Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes
I read the reviews on this game and honestly, I don’t know if can go by them or not anymore. I ordered the ultimate package so I would have the add-ons, paid the full $40, and for that amount I will be replacing every other game I own. Here is why…
I love Civ series games, Heroes of M&M, Age of Wonders, Endless legends, GalCiv etc, those types of games, but they always had me looking for ways to make: decisions, resources, battles, buildings, etc to mean more and to be more meaningful, more important in the game while not sacrificing anything too much. For me, Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes Ultimate pack is the game that finally did that in a satisfying way.
– Real player with 236.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Grand Strategy Games.
Empire building like Civ 5 + RPG elements + extensive customization for your army
It sounds like a winning combination, yes? Let’s find out..
First off, the ((tutorial)): videos and encyclopedia feature explains most of the basics very well, so the learning curve is pretty smooth. So even though it is clearly a complex game, it’s not hard to learn and play with most of the features. You still have to experiment yourself to master the customization features, which is great cuz such features are usually up to experienced players to make use of them anyway.
– Real player with 197.7 hrs in game
Industries of Titan
There are already a lot of excellent (constructive) reviews here already for the 21 June 2021 Steam release but I’ll add my 2 cents here to talk more about the side elements of the game and offer some advice for potential players who are still sitting on the fence.
What do you get when you combine the macro-management aspects of SimCity 2013, with FTL-like micro-management in factory management and combat, then slap on a UI that’s reminiscent of grand strategy games? You get the absolutely fascinating city builder that is Industries of Titan (IoT for short).
– Real player with 115.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Resource Management Games.
My first impression of the game:
The beginning is a bit confusing. You have different management levels:
1. Production
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Collect raw materials (initially from ruins, later in mines)
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Collect artifacts (also from ruins)
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Produce fuel and electricity
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manage garbage (a lot)
2. Citizens and workers
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Buy and house citizens
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Earn money from citizens watching advertisements
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convert some citizens into 24/7 workers (who then stop watching ads)
3. Build on two different levels
- Inside buildings on a square grid (reminiscent of Tetris blocks :D )
– Real player with 54.8 hrs in game
Myriads: Renaissance
Build-up your capital island and manage its resources using city building mechanics. Are your citizens starving? Add a wetland shard and build a farm. Do you need to raise a new army? Mine gold from your single mountain shard or trade goods for gold. But be careful, space is limited as you won’t be able to extend your island indefinitely.
You cannot survive on your own, you will need to explore your surroundings. Travel into a procedurally generated world, discovering a myriad of floating islands. Send your armies to loot lost secrets or treasure chests. Trace your path and establish new colonies. But be careful, the more you explore, the more you will let your enemy know that you exist.
The capital island is limited in size, you will need to expand your territory outside of its bound. Do you need some food to sustain your capital’s needs? Send your settler ship to establish a new exploitation colony. Do you need more gold in order to recruit more troops? Build and manage trading posts. But with great power comes great responsibility: will you be able to defend them?
Enemy’s corsairs are roaming across the world, raiding and killing. Place defense towers strategically to protect your colonies from them. Use your galleons to destroy corsair lairs, freeing the archipelagos from your enemy’s rule. But be prepared to face it as it will come for you!
New technologies are the key to overcome your rival. Are your citizens struggling with the lack of space? Use the lost secrets your armies found and unlock a new technology which allows more shards to be gathered. Do you wish to recruit more advanced troops? Build cartographers and keep looking for lost secrets.
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
Medieval Kingdom Wars
I like the game. In fact, I like it a lot. There are very few things I could personally complain about, in terms of gameplay mechanics, or graphics. If I wanted something different, I’d simply play something else, instead of asking for this game to be changed to the point it’s no longer the same game.
The reason for the negative review, would be that I’ve almost completely lost faith in the the developers, as well as any hope of improvement on what is currently something non-playable for me. And the reason I’ve lost faith in them, would be due to their approach on how they handle things.
– Real player with 142.0 hrs in game
Medieval Kingdom Wars is a Grand Strategy/RTS game that reminds me of a mix of a very simplified Paradox campaign map, with Total War elements, and then very Age of Empires style real time battles in a battle map. This game has a really cool concept, I’ve always wanted a game like this, and after reading the description apparently the 3 man Dev team always has as well, and they’ve made a pretty neat little game. What it lacks in complexity and depth it makes up for in pure fun, and it is fairly addictive as well. It’s not as immersive as a total war game or a paradox game, you won’t really feel Super in the 14th century, as many of the units are still fairly generic, but the devs are CONSTANTLY updating this game, and it’s always getting better with every update. Okay, lets do a quick rundown of it’s features and then some pros and cons:
– Real player with 54.3 hrs in game
Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville
A series that takes an inventive twist on the zombie apocalypse setting, Rebuild takes the “man versus man versus nature” struggle present in most games pertaining to zombies and reframes the gameplay from the more common action/shooter elements and turns it into a 4X game of conquest. The world of Rebuild is one in which the survivors are all fairly competent people. Nobody here is an idiot that is going to stand there and quiver in fear while the zombies take a bite out of their neck. The primary struggle is maintaining the flow of your resources and zombies are only really a threat when you spread your people thin. Fortunately the game manages to balance this well so that you’re generally never too comfortable that you don’t have to worry. Each map tends to follow the same flow of scrambling your survivors frantically so you can find food to eat that night to having a slight bit of breathing room so that you can begin to, as the title suggests, Rebuild and then challenge the AI factions present. Zombies ramp up their difficulty as time goes on as well. There are a few strategies that generally guarantee victory as long as you execute them well but I’ll leave you to figure out what those are. It has clever nooks and crannies and like any other good 4X you’ve played it’ll keep you up all night as you have multiple goals planned out at once, one of which can always be achieved in Just One More Turn. The ebb and flow guarantees that you’ve always got something to do.
– Real player with 338.0 hrs in game
Summary: Turn based zombie survival
Multiplayer: No
Completion: 46 hrs
Cards: Yes
Cloud: Yes
Rebuild 3 is a real time or turn-based tactical zombie survival game with a focus on recruiting followers and expanding territory. The game offers two distinct modes of play, Quick Play, and Story. Quick play offers unlimited procedurally generated maps, with various settings that can be adjusted to your liking. Story mode is a whole campaign where you can carry over leader stats and a small group between missions.
– Real player with 81.6 hrs in game
Driftland: The Magic Revival
Yet another ‘neutral’ rating. I’ve leaned on the positive side as a heads up for the developer, but see below.
Driftland is a nice original RTS with quite novel mechanics. It shows a lot of promise, yet often fails to deliver.
Let’s start with the good sides.
First, the active pause system works like charm. Basically, you can start any action while on pause, it drastically decreases the usual for RTSes time pressure.
The island positioning subsystem is probably the most important feature in the game, and it works, too. Forging an empire from fragments is fun, requires planning, and so on. There is a room for improvement (no flexible joints, no island rotating, no group movement…), but it is already good, and you might want to play the game for it alone.
– Real player with 131.1 hrs in game
An interesting adaptation of Majesty but lackluster campaign
If you’ve played Majesty, this is basically that except:
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The game world is made up of islands that you can move around and build bridges between.
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There are flying mounts that your units can combine with to make them stronger and let them traverse freely.
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There are more resources and most are all can be gathered through mines that you build after discovering the resources with a unit from your castle.
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There is a skill tree that unlocks a goodly array of economic, magic, military, and utility perks.
– Real player with 51.9 hrs in game
HUMANKIND™
Loosing progress at the Dia de los Muertos Event??
I build a city with more than 300 population for nothing?
You are Not worth of my time and my money anymore!!
Mark my words. Look at the playtime at writing this review (213hours) … not a minute more, not a cent more for the many future DLCs.
DLCs that are necessary (but not paid once), as clearly the game is MISSING stuff to be enjoyed, to be recommended.
There are still games out there, You buy at release day, You play, You enjoy …. And You don’t feel fooled. Humankind is NOT one of them.
– Real player with 213.0 hrs in game
This is now my favorite Civ-like 4x game.
9/10
Cons:
-Its tutorialization GUI and tooltips leave something to be desired. For example, the fact that Fog environment (tile modifier) on the ocean stops line of sight units from being able to fire through. Some things you have to just learn on your own. I wish they could update this for as much as possible.
-This might just be a flavor thing, but the way the game is set up, you can transition to entirely different cultures as you enter a new era. You can go from Assyrian to Swedish within a campaign, without ever having dominated or assimilated any different culture-groups. Sometimes, I wish this had been handled differently, like you could only transition into culture-groups you had somehow been culturally involved with by neighbors or assimilation/domination. But gameplay wise it is still very fun as it is. Just hampers the immersion slightly.
– Real player with 155.4 hrs in game
Stars Beyond Reach
Why Unlikely To Release?
We spent a long time working on this game, and ultimately it never reached the level of being fun. We had to step back from this in 2015, and moved on to other projects. We had over 100 testers in our alpha versions, and a lot of them did have fun, but the experience as a whole never truly gelled. Releasing into Early Access is not an option, because once we take your money we are obligated to somehow figure it out. Releasing it in a half-baked format also doesn’t seem like a great idea, even at a very low or free price.
So a lot of the great ideas from this game, the parts that worked, will probably wind up finding their way into the DNA of our other projects. Many of them already have, in AI War 2. Many of the technical achievements that we made with this game – or indeed with the also ill-fated In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor – went on to directly have a positive impact on AI War 2.
We actually have had many projects that went through some amount of R&D before being shelved, some with public testing and some without. Exodus of the Machine was one that had a huge bunch of art done on it. Starport 28 was a promising idea that wasn’t visually legible in the sort of art we could do. Cretaceous was a cool dinosaur-themed citybuilder/risk-like that gave some inspiration to Stars Beyond Reach. The difference with all those other projects is that we spent far less money working on them, and they never had any presence on Steam or any other storefront.
Stars Beyond Reach was to be our magnum opus, and so many things were going right with it, and we spent a ton of money on it, but ultimately it’s just another one for the R&D pile. The actual game itself, as it exists in these screenshots, is based on a UI system we no longer use or want to use, an art pipeline that is no longer compatible with how we make games, and a far older version of our codebase. There are also inevitable complications with rights on various pieces of the direct work here, which would make it hard for us to revisit it from a financial sense. We will inevitably revisit some of the same themes and ideas in the future in other ways, but it won’t be from digging up the code or art from this game itself (as good as both are).
TLDR: Its legacy will live on in various other titles we may do in the future, but this one was indeed beyond reach. (That pun is inevitable low hanging fruit)
Original Description
Crash-land on a hostile sentient world in this deep, turn-based 4X/citybuildier. Learn the languages of other trapped alien empires, explore, form alliances, and ultimately attempt the impossible: escape.
Features
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Manage your own civilization like a turn-based citybuilder, but in a 4X setting.
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Deal with other civilizations using force or more nuanced building abilities (“poison Narr’s water,” “invite Keleci to the opera,” “dump bodies on Strot’s populace”).
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The game takes place over four “acts” during which you have unique objectives and challenges: Arrival, Discovery, Alliances, and Doomsday.
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You have considerable freedom in how you build your empire and make friends or foes, but each race is filled with unique character under your control or that of an AI.
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14 alien races each have 3 possible leaders with their own personalities and goals. You will have to devise unique strategies for befriending or neutralizing them depending on their situation and exactly who is in a campaign.
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There are distinct degrees of victory that you can achieve. Just winning the game doesn’t mean you won well.
Info Dump Incoming!
There’s a whole lot of text down there. The trailer and the bullet points might be enough for you, and if so then go ahead and stop reading! But a lot of this game’s audience are the sort of grognards who – like me – would like to know as much as possible. So here’s the flow of the game as it progress through each act. Pretty cool stuff actually!
Act I: Arrival
When you first land on the planet, your minds and your computers have been all but wiped. You quickly have to learn both basic and advanced technologies and establish yourself as a new civilization. When you choose your landing spot, your citizens let you know what special objectives they expect you to meet in order to exit this first act.
During act 1, my interactions with the 13 other races on the planet are pretty limited. I can fight them if I wish. I can do things to them or experience things that they do to me. But I don’t speak their languages, nor they mine. If I want to capture more territories (think Risk), I can do so. I have a fair bit of freedom here, but only low-level technologies and buildings.
Whether or not I choose to go conquer or subjugate someone I can’t even speak to yet is up to me. My core goals are all about my own city, however. My citizenry is complex and I need to get them established and built up.
This is a living world where your own territories are as interesting and complex as the civilizations you encounter. Threats come as much from inside your own civilization as much as from outside it – and in Act 1, the focus is on threats from within.
Act II: Discovery
Now we’re starting to look outward. The abilities and needs of our own empire have just upgraded substantially, and we’re able to start learning the languages of our potential allies and enemies.
At this point there are specialized “natural wonders” scattered around the world that our scientists need to examine. There is key information about the world that we are able to detect in these places (and for fans of Arcen’s other titles, you can find some answers to longstanding questions about both AI War: Fleet Command and The Last Federation).
Problem is, a lot of those natural wonders are in territories controlled by other races. How do we deal with those? Maybe we get lucky and can snatch up enough territories that we can learn what we need without involving the other races at all just yet. Maybe we beat a few heads into the ground. Or, more intelligently, maybe we find out what their deepest-seated fears and desires are… and then exploit whichever of them we can.
I might be renting out mainframe time to Xermi, who desperately needs it, while at the same time dumping garbage all throughout the lands of Vesden until she gives us the information just to get me off her back. I might not trust the shifty and volatile doShal, and might militarily suppress him to the point that he surrenders and becomes an early puppet state for me.
Act III: Alliances
A sudden realization has hit us. I won’t spoil what is learned, but something becomes abundantly clear. I must attempt what all the other races have failed to do: return to the stars. Armed with my new information, it is time to set out and gather as many allies as possible.
Unfortunately, I can’t make friends with everyone. Isn’t it always the case where the most eager-to-be-friends folks seem to be the least useful in a disaster scenario? Well, some of the stronger folks come with unsavory demands: they might not join me if I don’t murder an entire innocent species, drive an empire into poverty, or bring them an enslaved race of fallen foes.
What mix of races am I willing to ally with? Even if I throw morality to the wind, what will set me up in the optimal situation for Act IV? Can I get those races who are determinedly neutral to actually take action? Some of them are incredibly powerful, but almost as hard to sway.
Act IV: Doomsday
I don’t want to spoil much about this one. The battle lines have been drawn. Everyone has declared their alliances or their neutrality. And the planet itself has put its own long-dormant plans into motion. It’s time to hope that my empire is robust enough to survive the all-out war that now consumes the world. Can I help my allies live through the assaults of their enemies? Can they help me against flying saucers arriving on my doorstep and monsters erupting from the ground?
All of the choices I have made in prior acts now either come to fruition or come crashing down. Either way it should be quite entertaining, as both my citizens, my enemies, my allies, and the planet itself will have plenty of remarks on what is happening (all unobtrusive and something you can skip reading with ease if you just want the meat and no dressing).
Degrees Of Victory
This is one of the few games where “winning” is not a black and white proposition. There are two overall goals for Act IV: escaping, and stopping the planet’s machinations.
But just what does it mean to “escape?” If only I and a handful of my higher-ups from the government make it out alive, and everyone else dies, is that a victory? The game will tell me it is, sure, although a pretty poor one.
How about getting more of my citizens offworld, and even allied citizens of other races offworld, and thus really saving some genetic lineages there – is that a good victory? Well, I suppose that’s not bad. But if I haven’t stopped the planet from doing… what it’s doing that I won’t spoil… then there are some pretty awful things that are going to happen around the galaxy. So… yay me, I guess?
On the other end of the scale, what if I stop the planet, but at the expense of my own life and everyone else living on the planet? I may completely fail to escape, but stop this awful planet for good. In the grand scheme this is actually a far more notable victory – but then again I have killed myself and everyone I ever knew in order to accomplish it.
In an ideal world I would get everyone to safety, stop the planet, and do so without committing any moral atrocities along the way. But there’s the question: am I good enough to pull that off?
A Note About Humor
This is a serious 4X and citybuilding/simulation game, despite the funny promotional videos. Let’s face it, when you play a game of this sort that has anything novel at all in it, the result at first can be death spirals and unintentional hilarity. May as well have some fun with that! Better a Memorable Defeat than a Forgettable Victory , you know?
That said, the game itself maintains the more serious tone you would expect, dark or wry humor aside. Sometimes you get hilarious things like a race of capitalistic amoral robots inventing a TV show they call The Sweatshop Comedy Hour , but it’s actually a useful upgrade that makes them more fearsome – so mock them at your peril!
We know that not everybody wants humor injected into their serious strategy game (our earliest beta testers actually made this pretty clear to us), and we have kept that in mind. But we’re huge fans of the LP called Boatmurdered, and we hope that this game will inspire similar tales of dark humor.
Ymir
I whole-heartedly recommend this game with a few caveats.
-The game is early access and is being worked on my a single developer.
-This game will not be completed quickly. The game will not always be updated quickly (although he has been doing quite well so far. An update every couple weeks usually).
-There will be bugs (although generally not game breaking, they can be a challenge and if you do not want to deal with it, I would wait).
-While there are official servers. They are usually quite full. So, the other servers are entirely player run. They can be hit or miss. So, until there are more official servers / there are better server hosting tools / more dedicated server hosts are better equipped to handle the job, you may very well sink 2-3 weeks into a game and one day it is gone. This can be avoided by doing your research on servers before joining. Some server and their hosts are amazing such as Age of Porcos run by Shem and PigsLands run by Jey.
– Real player with 5283.9 hrs in game
New changes and recent major update have slowed the already awful pace of the game and made the overall progression and experience worse, to name off a few problems. I am giving this a negative just based on the early neolithic stage of the game alone, it is that fucking bad.
-You are now locked into where you spawn, you use to be able to move your starting tribe around a bit and maybe find a better spot at the risk of losing some or all of your tribe; you could even force settle onto another primitive tribe if they had a better spawn and after you reached a certain size you would have to fight them for the land. This ruins Arid players who spawn in the desert and rely on river networks to farm crops during agriculture and ranching phase of the game. Already players are just straight up abandoning and respawning if they get a godawful spawn.
– Real player with 3036.9 hrs in game
Translunar Enterprises
Translunar Enterprises gives gamers the tools they need to compete in randomly generated sandbox universes. In these universes are multiple worlds to either colonize or exploit for their resources. Players can either fight for more resources through war or complex trade agreements. With a unique design system that enables players to design new reactions from elements and components, They can share or keep the research they discover throughout the game.
As a player, you will have to manage the economics, production chains, colonies, wars, and research of your corporation. Dive into the translunar universe where you will play as a corporation, either alone or with friends. Each session will never be the same as each universe is generated randomly, which will force you and your opponents to think differently on each playthrough. You can take up arms if you can’t find a peaceful resolution, or fuel the fire between other players and sell your high-tech weaponry to the highest bidder.
Features
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Community driven development
During early access, the community will be involved in what will be coming in the next patch. We value your feedback immensely, and we want you to be a part of this game’s development! We, the developer, will select a few features that we can manage for the upcoming milestones, and then you get to vote on what is most important to you! Be a part of the community!
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City Building on Planets, 4x In Space
Command your locations and your resources located in space and on different planets! You won’t have to manage menus to upgrade and build your megacity or industrial complexes, because they are created on the very planet surface! Space travel and combat will never be a menu or numbers game. Use your battle strategies and tactics to your advantage and prepare to defend yourself against enemy players and space pirates. Build Missile frigates for reinforcement and then counter incoming attacks with close-ranged defense systems that will eliminate most missiles. Or you can blast your enemies into nothingness with the power of your railguns. You control everything with the flick of a finger.
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Player Driven Design
The players are in full control of designing the items that exist in their universe. You can trade, sell, and produce each of your items, control the market with your designs, and specify who can produce your items and the cost of the royalty fees they must pay. With over 20 different items to design and more on the way, each player is challenged to find the best combination while keeping their resources stocked by trade or mining. Successful execution of these skills will reveal the pros and the rookies.
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Sandbox
Whether you choose to build entire cities, harvest and collect every resource in the known universe or become a warlord that make the strongest of players scream in fear, the decision is up to you to do exactly what you want. Play your way and fulfill your destiny!
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Realtime Combat
When war strikes the universe, each player controls a battlefleet that fights in real time. Proper management, skilled tactics, and careful planning can turn any battle into a victory. You can also control individual ships or fleets at the same time to maximize the tactical ability in each combat situation to make sure you win. A corporation without protection rarely gets its mineral safe to harbor.
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Multiplayer
Multiplayer gaming is at the foremost of this game. Together with integrations from Steam, your gameplay experience will be as smooth as possible. Play alongside your friends, or fight and destroy enemy players who have just as much to lose as you do!
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Production Management
Transport minerals across the universe to manage production and raise it to its highest possible level. Optimize your production and transports for maximum output. You, the player, have full control over the market and what to sell and buy. Players can also choose where to sell or buy. Cause these prices to skyrocket by hoarding valuable minerals, or by making sure no other mineral transport reaches its destination.