Deity Empires
Short description:
DE is the most faithful (playable) successor to Master of Magic. It has some
*4x Fantasy Strategy with seperate magic and civic research
*points to spend on perks at game start
*sophisticated economy
*incremential elements like resource upgrades and unit leveling ( (which you can turn off))
*Tactical battles and Rogue like dungeon diving (simplistic Rogue Like at the moment but there is more to come)
A negative point is, that this game is complex and/but has very limited manual (and no tutorial). As I understand it, the devs wait for the big and essential updates, before they spend time on manuals. The DE community is very welcoming. The forum search function is your extended manual.
– Real player with 783.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
This review is from the perspective of someone who has played a significant amount of the Age of Wonders series and the Fall from Heaven 2 mod for Civ4. I’ve also dabbled in Endless Legend, Fallen Enchantress, Dominions, and Master of Magic.
Right now this game feels like a cross of Age of Wonders and FFH2, and I love it. Below are some of my thoughts:
City Development (Tall vs Wide):
Cities start weak but can become incredible powerhouses given time and investment. For example, a starting city will produce approximately 100 gold per turn, which is enough to fund a low tier army or a level 1 improvement every 5 turns. My capitol in my latest game, however, produces 4000 (!) gold a turn, and is still not yet fully developed. I basically don’t have to care about income because this city is basically El Dorado.
– Real player with 357.3 hrs in game
ENDLESS™ Legend
Good game, but I will give more preference to endless space 2 with more mechanics and more elaborate gameplay.
– Real player with 364.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
Pros:
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Great strategy experience
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Interesting fantasy theme
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Enjoyable equipment mechanics
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Heroes add an interesting strategy layer
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Tweaking a faction to your play style is awesome
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Complicated subsystems that make the game always interesting to optimize
Cons:
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No in game encyclopedia to learn game terms and mechanics (tooltips aren’t enough)
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Game speeds other than standard are imbalanced
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Subsystems need better explanation
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Too much and too costly DLC
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DLC should not radically change the way the game is played (here it feels like what should be an update is DLC)
– Real player with 228.6 hrs in game
Beard of Stone
Beard of Stone is a fantasy turn based 4x that tell the story of a world’s creation all the way to the twilight of the gods. Not exclusively a turn based strategy game, real time bidding mechanics keep everyone actively involved. Who is up for their next turn is constantly in contention! The game is fast paced and quick enough to be played in a single sitting.
Players take the role of Gods, bending the prophetic destiny of the world to their ends. Every event and action in the game is public information from the very first turn, displayed on the Prophecy Track. Players spend their Influence currency to gain control of these prophecies in real time. Anyone can bid and be outbid before a prophecy arrives as the current turn. Prophecies span a wide range of actions, from the creation of the continents of the world, the birth of all the various races, disasters, military campaigns and more.
As Gods, players are not playing as any specific race. They strive to make the warriors and nobles of the land believers in their faith. As the races expand and worship each God, the Influence invested is redistributed to the Gods to be bid on further prophecy turns. Having the most believers in the most prosperous races will lead to one of the Gods dominating the world and winning the game.
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War
Cons: cost.
Pros: everything else. This is THE BEST 4X combat game. No diplomacy, simpler than in Civ city management, and huge variety of units and sides with real tactical options and paths. The combat mechanics is interesting and more complex than in any 4X game.
But! While the base game is good, the game shines with all the expansions. And it becomes costly to buy all of them. Therefore, we come back with the biggest drawback: Cost. But in some sense you get what you paid for. If they release one more DLC, I would buy it without thinking. I love this game that much.
– Real player with 270.1 hrs in game
Recommended with caveats:
It’s a great game even from its humble beginnings with only Imperial Guard, Space Marines, Orks and Necrons. As the first and so far only 4X Warhammer 40K game that isn’t a mobile freemium, the game captures a lot of the spirit of 40K and even brings back elements from the 1st edition Rogue Trader such as all kinds of alien wildlife. Every faction is unique in its mechanics and technology. So I would recommend the game but…
I would have more highly recommend the game more in the past. These days if you have an older laptop like mine, the game crashes almost immediately due to some kind of renderer error. If Slitherine can come up with a solution to this problem, that would be fantastic. But as it currently stands, I’ll have to delete the game.
– Real player with 178.7 hrs in game
Conquicktory
Conquicktory is a minimalistic turn-based strategy focused on top-level decisions in your civilization’s development. You’ll control the diplomacy relations with neighboring countries, declare wars, plan the key strikes and distribute funds to the peaceful/military issues. Your subjects will do the rest of work - there is no need to deeply micromanage all the aspect of your glorious growing empire.
The game map has 3 views:
1. Military view. If you see a spear with a flag over one of your cities, it means that you can create an army in it. Simply touch and drag from it and you’ll see the army path. Army will capture cells around its path. The same dragging way is used to plan the movement of your existing armies. Also you can see the cells defense ratings on this view. Cells are defended by nearby armies, cities and forts.
2. Diplomacy view. Here you can select a country and see its current enemies (red) and allies (green). You can select a country and suggest a treaty to it, or declare war. Also here you can answer the treaties suggestions from other players
3. Economy view. You can see how much each of your cities brings to you, and set the funds spreading to war, peaceful growth and treasury. You can fund new cities and fortresses in this view.
Game features:
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easy control mode which lets you focus on the top-level questions of you empire
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simultaneous moves, which are performed once all the players have issued orders
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challenging AI, which does not cheat but can make clever moves
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spectator mode, where you can relax and spectate how the AI play (and try to guess the winner)
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prebuilt maps of the world, continents and countries, which you can conquer
Pandora: First Contact
This is a solid game in its niche marked of 4x games, and more specifically, 4x games with space age human colonization. With its only direct competitor being the blatant AAA cash-in Civ: Beyond Earth, it is clear that this dev does not have much to compete against.
Let’s start with the bad, because everyone else starts with the good, and I’m a unique and interesting individual, as well as a special snowflake, so I go out of my way to be different in ways that try to be clever but miss the mark entirely.
– Real player with 245.6 hrs in game
A great 4X game, what I used to cure down my hype in waiting for the release of Beyond Earth.
Although the game has quite a steep learning, REALLY took me alot of playthroughs and restarts (“rage quits” you might call them) to get things going right in the game (e.g. Prioritizing the wrong things).
TL:DR;
Like it or not, Military is VERY IMPORTANT in the game; you arrive on this new planet, Pandora; peaceful at first (depending on your alien agression difficulty), but eventually the planet will become very hostile towards you (and other factions). Aliens (Native Wildlife) in the game behaves similarly to Barbarians in Civ, their main purpose is to cause trouble and possibly wreck havoc in your new cities (with the exception that Aliens can actually raze entire cities in a turn). However, Barbarians will always attack you, but their not that strong, usually a good combination of 2-3 units can deal with most of those issues. But for Aliens, they won’t attack you right from the start (that’s why exploration is safe and actually a necessity); but when they do, they can be really troublesome; barbarians quite often invade in individuals, but aliens invade in large groups. Have a bad military and your city is prone to destruction. Other more powerful aliens (e.g. Galeths, Aspidochs) attack you much later in the game, prioritize the right things (e.g. research on weps) and you can deal with them (with the lost of a few units in some cases); otherwise be prepared to lose a few cities. Keep playing longer, then there’s a third type of alien invasion that can even be more of an issue for unprepared factions (having little military), but I’ll leave it for you to discover.
– Real player with 92.3 hrs in game
Shadow Empire
Shadow Empire is an incredibly crunchy 4x planetary empire simulator. That’s the short version. Please also note that I purchased my copy on the Matrix site about a week before the Steam release, and I have basically been playing it non-stop since then.
A word of warning. If you are not into highly complex 4x games, you might as well stop reading now.
Still with me? Good. Here’s the TLDR. If you can imagine Civilization, Total Annihilation, Railroad Tycoon 3, and Mad Max: Fury Road all getting together and somehow producing a baby, then you aren’t too far off the mark. Shadow Empire is a love letter to those deep, complex 90’s-era strategy games that have become almost extinct in the mainstream today. Even the quaint and simple graphics reflect this. Remember when games like this came with a big instruction book? Well, this thing’s E-manual is 365 pages long. Three. Hundred. Sixty. Five.
– Real player with 930.9 hrs in game
tl;dr: Mechanics excellent, usability middling poor, visual style atrocious. It’s one of a kind. If you can stomach its looks and a lot of micromanagement, get it.
I’ll not even start talking about the positives, because that would leave me with no time to play the game any longer. Instead, here’s what’s bad.
UI is a sin. Functional, but as ugly as it can be without forcing you to turn your head in disgust. I’ll say no more on the subject, let’s just state that the screenshots, which almost dissuaded me from even giving the game a try, are carefully selected to show its more presentable views. Apart from its aesthetic shortcomings, it’s also cumbersome, inelegant, and sometimes buggy. And you need to pay very close attention to every part of it, because much important information is presented in very unassuming ways.
– Real player with 850.0 hrs in game
From Village to Empire
This is a good game if you want a turn-based, 4X strategy game without the overgrown complexity of most established games in the genre and you’re willing to put up with some rough edges.
My own taste leans more toward city development than combat. I like the way this game handles that: it creates a nice puzzle as every addition to the city has to come next to a previous addition, and most additions are restricted in where they can be placed (e.g. lumber mills have to go on forest, farms on grasslands or hills). So, you have to plan ahead to place your improvements in places that set up future improvements without stealing necessary territory from neighboring cities. And, of course, you have to plan where you place your cities so they get a good variety of terrains and access to strategic resources without bumping into each other too much.
– Real player with 43.5 hrs in game
Barebones Civ. Still an immense amount of work to be done. But encountered no bugs so far.
The biggest headache at the moment is that there are no lists, so operating 1 town is ok…for a while…But get 3 or 4 towns and try to remember everything you have built in them !!
Having said that, i love the simplicity, and believe this to be a game of great potential.
I just hope the dev sticks with it and regularly updates.
I will recommend it only because i think the creator deserves every chance :)
– Real player with 15.3 hrs in game
军团战棋Legion War
Just on the last weekend I played a big FFA the demo for 10.2 hours.
Then got the full game and played 2 1v1s for a combined other 5.5 hours!
It is rare that a game captivates me that much from the get go.
The AI is also quite competent already, which is part of what makes the game so fun to play. But I also see room for improvement there.
There’s some minor annoyances that could easily be improved like:
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no hotkey for ending the turn
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a lot of places where I first have to select something and then click a button instead of having double-click work there like with the hero-skill-tree, would be really nice if equiping items worked the same way
– Real player with 85.9 hrs in game
Legion War is a classic style turn-based conquer the world game with tons of options and depth to it. I’ve played nearly 75 hours and haven’t even touched the two campaigns currently included.
As of this review there are 5 playable factions with unique units, heroes, spells/abilities and mechanics as well as several minor factions that can be encountered in game and whose units can be recruited.
The game receives regular updates adding new and completely unexpected content, and development on the campaigns for other factions seems to be ongoing at a steady pace.
– Real player with 74.5 hrs in game
Demise of Nations
This game is very interesting it’s really fun and it reminds me of Age of Empires 2 and Rome Total War. I love how you expand your borders by moving across the map that is so cool. One thing I really don’t like about the game is unit health; I will use RTW as an example. In that game it is pure strategy like using the higher ground or using a pincher type move and so to win a battle instead of how much health your unit has. I have a few suggestions for the developers. 1) There are far to many farms and not enough other resources. In order to get a decent amount of other resources available in the game the whole map is nearly all farms. So my suggestions is to have a capability of making areas into resources like example prospecting a mountain or how dense a forrest is. 2) Put in Trading land and cities. 3) Have a capability of building roads for trade routes to other factions similar to RTW (Basically I will suggest them to play RTW to get some ideas). For trading to other factions have some things on the map like wine, textiles, and other stuff to trade to other factions for gold or for other important resources you need that you can’t obtain in the areas you control. 4) Have factions return if a place revolts if a faction has been defeated and add more factions that would be cool to. 5) Have each faction have a couple of unique buildings and units that other factions can’t get. For example the Celts can have druids and since Gaul is similar barbaric people they can have armored swordsman or something like that.
– Real player with 465.3 hrs in game
When I first got this game, I liked it, but thought it was just an ok game. I was wrong, the game is absolutely amazing (unless you hate strategy games).
It is a little difficult to see, but the graphics are pretty good, especially in-game. There are lots of different factors and numbers, such as groundwater, which either you like, or you can ignore and still play the game fine.
I like strategy games however, and I think this is one of the best ones on steam. It is very straight forward if you want it too be, yet there is a lot of content that you could pay attention to if you wanted. I also love one of the developer’s other games.
– Real player with 296.6 hrs in game