Factions. Here are the factions: the aggressive conquest Klingon guys. The evil insectoid hive mind who build stuff and/or have loads of cheap soldiers. The researchers who are probably robots and you usually pick because they can be competitive at anything. The diplomacy/espionage ones (humans, or The Greys).
You know what I'm talking about. You may well have thought of a recent exception too, since we've had a fair few 4Xeses experimenting with some of the standard formulae these last few years. It's been a while though since I read through every word of every faction's description and wanted to play all of them. Zephon captured my interest immediately.
]]>Clambering deep out of the Contemplation Pit, where reading reviews or opinions or, god help you, Takes, is forbidden, I am curious to learn how people have been categorising Songs of Silence. Its structure most resembles Songs of Conquest or Heroes of Might and/or Magic, but with little RPG emphasis or base building, and minimal tactical fighting.
Taxonomy is arbitrary and often unimportant at the end of the day, but I am very glad to firmly rule it out of one category: It's not a bloody card game. It looks like one, sure. You do most things with cards, and characters acquire more cards over time. But even if you absolutely, utterly, and correctly loathe card-based systems, this game has none.
]]>Cyber Knights Colon Flashpoint does not lead with its best foot. This is easier to shrug off while it's still in early access, but I will confess some relief when I read that the Trese Brothers (It's pronounced "Trese") nudged their estimated release date back to 2025. It needs a bit longer. But I'm about ready to start recommending it.
I'm a tad biased by my love for their previous Star Traders Colon Frontiers, an interest in mercenary management, and a wish for more turn-based tactics games that aren't bloody XCOM again. That I have reservations about what CKF hasn't yet nailed down is in part a symptom of high expectations. And because despite carrying over some design ethos from Frontiers, Cyber Knights is a very different kind of game.
]]>Four thousand words of notes. Hoboy. Field of Glory Colon Kingdoms is definitely thought-provoking.
It was also complaint-provoking in the fairly long period where I didn't understand what it's trying to do. Reaching that point, luckily for you, means we can cut out a lot of the "confused whingeing" subsection of those notes. Though it still has its shortcomings, I've come to appreciate that I was reading Kingdoms all wrong. Although it talks big about characters, politics, and religion, they're not what it's about. It's about building.
]]>I was partial to a scrappy little strategy game even before idiot billionaires doomed the planet, and the UK to brain-steaming heat just when you thought we'd escape it this year. Khaligrad is plenty scrappy. Its edges are rough and you have to figure it out yourself, but it's more intuitive than it appears, and easy to operate once you discern some basics. It's scrappy too in that it's, well. It's Stalingrad. Not really: its world is so fictional it's their 15th century. But the invaders are explicitly fascists and the defenders communists embroiled in a long and brutal semi-guerrilla city war with World War 2 technology. Thankfully, it's stripped of any actual fashy or genocidal play-acting beyond each side doing "hail the empire/union" bits as a sign off.
I think that's why, despite its brutal and difficult setting, it's this year's entry in the long tradition of Low-Intensity Strategy Games For When Hot Why Hot Please Stop You Cannot See My Begging Tears For They Evaporate.
]]>"Dune is unadaptable! It could never work as a film," I cry, placing defiant fists upon my hips. "But what," says Denis Villeneuve, "about two?", shattering my physical form into one trillion shards. I have a difficult life.
But wait! What about as a strategy game? Denis glances nervously at the inexplicable open pools of molten steel all around us. I've got him now. He hasn't even played Spice Wars. Except... I think Spice Wars is about as good as an adaptation could be. Imperium too. Damn it. Alright Denis, let's have a truce and sort this one out.
]]>I should be further in than this. My supposed rebellion has thus far eked out a territory that could be described as "where?". My personal reputation is great only among people who love mushrooms and hate deer. It's been long enough that I should probably be a fierce warlord running a large chunk of the kingdom in opposition by now, but instead, I have the skillset of fifty peasants, and the outstanding work of fifty three. And I know why. Bellwright has taught me what I already knew in theory, but had not truly appreciated:
Good managers are rare and precious. And I'm not one of them.
]]>For someone so skeptical of taxonomy, I sure love a good subgenre dive. That's partly because it's so easy to find a healthy one now, and there's a joy in shearing down multiple times and still finding material. You can start from "strategy games are in a good state" and go all the way down to "Turn-based strategy wargames that balance detailed simulation with accessibility and are set in World War 2" and still find several strong entries from the last few years.
But it's The Troop that grabbed me most. It's a little surprising, given its modest look, and the stiff competition. I think what clinched it is that The Troop has revealed to me something that I already sort of knew, but hadn't quite caught hold of: that a tank warfare game is all about the pause.
]]>You wouldn't believe how long I've been bumping Command & Conquer Generals down the list because "but it's abandonware and a pain in the hole to run" makes for a more frustrating read than "and it's available here".
Ever the afterthought, Generals has shimmered between abandonware and temporarily available in some obscure place with no fanfare (I think? I honestly lost track) for years, but it's now available in a bundle on Steam as part of whatever needlessly awkward thing EA are doing this month. There's suddenly an opportunity to get into why its design and atmosphere make it probably my favourite of the whole collection, and why I wish I could say that without adding that it indulges in a lot of boring early-00s racism.
]]>Calling dusty post-apocalyptic city builders a trend is probably a stretch, but not by much. I suppose it's a natural extension of the post-2000s explosion of the survival sim from "literally about 3 ever made" to "does your tetris remake really need the hunger meter". Games like Against The Storm porting over the roguelike element as well certainly suggest it. In my head, that's probably why New Cycle hangs out more with Endzone Dash A World Apart, and Surviving The Aftermath. It's more a traditional building game than a punishing test to be retaken, or the intense "survive the ordeal" narrative of Frostpunk, despite the superficial similarity that your town expects to be ravaged by scorching solar flares.
But it might also be because after playing it more than I really wanted to, New Cycle matches those two peers by leaving me with a vague feeling of disappointment. I'm just not sure what it really has to say.
]]>Dominions is a series where you can build the Ark Of The Covenant, which blinds everyone on any battlefield it appears on. Games where any soldier can receive a horror mark, which attracts unspeakable phantoms from beyond reality to randomly attack them, and if they survive, they'll probably receive more horror marks. Games where I once deployed my entire military against an evil raven so large and powerful that I lost, leaving behind corpses that it fed on to grow even stronger. Games where a frog could, mathematically, kill god with one blow.
Dominions 6 is due out in January, bringing with it changes so esoteric that I'd be better off talking about Dominions 3 to Dominions 5 instead. So let's do that.
]]>I had, shall we say, a bad experience some years ago. Several days of lying in a darkened room eating cold party leftovers were to be expected. The amount of comfort I got from playing Alpha Centauri throughout, though, was a surprise.
It's less about mere familiarity than you'd think, given how late I first played it. Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri By Sid Meier endures partly because its design has aged well, but mostly because it's an unusually human 4X strategy. Its high concept story asks for interpretation, for a philosophical response. Where so many others are about the arbitrary icons of nationalism, or stock elves/insectoids/robots, it's a game about ideology and personality. Where a sequel to Civilization's "send a colony ship into space" ending could have asked "what if lasers and aliens", Alpha Centauri instead asked: Where is humanity going?
]]>It is once more that time of year when the searing heat drives us underground, to subsist on raw snacks, re-read The Book Of Phoenix, and play this year's Low-Intensity Strategy Game For When It's Actually Refreshingly Temperate And Rainy Out But We're Committed To The Bit Now.
Myriads Colon Renaissance is not quite the break from the 4X that I'd tried to get us, but it is a hybrid. You build up a city, explore and conquer new lands, unlock research and ultimately push everyone's faces in, but its other main pillar is tower defence, a genre I very rarely align with. Which is a good sign, right? Two good reasons not to choose it, but I am anyway.
]]>Ruinarch is based on a concept many of you have thought of at some point. What if, instead of building up villages and hunting down hostile monsters and evil overlords, you were playing as the Dark Lord?
It's been done most famously in Dungeon Keeper or Overlord, but those were quite conventional structurally. Sure, you were playing as the baddies, but still doing mostly the same things as in other games, twirling your moustache the whole time. Ruinarch feels not like one of those thematic remixes of an established structure, but an attempt to build a new subgenre. Now that it's reached a full release, it also, sadly, feels like a demonstration of how difficult that really is.
]]>There are old games that are plain too hard to get into now, even I have to concede. Ancient ruins of a house to be admired and contemplated, but not fit to live in. The ceilings are too low, the stairs too narrow, the pipes an afterthought. Jagged Alliance 2 isn't that far gone, but it’s getting there. It gives lots of options for fine control but using them is largely gated behind esoteric, repetitive keyboard shortcuts, which get doubly cumbersome during its awkward transitional moments between real and turn-based movement.
It's about leading a group of mercenaries to overthrow the tyrannical queen of a fictional island. A guerrilla warfare sim with great strategic freedom and probably the best turn-based tactical combat ever, all buoyed away from self-seriousness by a campy, irreverent tone and intentionally over the top characters.
What I'm saying is: it's still worth it.
]]>It's difficult not to start out by namedropping Dwarf Fortress. Songs Of Syx will compare to probably every colony sim you've played, in fact, but it feels like a fundamentally different game conceptually.
The usual parts are there. Chop some trees, chip some stones, and chep some crops to get your pioneers' basic needs met, then get to expanding. But Syx isn't interested in testing you or manufacturing drama. It's not about surviving, not about building a happy little colony. It's about how growth changes not just the scale, but the nature of a settlement. Despite similarities with its influences, it defines itself with a different dynamic, a whole different ethos to its peers. And it's one that even playing it my own awkward way hasn't broken.
]]>From the heady mists of 1994 once came Master Of Magic, an all-time best 4X loosely summarisable as Civilisation crossed with Master Of Orion.
In the... uh, semi-heady fog of 2019 came the news that it was getting a remake, and I was muchly excited, for in the interim I'd actually learned the original existed and how good and somehow unrivalled it still was. And finally, in the slight damp of late 2022, that remake arrived. It is a remarkably faithful remake, to a degree I may not ever have seen for such an old game. Some details and flourishes aside, it's basically the same design, with all the same parts.
Coincidentally, I've also finally got into Total Warhammer lately, and spent some time reacquainting myself with Warlords Battlecry, and in between building city walls and crushing stupid aryan elfs, I've realised what truly connects all three: balance. They all, correctly, reject it.
]]>Can I tell you a secret? I'm terrible at Battle Brothers. I'm still terrible at Battle Brothers, even after playing it on and off for a few years. It's a bit like Blood Bowl, oddly, in that it's all about mitigating risks. And like Blood Bowl, despite having a decent head for tactics and planning on the fly, I am hopeless at sticking to them when I see a new idea, thus: terrible. At it.
But since an update last March looks likely to be its last big one, it's about time to get over myself and gave it a proper look as a complete package. It's long overdue, in fact. Although I still struggle to fully enjoy it, Battle Brothers is an unusually good tactical game, and the one to beat for the burgeoning subgenre of mercenary management sims. That's partly because it sticks so resolutely to its guns. Where Bannerlord faltered by throwing extraneous stuff unrelated to the core combat that should have defined it, and other open world games typically take a varied but shallow "do and be everything" approach, Battle Brothers resists dilution of that core concept.
]]>We've all worn the rose-coloured glasses when it comes to old games. It's a real hazard of the job when you started out covering stuff from the 90s. It's less common though, to fall afoul of whatever its opposite is. The uh, yellow-tinted glasses, maybe? My point is that I did you all a disservice when I described Emperor Of The Fading Suns as "an intriguing, ambitious, crap mega 4X" last year. It was a remarkable game, and more remarkably still, its developers Holistic Design Inc. recently updated it with a major patch, 25 years after its original release.
It's a lot better than I remember. And only some of that is down to the patch.
]]>I pity anyone who has to review, or god help them, write a guide for Terra Invicta, because doing it even semi-comprehensively would take longer than I expect to live.
This is a hugely ambitious game, covering something I've never seen before, with a scope that makes Europa Universalis seem limited. It is a complicated, huge, and ponderous alien invasion simulator that constantly threatens to drop the other boot on you the entire time. Anything you do could be the butterfly whose little wingflaps eventually result in the obliteration of the planet. It is not a game to be powered through, but to be played and contemplated exclusively for a solid month.
That is its central weakness. But I think it had to be this way. Its commitment to an idea is demanding, but if you can tolerate some issues with clarity and presentation, the payoff for meeting it is utterly unique.
]]>Let's be clear about one thing: whatever else I say today doesn't deny that building games are in a great state right now. Within just the last few years, we've not only had many releases, but an impressive proportion of well-designed, enjoyable games made with obvious care and enthusiasm. Things, in a word, are good. And yet I keep coming back to Ostriv, and Workers & Resources. Neither are out of early access yet. But they've had me contemplating the nature of a settlement, and the complex relationships between people, leaders, and the land itself, where so many of their peers feel like a dispassionate excercise in placing tokens.
Building games are doing well. But they could be doing more.
]]>Do you ever feel like you're sitting down with a game like a worried parent, saying "I just don't know what to do with you?" Because that's how I feel about Phoenix Point after the last few months of playing it on and off. I’ve definitely enjoyed it more than on its release in 2019, and its DLC adds more to think about and manage during what were once long lull periods. There's a lot to like about its final form. There's also a lot to... I don't quite want to say hate, but I'm also not quite sure why. It's one of the most evenly mixed bags I've ever rummaged around in.
]]>Strategy games are the go-to option when you're looking for something to really get your brain working. But they can seem unreachable when your synapses are being melted from without rather than through overuse. Happily, we found an excellent solution last summer, and being a wily fox, I had a plan ready for this year. 2022's now-traditional Low-Intensity Strategy Game For When Burny Light Make Think Hard is, of course, The Battle For Polytopia.
]]>The first unusual thing about Symphony Of War Colon The Nephilim Saga is that it's a strategy game made in RPG Maker. That's not particularly unusual, but it leads into the second unusual thing: that it's also a good strategy game. The third unusual thing is one I didn't even appreciate until I was a fair bit in: it's not only a good strategy game "for an RPG Maker game", but one of the best games I've played this year.
]]>I still don't know whether to describe The Heroic Legend Of Eagarlnia as "complicated" or "simple". Before starting a game, it gives an impression of being a complex grand strategy that's something like a fantasy Total War with a D&D alignment system and a distinctly East Asian focus on characters and dialogue.
It's far simpler than that. There was a period of disappointment, even, when it seemed like there wasn't much to it at all. That's partly because it's easy to play it too passively, or get stuck in attritional stand offs, and partly because of the need for a bit too much repetition. But over time its subtler details become more apparent, and your choices start to feel more multifaceted.
And yet, it remains at heart the same throughout. On your first ten turns you're doing the same actions as in your 200th, and its battles in particular are largely hands off. So maybe it's complicated, but simple to actually play? Hmm.
]]>Gods. Those jerks. You know what the problem with god games is? They've got no subtlety. It's all open worship and overt power, conquering and seizing so you're only superficially different to a 4X or management game.
Shadows Of Forbidden Gods is different. It's all about building the power of your evil god under the radar until it's too late for anyone to defeat you. The more I've played it, the more I start to suspect that this concept will always suffer from being gamed by player who'll seek the most efficient paths. Any system of influencing and manipulating characters will necessarily be abstracted, and at some point subtlety becomes just another numerical value.
I suppose what I'm saying is that SOFG is more fun if you revel in scheming and causing chaos, and given the choice between effective and interesting, will always do the right thing.
]]>I think I'm tired of winter.
It's not the cold. It's not even the lack of anything to do. It's that when your main threat is starvation and hypothermia, and your only real tool is stockpiling, it often feels like your fate is already sealed come October, and waiting around to see if you survived or not carries the same sense of slow inevitability that the average RTS or 4X game does past the opening act.
My first village in Timberborn gave me that feeling. Even though its dry season is the opposite of Winter, the ultimate effect was the same. I've played this before, I thought. This is the villagers vs winter game again.
I was a fool. A big, wrong fool.
]]>It's been a busy, kind of mixed year for strategy games. Ever a broad church, 2021's seen enough releases to keep ten of me busy, from the easy-going Legion War to the month-consuming Shadow Empire. I don't know about you, but my personal "to play" list is out of control.
And yet, while we've had plenty to enjoy this year, it's felt like a period of build-up to something bigger. I'm not one for looking forward. If a game's not out yet it tends to disappear from my mind, making room for a hundred other recent releases in this age of plenty. That I've less interest in looking back over this year than I do pondering the next suggests that maybe we're in for something special in the coming twelve months. Or perhaps it's just been a rough one and I'm very sleep deprived and don't want to think about 2021. Either way, let's have a look at what's in store for strategy fans in 2022, yeah?
]]>This Is The President is a game that, partway through, had me worried it wouldn't really qualify as a strategy game. As you'd expect, it's about being the US President, and making lots of decisions about running the country and trying not to become too unpopular. But it's far closer to interactive fiction than a simulation, with a main plot whose demands, if failed, will instantly end the game.
It has, however, got me considering what exactly "political strategy game" means.
]]>It's been a few weeks since I came down on the side of basically liking Age Of Empires 4. Lukewarm praise, perhaps, but it seems to be doing well, and that makes me glad. We've needed an RTS revival for ages, right? And this one is good, if a bit safe.
For the last few weeks I've been puzzling over the lingering feeling that it could have been more ambitious. Why do I think it could have pushed the trireme out further? Is it possible to make a modern RTS that captures the best of the classics without simply rehashing them? Has it even been done already and gone unrecognised?
]]>I hesitated. Not to play The Riftbreaker, you understand. I'd played its demo last year, which was enough to sell me on playing the full game. But to cover it as a strategy game is another matter.
It does games in particular a disservice to get prescriptive with genre, but there's no question that Riftbreaker falls under 'action strategy', with an even greater emphasis on action than, say, Hostile Waters or Sacrifice. But then, it also has detailed base building, tower defence, and a tonne of resource management. I've given up trying to categorise it, and it will always be distinct from most strategy games, but I think its peers could still learn a few things from it.
]]>Strategy games are, as everyone knows, much like moving house. Whether it's your first, daunting one and you don't yet know that the whole "most stressful thing in life" line is a total lie, or you stopped counting house moves after your 15th, there's one obstacle that never stops getting in the way: the deposit.
You know you can pay it, theoretically. You could gather together the energy and focus it takes. It is not beyond you to learn how a new game works and take the time to situate yourself within its world. But doing it all at once? Right now? Ach. Now you're asking.
That's the deposit. And it prevents you from playing games you'd love.
]]>When you've played a lot of games, or seen a lot of films, or probably eaten at a lot of restaurants or generally oversaturated your life with one subject, it's easy to start making rules and codes for How It Should Be. I given a lot of games a hard time for being opaque and failing to explain themselves. And yet here I am, finally writing about Mech Engineer after watching and playing it for nine months, waiting for it to hit the point where I can almost, sort of, not exactly recommend it... but share my fascination with it.
]]>It's near impossible to describe Conquest Of Elsyium 5 without contrasting it to Dominions 5, the expansive god-creating strategy series also by Illwinter. Their release history has intertwined since the 90s, and both series share common concepts and many, many unit types.
In fact, I've always somewhat overlooked the series, not really understanding what it was. That was definitely a mistake.
]]>Ordinarily with games, something grabs me, I become dangerously obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else, and then suddenly abandon it for no reason a fortnight later.
That hasn't happened lately. I have, however, been playing Stirring Abyss, and in the interests of being fair, I must make it clear upfront that I've enjoyed it, and my choosing not to go into detail about it shouldn't be taken as a mark against the game itself. With that said, I want to thank it for prompting me to raise a longstanding grievance I have with turn-based tactical games: We have a problem, friends, and that problem is overwatch.
]]>There's an obstacle to playing strategy games. All games have their upfront learning period (even using a mouse or controller is a skill we all had to learn), but it's strategy in particular that often has me start up a game, stare at its menu or map or world generation screen for a while, then close it down. It's a kind of focal cover fee.
In this sweltering heat (hello to other countries, congrats on not being here, for many reasons) these fees have near bankrupted me, and only partly because I'm still weaning myself off Workers & Resources. I've retreated to something more inviting. A little place that doesn't charge me upfront, but eases me into a seat and sprays a cooling mist in my face.
Legion War is all my brain can handle right now, is what I'm getting at.
]]>I cannot pull myself away. This paragraph started about 40 minutes ago, when I reopened Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic "to check something". I'll do this again several times. You probably know that this is a Soviet-themed city builder. You might know it's complex and big on how your cities are organised. If you've played it, you know that it's a hefty logistical sim (note: W&R includes options to dramatically dial down this side of things if that's your preference).
What you might not know is how brilliant it is when you reject building a large-scale industrial behemoth, and play it as a backwards rural village dependent entirely on horses.
]]>As I entered a second hour of trying to hammer Distant Worlds Universe into a playable state on Windows 10, two thoughts occurred. The first is that I hope the upcoming Distant Worlds 2 is the 4X I want. The second was more troubling: What do I want from a modern 4X game?
I might as well put this upfront: I don't think I want the same thing most players do. Let me relate both why I admire Distant Worlds, and why I don't think its sequel will do what I want.
]]>I've hinted a few times at my dislike of naval antics in strategy games. Since Strategic Mind set me off on a World War 2 kick, this week seemed like a good time to resolve this by picking out a dedicated seaborne war game and making a sincere effort to get over myself.
It is time to declare War On The Sea. And thus it is that I gave the order to dive to crush depth with oh wait, no this is a destroyer what have I done.
]]>Kiev-based studio Starni Games have been knocking out the Strategic Mind series since 2019. From a slightly rocky start with The Pacific (rockier still if you count 2018's Panzer Strategy) they've hit their stride with Fight For Freedom, an entry showing off the American and British led chapters of the Great War reboot.
The Western front is frankly overdone in any media, not just games, and I'll admit I was hesitant. How many times have you run around Normandy with tanks and paratroopers? How many Cockneys and Ohio farmboys have you heard yelling about bunkers and stukas, versus exactly zero Australians or Kenyans or the literally millions of Indian soldiers propping us up? I'm not even talking about this in a political sense. It's just, yknow, it's been done. I've probably left more tank debris in France than the entire US Army.
I gripe, but I'm talking about Fight For Freedom because I've had a great time with it anyway.
]]>Sometimes you want to write about two things, but don't quite have enough for either. I've noticed mech games, for example, are having a bit of a moment these last few years. It's not huge, and I don't see them absorbing everything like survival games or bloody roguelikes, but they're definitely picking up. It's a bit of a thin premise for a whole article though, right?
And then there's simultaneous turns. I want to cheer them on, to bewail the lack of games that dive into that rift between turn based and real time tactics and scheming. But so few games do it that I haven't found the champion I need. Thank goodness, then, for Phantom Brigade.
]]>Having namedropped Tropico in the very last episode, I discovered two things this week: the happy fluke that it coincides with the 20th anniversary of the first game in the series, and that after years of waiting to use "serendipitous", it reads far too pompously to open an introduction with it.
It's a perfect opportunity to bring up why I love the series, because that should counter-balance all the complaining I'm going to do. And I'm hinging it on this: I don't want Tropico 7. I want another Tropico 2.
]]>Consistency. That's the word that comes to mind.
It's one to use carefully when talking about a sequel. I'm prone to criticising games, particularly long-running series, for iterating gradually rather than taking bigger chances. I've bemoaned Tropico's rehashes. I've whinged about everyone copy-pasting XCOM to a fault. I've sent guys to show GTA a picture of Saints Row before throwing it through a window.
But here's Creeper World 4, quietly releasing at the end of 2020 in an already busy month. I can't say anything about it is revolutionary, or even drastically different to the rest of the series. And yet I become utterly engrossed every time I play it. Again.
]]>When Graham asked me to write a strategy games column, my first challenge was of course to think of how to annoy as many people as possible. "I won't stretch the definition of 'strategy'", I thought, "I'll warp spacetime itself until all points within it are 'strategy'". You have to set goals with these things. But what game would irk the most readers? "The hardcore strategy of Among Us", maybe. Is there a Mario game on PC? I could get dark gags out of lives as strategic resources. Call Of Duty would surely make it too obvious?
I left those questions to my brain while I had a go at something I'd had my eye on already anyway. It's called Shadow Empire. It is a grand strategy 4X wargame. I have been playing it almost every day since. It is as strategy as strategy gets, and it is so excellent it has ruined everything.
]]>
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