4X Games Thread. Expand Explore Exploit Exterminate.

[Dammit Mandrake!]

I still love making a gigantic naval

s-senpai~

 

[DNA_JACKED]

Ok a few games near and dear to my heart:

1) Sins of a Solar Empire. I had no idea when I first bought this how much I would enjoy it. The scale is fantastic and well-managed in game. Sure there is a lingering scent of not-made-by-a-AAA-studio but I really bought into the character of the factions and atmosphere of the game. Also flying a kilometres-long flying gun that obliterates entire fleets with the press of a button as weird Russian space-traders never gets old.

2) Rise of Nations. I spent hours on this one. Kinda like a real-time version of Civ with some Age of Empires thrown in there. The idea of fluid “battle lines” and how they impact warfare makes combat less of a Zerg rush and more of an ever-fluctuation zone of combat, like real warfare. Also stealth bombers are OP

3) Supreme Commander. Ok this is more an RTS, the spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. But the sheer scope and breadth of skirmish games in SC makes me lump this in with 4X games. Also, who DOESN’T want to march an army of hundred-foot-tall spider bots with giant supervillain microwave lasers on their backs across the ocean floor to emerge on the beachhead of the enemy, torching everything in their way? Oh and controlling literally the huge saucer motherships from Independence Day, complete with scary central-mounted death beams who, when shot down, obliterate anything under them as they come crashing down to earth.

I have thousands of hours on Sins over the years and different versions. To this day I kick myself; I bought it from wal mart, and the wal mart version came with a download code for a special site. Stardock did theming software for 7, MyColors, and there was a Sins theme that looked absolutely amazing.

Of course, I didnt back it up, and the download site is long gone. What I would give to find it again.

Supcom and Supcom:FA are legendary RTS/sudo 4x games. It's a real shame nothign as good has come along since, the engine is in desperate need of an upgrade for 64 bit and 8+ core systems.

And that makes perfect sense. Even at a higher resolution like 1080p it’s hard to make effective use of the minimap and the main display on a single monitor (yes I still play it to this day).

SupCom didn’t have the personality of Blizzard RTSs at the time, and it ran like a total pig on all but the beefiest systems, but holy god was it fun. I still love making a gigantic naval flotilla to patrol my starting island and then, once I have enough battleships, set sail for the enemy and batter them down with long range artillery in a way that they can’t even retaliate against.

Also when the UEF commander gets access to those tiny tactical nuclear missiles in its backpack and it can just sit underwater and fuck your shit up.

I see your spiderbots, and I raise you cybran tier II destroyers that can grow legs and walk on land like giant tanks. Nothing like a navy that is also an army, or suddenly showing up on your opponents doorstep with a pearl harbor sized navy that just....walks up to your base and starts sieging it. Like "oh nice shields, imma just walk through them"

Or the occasional funny, like since all rounds are calculated it is entirely possible, although mythically rare, for something like an artillery round to accidentally smack a bomber in the face and blow it up, or a ship shoot at an enemy, miss, and hit its ally right behind it. And yes, I've seen a gunship get blasted by a battleship main cannon by accident.

 

[Fwiffo]

I have thousands of hours on Sins over the years and different versions. To this day I kick myself; I bought it from wal mart, and the wal mart version came with a download code for a special site. Stardock did theming software for 7, MyColors, and there was a Sins theme that looked absolutely amazing.

Of course, I didnt back it up, and the download site is long gone. What I would give to find it again.

View attachment 3340694

Supcom and Supcom:FA are legendary RTS/sudo 4x games. It's a real shame nothign as good has come along since, the engine is in desperate need of an upgrade for 64 bit and 8+ core systems.



I see your spiderbots, and I raise you cybran tier II destroyers that can grow legs and walk on land like giant tanks. Nothing like a navy that is also an army, or suddenly showing up on your opponents doorstep with a pearl harbor sized navy that just....walks up to your base and starts sieging it. Like "oh nice shields, imma just walk through them"

Or the occasional funny, like since all rounds are calculated it is entirely possible, although mythically rare, for something like an artillery round to accidentally smack a bomber in the face and blow it up, or a ship shoot at an enemy, miss, and hit its ally right behind it. And yes, I've seen a gunship get blasted by a battleship main cannon by accident.

Man the cybrans had all sorts of kooky shit, I love it. Their mobile repeating artillery looked absolutely fucking ridiculous but melted armies. And their sick T4 gunship looked like an insane murder-tick thing.

One of my favourite hacks was bearing UEF and having a ton of mech marines inside the shield envelope of a T3 transport. Classic ghetto-gunship.

 

[DNA_JACKED]

Man the cybrans had all sorts of kooky shit, I love it. Their mobile repeating artillery looked absolutely fucking ridiculous but melted armies. And their sick T4 gunship looked like an insane murder-tick thing.

One of my favourite hacks was bearing UEF and having a ton of mech marines inside the shield envelope of a T3 transport. Classic ghetto-gunship.

My favorite tactic was setting up outposts consisting of a single shield generator, a repair station, a bunch of turrets and T2 artillery. The AI could never seem to figure out how to handle random hotspots just appearing where one was not before.

Follow that up with a swarm of T2 gunships that would get planted over an enemy base and wreak havok.

 

[Spunt]

Further investigation shows it's my GPU not my CPU that's overheating - poking around this seems to be a known issue with some older Nvidia chipsets and this game. Some poor fuckers have had their cards reach 90 degrees. Altering the graphics settings doesn't change much apparently, it's more a coding issue that's been known about for at least 2 years, so if they haven't fixed it in that time they're probably not going to fix it now.

I need to upgrade my GPU anyway. Ideally I need a new rig, but I can always get a new card for this one and build a new rig around it later.

Report for Old World, now I have a new GPU that doesn't melt.

Pluses:

- It has a lot of very innovative ideas. The "orders" mechanic (a limit on the number of actions you can do each turn) is a really good way to make you think about what you're doing - if you're having a big military adventure the running of your empire will suffer, and bigger armies move slower.
- There's a lot of depth and interconnected systems - it borrows a simplified character mechanic from the CK games. You get courtiers and relatives you can assign to different cities as governors, to units as generals or to Council positions and their stats give buffs or debuffs.
- You have to make genuine choices - there's not enough orders to do everything, not enough characters for every position, not enough suitable building sites for all the improvements (especially from mid-game). Many buildings consume one kind of resource to make another so you have to keep an eye on everything rather than just spam everything like in Civ.
- It looks pretty.
- It's not woke. There's no mysterious black people in ancient Greece, all the character portraits (which are beautifully made) look like a realistic summary of the ethnicity of the empire they belong to. By default it has cognatic succession but you can change that in the options.
- In fact the options menu is pretty good, and many of the issues of the default game (stingy turn limit, characters who drop dead way too quickly) can be changed. You can play with 2 turns per year instead of 1, which I much prefer.

Minuses:

- The AI fucking cheats. Even on the lowest difficulty level, it somehow spits out way more military units than you can, and tough ones too. If you pick a fight with another Civ, unless your cities and economy outmatch it by at least 4 to 1 you're probably going to lose, or win so hard you'll wish you hadn't. The optimum strategy is to concentrate on economy and diplomacy and avoid war at all costs (making Civs like Persia and Egypt, who specialise in that playstyle, much more viable than those with military bonuses like Rome or Assyria). The only wars you should start is after you have goaded the other Civs into fighting each other and you pick off the loser. This makes it horribly unbalanced.
- The combat system is based on Civ5's and it shows. Most units have a gimmick at least, but it still lacks depth. Like in Civ5, having only one unit per tile turns war into a logistical nightmare of shuffling your troops around so you can actually engage the enemy amidst a sea of units all over the map. At least the maps tend towards wide-open fights rather than chokepoints, but it still feels like a knife fight in a phone booth.
- Bad optimisation. Aside from the GPU issues (which is a Unity problem, I understand) the framerate tanks when there's a lot of improvements and units on the screen and the AI's turns get really laggy - in big games, get used to the sound of your CPU fan protesting at the calculation load.
- The interface, while pretty, is really unclear. Important things are hidden in illogical places. I had to google how to declare war on someone and I still can't find how to see all my trade routes.

Overall though I'm having fun. Though the balance problems mean it's probably not got loads of replay potential.

 

[IrishGuy088]

Anyone here play Stellaris? It is basically Europa Universalis in space with all the same stupid problems that Paradox games tend to have.

I just got fed up with this one campaign I am doing. Did a vassal state start and my benefactor had a succession crisis and fractured, freeing my species from their control. I was the military bulwark power (because I knew breakup was going to happen someday) and so the other three smaller powers quickly allied with the crippled former master while I had just finished building my mega shipyard. Cool! Great situation to be in. I start pumping out ships and placing them along the border colonies and bide my time for a little bit.

My claims on their territories were placed and I sent in some spies and then declared a conquest war on my former master. All three other powers fall in to defend them and I slowly start chipping away at all four of them. I literally ended up controlling every territory of all four powers. And when the war ended all of that shit I took magically goes back to the original owners (who I presumed were shot in the head and rotting in a ditch somewhere), I got the territory of the original person I declared war on and a bunch of other territory became unoccupied and able to be taken by anyone.

Why does this happen? The tooltip said "claim victory and take claims as well as conquered territory" and I only ended up getting my claims. I fucked those faggots up and had control over all of their territory, I'm not giving that shit back. And now I can't declare war on them while they are weak due to some truce. Fuck that. I won. Get in line.

 

[Cisna H. Scumale]

Anyone here play Stellaris? It is basically Europa Universalis in space with all the same stupid problems that Paradox games tend to have.

I just got fed up with this one campaign I am doing. Did a vassal state start and my benefactor had a succession crisis and fractured, freeing my species from their control. I was the military bulwark power (because I knew breakup was going to happen someday) and so the other three smaller powers quickly allied with the crippled former master while I had just finished building my mega shipyard. Cool! Great situation to be in. I start pumping out ships and placing them along the border colonies and bide my time for a little bit.

My claims on their territories were placed and I sent in some spies and then declared a conquest war on my former master. All three other powers fall in to defend them and I slowly start chipping away at all four of them. I literally ended up controlling every territory of all four powers. And when the war ended all of that shit I took magically goes back to the original owners (who I presumed were shot in the head and rotting in a ditch somewhere), I got the territory of the original person I declared war on and a bunch of other territory became unoccupied and able to be taken by anyone.

Why does this happen? The tooltip said "claim victory and take claims as well as conquered territory" and I only ended up getting my claims. I fucked those faggots up and had control over all of their territory, I'm not giving that shit back. And now I can't declare war on them while they are weak due to some truce. Fuck that. I won. Get in line.

You only gain systems that you made claims on these warring empires, as well as only just vassalize the empire you declare war against, not their allies that they have a defense pact with. Pretty irritating like that.

 

[IrishGuy088]

You only gain systems that you made claims on these warring empires, as well as only just vassalize the empire you declare war against, not their allies that they have a defense pact with. Pretty irritating like that.

Very irritating. My fleets that literally decimated their starships say otherwise.

One thing that Stellaris did do well is the megastructures thing. I really like those and wish there were a few more options. I also liked that goofy little nanite galaxy that appears mid/late game.

 

[Cisna H. Scumale]

Very irritating. My fleets that literally decimated their starships say otherwise.

One thing that Stellaris did do well is the megastructures thing. I really like those and wish there were a few more options. I also liked that goofy little nanite galaxy that appears mid/late game.

It's why I prefer tributary declaration rather than just claims when declaring war. I'll get the whole empire as a subject when I win without spending influence and decide whether to absorb them all or keep them around as my credits bitch.

 

[IrishGuy088]

It's why I prefer tributary declaration rather than just claims when declaring war. I'll get the whole empire as a subject when I win without spending influence and decide whether to absorb them all or keep them around as my credits bitch.

I think my next game is just going to involve a lot of assimilation and an equal amount of purging.

 

[Urbanmech]

So its been almost 1 year but has Humankind improved since launch? Like to the point its worth giving it a whirl.

 

[BlackDragoons]

Ever since I played Twilight Inscription I've been wanting to dig my teeth into some Space 4X games. Any suggestions besides Stellaris and MOO?

 

[Kane Lives]

Ever since I played Twilight Inscription I've been wanting to dig my teeth into some Space 4X games. Any suggestions besides Stellaris and MOO?

It's been a hot while since I touched any major 4Xs to be honest, but off the top of my head:
- Endless Space 2. Part of the Endless franchise; gorgeous aesthetics, slick UI and extremely unique races. Nothing much to say except if you want to try 4Xs, then this is the one to try first. Beware the braindead AI though, unfortunately.
- Sword of the Stars (the first). A cult classic, features a real-time battle system to complement the 4X layer. Play this if you like pseudo-3D space battles, very distinct races (each race FTL is different and unique), and sadomasochistic RNG that even influences the tech you get, and game-ending super-enemies that could visit you at any time.
- Galactic Civilization II or III is a staple. I lean slightly towards II as it is balanced better, and runs on potatoes, but III is okay if you wanted something more modern. Pretty generic, the enemy AI is above average for its genre so you can expect a challenge for the first few rounds.
- Honorable mention: Stars in Shadow. A small indie thing, which I am told is based off the first MOO. Good for a romp if you can pick it up on a discount, but wears out its welcome quickly as you quickly realise there isn't much to do.
- Autistic mention: Distant Worlds: Universe. Extremely micro-heavy and obtuse 4Xs. Has this unique thing where while you manage the military side of the empire, the civilian side of things are completely automated and not under your direct control. While I'm told it is very deep and engaging once you can get past the antiquated interface, I was filtered out by the sheer autism needed to play it.

 

[The Ghost of Kviv]

Ever since I played Twilight Inscription I've been wanting to dig my teeth into some Space 4X games. Any suggestions besides Stellaris and MOO?

If you like simulation games, you make like X3 Albion Prelude.

 

[Spunt]

- Galactic Civilization II or III is a staple. I lean slightly towards II as it is balanced better, and runs on potatoes, but III is okay if you wanted something more modern. Pretty generic, the enemy AI is above average for its genre so you can expect a challenge for the first few rounds.

I simp hard for GalCiv games. Whilst III is, objectively, a better game, I keep finding myself coming back to II. I'm sure II is dirt cheap now so definitely give it a go, if you like it, you might like III.

Ways GalCiv III is better than GalCiv II:

- More systems and much more depth
- In particular, the way building on planets is handled is much, much better, with adjacency bonuses, unique resources and all sorts of other things.
- Much more interesting resource system
- More aggressive AI (may or may not be positive, but the AI in II seemed to want you to start wars even when they had the advantage). They rush for territory and you don't get to turtle up the way you can in II
- Better balanced economy (even if III is less well-balanced overall)
- An end to II's starbase spam, building starbases is both harder and less rewarding
- Tougher and smarter AI in general

Ways GalCiv II is better than GalCiv III:

- Much clearer interface. III's interface emphasises aesthetics over clarity and it's so fucking DARK everywhere it's actually depressing.
- II has a goofy sense of humour (especially in the tech descriptions) whereas III is tediously po-faced.
- III has excessive amounts of poorly-balanced DLC, not all of which improves the game all that much (especially the last one which added a lot of diplomacy features that are just aggravating, don't bother with it)
- Greatly superior ship designer
- III doesn't improve on some of II's weaknesses (the ship combat is still non-interactive and you can't even give orders or set tactics, just throw your blob at their blob)
- In my experience II rewards experimental playstyles and builds more (except starbase spam, build all the starbases, always). The AI was competent enough that you could hand them your wackier custom races and they'd play them well (and sometimes use them to kick your teeth in, which can be embarrassing)
- It just feels more "fun" in a way I can't really describe. I think it feels more "indie" from when Stardock were a much smaller company without a big publisher, and feels like a passion project, whereas III is a product (albeit a good one) to consoom and buy DLC for.

 

[Slap47]

In French fashion the Endless Space 2 Devs have pissed off their entire modding community by regularly insulting them.

And now that spills over into their already struggling Personkind.

 

[Shining Wit]

Almost out of nowhere, Civ 6 is getting a new set of DLC, based around new leaders and variants on existing leaders, with no new Civs. They are:

Pack 1- Great Negotiators
Abe Lincoln - America
Mbande Nzinga - Congo
Sultan Saladin - Arabia

Pack 2- Great Commanders
Tokugawa - Japan
Nader Shah - Persia
Suleiman the Magnificent - Ottomans

Pack 3- Rulers of China
Yongle
Qin Shi Huang the Unifier
Wu Zetian

Pack 4- Rulers of the Sahara
Rameses - Egypt
Ptolemaic Cleopatra - Egypt
Sundiata Keita - Mali

Pack 5- Great Builders
Theodora - Byzantines
Sejong - Korea
Ludwig II - Germany

Pack 6- Rulers of England
Elizabeth I
Varangian Harald Hardrada - Norway
Victoria Age of Steam

Packs are due to drop from later this month through to March 2023. Surprisingly, if you've got the full set of DLC, this is coming for free.

Bit disappointing on a few of the selections just being safe picks from earlier games but im glad to see the alt leader system being utilized. Hopefully some of the leaders are cross-civ again, mainly Harald. As its free DLC none of them should be broken nightmares like Simon Bolivar either

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Get the first Master of Orion.

I've played it. Fairly good "soft SF" space 4X game, although I like the 2nd MoO better. Feels "more immersive" than the first MoO.

Speaking of "soft SF" space 4X, there is the even more unrealistic Ascendancy. The 3DCG graphics still look OK for being from 1995.

(And speaking of '90s games and 4X, Civ 1 and 2 are still good for 4X games too.)

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Damnit. Why did nobody tell me GoG finally got Emperor of the Fading Suns? I'd been waiting for them to get that game for a long time.

 

[Shining Wit]

Almost out of nowhere, Civ 6 is getting a new set of DLC, based around new leaders and variants on existing leaders, with no new Civs. They are:

Pack 1- Great Negotiators
Abe Lincoln - America
Mbande Nzinga - Congo
Sultan Saladin - Arabia

Pack 2- Great Commanders
Tokugawa - Japan
Nader Shah - Persia
Suleiman the Magnificent - Ottomans

Pack 3- Rulers of China
Yongle
Qin Shi Huang the Unifier
Wu Zetian

Pack 4- Rulers of the Sahara
Rameses - Egypt
Ptolemaic Cleopatra - Egypt
Sundiata Keita - Mali

Pack 5- Great Builders
Theodora - Byzantines
Sejong - Korea
Ludwig II - Germany

Pack 6- Rulers of England
Elizabeth I
Varangian Harald Hardrada - Norway
Victoria Age of Steam

Packs are due to drop from later this month through to March 2023. Surprisingly, if you've got the full set of DLC, this is coming for free.

Bit disappointing on a few of the selections just being safe picks from earlier games but im glad to see the alt leader system being utilized. Hopefully some of the leaders are cross-civ again, mainly Harald. As its free DLC none of them should be broken nightmares like Simon Bolivar either

And just because, they've announced Julius Caesar as another free DLC. Someone at Firaxis got visited by 3 ghosts, shame one didnt mention making good AI