Classic (really old) computer strategy games

My second ever computer was an Amiga500 (first was an Amstrad cpc6128). The Amstrad had no strategy games, but in the Amiga my first one was Centurion: Defender of Rome, which was quite groundbreaking for its time





Although you could only play as a Roman, the game had a decent map and many foreign powers. It also featured a real-time battle map where you could move your legions.

Another early strategy game i had for the Amiga was Powermonger. Unfortunately i could never quite figure out what was going on in that game, so mostly got slaughtered...



Civilization I was also a very notable game for the Amiga. (the following pic is of a mod, since no earth map existed in CivI for the Amiga)



One of my favorite Amiga strategy games was Utopia: The creation of a nation. It was my first city-building game, and had a very nice atmosphere (unearthly atmosphere anyway )



Other strategy games of note for that ancient period were North and South, Megalomania and Dune II (first real-time strategy game).



Feel free to mention your own favorite old strategy games Posting (small-average size) pics would be good too

Wow, that open post could have been written by myself. You have walked exactly the same gaming path as me, Kyriakos. Well, excepting my first computer was an Spectrum+ 48K and never played Utopia. I didnt figured out Powermonger completely either but it was fun to see all those tiny guys going around killing people, wasnt it?

Maybe we grew up in the same period. Amiga500 was a really popular computer back then, moreso for Games. My own was an Amiga500 with an extention of memory to 1024kb.

It did have some very cool games indeed.

Powermonger was strange, but looked cool. I mostly liked that when your people died they turned into floating souls (angels) as in the pic posted in the OP...

Playing this right now:

Genghis Khan II: Clan of the Gray Wolf



You could say it is of the same genre Centurion is, which they call grand strategy now after Paradox has stolen the title of pioneer (and the developers of Total War series also done it).

Genghis Khan II is an excellent game

I never played it at its own time, only found out about it many years later.

If you are interested in the actual first game that looked a lot like Europa Universalis, here it is:



It is called Medieval Lords. Another great game i found about years after its time. It is exactly as EU, only obviously with primitive graphics, and armies which are only numbers on the map. But you could choose (iirc) tens of different nations to play as (I think the map was not global though, it had all of Europe, much of Africa and up to central Asia, but i am not sure now)

And Thessalonike is almost its own province too Something the EU games still have not done

The original Age of Empires. One of my very first games, and it's closing in on 15 years old now:



I feel like every time one of these threads comes up I'm the first to mention Lords of the Realm II. One of the earliest memories of my childhood is watching my dad play this game. I played it too, but I was never any good at it until later on when I rediscovered it and learned just how ridiculously easy it was:

LOTR2 is (for a very short time) part of the Builder's Bundle at GOG incidentally - it, plus a bunch of other Sierra classics, for quite a good price. Think it ends in just a few hours though.

Lortr2 is an amazing game. I wouldn't have really considered it for really old games but I guess it is going on 17 years.

I can't remember what our first pc was. I think it was a 386 ibm or something, does that sound right? Around 1988. I do remember our first pentium pc in 1990 or there abouts. That was the first one I played civ on.

But I had a lot of obscure games. We would always find bargain bin games at office max and similar stores, bins full of titles no one's heard of. I had this one called fighting for rome. It was a real time game but you only played battles, you had to pick your army then you fought, but it had no instructions and I couldn't figure out how to make my ranged guys attack so I always lost.

I love LOTR2, but I don't like the combat in it. I don't like most RTS except maybe Age of Empires II so that might explain it.

Aleksey_aka_al said:

Playing this right now:

Genghis Khan II: Clan of the Gray Wolf

Spoiler :

You could say it is of the same genre Centurion is, which they call grand strategy now after Paradox has stolen the title of pioneer (and the developers of Total War series also done it).

Click to expand...

That looks a bit like the Koei games on the SNES--there was Liberty or Death about the American Revolution that had a similar-looking map:


I got my start on strategy games playing Civ1 (above), Civilization II:


... the original Master of Orion (still a huge favorite of mine, and yes I know Star Lords is a direct predecessor but stfu MoO is teh awesome):


You could design your own ships and fight turn-based space battles, loads of fun.

I also played Ed Grabowski's Blue and the Gray with my dad, which was a strategic turn-based civil war game with pause-able real-time combat:

Genghis Khan II is by KOEI too As is Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Kyriakos said:

Genghis Khan II is by KOEI too As is Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

Click to expand...

Didn't know that. I only played KOEI on the SNES, so I won't clutter up the computer games thread with too many of their screenshots. I played a lot of PTO I and PTO II, though.

Defender of the Crown


Supremacy

Link to video.
Nuclear War (Not very refined..)


I also played Civ 1, SimCity, Utopia and North&South on the Amiga 500. All very good games.

Lords of the realm 2 combat ai just sucked. They never protected archers and couldn't win any siege. Very easy combat to exploit. Otherwise the concepts of the rts battles were fine.

Nuclear War

I used to own that in the Amiga. It sucked really bad but at some point i was a bit hooked to it...

Nuclear War is a game that looks like tons of campy fun. Never played it as a kid, though.

That guy Jimy Farmer (is he supposed to be Jimy Carter?) resembles a lot Spanish ex-president Felipe González.

Buzz Aldrin's Race into Space:




It's basically a really early version of KSP, campaign mode only. You play as either the Americans or Soviets and race to gain prestige points by being the first to conduct various missions (orbital flights, docking, spacewalks, interplanetary probes, etc.). The first to complete a successful lunar landing and return wins the game. However, the game was brutal with random events, killing astronauts, and explosions. You just prayed the random event was flavor text since the good events were so rare. The only time my roommate actually won the game (I still never have) was with a Gemini capsule and light lander that were docked in orbit (and the lander was later abandoned in lunar orbit since he didn't have enough fuel to make it back with the lander).

It also had newscasts after each mission. The Russian lady would lie and cover up your disasters (three astronauts volunteered to build schools in Siberia today) while the faithful Carter Walcrite would tell the truth to the American people.

The first strategy game ever I've seen and played was the demo of this one:

Populous III: The Beginning



One of the belovest games to me still.

Then came the demo of Age of Empires: Rise of Rome. Both were on the same magazine's CD. The first game magazine I had. Since then, we play AoE with my father periodically, kinda a tradition as chess.

When playing AoE demo, since there was no multiplayer, we gave each other 5 mins of rule (ancient democracy ) practically fighting for the seat when one's time was running out. There were absurd moments such as when he sends the whole fleet to attack the enemy and his time runs out, so I take those ships while they are still on their way and send them back to the safety of the base's bay; when my time runs out he tries again with the fleet, and so on. That's when I first started to suspect that democracy doesn't work...

We play AoE II: Age of Kings multiplayer these days. Though, I believe the original Age of Empires with the Rise of Rome expansion is much better as a game. As for AoE III... it is not even worth it to be compared.

***

Found this one just a pair of weeks ago:

Crisis in The Kremlin



Never seen so much propaganda in a game before! Leave alone the texts and images there... it is intrinsic to the gameplay itself! No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try the Union collapses around 1991-1992 and immediately you get excellent socio-economic situation. I've even found an exploit with budget, still it doesn't help.

civvver said:

Lords of the realm 2 combat ai just sucked. They never protected archers and couldn't win any siege. Very easy combat to exploit. Otherwise the concepts of the rts battles were fine.

Click to expand...

Yeah this. Once you got your first stone castle with 150+ archers you were essentially unkillable. Follow it up with archer/pike spam and the game immediately became a matter of when not if you were going to win.