Good 4x games to recommend

[Helton]

Yeah in MoM hero units (and normal units to some degree) earn experience points. Heroes can also be equipped with magical weapons, armor etc. The cool thing was that you actually could construct and name those artifacts yourself. Once you supplied your battle hardened hero with lovely crafted artifacts like "The Ultimate Asskicker of Doom" he could become pretty much unstoppable.

You guys may have made the first month or so of my summer vacation, here.

 

[mondblut]

That's another one of those that could've been good. Now it's just broken. The symbionts never leave their homeworld, the other alien race never ever gets a turn and the ai is moronic.

Can't agree here. I had a lot of space battles against symbiot fleets over Stigmata, as for Vau, I don't think they ever were supposed to be an active participant.

(although triggering a Vau invasion after a certain amount of maps sold, like the merchant rebellion is triggered when they get enough cash in their "warchest", would surely be nice. then again, they never were openly aggressive towards humanity in original FS setting, were they?).

As for ai, it is primitive but quite effective due to broken unit balance. It just spams basic artillery types on every farm in enormous quantities, and those are enough to stop any reasonable invasion of advanced units. At one long game I had Li Halan (enemy) army graph disappear beyong the right border of the screen. Also it reacts swiftly and deadly to any late-game landing attempts. So, trampling out an enemy house is only possible early in the game. Then again, this is a kind of a game which isn't supposed to be won through brutal massacre of every single enemy unit, but more through diplomacy. If you're lucky, you can raid the capitals of 1-2 nearby houses and steal their sceptors in 2-3 turns, then just forget about them.

Hyperion or Nova patches are mandatory, yes. Installation routine is fucked up too, and videos incompatible with modern cards. I wonder if they may be resampled with more modern smk editor?

 

[Jasede]

Yeah in MoM hero units (and normal units to some degree) earn experience points. Heroes can also be equipped with magical weapons, armor etc. The cool thing was that you actually could construct and name those artifacts yourself. Once you supplied your battle hardened hero with lovely crafted artifacts like "The Ultimate Asskicker of Doom" he could become pretty much unstoppable.

You guys may have made the first month or so of my summer vacation, here.

It gets better. You could, for example, create a town near an adamantium ore, thus producing, units with super-weapons. Then you can lovingly buff the fuck out of your units (like in Age of Wonders, the spiritual successor with MUCH less features (but a fun game regardless)), train them with your warlord-hero, and own the enemies, with, for example, hasted invisible blessed (ultra)-elite adamantium halfling-slingers made-undead via magic of doom.

Or flying, invisible warships. Oh boy I love this game.

I also love Lords of Magic and Age of Wonders; very much so, but they never had as many features or things to do or tactics as MoM had; they were pretty simplified I'd say. Oh, and if you own LoM, can you upload the "order" town background music for me? I miss it.

 

[The Dude]

You really should try Dominions 3 Jasede. As far as features and stuff to do, it's like MoM on acid. Knowing you, you might not get over the slightly annoying UI though.

 

[Seboss]

Yup. It's amazingly deep and has a pretty good community. You should give it a shot.

 

[Helton]

I also love Lords of Magic and Age of Wonders; very much so, but they never had as many features or things to do or tactics as MoM had; they were pretty simplified I'd say. Oh, and if you own LoM, can you upload the "order" town background music for me? I miss it.

I guess I'll try when I get home. I'm pretty iliserate when it comes to "uploading" anything but shit on photobucket.

As a fortunately unrelated individual note (nice dream ah?):

<a href="http://www.subgamers.com/forums/strategy/44548-few-questions-regarding-masters-of-magic.html">Best thread evar.</a>

edit: Dominions 3 is a great game to learn. Really fun going through the manual and trying to make a nation strategy that seems flawless. But then:

Maybe I'm just an idiot, but having so little control over how a battle progresses really blows. For normal units, sure it's easy. But for mages? Which, I gather, are the focal point of advanced play. Too many wasted gems! Is there a way to make them just stop casting? Say I want him to cast a battle-wide precision buff every battle so my dwarves can hurl stones like good lil' archers? After he casts that, he'll just decide to cast uber-wind-of-death and use up all his gems.

Or I'm prepping for an important battle, so I tell him to cast uber-wind-of-death and then get hit by a random scout and have wasted the spell. It sucks.

So I say screw gems and big spells like that and play Mictlan with bless strategy. But that's only fun for so long.

Still, not to deter you from the game, I played it for tens of hours before I hit the point where this started to bug me. Definitely worth the $50 or $60.

 

[Gold]

Alpha Centauri, and MoO(1/2)

 

[Suicidal]

Does MoM have a campaign?

 

[Troll]

Does MoM have a campaign?

no but it has one hell of a random map generator

 

[JarlFrank]

Downloading Master of Magic now, put Alpha Centauri into my torrent list [I doubt I can find it anywhere that is not ebay to buy] and going to try those two then. Thanks.

Oh, and Sword of the Stars sounds good too. Gotta give it a try too.

 

[Jasede]

Don't forget to also download the latest patch for it from patchesscrolls.de

 

[The Vanished One]

I also love Lords of Magic and Age of Wonders

Which Age of Wonders is the best? According to Gamespot, AoWII is more complex and more difficult than AoW and AoW: Shadow Magic is more balanced than AoWII.

 

[Jasede]

I never played Age of Wonders 1.

Think of Shadow Magic as a stand-alone expansion pack to Age of Wonders 2 with more stuff to do, but with everything being harder and what balance issues AoW 2 had fixed. If you want a challenge, I recommend playing the AoW2 campaing as practice, then Shadow Magic - it'll be plenty difficult.

Shadow Magic, being the "expansion" is also even more complex than AoW 2. AoW 1 must be the easy and more balanced one you mean, but I never played it.

That said, they're all less complex than Master of Magic.

 

[Nedrah]

Still no modded/Patched MOO3 experiences, huh? Nobody ever gave it a shot because of the games crappy rep, I take it.

 

[Fez]

Jasede is right about MoM being a gem and an unusual one at that. Have you given Dominions 3 a try yet, Jasede?

 

[Jasede]

I haven't seen it sold yet, Fez. I've been looking in the stores though. I'll just keep looking. I think I can get it on Ebay. It looks really good; I'll likely be disappointed though, since I tend to hold the standards of old games to new games, and MoM and MoO 1/2 raise the bar very high indeed.

But it seems very promising, from the Wikipedia entry.

edit: We are all huge faggots!

We've been talking about great 4X games, and we haven't mentioned Alpha Centauri at least ten times by now? I feel so stupid now. I -love- MoO 2 and MoM, but if any game comes close, it's Alpha Centauri. I prefer it to ALL Civilization games.

 

[Trash]

I second jasede's opinions on AOW 2 and it's sequel/expansion Shadow Magic. However I played the original AOW. It's a rougher version of AOW2, but somehow it has more charm to me. There is a pretty standard fantasy story. However you can play both a good and evil campaign, and both have different ways to play through them. The gameplay is almost the same though.

Personally I prefer to play through them in the way they came out.

 

[mondblut]

Still no modded/Patched MOO3 experiences, huh? Nobody ever gave it a shot because of the games crappy rep, I take it.

Its micromanagement is deliberately fucked up to make user concentrate on macro issues, which mostly involves hitting "end turn" and twiddling thumbs. Either that, or struggle with 1000s of spreadshits (sic!) which demand finetuning EVERY turn. And a crappy combat to boot.

It is tolerable as a lunch break game - launch it, run a turn or two, then abandon for half a year, then resume as if nothing happened. But playing it for hours daily is an ultimate waste of time.

 

[Fez]

I haven't seen it sold yet, Fez. I've been looking in the stores though. I'll just keep looking. I think I can get it on Ebay. It looks really good; I'll likely be disappointed though, since I tend to hold the standards of old games to new games, and MoM and MoO 1/2 raise the bar very high indeed.

But it seems very promising, from the Wikipedia entry

If you are going to get it online, you can buy it here and get a demo here to try before you buy. Keep in mind that the demo is limited and I don't think it is as up to date as the game proper. They have great support and updates for the game. Try the demo first to get a feel for it.

We've been talking about great 4X games, and we haven't mentioned Alpha Centauri at least ten times by now? I feel so stupid now. I -love- MoO 2 and MoM, but if any game comes close, it's Alpha Centauri. I prefer it to ALL Civilization games.

AC is still my favorite out of the Civ type games. I play it and the expansion every now and then.

 

[Jeff Graw]

Still no modded/Patched MOO3 experiences, huh? Nobody ever gave it a shot because of the games crappy rep, I take it.

Its micromanagement is deliberately fucked up to make user concentrate on macro issues, which mostly involves hitting "end turn" and twiddling thumbs. Either that, or struggle with 1000s of spreadshits (sic!) which demand finetuning EVERY turn. And a crappy combat to boot.

It is tolerable as a lunch break game - launch it, run a turn or two, then abandon for half a year, then resume as if nothing happened. But playing it for hours daily is an ultimate waste of time.

Yup, MoO3 is a good example of why "macromanagement" is a stupid idea. Hitting "next turn" as your empire controls itself is even less fun than it sounds. So many people say micromanagement is bad, or too much micromanagement is bad, and use that to argue for "macromanagement", but that opinion is based on misconceptions. For some reason people think that the time they spend on a task is directly proportional to the amount of micromanagement the task requires and that leads to people mistaking a bad interface for micromanagement. Take MoO 1 and 2. Most people think that MoO 2 has more micromanagement than MoO 1, but that's just not the case. The planetary and research screens in particular are less complex and less useful in the sequel, but because the interface in MoO 2 is so fucked up (going through a solar system screen, a main planetary screen, *and* a secondary planetary screen just to get to ship design anyone?) it takes people more time to complete simpler tasks and they mistake the shitty interface for micromanagement (which the MoO 2 fanboy defense force will sometimes call "depth").

 

[dragonfk]

Still no modded/Patched MOO3 experiences, huh? Nobody ever gave it a shot because of the games crappy rep, I take it.

Its micromanagement is deliberately fucked up to make user concentrate on macro issues, which mostly involves hitting "end turn" and twiddling thumbs. Either that, or struggle with 1000s of spreadshits (sic!) which demand finetuning EVERY turn. And a crappy combat to boot.

It is tolerable as a lunch break game - launch it, run a turn or two, then abandon for half a year, then resume as if nothing happened. But playing it for hours daily is an ultimate waste of time.

I presume your comment comes from vanilla game with the latest patch?

 

[Helton]

I guess I should mention Stars!

I grew up watching my old man play it, so I never actually had a learning curve to go through. Don't know if it's easy to get into but if you do, it's awesome. The race customization is off the chain and, for me at least, the primitive graphics invoke the imagination. Really good ship customization as well. Lots of strength/weakness stuff to consider without becoming annoyingly like rock-paper-scissors.

Gameplay is great but starts to take a long ass time per turn if you play on huge galaxies and are managing hundreds of fleets and dozens of build cues. That's how I always play because I don't mind not finishing games, but there are, of course, smaller galaxy sizes.

And I say all that when you probably have no chance in hell of getting the game. Which is a shame.

 

[larpingdude14]

lol
here is the full cd version of stars:
http://files.filefront.com/STARSrar/;77 ... einfo.html

 

[Thalkirst]

MoM is definitely a great game, but it has some balance issues - seriously overpowered units, like Halfling Slingers and Human Paladins, and there are some exploits as well

Still a very solid gameplay and very fun overall. It has a certain X quality, which makes it fun to play. I think it has one of the best designs I have ever seen in a 4x game.

For Civ 4, the VISA Expansion Pack gives me the same feel. It is for Warlords only.

It has a ridiculous amount of extra content and the game can easily go over the top with HUGE armies and sometimes excessive micromanagement is needed due to the greatly adjusted civics and the game is made very complex.

But it is really fun to play a VISA-modded Civ 4 game - especially with the PerfectWorld script, which creates a realistic planet with realistic placement of resources. This will keep the AI from becoming too powerful and prevents the overabundance of super cities.

 

[JoKa]

This thread seems like the right one to do some advertising for Alpha Centauri-Multiplayer via Hamachi...it takes a hell of a lot time and isn't that easy to set up, bit it's well worth it. Take a look at my sig and send me a pm if you're interested (Timezones will be discussed later...). I'm not online with Hamachi too often so just dropping by there won't do the trick.
Let's Play some SMAC and conquer Planet!