Old World
Old World is a historical strategy game where you lead your empire through multiple generations, building a grand legacy to last beyond your own years. This is an era of great leaders, from the revered to the feared. Which will you be?
Marry for politics, raise your heirs, and manage your relationship with the families of your kingdom. In the fast and furious world of kings and queens, family matters.
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Each of the 7 kingdoms has four noble families that provide various benefits when put in charge of your cities.
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Manage family ties through events, actions, and marriages to keep them happy and reap additional benefits. Upset them, or make them too powerful, and you risk their ire.
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Maintain a strong family unit, or distract yourself with more illicit adventures.
The world is full of great characters with distinct personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. Use them to forge your kingdom, defend your borders, and build ties with other leaders.
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Seek out and recruit famed warriors, philosophers, builders, and more. Have them tutor your children, lead your armies, and further your reign.
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Different personality archetypes allow your court members to perform different tasks in similar roles. Find the right combinations to take full advantage of governors, diplomats, spymasters, and even your spouse.
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Characters develop new personalities and traits over time, growing old, gaining experience, and finally falling ill and passing away, leaving room for the next generation.
Unsettled tribes, barbarian marauders, and remnants of previous cultures are all waiting in the vast unexplored wilderness.
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Discover artifacts and great heroes of the past at ruins scattered across the map.
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Experience over 3,000 unique events inspired by history and mythology.
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Contact with foreign dignitaries triggers event chains, stories, and courtroom drama.
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Pursue ambitions and legacies related to conquest, development, faith, and more.
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Historically inspired scenarios, weekly challenge games, and a choice between randomly generated and handcrafted maps to explore. Lead Carthage to victory as Hannibal in the Punic Wars, hold your own against Barbarian Hordes, or compete against other players in tackling fictional scenarios.
Why do things the way they’ve always been done? Old World brings a new take to key elements of the 4X strategy genre:
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Go beyond the traditional resources. Buildings are made of wood and stone, not “industry.” Population doesn’t grow off “food” alone.
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Orders are a resource shared across your realm. Instead of moving every unit once per turn, each unit can be moved multiple times until fatigued or Orders are depleted.
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Technological advancement is not predetermined. Randomization helps keep technology trees feeling fresh with each new playthrough.
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Quality of life improvements, such as the ability to undo mistaken commands and nested tooltips, ensure you’re always making informed decisions.
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Play with friends in countless multiplayer modes — from hotseat, to asynchronous, to cloud play.
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Mods further open up infinite options for new worlds, empires, and dynasties — inspired by our real world, and by works of fiction as well.
Read More: Best Grand Strategy Tactical Games.
Dominions 4: Thrones of Ascension
I’ve played several thousand hours of this game, and dominions 3. The only other game i’ve played anywhere near as much is tabletop rpgs. But i’m biased, old hand, fan, etc. This guy isn’t. Here’s what he had to say on the Steam forum.
@Stephen:
Earlier tonight, one of the most epic occurences I have ever seen in a video game occured. Seeing that as a sign of a good game and also worth telling about, I decided to post here for your reading pleasure. Since it is only due to a confusing chain of events that this occured, I’m going to tell the full story from start to finish. Enjoy.
– Real player with 595.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Grand Strategy Multiplayer Games.
Dear friends, I know that many would have you believe that the Pale Ones are extinct, save for the occasional emergence of an Earth Reader or the primitive Pale Ones that are sometimes encountered in remote regions. I am here to set the ancient records straight.
Long have I labored in service to the Ancients, dead and forgotten though they may be to most of the civilized world. Only after extensive research and tireless experimentation had I uncovered a ray of hope in the sea of Agarthan darkness.
– Real player with 333.1 hrs in game
Medieval II: Total War™ Kingdoms
WARNING: ABOUT THE GAME’S DISAPPEARANCE FROM YOUR LIBRARY
The game is not gone from your library, they simply merged it with Medieval II. To find it follow these steps:
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Install Medieval II
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Go to your steam game library
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Right click on Medieval II
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Below the “Play Game” option there should be 4 new options with the Kingdoms campaigns.
And now, after that prologue, LET THE REVIEW BEGIN!
Kingdoms is the expansion pack (yeah, not DLC, for 20 bucks you can buy actual, sturdy, nearly endless content) of Medieval II: Total War.
– Real player with 384.3 hrs in game
Read More: Best Grand Strategy Multiplayer Games.
Don’t let my playtime fool you, i’ve played this game for over a decade ever since 2006 and probably sunk thousands of hours into this game on disc. This game features a combination of RTS (while in battles) and TBS (displayed on the campaign map), you move your armies around on a fully 3D map authentic to the terrain of Europe and Asia, Risk style.
There are many troop types from Horse Archers to Knights to Longbowmen even Elephants and Native American braves! this game is a perfect example of a well crafted Total War game. Yes it is old, even on max graphics a graphics snob might brush this game off right away but this game captures the atmosphere, lifestyle, turbulance and religious strife of the Middle Ages wonderfully.
– Real player with 237.0 hrs in game
Stellaris
Stellaris is a fantastic game.
I have seen thousands of stories unfold during my playtime. I’ve watched humanity bloom into a galaxy-spanning civilisation. I’ve watched megacorporations be seized by fanatic communists. I’ve seen weapons created that span the circumference of quasars and watched them wipe away entire solar clusters. I’ve unlocked the secrets of the universe again and again, scoured the galaxy for relics and found stories spanning universes in scale, stories that go beyond the beginning and the end of what we would conventionally call a universe. I held the line against an extra-galactic threat while the galaxy crumbled around me, a threat that had followed the Prethoryn Scourge to our local cluster and fed on our galaxy as a cow would a field. My empires proved and disproved the false vacuum theory again and again, and when that empire eventually fell; futurespawns travelled back in time to warn the past against the coming storm. A revolt against fate itself had formed, and after swiftly taking over the galaxy through diplomacy it found itself fronting that storm yet again. This time it was ready.
– Real player with 1967.2 hrs in game
This review is difficult to leave as I have lots of great memories with this game. Its unique approach to RTS Space Strategy is incomparable to anything else on steam at this time. Which is a real shame because Paradox Interactive continues to fail with DLC updates and constant redesigns.
The game has been practically remade at least twice. Entire game feels more like a beta with constant major changes to core gameplay, to fix things that should have been fixed before release. Which ironically, PDX Interactive fails at almost every, single time. Every update that “fixes” bugs only temporarily patches them or just changes them to be slightly more bearable. For instance, every claim of late game lag being fixed might as well be ignored. You can choose a tiny galaxy, and you’ll still have lag in the late game. Pop changes or whatever other crap they’ve put it in hasn’t fixed much of anything. But what it has done is break mods, introduce new & more upsetting bugs, and piss off the community. They also released some stupid launcher so they could shove ads in my face when I launch the game, but in doing so also broke mods by introducing frustrating & upsetting mod order issues. Literally never was an issue before the launcher, now I have to shuffle mods around to hopefully not crash when loading saves. Which you might as well just delete your old saves if the devs release an update, because its going to break.
– Real player with 700.2 hrs in game
Making History: The Great War
The big problem with this game is the AI.
It´s much, much to aggressive and unhistorical.
The first world war and the time proceeding it was marked by decidedly conservative regimes and military high commands doing everything decidedly conservatively and cautiously.
But so far I’ve seen Germany completely loose the war on Russian within a few turns while I as France was awaiting to get my face bashed in by them in the autumn of 1914. The Germans that did attack on the western front stuck to the Schleiffen-plan religiously and kept on punching their way thru Belgium to the channel coast even as they where cut of behind them by my counter attack.
– Real player with 488.3 hrs in game
Muzzylane’s Making History:The Great War is a very good game for two rather different reasons.I was having trouble with the production code (0 and o,B and 8 you know the sort of thing and most likely my mistake )but Chris Parson at support was right there and assistance to a rather grumpy gamer was just an email away . Not hours or days later but help right now.That was a pretty good intro to M.H:T.G.W.Thanks Chris.
The game itself after a modest 14 hours is proving to be excellent.The map ,oddly is much better than it appears in Steams add, the choices of countries you can play as is amazing,the detail quite stunning.Ok if you just want to roll the armour ,the good old Command and Conquer tank rush this isn’t your kind of game. I’m still trying to get my rail system up and running correctly, learning how one problem effects so widely and how to solve it is the brilliant part of this game.Micro management,sure, but great fun. You want to do something ,but can not ,if you delight in finding why not and how to rectify it you are going to just love this game. Its a clever, functional game.No crashes,no long load up times,all good.
– Real player with 243.1 hrs in game
Darkest Hour: A Hearts of Iron Game
Darkest Hour would merit an award not only for its terrific value but also for the care put into its playability and historical accuracy. Historical events will generally always occur but sometimes at a different moment than anticipated depending on a number of factors. It is generally impossible to avoid having Stalin’s purges as the Soviet player, or election results in France for instance. But in spite of this, outcomes may be very different from game to game because of all other factors that may come into play. It is a complex game that requires a lot of attention, but that is also very rewarding to play.
– Real player with 2008.6 hrs in game
I have 250-something hours in this game, and it is truly worth every cent i payed for it, i think it was like 2$ CAN. As Hoi4 can never hope to run on my system so this was my first hearts of iron game and i think its a good introduction for the series. It does have a steep learning curve and requires some mental capacity, but it is sorta simple when you look at it and its parts.
Some reviews say that the game is rather linear, that is sorta true at a glance depending on how you play. You can choose to play any nation at a variety of start dates and choose multiple paths to go down for your nation, (though not nearly as extensive as hoi4s foucus trees). there are options to go down alt-history in the base game, through the great number of events and decisions. they are limited though, it is impossible to have a communist USA for example, without the use of a little thing called console commands, which opens up alot of opportunities. make canada a fascist industrial powerhouse rivaling germany in might? you can do it, you can cheat your way through alot, but my advice is to use it only for developing minor nations or capitulating a already defeated enemy, or bypassing the script and creating your own scenarios.
– Real player with 812.1 hrs in game
Europa Universalis IV
I’m a divorced woman of color. Recently, my ex got our son Larry a video game called Europa Universalis for his 14th birthday. It seemed good for him, because it takes place in the distant past and he’s always been interested in history, so it seemed like a nice enough game, no graphic violence or anything, at least until I sat down and watched him play at it. I don’t know what sorts of racists made this game, but it’s basically a colonialism and genocide justification simulator. If you want to survive, you need to have access to money and soldiers, and the most (only) reliable way to ensure you have enough is to attack and conquer your weaker neighbors. If you don’t, you can be sure someone else will eventually come attack and conquer you.
– Real player with 4558.6 hrs in game
So EU4 was a good game. Then they released the 450+ ‘bug fixes’. The entire game outside Europe has now been put back behind a new paywall unless you have the paradise DLC as it is now impossible to develop your provinces to spawn institutions as army tradition gives you impossibly high dev costs. I played one game and when I needed to dev an institution from a 1/1/1 grasslands province and starting cost is 120. That is only with 33 army tradition giving a 150% penalty. This was a custom nation and I had -20% dev cost. Good job paradox forcing everyone to buy your shittiest dlc in order to use any of the other DLC’s you have paid for. The game is now broken outside of Europe without the paradise dlc. You make me sick Paradox!
– Real player with 1819.5 hrs in game
Imperiums: Greek Wars
So, I have been playing this game for about near 40 hours at the time of this review.
Imperiums, focus' on the Greek Wars time era. And the developers do a very good job in portraying accurate history, in my opinion. The game keeps trying to ‘curb’ you back toward history. However; you can fight against that, and go your own way. However it requires more effort or ‘elbow grease’ to get there. Basically, to ‘go against’ history; the game feels harder! Usually. Usually when trying to go against history. I really like this aspect of the game.
– Real player with 323.7 hrs in game
As a strategy game Imperiums is one of a kind. Designed from scratched with pen and paper by a passionate developer and now released as the second entry in a hopefully long lasting series of strategy games.
Over the years the game is shaped and finetuned by the help of a small, but very dedicated playerbase who can discuss with the developer in forums on Steam and Discord.
Hundreds of players already mentioned their complains and wishes for the game and the developer keeps a list with urgent must have features and nice to have features for the future.
– Real player with 158.9 hrs in game
Dominions 3: The Awakening
I own Dominions 3 and 4. Started playing Dominions 3, few monts later Dom 4 came out - moved to it.
Now I’m playing Dominions 3 and enormousely enjoying it. Less spells, less magical items than in Dom 4 - somehow even more fun.
Why I like Dominions:
1. Very interesting fantasy setting (not just elfes and other copies of Tolkien imagination) with Valkiries, armoured gorillas, ghouls, giants, chariots, eagle-men, bat-men, spider riders, raptor riders, fiery salamanders, armoured or undead elephants, giant ants, tiny dragonflies, barechested warriors, tritons with amber armour, hydras, halfblind cyclopes, nagas, twoheaded giants, liches, krakens, dragons, mechanical dragons, trolls, tengu, ghosts, lamias, jaguars, werejaguars, powerfull but insane gods, mages of various kinds,assasins, shark knights, Vikings with glamour, Aztects with flying ability and many, many more…
– Real player with 360.6 hrs in game
BLUF: This game’s pretty awesome, if you can get past the ancient graphics and focus on the creative/imaginative aspects.
I loved the game. Yes, it is complex, but I think the complexities are actually exagerated. It’s basically raise armies, research spells, invade provinces, collect gold, etc. But somehow I find it 20x more engrossing than any other “4x” game (which I don’t think it quite is). There are little quirks, like that it is turn-based, but then all the movement happens at once for everyone, seasons affect gold income, but they also affect how many mushrooms grow in the forest for your witches to collect, and it’s all these quirks and the plethora of races to play that make the game world feel alive. I love how you are slowly introduced to the lore; it never feels like a chore to read it to get into the game, you just pick up some of it as your priests randomly summon some ultra-powerful seraphim that then randomly gets itself killed by wandering around the map.
– Real player with 159.4 hrs in game
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