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 City Builder Games.
My first impression of the game:
The beginning is a bit confusing. You have different management levels:
1. Production
-
Collect raw materials (initially from ruins, later in mines)
-
Collect artifacts (also from ruins)
-
Produce fuel and electricity
-
manage garbage (a lot)
2. Citizens and workers
-
Buy and house citizens
-
Earn money from citizens watching advertisements
-
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
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
Station Commander
The game is good, worth the money. I hope this will continue to be developed with regular patch updates. Some notes:
1. Pirate ships are too strong in early game. Make them less oppressive or add a difficulty setting so fighting pirates can feel more engaging.
2. Repairing ships is a serious chore. I mean like for each ship in a fleet (9 total) there are multiple clicks per ship which gets tedious very fast. Just add a simple way to repair all the ships in a fleet with one click.
3. The scaling on the storage modules is too high, forcing me to use almost all of my free slots to add storage space. I’d really like to use those slots for other modules….
– Real player with 7.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best 4X Strategy Games.
Very bare bones resource collection / trading game. Best part of the game is gaming the planet economies and trading (sitting outside a planet desperate for food, waiting for prices to go up, selling at the peak, etc.)
Military units are really only for defending your trade/mining ships from pirates, or hunting pirates/other NPCs to take their cargo.
Your station itself, from what I can see, cannot come under attack in anyway so it’s not a high-octane challenge, but more of a fun little game to play with mini-stock markets in every planet (best part of the game is the economies shifting with line charts)
– Real player with 2.1 hrs in game
Polaris Sector
Nice and deep space 4X game, definately the best of the recent releases. It also avoided a common fact with 4X which is that many features are copy/pasted beetween games, so it will feel fresh even if you’re used to the genre.
In a nutshell, it’s a bit rough but a must for every space 4X fan. It shines in empire management, elegant mechanics, diplomacy. It would deserve a bit more streamlining.
Why is it better than most other 4X?
+ Rewarding diplomacy:
Interactions pretty rational. There are many possibilities, from trading ressources (shortages are common so that’s handy), to technologies, to being able to use friendly planets as bases for your fleet or asking for a 3rd party to negociate a peace with your ennemy, or bribe them into getting into war against your ennemy (or request a bribe to help them!)
– Real player with 229.8 hrs in game
Lets get to it.
Pro:
[olist]
- A.I. (Articial Intelligence) - I cannot emphasis or stress enough of how extremely good the A.I. is. It’s probably one of the most advanced one I’ve seen in a 4x game genre. I absolutely love how it handles playing against me and handling my orders for planets, colonization, and etc (without the need to micromanage everything). Again, the A.I. in this game is just so good that it cannot be expressed sufficiently of how good it is. Even the developer of this game admits that hard is very tough for him.
– Real player with 159.5 hrs in game
Rising Constellation
Rising Constellation is an awesome game which is mixing strategy and role play at a perfect level.
It offers many distinct gameplay based on factions and its agents mechanics - however, remind it’s strongly depends on team play!
Indead, this game is part of those who are perfectly designed to work in cooperation with your mates, but definitely not alone.
Use Siderians and rule your teamates, just because you’ll get the economy power - or perhaps you’ll prefer bite everyone using large fleets lead by Navarques.
– Real player with 933.3 hrs in game
Rising Constellation is 4x RST game still in developpment.
Created from a small team of Swiss developper, I was a player of thier first MMO RTS 4x game: Asylamba.
I see RC (Rising Constellation) like an MMO RTS 4x game based on Agents (Navarques – Ereased – Sidérians).
I really enjoy the game for is background story (lore can be added by players participation) , B&W graphic style and is MMO possibility !
There is now 1 mod to play : fast flash 2H gamemode , this is quite small with 1 or to 2 games per week with a small cummunity.
– Real player with 837.1 hrs in game
Terraformers: First Steps on Mars
Interesting theme, the graphics are simple but cool, the music is nice, it does run on GNU/Linux, but after eight hours of repetitive play, I wouldn’t call this a civ strategy kind of game, but more like a deck building card game, with lots of randomness, which gets you nowhere. You just need to be lucky to get the right cards at the right time for the right random spots to get a better score. No matter how good your planning is, there is too much luck involved. Maybe the 30 days span of a gameplay is too short for seeing the bigger picture, this is just a demo after all, but that’s my take on the current game. I do wish the devs good luck and I hope the final game offers a better experience.
– Real player with 8.8 hrs in game
A pretty solid board game
Game is very reminiscent of the popular board game Terraforming Mars, with some slight changes.
-
Your starting hand is always the same 2 cards
-
Beyond Oxygen, H2O and Temperature, there’s a nebulous “atmosphere” terraform setting
-
Ever 10 years you select a leader, who has special abilities and traits that can be used on your turn
-
Pop happiness is measured and scored.
Overall its fun for a few play throughs, but with the same 6 leaders, same starting hand, and hard 30 turn limit, you’ll only have fun for a bit.
– Real player with 4.1 hrs in game
A Planet of Mine
A cute time killer that its easy to get lost on for hours at a time. The random planet load outs and landing positions can make some planets practically impossible to win which can take a while to spot. Re-starting is fairly easy though.
– Real player with 21.0 hrs in game
Very enjoyable little game~
Takes a bit of learning but it’s very fun~ you can find some good info and tips with a quick google search that might help you get started.
I used to have it on mobile but I find it much more enjoyable on PC and it runs very well.
Lots of races (I believe 16) and different ways to play. Discovers and exploration. Planets are very unique and not all the same.
You can also destroy a rivals planet completely or be friendly and trade with them.
The gist is you start on a single planet and harvest resources and build different constructs. After a while you ascend (which you can do several times) and more technologies become available. Soon you will be colonizing multiple planets.
– Real player with 19.5 hrs in game
Conquest of the New World
This is an old game I firt bought around 20 years ago. I enjoyed it a lot then and still enjoy it. The controls are very basic and the graphics are poor by today’s standards but it is still fun to play and does take strategy to conquer the new world. For $10 I’m very happy with my purchase, I’m only irritated that I had to purchase the game a second time because my current machines don’t support the old software.
– Real player with 1783.2 hrs in game
This game is an old favorite of mine from many years ago. Although its graphics are now very dated, and it is a turn-based game in an era when most people seem to prefer real time (at least, the people who sell games seem to think so!), I have always found it to be a very well conceived, highly playable, and unusually entertaining game. It might very well have become one of my all-time favorite games if not for one fatal flaw: It contains a number of bugs which, in extended play, render it literally unplayable! The most annoying of these is that, in battles between large armies, the game hangs in the middle of the battle, and is unrecoverable. The only solution to this I have ever been able to find is to save your game before the start of each turn so that you have a fall-back position if you hang. Note that you must save under a new name, exit your game, and restart under the original name each time you do this (in other words, there is no “Quick Save” option as in so many other games). This makes it such a nuisance that you are not likely to do it. But even if you do, what’s the point? In order to not hang, you must choose not to have the battle. But without large battles, this game holds little interest for me. So when I saw that Steam was offering Conquest on their platform, I was excited to think that they might be offering a playable version, and I immediately bought a copy (at full price). Unfortunately, once I got well into the game (about Turn 120), the same old problem occurred. When playing on my own computer I was sometimes able to resolve the hangup by force-closing the hung game and rebooting the computer. Obviously rebooting the Steam server which supports this game is not an option. So here I am, having invested about a week in playing Conquest (actually 24.1 hours of play time according to Steam), and my game can neither be continued nor reverted to an earlier position – not that going back would necessarily help, anyway. I’m sure you can imagine my frustration level, and my disappointment that Steam did nothing to fix this potentially classic game before offering it for sale.
– Real player with 838.7 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.
Ozymandias: Bronze Age Empire Sim
If you’re interested in Ozymandias, please wishlist, follow us and download the demo! :)
At the dawn of history, Bronze Age kings built the first empires. Strategize their rise to power in a uniquely streamlined 4X.
DISTILLED DESIGN
-
Focus on strategy over tactics, we’ve stripped the busywork out of 4X gameplay.
-
Combat abstracted via innovative Power system so you need only move armies and fleets.
HISTORICAL MAPS
-
8 handmade maps charting Bronze Ages around the world, empires in real-world locations.
-
Empires are tagged from ‘Easy’ to ‘Very Hard’ to reflect their unique challenges.
COMPETITIVE AI
-
Data-driven AI system, flexible enough to succeed in any environment.
-
Streamlined ruleset is inherently AI-friendly so no ‘AI cheating’ required.
MULTIPLAYER
-
Players take their turns simultaneously so there’s no waiting around.
-
Choose to play ‘live’ (short turn timers) or ‘asynchronous’ (long game timers).