Dominium Mundi
I only played the game for 5 minutes, but I left the game running for 3 hours as I was doing christmassy stuff with my cats. So in short, I know very little of this game so far. The UI and map are excellent, I’m excited to go back and look at it more. I only took over one single city and explored over half of the map thus far, but it feels good to play.
If you consider yourself a fan of something, you deserve to something something good review.
– Real player with 4.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
Save your money. I like simple strategy games at times when I want to take a break from too much intense thinking, but this is overly basic. You get bored of it after playing once or twice; it looks far more interesting than it truly is. Perhaps prices at $0.99 it may be worth considering - do not spend more than that on it.
– Real player with 1.3 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.
Wizards and Warlords
This is the good stuff. I have 13 hours played and I started playing it less than 36 hours ago. It gets the ‘one more turn’ feel just right, and has enough depth to keep things interesting, but is a bit un-optimized in terms of interface and mechanical transparency.
The Dev (yeah, the one dude making it on his own) is basically the paragon that all early access devs should try to be, constantly pushing updates and tweaks and engaging the community in respectful and productive discourse with humility and ingenuity. His turnaround time on new ideas is alarmingly fast, which is why there are multiple patches every week.
– Real player with 228.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
I very much wanted to this game to be great. The references to Dominion but with a different take on it.
There’s so much in the game, cool thought out magic, cool proc gen world, cool city development, cool leader development. But it’s so shallow. I didn’t care about any of my leaders, all the cities were functionally the same.
And the list of resources is insane. There’s a ton of resources to be gathering, but most have only a single use. It’s annoying to play a Fae wizard, get herbs and fairy dust, and have little use for it. You chase more resources until you realize you have no use for mithril. I’d rather have a smaller more concentrated list of resources that did something.
– Real player with 104.0 hrs in game
Defense of the Oasis
I picked this up after being mentioned on Crate and Crowbar as a puzzle game with very short rounds appealed. It fits that comforting spot very well. I can play a few rounds while other stuff is happening around me in the house. As an older game it’s also at the right price. I have never been a graphics obsessive, but to me these graphics have an old-school style, but work fine on my 1yr old Windows gaming laptop, and I never have trouble working out what a particular tile is. The game structure is an elegant idea with not too many pieces, where the pieces combine well to create lots of interesting variation.
– Real player with 85.4 hrs in game
I bought this game a long time ago - forgot about it, tried to find it again a few times over the years since and it was impossible to find. I was so excited to see it finally on Steam! However after 2 minutes it’s clear that it is just a port of an amazingly old game. Going into full-screen mode immediately breaks the game and makes it unplayable with a ton of graphical glitches. I’m glad its available to play though, but be warned that it’s a bit ugly and potentially buggy.
It has been described as ‘Civ meets Minesweeper’ and if that sounds like something you’re into I recommend it.
– Real player with 57.0 hrs in game
Line War
Line War is a multiplayer Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game heavily influenced by other strategy genres including 4X, War Game, Auto Battler, and Real-Time Tactics.
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Endless number of asymmetric procedural worlds
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Players select their starting territories in an innovative and fair “picking phase”
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You draw commands that units will follow
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Reduced micro-management, Actions per Minute (APM) is not important
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No control of individual units, they all follow commands and directives
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Traditional, recognizable, and well balanced militaristic units
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Conquer territories, build towns, cities, industries, ports, and trade routes to earn capital
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Produce energy with refineries and powerplants for sustained mobility of tanks, air force, and navy
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Visual commands
This game has a never-before-seen approach that lets you focus on drawing commands and executing a strategy rather than managing individual units. Chain commands and execute orchestrated operations for coordinated attacks against your opponent. This command system sets Line War apart from other strategy games.
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Familiar Units
Line War dares to break the trend and has only one race with familiar units to widen the audience and ease the learning curve. Each unit has a distinct and carefully balanced role.
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Strategy
Line War focuses on strategy. We’ve designed the game around the typical RTS-problems to remove the steep learning curve and need for ultra-fast micro-management so you can focus on planning and executing a strategy.
During Early Access; Line War is a multiplayer-only game! We will add single-player campaigns for the full release in 2023. As an Early Access customer, you will receive the single-player campaigns for free once the game is fully released.
The Dwarves of Glistenveld
It has been a while since I posted this review and much has changed since then. Having played the game now for a total of 300+ hours (and there was me saying I don’t get much time to play games), I have explored many of the game modes. My favourite right now is the Skirmish mode where you can hand-craft your map options, such as the number of enemies, their initial strength, the map size and style, etc. I am currently working my way up to more and more difficult settings to see how good I really am. My other favourite mode is the cavern mode (the game’s sandbox mode ) where I have also spend many hours. In this mode you can slowly build your base to ever increasing size while improving your tech tree. The current tech tree is already in place for the upcoming next chapter of the game and it allows you to build a railway network so that your miners don’t have to carry everything back to your base, improve and automate your defences, build automated farms for farming roots and mushrooms, light up your neighbour hood with lanterns, build cooking stations and much more. I have also played with the map editor and will be uploading my own hand-crafted map very soon. ‘hwill’ has uploaded a new map to the workshop which I enjoyed very much. I must add a comment.
– Real player with 638.7 hrs in game
This game, is absolutely fantastic! This RTS adventure strategy game is about leading a tribe of Dwarves trying to take back their homeland from the goblins that have ran them down underground. There are so many things that you find out during every level, there are nice challenges such as the achievements and the schematics that you have to find to advance with technology, there are song hidden choices through your first play through (such as when you meet Fishbeard’s first guard) it’s amazing, it’s so replayable and enjoyable for sooooooooooo many hours even when there is only 6 levels at the time of writing this. Along with the mechanics in this game are so nice and fluid such as the base building part, and the class switching system, the AI is pretty on-point, it’s not one of those games where the AI struggles with some of the commands that you try to give it, in this game, it just does it immediately!
– Real player with 18.9 hrs in game
The Mystic
Game is improving a lot trough the EA. Even now i find it god offer. I’m looking for the campaign. if it is good this will be classic.
– Real player with 40.4 hrs in game
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
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
Zenith Frontier
Zenith Frontier is an interstellar strategy simulation game. Explore and colonise hostile exoplanets and help humanity survive the struggles of 2040 and beyond.
Zenith Frontier features several novel mechanics in the context of traditional 4X and grand strategy gameplay elements. Experience visionary strategic gameplay set in an evolving procedural galaxy populated by billions ot autonomous citizens and private companies. Build a faction with a rich background and strong identity, then oversee their interstellar efforts to advance their position within the precarious New Space Age.
New Gameplay Features:
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A Shared Origin: Factions start in the same overpopulated, suffering home system and compete to expand outwards in the year 2040. This is made possible by the recent discovery of –REDACTED– which allows high-tech spacecraft to slip into subspace.
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Volatile Subspace: Exploration of this newly accessible subspace is incredibly dangerous. This chaotic region is thick with dark matter and swirling dark energy fields, but the ability to travel interstellar distances in considerably shorter timeframes may be worth the risk. Known safe routes will become critical to sustaining your remote holdings, but beware - subspace is neither static or stable and these routes may change!
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Information is Essential: Unshielded signals will be destroyed in subspace and must be carried through by comm drones. News that arrives at your capital from a distant colony will be out-of-date - the situation will have evolved and you will have to consider this when planning your response. Additionally, perhaps the illegal hijacking of another’s comm drones will glean some strategic information - and prevent it from arriving at its intended destination!
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Special Relativity: Spacecraft travelling at incredible speeds and colonies established within deep gravity wells will experience first-hand the effects of special relativity and time dilation. Time will progress more quickly for the crew of your –REDACTED– spacecraft making a long journey at high speeds than the colony they are destined for.
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Geospatial Resource Pricing: A supply and demand model for price determination within a dynamic economic system that includes taxes, import/export fees and transportation costs mean that resource prices will vary throughout the galaxy. Plan your economic developments accordingly - or invest in this interstellar network infrastructure to take a slice of your rival’s operations.
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Top Level Direction: Shape your faction from the top down by issuing orders, directives, and edicts to your military staff, governors, and private sector. These are executed autonomously, which can lead to surprising outcomes. This indirect control poses interesting strategic challenges.
Traditional Gameplay Features:
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Diplomacy and Politics
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Research and Technology
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Military Conflict
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Management and Governance
Zenith Frontier’s Design Pillars:
Zenith Frontier is being designed and developed in line with these pillars.
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Emergence - A rich, living world that generates unique emergent scenarios.
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Strategic Depth - A semantic network of interconnect systems.
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Gameplay Over Graphics - A high quality interactive system that priotises gameplay.
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Self-Directed - The player is primarily working towards self-selected goals in open gameplay.
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Top Level Decisions - The player provides direction from the top-down to autonomous agents.
Galactic Civilizations III
NOTE: This is a review of the Final Release Candidate for the game, so it should apply to the released version.
Having been a long-time GC2 player, I eagerly signed up for the Founder’s Edition early-access over a year ago, and have followed the development of GC3 since then closely.
Let me tell you, getting a 4X game that incorporates all the features that hard-core strategy gamers want, while remaining both relevant and competitive, is really hard. As in, EXTREMELY hard. StarDock has done an excellent job with GC3. That’s not to say there still aren’t quibbles over the direction certain features have taken, but the reality is, that if you actually want to release a game, certain decisions are going to have to be taken, and you’re sure to piss off someone who wanted that feature and didn’t get it. But GC3 is a solid and entertaining game, if not a radically innovative one.
– Real player with 2842.9 hrs in game
First of all it is critical to understand that the game is still in beta testing and therefore has some glitches. That said it has been pretty stable for me. (Four year old dell xps 8100 with 16gb and a 750 Ti video card). At present the plan seems to be to a go for a final release in May. There will be frequent patches before then and perhaps a beta 6 release (beta 5, with enormous additions, was released yesterday (Mar26). If you don’t like encountering bugs and reporting them to help the game, then wait for the release. Of critical importance remaining is tuning the AI to be smarter and more aggressive, imo.
– Real player with 2285.4 hrs in game