Conquest of Elysium 5
Conquest of Elysium 5 is the next iteration of the past CoE games with more content, and with nearly the same (pixel art) graphics that were used in Civilization 2. They have gotten a little better over the years, but not much. If you played CoE4, there are three new factions, new modding tools, and new “Planes” within each map to conquer. The biggest difference for me from the previous version was not just that there was more to conquer though, it is that the “more” that exists is also now much more accessible. More on this below:
– Real player with 193.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
I love this game, I never get tired of it. It strike the perfect balance between complexity and accessibility.
– Real player with 167.9 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.
Warlock - Master of the Arcane
Warlock Master of the Arcane is a turn based strategy game in which you play a Great Mage, a member of the aptly named Council of Great Mages. The game is centered around your character’s goal in defeating or otherwise becoming unopposed as the titular Warlock, who is unsurprisingly the Master of the arcane.
For anyone experienced in Civillization, or games similar, many of the concepts in this game will be familiar. But it would be erroneous to call this game a clone. There are dozens of differences, and I can only list a scant few in this review.
– Real player with 105.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
I’ve been on Steam for years, and I cannot recall writing a review; this game begs to be an exception (and rightly so), so here’s my short n' sweet:
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Old time gamers remember Master Of Magic from the 90s? If so, good…
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Current gamers …have you played Age Of Wonders 1, 2, or 3? If so good…
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And/Or, perhaps have you played Elemental: Fallen Enchanter or Sorcerer King (Starkdock)? If so, did it feel so-so, or the artistry not your flavor? Regardless, keep reading…
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And/Or, have you played any CIV 1-6 game? If so, good…
– Real player with 101.2 hrs in game
Warlock 2: The Exiled
Warlock 2 is a truly fantastic game, despite what some of these reviews may say. If you’re a lover of 4X strategy games and fantasy lore, get this game – you won’t be sorry.
One of the reasons this game has so many harsh ratings is because it can be a little buggy. But on the right system (Windows 7, 8 and 10 all work well), it’s a ton of fun and you’ll encounter few bugs. I can safely say this after 2000+ hours of game play.
However, the Linux and Mac versions do not work. The developers were forced to abandon the game before they were fixed, so avoid this game if you’re using one of those systems.
– Real player with 5783.6 hrs in game
I bought Warlock 2 during the Summer Sale, and I’ve quite easily gotten my money’s worth. It is a lot of fun, though not without serious flaws. My review is based on three (partial) plays of “The Exiled” story mode, and one full playthrough in “Battle for the Outplanes” mode.
A big complaint a lot of people have is that it seems like a content update, rather than a sequel to Warlock. This is true to an extent. However, the handling of the planes was the biggest flaw of Warlock 1 but seems to be the central appeal of Warlock 2. In Warlock 1, there were other planes, and they were full of big bad monsters, but they weren’t very interesting and the rewards for going there weren’t significant enough to bother with them. A game of Warlock 2, on the other hand, has a hierarchy of planes, where you (and your A.I. opponent mages) start on less threatening planes, and you work your way down through to planes with significantly more dangerous fauna (and sometimes flora), or back up the hierarchy to fight the other great mages. Each plane has its own unique flavor, and most special resources only occur in one or two types of plane. The special resource thing is key… most races don’t have strong research-producing buildings, so you need to chase after the research-producing resources, which tend to be a couple planes down from where you start. The first time I reached a Shadow Plane, and established a fortress there to defend myself against the horrible shadowy horrors that awaited me, it felt … well… I would say “epic”, but that word is way overused these days. But it was awesome.
– Real player with 223.5 hrs in game
Worlds of Magic
Updated Review, Brief! (6 December 2015)
This game is unfinished by a grat deal. Even leaving out features annotated in the manual. While some bugs have been fixed and it is possible to complete a game after dealing with many crashes, the developers have abondened the game. They do not post to forums nor have they updated this work in months. I would recommend strongly against buying this game. You have been warned.
It should also be noted, MY GAME TIME IS NOT ACCURATE. While I have likely played over a hundred hours in total and have played enough to confidently review the game, I often neglect to close the game when walking away from my keyboard, indeed keeping it on overnite at some points. I would not mention this, but it has come up in comments.
– Real player with 724.4 hrs in game
This is my updated POST-RELEASE review as of 3/21.
“Worlds of Magic” is a 4X fantasy strategy game that attempts to be a spiritual successor to the classic 4X game “Master of Magic” If you are a fan of MoM, then you will want to buy this game. If you have never played MoM, and you like 4X games, I highly recommend you purchase it – nowadays you can get it really cheap from Gog.com. If you like it, you’ll want to buy “Worlds of Magic”.
WoM is an incredibly rich game, with tons of monsters and spells, and special locations to loot and exploit. It includes hundreds of spells, item crafting, heroes, 7 separate planes you can explore, the abillity to customize your game to last an hour or so, or to potentially last weeks, if you are so inclined. I’m not 100% sure, but I suspect that with everything implemented, it’s potentially the largest non-space-based 4X game there is. And there are so many different ways of playing the game, so many different ways of customizing your world and your wizard, so that no 2 games would ever feel the same.
– Real player with 573.6 hrs in game
Deformity
Turn-based fantasy strategy. Elves, Dwarves and Humans lived in peace for hundreds years. But the quiet life spoiled them. Sins grew and led to war.
Features
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World map consists of hexagonal cells and is divided into sectors.
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Colonize sectors to develop your empire.
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Sector is fundamental economic unit with resources and buildings. The maximum allowed number of buildings is limited for each sector.
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Units with unique parameters and different attack types. Hero is unique powerful unit.
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Units use sectors for global movement and cells in combat.
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Turn-based combat takes place between two sectors at the world map. Terrain and buildings affect combat.
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Each race has a dominant sin and demon-patron with unique gifts tree. Acceptance of gifts greatly strengthens the army. But with time people will rely more and more on faith and become weaker.
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Unique technology trees for each race.
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Growing population consumes food and is limited by number of houses.
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
Infinity Kingdom
This game is heavy pay to win. There’s no limit of how much you can spend and the power difference is unbeatable. As a free to play player you can reach most milestones and with a bit of spending you can get everything in the game just slower than whales. You can eventually transfer server find a better environment with non-toxic whales. So as a long term game is great, but at the beginning the whales will bully the server.
Players in the same alliance as the whales receive an insane amount of resources, gems and vip points. Unbalancing the server even more.
– Real player with 772.3 hrs in game
Decent game, but some dragons and heroes can be obtained only by purchasing bundles with real money.
It means that’s not free-to-play, but buy-to-play, and, above all, i’m forced to downvote because some of them are pay-to-win. “Charles the Great” appears in a bundle for the ridiculous price of 99 bucks, and he’s totally overpowered.
Besides this, you receive a decent amount of speed up and other boosts for free.
For free you can also roll units and have a chance to find legendaries or “fragments” to summon legendaries. Every day you earn two crystals to roll (one from daily quests and one for free).
– Real player with 367.4 hrs in game
Planar Conquest
Well At least the CURRENT top review for this game has more than 10 hours. So, it’s probably legit, though it does look like it was written by a competing Developer. That review though negative, does have QUITE a lot I agree with. But, I give the game a RECOMMEND. Why? Let me count the ways.
1- As has been stated this is the “spiritual Successor to Master of Magic” (WIDELY widely widely regarded as the best 4x game even though it is almost 30 years old)
2- There have been attempts at updating/cloning MoM, and as of this writing there is in fact a NEW version of MoM coming out next year or so.
– Real player with 675.6 hrs in game
This game has a lot of good points and good design decisions , despite some design flaws, which are compounded by the fact that the game doesn’t seem to be able to be modded.
I finally managed to complete a game on Large map size with all planes and 7 opponents without a bug stopping me continuing. But tbh it became more a chore than enjoyable. Once you work out how to play, you realise the AI is terrible both at strategic level and at battle level.
On the campaign map it frequently just sits lots of armies next to its cities doing nothing for most of the game
– Real player with 560.9 hrs in game
Age of Wonders Shadow Magic
Age of Wonders Shadow Magic is a relatively unknown gem of a game. The entire game is turn-based, with the action happening at the strategic and tactical levels. As was normal for games of years past, this is a game where you will spend the vast majority of time poring over the hex-based maps; this holds true at the “world” level as well as the “battle” level.
A few things make it stand out of the pack. At it’s core the Strategic level plays out VERY similar to a “civilization-lite” style game; establish cities, build and upgrade various structures, research “tech” (in this case various spells), and expand your empire across the map. On top of that, your faction leader can direclty influence gameplay through the casting of spells; some of these are “global”, affecting the entirety of the map (or targetable upon an opponent), others are “permanent” (enchantments upon units), and yet others are direct-combat use (more on this later). Adding to this is a (VERY LIGHT) diplomacy and alignment component that can affect your race’s interaction with other races; some races will ally with, some will tolerate, and others will outright rebel. The resoureces are limited to two; gold and mana. Both are generated through your settlements as well as from capturable nodes.
– Real player with 378.8 hrs in game
A Civilization type game with Tolkeinesque races, such as Elves, Dwarves, Undead etc. Despite being ten years old, I still find it to be the best of its type.
Very similar to most other turn based strategy games, although the difficulty can be a barrier for new players. You control a race, build\control cities, produce armies and buildings and spend time either allying or destroying other races.
You control a Wizard on the map who acts as the races leader. Should the Wizard die without any means to revive, your race is defeated.
– Real player with 216.2 hrs in game