Aggressors: Ancient Rome
This review is actually a Thank you letter to the developer for making this game.
For unbiased reviews skip this one.
I think it was 25 years ago that most of my school holiday time was used to do what I really like. Gaming. But I did not had my first PC yet, so gaming was spending one day in the city to collect all kind of painting materials and paperboards to create the ultimate game myself.
The Civilization boardgame, HeroQuest boardgame and some rare tabletop games I owned served as an example. But mine had a bigger boards, more options, more counters and features, more of everything actually.
– Real player with 562.4 hrs in game
Read More: Best Historical Grand Strategy Games.
Aggressors - Ancient Rome
This obscure historical game is turn based strategy / tactics to dominate the world starting in 280 BC by default, but adustable from 1000 BC to 500 AD. It is single player and is my personal choice for game of the year. I have played it for over 480 hours in the past 60 days. It is published by Slitherine and available through them, on Steam and GOG.
Where I am coming from
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I am the curator of Strategic Win https://store.steampowered.com/curator/9074928/ and have reviewed 142 games there in the past 2 years. I bought this game from Matrix games.
– Real player with 521.5 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
Read More: Best Historical Grand Strategy Games.
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
HUMANKIND™
Loosing progress at the Dia de los Muertos Event??
I build a city with more than 300 population for nothing?
You are Not worth of my time and my money anymore!!
Mark my words. Look at the playtime at writing this review (213hours) … not a minute more, not a cent more for the many future DLCs.
DLCs that are necessary (but not paid once), as clearly the game is MISSING stuff to be enjoyed, to be recommended.
There are still games out there, You buy at release day, You play, You enjoy …. And You don’t feel fooled. Humankind is NOT one of them.
– Real player with 213.0 hrs in game
Read More: Best Historical Multiplayer Games.
This is now my favorite Civ-like 4x game.
9/10
Cons:
-Its tutorialization GUI and tooltips leave something to be desired. For example, the fact that Fog environment (tile modifier) on the ocean stops line of sight units from being able to fire through. Some things you have to just learn on your own. I wish they could update this for as much as possible.
-This might just be a flavor thing, but the way the game is set up, you can transition to entirely different cultures as you enter a new era. You can go from Assyrian to Swedish within a campaign, without ever having dominated or assimilated any different culture-groups. Sometimes, I wish this had been handled differently, like you could only transition into culture-groups you had somehow been culturally involved with by neighbors or assimilation/domination. But gameplay wise it is still very fun as it is. Just hampers the immersion slightly.
– Real player with 155.4 hrs in 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
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Focus on strategy over tactics, we’ve stripped the busywork out of 4X gameplay.
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Combat abstracted via innovative Power system so you need only move armies and fleets.
HISTORICAL MAPS
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8 handmade maps charting Bronze Ages around the world, empires in real-world locations.
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Empires are tagged from ‘Easy’ to ‘Very Hard’ to reflect their unique challenges.
COMPETITIVE AI
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Data-driven AI system, flexible enough to succeed in any environment.
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Streamlined ruleset is inherently AI-friendly so no ‘AI cheating’ required.
MULTIPLAYER
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Players take their turns simultaneously so there’s no waiting around.
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Choose to play ‘live’ (short turn timers) or ‘asynchronous’ (long game timers).
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
This is my favorite game since it came out, and my favorite version of Civ (I know Civ 1 through 5)
I won’t go into what Civ is specifically about. You should know.
Nor will I compare to other Civ games. It has been done.
This versions' depth is impressive, and the playability is… at least a few lifetimes.
Graphics are normal, but totally irrelevant!
The 4X strategy design and many (but not too many) balanced options make it something that will always be enjoyable.
Spock will still read your Scientific discoveries out loud! :P
– Real player with 1974.8 hrs in game
I’ll start by saying that this is not a game for casuals, if you want to have a game that is incredibly compelling and complex and rewarding to learn, this is your game. While Civ 3 remains a complete mystery to me, I can say I have played all the others, and this one is by far the best I’ve played. You might say “what about Civ 5?”, but I highly prefer it to Civ 5 for several reasons (unit stacking Figure out how to use collateral damage people, tech/espionage/culture slider, much more micromanagable empire, better system for unit and city maintenance, far superior espionage system, more interesting promotion dynamics with military units, unrestricted leaders, non gimmicky leader traits, non gimmicky religions, far superior map options, way less annoying barbarians, way less buggy multiplayer, etc etc etc…)
– Real player with 1765.2 hrs in game
Civilization IV®: Warlords
I’ve enjoyed this episode the most, usually playing the Terra map in order to be able to expand first into an unclaimed territory.
The ability to modify the game text by editing XML has been fun – part of the enjoyment in both Civ II and Civ IV for me has been editing the resources.
On my platform (Win 7/2.8GHz HP home PC/8 MB RAM), the UI alternates between snappy and very slow. After a while (presumably a memory garbage collection) it gets fast again. Using some of the shortcuts like right-click to move makes the slow-down bearable.
– Real player with 5678.9 hrs in game
This version has a good balance of factors. The economy enables everything of course, but you can take territory with guns or culture, and any of the victory methods is achievable.
Mostly I win either by dominance, or by culture, or by winning the space race. Econ victory is a grind but I have never tried to optimise it.
Funny thing: I took out the French with culture once. I just squeezed them right off the edge of the continent. Never fired a bullet at them. Even their capital revolted and joined my civilization.
– Real player with 2885.1 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
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
Nikhil Murthy’s Syphilisation
I like the use of a strategy game as a complex social metaphor that this presents. Even though I couldn’t complete any game of it due to crashes, trying to fathom the mind of the author was worth the price of admission.
– Real player with 0.8 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
Jon Shafer’s At the Gates
So I really, really tried to like this game. I had read a few mixed reviews and the game has been more or less available to the public for over a year as of the time of this writing; however, I decided to give it a real attempt.
What’s good?? What I thought would be interesting game play is actually just that…interesting (in a good way). In CIV, you essentially move pops around to hexes and they work the fields. Drag/drop mindless bore and I stopped playing CIV 2 versions ago because the franchise is too shallow in that way. In AtG the Discipline/Profession mechanic adds a layer of complexity to something that is very glossed over in CIV…how to prop up an economy and a balanced society. This part of the game is very fun, and challenging and requires some thought and chess play of your opening and mid game moves.
– Real player with 61.7 hrs in game
This is a game that should really have two reviews.
Version 1.0 as released last week is one thing - it’s solidly OK for a couple of playthroughs. The potential of the game overall is much greater, and something refreshingly different in the genre.
Nomadic Start - The game opens with you playing as a group of nomads, scouring your environs for the resources you need to survive and begin building a civilization. Resources not at your starting location? Barbarians plaguing you? Too close to another tribe’s settlement area? Move it! This is pretty cool and doesn’t set you back the way it would in other 4Xs. While you’re in this phase, your population will actually consume the resources on the land, eventually permanently exhausting the deposit.
– Real player with 38.1 hrs in game