Before We Leave
I have personally been enjoying this game very much! I appreciate that I don’t need to worry about war or combat, nor must I consider the monetary value of my peoples (ie. slavery). It still can be challenging, and I was pleasantly surprised by the little challenges it throws your way (ex: the gremlins!). The aesthetic is very pleasing, and it isn’t very demanding graphically. I would definitely recommend this! I’ve written out some of my experiences and some tips! ♥
- The Tutorial -
Doing the tutorial is a good idea and I do recommend it, but the tutorial will take you through pretty much the whole game, or at least deep into the mid-game – this could literally be hours and hours lol. But I would suggest stopping after you have started to explore your second planet., then proceed to your own games.
– Real player with 59.2 hrs in game
Read More: Best Economy Resource Management Games.
At the time writing this I have little over 10 hours in the game! You tell me what I end up getting to :)
Check out this Let’s Play for More Visual and Audio Experince!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOdcC0ErbSc&list=PLjMDVXkLIQ3772ETUImsVXS_1AwZFdcKw
Before we leave is one the best games I have played in a long time for getting right into the game and understanding what to do. It’s not because it’s easy or simple. It’s because of the amazing job they did with the tutorial system and explaining the basics of the game.
– Real player with 31.8 hrs in game
Hex Commander: Fantasy Heroes
First of all some critics claim that this is a pay to win which simply is not true. You’ll get more resources than you need to complete it just by playing it (you really do not need to spend any money on it unless you want to support the devs). This is one of those rare games that really lives up to it’s 5/5 rating.
True value 10-15 £.
Although the size of the battles are mostly small to mini this is a true contender for best game of the decade. I’ve played it back to back, all the campaigns and every scenario, over and over again. It is that good!
– Real player with 1484.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Economy Free to Play Games.
Great little game if you like turn based games.
No need to spend any cash either which is a bonus.
You can achieve highest levels on mage and alchemy very quickly just by playing the easy levels.
Major in magic and seige and do the hard levels to raise them to full rank.
Do the levels on extreme and you can have full skills to fight final boss.
And not a penny spent, took me a week to finish the game and very enjoyable it was too.
Now don’t get me wrong, not everyone’s a grinder, so please free to support the effort put into this game by purchasing some gems.
– Real player with 96.7 hrs in game
Hexonomy
Hexonomy is a game of strategy and economics. Choose from hundreds of different businesses to build and use the resources at your disposal to create the largest economic empire before time runs out. Be sure to keep your eyes open for any weaknesses in your opponents business strategy, placing the right business, at the right time, in the right place, could mean the end of it all for your opponent.
GAMEPLAY
Start with a blank slate. You begin by creating Resource nodes on the map. These will set the basis of the game. Where you place your first resources could affect the outcome of the entire game. All businesses derive from a resources in some shape or form.
From there, you advance into Tiers. Each Tier requires a business from the Tier below it. For example, a Tier 12 business requires a Tier 1 supplier. A Tier 6 supplier requires a Tier 5 supplier. And Tier 1 suppliers always require Resources. The higher the Tier, the bigger the risk, and the bigger the reward. Higher tiers will requires a wider variety of supplies from multiple businesses, so you have to be sure that all the suppliers are met. For each supplier on the map that supplies your business, you get a boost to efficiency, which results in more money for you.
If you own the supplier to your business, you get a HUGE discount on supplies. Meaning, chaining the suppliers and business makes great economical sense when possible. But that may not always be the case.
THE CATCH
There can only ever be ONE of any business. Which means if you need birch wood, and your opponent owns the only tree farm, you HAVE to buy from him. You cannot decline to buy from a supplier. If the supplier is available, you have to buy from them, and you have to pay their price. Meaning, if you know your opponent needs Gold in the future for their Jewelry brokerage, it would be wise to put down a Gold mine if they haven’t already. You would profit tremendously selling to your opponent, they wouldn’t get a discount, and that means leverage by trying to hike the price up as much as possible.
However, they can do the same to you, so its wise to be careful about leaving any vulnerabilities in your supply chain. These vulnerabilities sometimes may be unavoidable, since the higher Tier business may already require resources that your opponent bought early in the game. This is where prediction and smart calculations will win you the game.
TACTICS
Businesses location and information varies as well. Certain business only do well in certain time of the year (the time of the game is calculated in a 12 month system, using economic quarters and sprints). Some businesses have higher shipping costs than others. Some require a higher amount of resources to produce their product. Other business may have to be placed next to other tiles. Some business cant be within x amount of tiles of another business.
These placement restrictions and variables make it a little harder to create good economic chains. However, they can also be used to your advantage in order to put your opponent in a tough spot. If you know what their strategy is, you can restrict certain businesses from being built by creating others that counter those businesses. Knowing the supply and demand will help you overcome this as you learn about the Hexonomy.
UPGRADES
Once you have businesses placed, you can start thinking about how to upgrade. There are many types of modifiers in the game. Ones that apply to the whole board, ones that apply to all your businesses only, some that affect an area, and some that affect a single business. You can purchase these modifiers for Capital. By doing this, it will effectively cost you Net Worth, but in the long run, may help generate significantly more income. Spend wisely.
WINNING AND LOSING
As the game goes on, you are constantly trying to increase your company’s Net Worth. The more property you own, and the more successful businesses you have, and the more Capital your businesses earned you, the higher your company’s value. The player with the highest Net Worth at the end of time is the winner.
Create the empire you want! You can choose a hundred different paths to victory, as long as you have a great strategic and economical mind!
Read More: Best Economy Grand Strategy Games.
Signals
This is the game for Vibing!
Its super chill and the perfect for winding down.
The music really sets the mood of the game and the next thing you know you know, you’ve lost track of time and its time for bed. The controls are intuitive and the shortcuts become muscle memory, navigation works well and the UI is clean.
First play I sat there and completed the campaign mode and am now ready for getting those achievements in “Run mode”. Campaign helped to learn how the economy works and gave some backstory to the “signals”.
– Real player with 10.8 hrs in game
I really wanted to like this game. I don’t like combat games, or games that test hand-eye coordination. This has a lot to like for somebody like me. The problem is the interface. There’s no decent help. I passed challenge #1, but couldn’t pass challenge #2. So I tried the run mode. There are three icons at the top of the bottom bar. I can’t repair the portal until I have all three resources, and I can’t even figure out what the third resource is. Whatever I do, it stays at zero. It might be titanium, but I’ve three three runs and checked every planet and I can’t find any with titanium. And I can’t find a way to get advice. So I’m done.
– Real player with 9.0 hrs in game
18Korea
You should know what you are getting with the 18xx games. This is pretty good, both as a client and as an entry in the family of games, including elements that are questionable if you are a purist but are pretty nice if you like your board games to have replayability and some minimum degree of asymmetry, and I am referring to the pre-game draft of assets cards. Also the theme is great and enriched by the Korean war elements.
Buyers beware: there is NO single-player or versus-AI mode. This is a multiplayer only game. As it should be.
– Real player with 4.6 hrs in game
As an avid 18xx fan, I was very hopeful for this title. I’ve only played through a 2 player local multiplayer game(vs myself) to get a feel for the rule set and interface. This rule set is more of the “running good companies” style of 18xx vs the Stock manipulation style of game. All train routes are autocalculated which is a huge time saver over the tabletop games, interface was relatively simple to figure out.
This game has a very unique(as far as my exposure to 18xx which is pretty extensive) mechanic with half of the map getting wiped out once you advance to Era 3(brown tiles). This is the Korean war. Map gets cut at the DMZ(which you can traverse before it happens), North becomes unavailable and all cities in the South are wiped out and have to be rebuilt. I understand it works for a smaller map, but not sure how I feel about it after only one play through but its intriguing for planning and strategy.
– Real player with 2.0 hrs in game
Terroir
DO NOT BUY! This game can be fun but…only for the first hour when your small i thought it was a tycoon game and it doesn’t feel the way. It feels like Rimworld except the challenge is the weather and the “supply and demand system” so i will explain
Weather: Its too unpredictable it feels like some years your in Arizona where it hardly rains and the next year you’re set down in Washington and it rains all the time and sometimes not enough for crops to get ripe, even with no foliage. I enjoy challenging games but tycoon games don’t come to mind unless there is AI and ill get to that later. There is absolutely no research for predicting the weather if they get too ripe you can usually bring them down but if rains so much they don’t grow it is almost a guaranteed FAIL. In the start of the game its easy to deal with but in later stages two bad years you will spend almost a half a million in maintenance and if you can’t produce anything with the rain never stopping and rot eating into you’re yield you are doomed. There needs to be a way less RNG, I want a challenge, not a game based on luck, it just feels very lazy, even for such a cheap game.
– Real player with 14.4 hrs in game
Fair warning, I know nothing about wine but I am a big fan of tycoon games so I thought I would give this a try. I’ll deal with the positive first, the game’s graphics are attractive if minimalistic, and serve their purpose nicely. I appreciate the option to pretty up your vinyard with assorted items to create a nice looking creation. The full voice acting is also nice, if somewhat unneccesary. The problem though is with the core meat of the game, the winemaking and tycoon-ing. Making wines is initially a huge challenge, and you will barely scrape through the start of the game with no real knowledge of how to create each wine or the facilities to do so. Slowly, you learn the ‘recipe’ for each strain and can begin to make a 5-star wine every time, quickly accumulating vast amounts of money. Initially, I was stumped by how to increase my renown enough to upgrade my estate or unlock helpful worker tools, but then I realised that the Tavern, a relatively cheap building which also makes tons of cash, earns you an absurd 6 renown per month (for context, a month is about 30 seconds uninterrupted). Once I knew that, the difficulty curve completely reversed and there was no challenge whatsoever. I upgraded to the maximum and researched all tools and techniques within a couple of years, and hadn’t really needed to use any of them to get to a point where I was a millionaire with maximum reputation and totally bored stiff.
– Real player with 12.1 hrs in game
Little Kingdom 2
Game is fun to play although since the Latest update both my friend and I have found ourselves unable to load the game.
– Real player with 17.5 hrs in game
Pros: This game is a very neat indie that with a group of friends can become quite the fun bout, its all about attrtion so no actual units and it makes for a unique strategy game for a hotseat adventure!
– Real player with 16.1 hrs in game
Phos
You play as a robot colonizer that has been sent out to an alien planet with one goal. Harvest its resources and send them back home. To accomplish this you must build a base on the planet. As your base develops you will be able to build more advanced structures to harvest at an increased scale. And eventually you will be able to accomplish your goal to start sending resources back to your mother planet. But the native inhabitants of the planet won’t sit idly by as you strip their world of its resources.
Rise of Hegemony
Rise of Hegemony is a strategy game inspired by great games such as Civilization and Victoria. Triumph over your neighbours by successfully managing your country economically, diplomatically and militarily. The path to global hegemony is up to you.
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Subdue your enemies by pure military force.
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Forge alliances and diplomatic pacts to be part of an unstoppable coalition.
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Educate your people to eclipse your rivals technologically.
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Become an economic powerhouse and make other nations dependant on your resources.
In-depth economy
Rise of Hegemony features an in-depth economical system where every province contains a discrete number of people that all need resources to survive and thrive. Lacking access to sufficient amounts of critical goods such as food will cause your population to starve. Without access to weaponry your soldiers will be woefully unprepared to face enemies in battle. Trading with other countries is important, being dependant on them is perilous.
Build up your country
Starting as a fledgling country the way you want to conduct yourself on the world stage is up to you. Acting peacefully and benevolent has its benefits, but sometimes a more warlike approach is a quicker way to achieve your goals…
Randomly generated worlds
Even with the same strategy every game can take a vastly different course when the world looks different and countries will develop distinctively depending on their starting conditions.
Moddability
Rise of Hegemony leaves a lot of room for mods to expand on the game. Do you prefer to focus on a certain time period? Perhaps a fantasy setting is more to your liking? The possibilities for alternative scenarios are plenty!
Age of Wonders: Planetfall
This game is easily one of the best newer strategy games (i.e. 4X style game) currently available for single player in my opinion, period. I’ve had a lot of time to try several of these sorts of games that are considered the top games in the category lately. Civ, Total War games, Stellaris, Endless Legend, the list goes on, but I always come back to this one.
NOTE: Many of the reviews for this game were from when the game was released, since then they did a massive update that re-balanced the game and overhauled several mechanics. A lot of the comments in negative reviews were from a year+ ago using the old mechanics. This game is being actively improved / patched as of Oct 2020 from what I’ve seen and they’re still releasing an expansion.
– Real player with 1901.7 hrs in game
As the game is now, I do not recommend it.
I played the entire series extensively, over 4.000 hours over all titles of the series, for me personally, they changed things that were good about the game, and kept things that were bad about it.
City Siege
The first thing that is really noticeable and changes the dynamic of sieges entirely, they removed gates from city walls, those were replaced by militias and defensive towers, however these militias don’t have mods, and you can’t aim the towers, so any other troop that attacks the city will be stronger.
– Real player with 1383.1 hrs in game