind of like high fantasy RPG RTS.
One game that we always play at LANs is Spellforce III . It’s got a great old school RTS vibe while throwing some new stuff in the mix and there’s a free version of the multiplayer which gives it a really low barrier of entry.
The graphics are trash because I have the “Poor Eyesight” nwgative trait, which requires glasses to see well. I also got the “Hyperfocus” trait which is a mixed bag. Too bad the skill point for poor eyesight didnt get used so now my character’s got the depressed moodle
I got that trait too. When I first picked it up, some 18 years into the game, I didn’t mind too much, but I didn’t realise that the trait gets worse as you level up? Apparently the version of the trait that my character has can be prevented from progressing by spending more time “outside”, but that just sounds like a scam intended to make me spend more on some new dlc or something.
I agree that hyper focus is a mixed bag. I’ve heard it works best for players with a really clear plan for their character build, so they can use the buffs most strategically, but I have no idea how people can make effective characters based on such RNG mechanics.
Regarding the depressed moodle, I feel your pain; I feel like whoever designed this game needs to read about reinforcing and balancing feedback loops, because it’s fucking dreadful with how easy it is to get into a losing spiral, where you end up with such severe debuffs that it feels impossible to get out of. Honestly, even though all my friends play this game and seem to have a lot of fun in it, I’ve come close to just stopping playing a few times, with how unfun it is.
This might not be helpful advice, because the effect doesn’t seem to proc for everyone, but apparently when you’ve been stuck with the depressed moodlet for a long time (and apparently some other conditions), you start to receive a hidden xp bonus to routine tasks. I always thought it was bullshit they told people to keep them playing, but I tried it once (almost out of spite to prove that it wouldn’t work), and I found that yeah, I did actually see bonus progression from lower level tasks that wouldn’t ordinarily give xp. I found that the “showering” and “eating” tasks were the highest yield, but the xp-farming loop was too grindy and I got burnt out too easily to keep it up alongside the debuffs. I found that the xp multiplier still applied to smaller quests though, like “use wet-wipes to approximate a shower”, or “eat a snack”, and I could do those things close enough to my daily respawn point that it was easy enough to do on the side.
This certainly isn’t a solution though. Like I say, the balancing of this game is out of whack, and it sounds like you’ve been having a grim time of it. I hope that you’re able to break out of this cycle somehow and find aspects of the game you can engage in again, whether that happens via the game gets a big balancing update (unrealistic hope with these devs, I know), or something other way (such as grinding, or finding an exploit in the code that allows you to shed your debuffs)
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