Espiocracy
Disclaimer: Trailer & screenshots are early work in progress
GRAND ESPIONAGE STRATEGY
Choose one of 102 countries and guide character-driven national intelligence agency through rough seas of the Cold War. From Soviet KGB and American CIA, up to Israeli Mossad and British MI6, expect different approaches to grand strategy gameplay.
INNOVATIVE MECHANICS
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Espionage finally made as it should be
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Precise modelling of views & ideologies
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Direct links between causes and effects
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System of geopolitically active actors
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Emergent multipolar simulation
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Operation plans, campaigns, and opportunities
MEANINGFUL DECISIONS
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Prioritize grand scale and leave micro to your operatives
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Establish contacts, threaten, exploit, and trade
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Manipulate public opinion, support and establish political factions
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Launch coups and proxy wars, falsify casus belli
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Hunt spies and terrorists, protect internal stability
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Form alliances, prepare all-out attacks, break rules
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Advise country leader on critical decisions such as military interventions
DANGEROUS TIDES OF HISTORY
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Nuclear race: first atom bombs, thermonuclear revolution, mutually assured destruction
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Huge progress in technology, simulated in the game with Kuhn’s paradigm shifts
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After-war poverty, civil wars, controversial past
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Configurable balance between alternate history and determinism
Read More: Best Grand Strategy Cold War Games.
Rogue State Revolution
Let me start by saying that this has the potential of being a great game, but this game is far from being ready for release. Consider this game an early access.
Here’re some warnings if you wanna purchase:
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Update 1.2 introduces a lot of CTDs, every few turns.
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Game mechanics is only partly there. For example, there’s still no building to help boost a province’s security score. Dev is also still working on mid-to-late game progression issues such as running out of imported resources.
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Many QoL changes needed. Ffs let me look at my current exports every time my neighbor asks me to increase export!
– Real player with 29.9 hrs in game
Read More: Best Grand Strategy Atmospheric Games.
Rogue State Revolution is a resource management game with a novel theme and deary indie production values, but falls into to the typical issue of initial hump of difficulty after which you are free to explore and express regardless of difficulty. (Mind I’m a bit sadistic with difficulty on these games.)
After setting up your economy and surviving the initial diplomatic/societal/environmental challenges the game throws at you, one slowly but surely is on top of the wave. This is where the game suffers from bad pacing and/or balancing. I found myself having way too many actions while not having enough favors and/or money. There are several stretches like this in the game and it seems the team tried to introduce mechanics into the game that one can sink extra resources into (civilians & space missions & casino), but all of these will be exhausted relatively quickly leaving you, again, just passing the turn waiting for something to happen.
– Real player with 29.4 hrs in game
Deadwater Saloon
Create Your Character
Playing as a rich and dynamic character in the old west, you will be able to fully customize your attributes to fit your playstyle, such as Mixology, Seduction, and Sneakiness. You will manage your life as well as your saloon, such as maintaining your reputation and getting married. You will struggle with the effects of disease, aging, sanity, and addictions.
Form Relationships
Provide travellers with a distinct drink parlour, gaining legendary stories to regale and build your legend. Interact with townspeople as they populate the town, forging friendships with blacksmiths, sheriffs, and preachers, romance prospective partners, or blackmail, abduct, and murder those who threaten you.
Build
Build your saloon from the ground up. Expand the walls, build bordellos, opium dens, high stakes gambling rooms, and railed porches. Buy and place spittoons, tables, chairs, handcrafted bars, pianos, chandeliers, and diamond dust mirrors.
Manage
Thrive within a complex economy system, stockpiling booze, food, guns, and opium. Research a diverse array of drinks and foods to serve customers. Hire and manage staff from within the town populace, including barkeeps, cooks, servers, prostitutes, croupiers, pianists and bouncers. Help them reach their full potential, or fire and replace them with those more skilled.
Hundreds of Events
Face the forces of nature, meddlesome customers, firebrand Preachers, rival outlaw gangs, and much more. At some point, you will be tested by stronger and more formidable nemesis in longer event chains. Whatever you choose, you will face the consequences of your choices. The frontier is an unforgiving place.
Read More: Best Grand Strategy Choose Your Own Adventure Games.
Frontline: Panzer Blitzkrieg!
Simple little simulation. NOT going to test an Avalon Hill fan. Wait for it to be on sale, as it has no scenario designer so you only get what it comes with. Limited replayability. A few minor glitches where the game wont let you attack or even move into a grid that you should be able to. So sometimes, you cant eliminate an enemy unit.
– Real player with 110.0 hrs in game
just got the 4 game bundle was looking for a break from high stress turn base games the bigger devs make .
wow was this a surprise a lot is packed into the game some is not , so will not be for everyone .
but looking for a good shot out game with minimal supply planning this can be it .
One thing I like is no max turns just objectives But you have to keep going since you will run out of supply but collecting objectives or Parachute drops gets you more . I played on normal and a few battles had to restart .
– Real player with 56.7 hrs in game
Raiders! Forsaken Earth
IN A WORD: MAYBE
IN A NUTSHELL:
WHAT TO EXPECT: Be the villain. Sandbox generated world. Mixes strategy with management. Turn-based, side-on combat with many tactical options. Post-apocalyptic setting. Lots of raider and some base customisation. Large array of inventory. Item crafting. Artillery, siege engine and landsail craft. Slaves and cannibal options. Seed generated world maps. Alot of micro-management. Optional endgame scenarios or endless mode. Singleplayer only. Currently supported by dev.
– Real player with 63.2 hrs in game
Can I recommend this game? Boy, that’s a doozey. If the game was $60, hell no. At its current price? Totally.
Basics of the game is, you start off with pretty much nothing. You got some raiders with you and they are bottom of the barrel. Its ok though because the way you level up is by fighting. There are, I believe, respawning caravans with really low level mobs that at first is a little bit of a challenge but after some levels and better armor, maybe weapons too, you can pretty much take on the whole wasteland. Your raiders quickly receive a message saying that Wasteland’s Rangers are coming in 120 days. I’m not kidding, they are pretty much the Wasteland game franchises Rangers. For some reason, after playing w2 and just devastating all the raiders, my head-canon really enjoyed being that ONE GROUP that won lol.
– Real player with 24.8 hrs in game
Scrapping Simulator
This game is in early access so, you unlock all the available features quickly. As you may have guessed, this game is about disassembling eWaste for scrap materials. You can then sell the scrap directly or spend the time to melt them down to ingots for a bigger profit. Eventually, the world will be much more open and new features are coming.
I’ve logged a lot of extra hours figuring out many of the ins and outs of different processes. I enjoy the “grindy” aspects of this game and look forward to how they’ll adapt to user input.
– Real player with 35.1 hrs in game
game is really fun and easy to get into having a good time playing this game easy and chilled to play. loving all the new stuff and animations but game has some little bugs here and there but can see they are trying to fix them. but loving the game cant wait to see what else they do to the game.
– Real player with 30.3 hrs in game
Sorcerer King: Rivals
After finishing game on insane difficulty I finally feel ready to write a review. In short, I think Sorcerer King Rivals is an amazing game. One of the best games I have ever played in fact. Having said that, I doubt it will appeal to people looking for a deep strategy game. Because this game is not that deep and not particularly hard, except, maybe for a highest difficulty. Also, I think it is important to mention, that I barely played FE:LH and did not like it at all so if you are looking for a similar experience, you may not like SC:Rivals. SC:Rivals is more like Eador: Masters of a broken world. So, as always, keep your expectations in check) Now, let’s talk about what is good, not so good, and pretty bad in this game
– Real player with 87.0 hrs in game
A great game. It’s fairly small in scope for a 4x, but I think this has allowed the developers to focus on producing a polished product. Sorcerer King: Rivals has lots of scripted story and events, which makes it different to other 4x games which rely soley on the quality of the AI players to pose a challenge. As Sorcerer King relies on heavily scripted events, don’t expect great AI. On the plus side, Sorceror King tells a great story with writing that is often hilarious.
You will see reviews complaining about lack of replayability, but I think if you want 300hours out of the game you need to look at the Civilization series or Galactic Civilizations 3. I’ve played Sorceror King for a total 65 hours. I will agree however, that the strategic map AI is extremely passive. It generally does not initiate combat and will wait for you to attack it. This means its not really much of a threat and this does effect replayability.
– Real player with 65.1 hrs in game
Eormor: Shattered Lands
Instant Action!
Nice strategic thinking!
Play and continue whenever you want!
– Real player with 82.8 hrs in game
Fun, good gameplay. The AI is ruthless
– Real player with 24.2 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
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
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