Europa Universalis III Complete
Whee. Europa 3, like its predecessors and its cousins Hearts of Iron and Victoria (Crusader Kings as well, but that isn’t as hard to learn), is an extremely complex game that is notoriously difficult to learn, not helped by crappy tutorials. I had an edge having been playing this series since its first installment, but it still took some time to get used to everything. So right from the start expect a significant time investment on learning how to play the game, and learning to do well at it. War, Diplomacy, Trade, Exploration, and more. It’s all here.
– Real player with 535.5 hrs in game
Read More: Best Grand Strategy Sandbox Games.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the best game ever - especially in this version with the first two additions to the game.
To a certain extent, it is comparable to the Total War games, if they only included the map mode, which would here be simplified to armies only being able to move from province to province and not within a province. However, you have a more complicated diplomacy and domestic policy to deal with.
Another thing that makes it different, and, for my taste, better than the Total War games, is the greater realism and historical accuracy - in this game you can’t just conquer everything, and it remains challenging for the more than four centuries that its timespan covers.
– Real player with 492.4 hrs in game
Lawgivers II
The sequel to Lawgivers is in the works!! Join our communities and contribute to one of the most ambitious political simulation game!
Lawgivers II is a political sandbox game which offers multiple ways to experience the process of ruling and approving bills. Start your political adventure from the very bottom and perhaps lead your nation one day to become the most influential in the world.
World
The game comes with a world map featuring the most well-known nations and up to two levels of administrative subdivisions. Players will have comfortable filters to display population, relations, gdp growth, election outcomes by districs, etc.
Parliament
Enter the parliament/congress with your lawmakers to approve or abolish laws in a much expanded and realistic way. Elect the speaker of the house to watch over parliamentary democracy and set up committees for personalized laws. Request a secret vote, or ask for impeachment. Many graphs will assist players with their choice.
Government
Run for the highest seat in presidential and semi-presidential republics or become the prime minister in parliamentary republics. Form a government alone or with a coalition of party and try to survive motions of no confidence. Bypass the parliament if necessary to satisfy your needs but be prepared to face the consequences.
Laws
Personalize and approve laws like never before. With constitutional amendments you can control the workflow of the most important institutions of the country. Players will enjoy total freedom of choosing whether to insert a bill in constitution or just approve it as an ordinary law.
Lawmakers
In Lawgivers II all lawmakers will have their own opinion about laws and way to rule. If there are to many points of view in a party, some politicians might leave it or found another one. Check out their personal history and be sure to have their trust.
Organisations and Lobbies
Organisations and Lobbies might achieve a lot of influence in your country. Ask them for support by hiring one of their gentlemen or try to practice honest and clean politics.
War & Trade
Raise your influence over the world and secure important resources for your country. Corrupt other parties in poorer countries or organise “legal” referendums to annect other regions. Enter war with other nations in order to reach economic and political supremacy.
Multiplayer
Join with your friends in a coalition to form the government, rr simply stay in opposition and get ready for your first chance to grab power. (The multiplayer will be available at a later development stage)
Mods
The game will come with Steamworks support. Modders will be able to add new countries, laws, events, resources, ideologies and more content just with a simple text editor. The appearance of lawmakers will be completely cutomizable too so you can draw and import your favourite politicians.
Read More: Best Grand Strategy Politics Games.
Supreme Ruler 2020 Gold
I know it says I’ve played 250+ hours of this game, and I’ve certainly played quite a few, but probably half of that is letting the game run on its own while I was asleep, or having fallen asleep playing it.
The concept behind the game is really great, and I wish it had been implemented in a way that made it fun to play, but it wasn’t.
I did play the original (SR2010) and it is certainly an improvement over that version - less buggy, better controls. But the core problems with the franchise remain.
– Real player with 827.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Grand Strategy Politics Games.
Absolute gold, one of a kind game that was arguably the peak of what Supreme Ruler or any strategy games to date ought to be. If you want a more arcady experience or more historical titles buy the Ultimate edition and play the 2020 or Global Crisis scenario instead. But for me, there’s just something about this cruder original version of the game that is lost on the new ones.
Key changes between this and Ultimate:
Positive
-World Markets make sense, prices go from 10-1000% the baseline and are independent of your production cost. And trade MUST happen between players, resources do not materialize out of the blue.
– Real player with 680.9 hrs in game
Victoria II
“Ugh… What could’ve been… Praise KEK that I at least have my videogames to live out my epic power fantasies”
– Real player with 1707.9 hrs in game
Really fun game once you get the hang of it, and If you ever get bored of the base vanilla content, there’s so much creative and fun community mods that gives the game infinite replayability
– Real player with 1442.6 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.
Arms Race - TCWE
Arms Race - The Cold War Era is pretty promising with the way game mechanics work and the AI is good. The recommended strategy in the guide section doesn’t work reliably for me and I ended up using a different strategy. The AI is also pretty good at adapting to what you are doing. The limited 3 budget changes ends up meaning every decision has long term implications.
Most games turn out slightly differently due to the AI choosing different tactics and the randomness of global crisis events.
The game isn’t as full fleshed as say Hearts of Iron but I feel like the mechanics are well thought out and the AI provides a challenge even on easy. It does a good job of abtracting the cold war and reducing decisions to the macro level (‘meaningful decisions’) compared to HoI3/4 which features considerable micromanagement. I personally prefer macro level games (less micromanagement) but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. If you prefer to play M&T in EU4 vs base EU4 or if you prefer to play Darkest Hour/HoI2 vs HoI4 then this is the game for you.
– Real player with 17.2 hrs in game
This is a fun little game which plays a complete run in about 2-3 hours.
It runs through the whole of the cold war and includes extensive historical detail and research - history geerks will enjoy looking through the tech trees and space race just reading some of the interesting commentary.
The game itself is primarily about resource allocation - the resources being influence (generated by diplomats) spies, and military. These three resources allow you to control the board through a variety of diplomatic coups and military intervention.
– Real player with 14.9 hrs in game
Crusader Kings II
If you care about the amount of gameplay you get for your money at all, this game probably rates higher than any other game. (Last I read, the average player had over 500 hours on this game.)
Crusader Kings II is a strategic game where you spend most of your time looking at a big map of Europe cut into little counties, but it is drastically different from a game like Medieval II: Total War. Whereas in those games, every nation had rigid boundaries and an entire nation was a distinct, unified entity, Crusader Kings II focuses upon the feudal system of governance, and especially its hereditary system of succession.
– Real player with 2025.1 hrs in game
Crusader Kings II is one of the most deep, fascinating and replayable strategy games I have ever played. In brief, you play as a family in the middle ages, anywhere between Mali and Mongolia, or from Bengal to Britain. You try to secure advantageous alliances and strategic marriages, and build up a small realm, either as a vassal of a greater power or striking out independently. There is no real win condition, though I love taking people who lost out historically, and helping push them to greatness.
– Real player with 1862.2 hrs in game
SuperPower 2 Steam Edition
The Year is 2015.
I am the new Prince of Monaco.
Little do they know that I am a semi-GOD who has the gift of Immortality.
From day one I start my rule by granting all rights like Poligamy, Same Sex Marriage and Legalising Drugs; soon, hedonistic parties and drug filled orgies would be a common thing to find in the streets of Larvotto and in the high-rises of Fontvieille.
I banned all the heretic foreign languages and forced everyone to speak the divine Monegasque.
But it wasn’t enough, I needed to expand my faith despite having only 30000 loyal servants to my cause.
– Real player with 935.7 hrs in game
This game is fun. HOWEVER it’s got issues that become hard to ignore the more you play. Especailly if you know anything about developmental economics.
1. The vanilla game doesn’t handle population very well. The population of any country will continue to grow untill the game crashes. Some mods (Human develoment for example) try to address this issue but end up with the opposite problem where countries will decrease in population untill their economy breaks down and they fall into anarchy. There’s basically nothing you can do to prevent either of these fates.
– Real player with 866.8 hrs in game
Collapse: A Political Simulator
The game is getting ridiculously hard with the new updates and the game balance is very poor (there are no proper tutorials on a game with such complex mechanism). Old bugs are unresolved and there are now lots of new bugs (such as the automatic override of your old save when you start a new one unless you exit the game and restart it from Steam, which would wipe out the save that you spent 10+ hours to play). Also, the game made no mentions about the conditions of the new crisis event ‘Mining Strike’ and my approval rating suddenly slides into the bottom after that event. Not to mention that the game was already very hard before these new updates, it is just unplayable after all these new updates that made the game mechanism even harder and more complicated. Bugs like ‘Russian requirement’ event freezing and Prime Ministerial maximum operability is only 75 made this game even worse. This game wasn’t ready to be released and need a total overhaul and rework
– Real player with 164.0 hrs in game
The game is brutally hard I have spent over 90 hours trying to understand the game mechanics. even in sandbox mode the game is hard and since the last few updates the game in my opinion isn’t worth it at this moment. maybe in the next update i will reconsider. Also the game needs to have better english translation it is very hard to understand what you are doing in the game.
– Real player with 90.9 hrs in game
Masters of the World - Geopolitical Simulator 3
I highly recommend this game for anyone who is a political geek.
The game is extremely in-depth. It goes from well-known laws like freedom of speech/demonstration/religion to tiny aspects you’d never see in a geopolitical simulator; blood toxicity level, driving age, maximum age for school, and speed limits on trunk roads, city roads, and highways. It also has a very realistic atmosphere to it. Setting aside the fact the map and characters look like 90s era games, it gives the game a feel no other geopolitical simulator has given me; realism. It goes from setting meetings with political figures and world leaders, to having small talk and influencing well-known figures in your country to vote for you or support your bill publicly. When a law doesn’t pass through, a reform can be made. Adding laws into this reform that is bipartisan will increase the chances of it being passed. More features include asking nations for authorization to build a pipeline through their territory, building pipelines for oil or gas, detailed trade agreements that allow you to set the price, quantity, and duration of the agreement (Example: Russia’s Natural Gas Agreement with China that will last for 20 years), the game also allows the construction of various buildings or transportations like oil and gas pipelines, high-speed trains, nuclear power plants, oil rigs, gas and oil fields, and even increasing the number of hospitals, homes, schools, or solar fields. The game also has a very complicated economic system. I have been having trouble with it, but I did have some success as Jordan earlier. Continuing on, the game is very recent. It isn’t like SuperPower 2 where it was created just before the NATO expansion or the break-up of Serbia and Montenegro, but it was released in 2013, meaning it has the world’s youngest country, South Sudan. The game features terrorist groups in every country, ranging from the Mafia to Total Jihad groups (Al-Quaeda). You have the options to infiltrate the groups if they live in your territory, to funding them with weapons, money, and 2 semi-trucks with rockets and explosives if they are in other countries to help them take down that country’s government. But if you do this, you have the chance to be caught red-handed. And this will transfer into the news, and Parliment will impeach you. I suffered that while playing as Russia and funding New Zealand terrorists. The game offers so much detail to their options, like adding more medical staff and adding more police staff. You can also investigate politicians and well-known citizens to reveal a scandal to use against them, to spying on heads-of-state or countries to find evidence that will gain the approval of the United Nations Security Council and allow military action against the country. Which brings me to the Organizations of the game.
– Real player with 385.6 hrs in game
Despite of a few bugs Geopolitical Simulator 3 is an exceptionally clever and entertaining game! Of course strategic gaming must be your thing in order to fully appreciate MOW. It has more body than for example Civilization (which in itself is also a good game). It is very interesting to see what influence your various decisions have in the field of domestic or foreign policy, financial health, economic growth or social aspects. Also the causal relations between investing/cutting in a particular sector, creating contracts, growth, unemployment, production, trade balance, budget deficit, privitization etc..etc.. is very realistic, interesting and entertaining. Fun to read the newspaper on which impact your various decisions have, how it is presented and how well it is received by public opinion. One of the things I have learned is that you certainly can’t satisfy all of the people and organizations in a country. And most of the time it is a real challenge just to keep your head above the water. But all the more satisfying it is when you do manage to create a contract, see that the invested tax payer dollars create economic growth an jobs etc..etc..
– Real player with 150.2 hrs in game