Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation
I like the use of a strategy game as a complex social metaphor that this presents. Even though I couldn’t complete any game of it due to crashes, trying to fathom the mind of the author was worth the price of admission.
– Real player with 0.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
This is my favorite game since it came out, and my favorite version of Civ (I know Civ 1 through 5)
I won’t go into what Civ is specifically about. You should know.
Nor will I compare to other Civ games. It has been done.
This versions' depth is impressive, and the playability is… at least a few lifetimes.
Graphics are normal, but totally irrelevant!
The 4X strategy design and many (but not too many) balanced options make it something that will always be enjoyable.
Spock will still read your Scientific discoveries out loud! :P
– Real player with 1974.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
I’ll start by saying that this is not a game for casuals, if you want to have a game that is incredibly compelling and complex and rewarding to learn, this is your game. While Civ 3 remains a complete mystery to me, I can say I have played all the others, and this one is by far the best I’ve played. You might say “what about Civ 5?”, but I highly prefer it to Civ 5 for several reasons (unit stacking Figure out how to use collateral damage people, tech/espionage/culture slider, much more micromanagable empire, better system for unit and city maintenance, far superior espionage system, more interesting promotion dynamics with military units, unrestricted leaders, non gimmicky leader traits, non gimmicky religions, far superior map options, way less annoying barbarians, way less buggy multiplayer, etc etc etc…)
– Real player with 1765.2 hrs in game
Imperiums: Greek Wars
So, I have been playing this game for about near 40 hours at the time of this review.
Imperiums, focus' on the Greek Wars time era. And the developers do a very good job in portraying accurate history, in my opinion. The game keeps trying to ‘curb’ you back toward history. However; you can fight against that, and go your own way. However it requires more effort or ‘elbow grease’ to get there. Basically, to ‘go against’ history; the game feels harder! Usually. Usually when trying to go against history. I really like this aspect of the game.
– Real player with 323.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
As a strategy game Imperiums is one of a kind. Designed from scratched with pen and paper by a passionate developer and now released as the second entry in a hopefully long lasting series of strategy games.
Over the years the game is shaped and finetuned by the help of a small, but very dedicated playerbase who can discuss with the developer in forums on Steam and Discord.
Hundreds of players already mentioned their complains and wishes for the game and the developer keeps a list with urgent must have features and nice to have features for the future.
– Real player with 158.9 hrs in game
Aggressors: Ancient Rome
This review is actually a Thank you letter to the developer for making this game.
For unbiased reviews skip this one.
I think it was 25 years ago that most of my school holiday time was used to do what I really like. Gaming. But I did not had my first PC yet, so gaming was spending one day in the city to collect all kind of painting materials and paperboards to create the ultimate game myself.
The Civilization boardgame, HeroQuest boardgame and some rare tabletop games I owned served as an example. But mine had a bigger boards, more options, more counters and features, more of everything actually.
– Real player with 562.4 hrs in game
Aggressors - Ancient Rome
This obscure historical game is turn based strategy / tactics to dominate the world starting in 280 BC by default, but adustable from 1000 BC to 500 AD. It is single player and is my personal choice for game of the year. I have played it for over 480 hours in the past 60 days. It is published by Slitherine and available through them, on Steam and GOG.
Where I am coming from
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I am the curator of Strategic Win https://store.steampowered.com/curator/9074928/ and have reviewed 142 games there in the past 2 years. I bought this game from Matrix games.
– Real player with 521.5 hrs in game
Forgetful Dictator
Recommendation: This is a fun game that will quickly improve your knowledge of world geography and maybe teach you a little bit about countries of the world.
Review: The story conceit of the game is fun; you play an aide to a Dr. Evil-like despot who is determined to rule the world by conquering it one nation (or territory) at a time. To conquer a nation, you just need to be able to recognize it and name it; doing so enables the despot’s armies to roll in to that country and conquer it. There’s no violence portrayed in the game, and the tone is cartoony and light, constantly poking fun at the dictator and his incompetence: it’s all just a loose story framework to fold around a game of identifying nations of the world by their border outlines and location on a Mercator projection map of the world. The game starts by asking you to choose whether you wish to identify all the countries of the world, or just work on conquering a part of it: Africa, the American hemisphere, East Asia and the Pacific, Europe, or West Asia and the Middle-east. Then the game choose a random nation within that group of countries, and you are presented with the outline of a country on the world map with a Hangman-like set of blanks to fill in with the name of the country. Enter the name correctly and you’ve conquered that country! Then the game will prompt you to choose an adjacent nation to identify/conquer. You have two resources to track as you play: armies and intel. You periodically gain armies as you march across the nations, but you lose one whenever you make a serious mistake (if you get one letter wrong, the game will tell you which letter it was and give you a second chance to get it correct). If you ever run out of armies, the game ends. You use intel to fill in some random letters in the country name (again like Hangman); there’s no penalty for running out of Intel (except that you get no clues). But as you continue to play, more game mechanics are revealed:
! a rival dictator - a ridiculous tyrannosaur - starts to conquer nations in parallel with you, chests of upgrades/materiel appear in random countries.
– Real player with 10.9 hrs in game
I’ve only played country mode so far, and bought on sale, but I’m impressed, even though the polish on this is not perfect, it feels more like a game than many educational games do, and I’ve been enjoying it more than any geography lesson I can remember (there aren’t many I can remember - not my strong subject).
There are a few different ways of revealing unknown country names (guessing letters, using up “intel” to reveal half of the letters or the remaining helf, multiple choice, and rarely you can reveal a random country). These different methods for arriving at the answer add variety and probably help with learning and recall. The zany dialogue sets a low-pressure atmosphere, although it does get repetitive after a while. Easy enough to click past, though. Being interrupted by trivia questions can be frustrating sometimes, but also breaks things up to reduce monotony, so I wouldn’t go as far as to call it a bad idea - maybe the implementation could be a bit better.
– Real player with 9.4 hrs in game
Pollute & Conquer
A strategy about ecology, where players can capture territory and build different buildings; And the choice between green and polluting buildings is important and affects both the world and the interaction between players. If both players make mistakes, then the world dies and both players lose.
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CAPTURE TERRITORY
Buy neutral or enemy cells for the accumulated resources of money or influence. Surround the enemy or go to the other side of the map. Choose and purchase cells with the most profitable terrain: river, forest, desert, hill, snow, ocean.
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BUILD BUILDINGS
Build buildings suitable for specific terrain, using the bonuses or disadvantages of each of them. Adapt to your opponent’s strategy. Build polluting, neutral, or cleaning buildings that use different resources: coal, oil, river flow, nuclear, sun, wind, fusion power, or hydrocarbon cleaning.
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DEVELOP TECHNOLOGIES
Upgrade technologies of different buildings. Use coal with less pollution for the world. Learn to obtain solar energy more profitably than coal. Cleanse the world with advanced hydrocarbon capture technologies. Or open a new era of thermonuclear energy.
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POLLUTE AND CLEANSE
Use the wealth from coal and oil usage, getting rich at an incredible speed, despite the world’s disasters that destroy you and your enemy. Or cleanse the world so you don’t die and gain massive influence.
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CONTEST
Earn as much money and influence as possible to win. Survive the most difficult situations by finding counter-strategies against your opponent. Deal with global pollution. Or take advantage of the world’s chaos from pollution to disrupt the enemy’s plans and capture them.
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PLAY WITH FRIENDS
Play with friends on the same device as a board game. The game provides great opportunities for a complete competition, using many different strategies and adaptations for the map, enemy actions, and disasters.
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DEFEAT EVERY AI
The game has several levels of AI difficulty from the easiest for beginners who started acquainting with the world of strategies, to the most difficult for hardcore players who want to test their skills. Can you pass them all?
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CHOOSE GAME TIME
Choose a map size from several options from a small map for 15-20 minutes to a large one for 40-60 minutes.
WORLD
Long ago, people believed that our world lays on 3 elephants that stand on a giant turtle. Those people were wrong about 2 things:
First - There are no elephants. That is silly. There is only the Turtle.
Second - Our world is just a planet, but there is another beautiful place wandering space, that is similar to Earth and rests on the Turtle.
An unprecedented economic war for territories and resources flares up on the turtle.
Will it and all life on it die in the chaos of pollution?
Or will intelligent beings come to their senses and prevent the end of the world by developing new technologies?
Pollute and Conquer, compromise and cleanse.
Bronze Age - HD Edition
If your looking for a casual-strategy-minimalist type game this game is for you! Bronze Age is mostly a balancing act. You have to balance your resource gathering with food gathering, building supplies, tech tree and army. The game is very easy to learn but as you move along in your balancing act, things are not so easy. There are two areas/eras to play the game, Africa and Near East both have their own special buildings.
Along with all this gathering, eating and learning you must decide what techs in your tech tree you should grab and what building you should build. For both some techs and buildings you can level up the particular tech and building as well. The game is turned based, as in once you decide where to put any new villagers, what tech to discover or which building to build you must end your turn. Once you end your turn you gain your resources and events can happen. Getting attacked by other tribes, have a hurricane or ice age hit. You can also run into other tribes. These events provide you with different choices you can make that will affect you in a good or bad way. You may at first think this is random, but if you are keeping track of your abilities and read what is going on in the event well, you will be able to make the wisest decisions for your tribe each time.
– Real player with 28.4 hrs in game
This game has fantastic economics of scale progression. It is a surprizing little indie game which you will love if you enjoy resource management games. Warning: Hardcore!
What is this game?
Bronze Age is a brutal resource management survival game. You start with a few tribesmen and try to develop new technologies, farm and expand your population, build improvements all while also keeping an eye on your military strength so that you are not attacked. You will eventually get to have an economic powerhouse of hundreds of thousands of people-or die miserably at 100 to a barbarian raid. But what is certain is the great progression you feel when your population expands and you get new technololies, buildings and advance to new civilization ranks.
– Real player with 15.1 hrs in game
Marble Age: Remastered
I’ve played a bunch of the original, I’d say I’m good-not-great, 126 unspent victory points (never use them), medium and hard difficulty. Might be one of my favorite low-concentration games. Just finished a first (second) run-through of the new one and its a clear improvement, just tightens everything up, adds a couple decimal places and so forth.
My one critique is that (and keep in mind that I’m practiced at the old game) the game slows down in the period from the Roman invasion to the Hunnic threat (I unify late). I found myself hitting ‘end turn’ repeatedly without taking any action during the turn, just maximizing resources before I unify. I played as Athens and ended with a Silver Victory, for some reference on my pace-of-play.
– Real player with 44.3 hrs in game
Successful Remaster. Recommended
Marble Age was a unique game of decision, strategy, resource and political management. A unique take on the Greek History where you go from the Dorian Invasion, to the Persian invasion to the unification of Greece, fighting Rome, uniting into Byzantium, fighting foreign conquests etc in a constant balancing act of resources mixed with Rogue-like one time events.
That game is all here now with better graphics, another city with a unique play style (Corinth) added to the already very different Athens and Sparta. With more achievements some of which are very difficult, this is a great game for hardcore strategy fans on high difficulty or great as a casual game with a unique character and a bit of history on low difficulty.
– Real player with 27.8 hrs in game
Predynastic Egypt
This is a very good turn-based strategy game. One game lasts around 200 turns, divided into 3 periods: the building of the first city, the conquest of the Nile, and a period of great prosperity. During each period, there is a number of trials to complete, and then a series of random events. The main line of the game and the trials follow the historical development of Ancient Egypt, from the times of nomadic hunter-gatherers up to the unification of all lands along the Nile and the first great kings. The developers found a balance between historical accuracy and enjoyment; there is a wealth of information to learn about these ancient times, presented as short paragraphs after events or discoveries. I learnt quite a few things!
– Real player with 217.3 hrs in game
Because of some really weird coincidence, I’m getting way too many mobile games in Steam lately. Here comes another one. Unlike many others, though, this one is pretty cool. And I’m not saying that because I’m a huge fan of historical games about ancient Egypt (if we can call such games historical with the entire Egyptian history being pretty much a fiction). It’s just… it’s a pretty cute and addicting game, really.
Long story short, it’s a very casual take on grand strategy genre with you dragging and dropping the icons of your workers on different regions of the map being most of gameplay. It sounds simple and, well, it sure is, but like any other good casual game, this one adds just enough complications to make it interesting, while keeping things simple. You’ll be able to praise the gods, there’ll be trials, you’ll be able to build stuff, there’ll be simplified combat and so on. The game also won’t push you and will let you to choose how to approach the other tribes. In other words, you’ll be able to both unite with them peacefully, or kick their buts and see them suffer. Your choice. Naturally, the entire thing is laughably historically incorrect, but again, what is? I mean, when the Impressions Games created Pharaoh (one of the very best games about ancient Egypt, go and buy it now if you still didn’t), the “history” tried to tell us that pyramids were built by slaves. Then boom! “History” changed its opinion. So… yeah. Don’t think too much about the accuracy, just enjoy the overall atmosphere.
– Real player with 33.4 hrs in game
Egypt: Old Kingdom
An interesting game. Not without flaws, but one I’m glad to have played overall. As for people saying that it is boring, I can understand that viewpoint as there is a strong focus on history, and if the player does not happen to care about the history of Egypt at all, this game might get dull pretty quickly as most of the mechanics are based around learning about and participating in ancient Egyptian history. I personally have a near-fanatical interest in ancient Egypt and can devour most media relating to it voraciously, so this was never an issue for me, but I don’t think you have to be quite so fascinated to still enjoy the game for what it is. If you have even a mild interest in Egyptology, you will probably find some value in it.
– Real player with 119.9 hrs in game
Predynastic Egypt was a gorgeous game it was beautiful historically accurate it is the strategy equivalent of an enjoyable Oregon Trail and then some.
This came improves on everything foundational about Predynastic. The graphics are better there’s even more historical information and it really does have a flavor at flare of ancient Egypt.
The game itself starts off right before the unification of the early chiefdom. From my small tribes of about 500. To eventual kingdom of Egypt seeing it through its height and falls and eventually collapse in the first intermediate period. And instead of where your societies ad from Hunter and gatherers to full state. It’s followed by the chieftains Proto kings and the eventual dynasties of the old kingdom. Which all have different goals and agendas.
– Real player with 61.0 hrs in game