Hrm, that’s tricky. I suffer from the same, if I knew how to overcome it I bet I’d play more 4X games.
Somehow it works for me here, I guess because I mostly play it in MP, and mostly async. Means I never spend more than a few minutes on a single match at a time.
If city building is also your thing, check out Against The Storm, a really clever roguelike take where you only spend 30-60 minutes or so on each village you build.
It might just be in-context. For all I know it’s a quite solid live service game now - unlike in the previews, which were truly terribly bad and laughable.
But that’s the thing, it’s still a soulless and styleless and barely suicide squad live service game. But the bar for those is so low overall, this might be quite good in comparison, so if you enjoy the near-endless time investment and this is your genre of choice for those, this might be a good fit for you. Personally I have FFXIV for that, so eh, not really interested at all. 🤷
Why is the board not held accountable for fostering the atmosphere via pressure on the CEO then? So the buck ultimately passes to them, they had every chance to rectify the situation, including replacing the C-suites if they don’t think the current ones are fit for the job?
I know, they just think of the shareholders and their pockets, but that’s my point: If you get money when your decisions make the company more profitable, maybe your decisions should lose you money when they do the opposite.
And specifically, I mean long-term. Not just based on share-price. You meddled with the company. If it tanks, you held X% of their money for Y% of the time, that’s how much you’re in the hole for now as your decisions were ultimately responsible for that percentage of the total decision space cash the company ever had in its time.
Plus, I don’t think that excuses CEOs from having 0 integrity. Yeah they could get voted to be replaced, but that doesn’t excuse it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but as an analogy, soldiers are supposed to refuse inhuman orders, no? Just that the board tells them to ruin 1900 people’s lives doesn’t mean they get a clean bill for the moral implications of being the one to pull the trigger on that.
Pluuuuuuus… isn’t it the CEO who would make the decision to take a company private again? So they could always reverse course if they mind the shareholders meddling too much?
Yeah same. I disagree with a whole lot, but it’s refreshing to see that perspective, and in a lot of ways that tells me much more how the rework is (knowing the base game) than the more “positive” reviews.
I play it in that async multiplayer they support with friends, both against each other and semi-allied with bots.
It’s cool. I love the variety, I love how that works against the sameyness these games usually develop, and it has just enough techncial qualities like pretty graphics and okay netcode to never get in my way. Plus hey, async MP! Always a huge plus to me, and sadly way too rare overall.
I can see it become boring if one players singleplayer generated maps religiously, but I got Against The Storm to scratch that itch, personally.
As far as the gameplay goes, it’s mostly the usual 4X fare, of course. Differences, if you’re not used to Age of Wonders games:
Magic is strong, to put it mildly. The games take their inspiration from the old Master of Magic game after all, and as such leader-cast spells can wildly swing battles even when your units are outnumbered and outteched. Likewise, strong summoned units and stacked buff spells make terrifying army stacks even out of tier 1 units (in fact there’s a spell tome specifically for that!).
The way you learn more magic makes for a nice little variety. You get 3 spells offered to research, you can reroll but it’s costly. Every few researched spells you get to pick a new tome of spells from which to research, and every few tomes you get to advance a tier and pick higher-level spell tomes.
From tomes + some other effects you have to “unlock” certain empire upgrades, and unlike other games some of these upgrades are instead instant effects, so at the right time they could swing things wildly (like healing all your units on the entire map to full).
There’s less focus on building your own empire - as you can only have 3-5 cities max anyways - and more on each city expanding in a huge sprawling network of influence and vassalizing more cities you take over, then getting tribute from them and hiring units with a resource specifically for that + empire upgrades.
Random encounters and events with decisions are way more common than in other such games. They’re not terrible meaningful 90%+ of the time (though cool ones do exist!), but it’s neat to get something shown so often, and sometimes you have replies that are unlocked by your specific empire attributes and setups.
The race/faction creator is something I’ve not seen that way since Master of Orion 2, not even when Endless Space 2 tried to go wild with that with later patches.
I mean at least they’re also removing managers at Blizzard and Activision with the layoffs. That it hits workers, too - sadly utterly expected 😑 - but at least MS isn’t above letting useless and redundant managers go.
(edit) Ugh, sorry. I should have added an explicit /s, it’s not as obvious as I thought it’d be. 😔
That’s news? If I spend that many billions of more people to fire, I damn well expect that my monthly revenue goes up. They’ve got to have some dedicated whales paying for lootboxes, after all.
As if modern Overwatch has much it can lose from a COD-centric influence. 😅 That game has nosedived so hard unter their internal pressure to prioritize e-sports and pro gamers above the current playerbase which at the time was a widest-net casual playerbase that made friends of all kinds play Overwatch together.
Good for the devs, seem to have worked out and secured their jobs at lea… oh. Well fuck Overwatch e-sports then.
Shadow Tactics is set in feudal japan. This one has an expandalone.
Desperados III then takes the game to the wild west.
Shadow Gambit goes wild and gives us a magic ship and an undead pirate crew. It has two rather pricey expansions, one bringing in a character from the first game. It also has a hidden character to unlock after you beat the game, which is kinda cool.
You can notice how each game perfects the formula, but they’re overall extremely similar. I would very much recommend the last one if you have to pick one, as the focus on magic allowed them to go truly wild with the character abilities. Gaelle shooting corpses and partymembers around with her cannon is a particularly fun one.
Sidenote: Far as I can tell they didn’t go bankrupt or anything, they just … stopped. They’re done or so. Did the same concept three times, happy now, works for them.
I can’t even remember any plot. I know I got past some hourglass shaped pyramid and then a few more steps. But it all felt utterly disconnected. I might have actually finished it, but I can’t even recall.
If you play with M+KB, you can aim as good as the game clearly expects you to. But you will rapidly develop RSI from the spam-clicking, nevermind how the melee attack has the weirdest input I’ve seen in a long time.
If you use a controller, most controls work fine, but in return you cannot aim that well. Which is still preferrable, but the game clearly originally built for precise aiming.
Combined with how janky all the enemy attacks and hit boxes are, it just feels frustrating. Plus the difficulty is wild, 90%+ are boringly easy, and then the odd totally normal enemy wipes you in seconds.