Game with strategic complexity

[Fifty]

My every-6-months itch to play video games is rearing its ugly head.

Whats a good, available (i.e. easily found on amazon or somesuch), not-graphically-intensive, and strategically complex game?

Note that tedious micromanagement is not strategic complexity.

For instance, civ3 is not strategically complex, its really just a game about how much tedious micromanagement one can endure before one gets lazy.

Explain your choice please.

 

[philippe]

sudden strike. It's a rather strategic game which doesn't has any spamming for economy but it all accounts on how you will use your men and how smart your tactics are and how they bounce back at you.

 

[Maniacal]

Stratego?

Hearts of Iron II?

 

[GoodGame]

RTS or Turn-based?

Ever looked at Empire Earth 2? Not really graphically intensive by today's standards. Has strategic choices in terms of which techs to research. Typical RTS strategy on economic efficiency issues---dealing with limited population, proximity to resources, which buildings to build. Diplomacy with multiple options, like Civ4. Combat is strategic, but much simpler than Civ4's combat. If you don't like RTS though, I suspect you'd lump it under tedious micromanagement, though there are some improvements in worker management over most of the Age of Empires style RTS games.

 

[Fifty]

turn-based, not RTS. I play aoe2 for RTS, as it has tons of strategic complexity with very little micro.

 

[GoodGame]

In turn-based, I'd say Gal Civ2 patched to 2.0. It's basically civ in space in the MOO2 mode but with spaceships and auto-combat (no civ4 type combat).

 

[Hitti-Litti]

Paradox Interactive games, like EU2, are practically turn-based, you can slow the time to really, really slow if you want, and it's really hard to play without pausing the game from time to time if one uses higher speeds.

 

[RedRalph]

Yes, true. i recommend EU3 and Victoria.

 

[Fifty]

RRW: What about EU2? I have that but I haven't taken the time to learn it. How would you describe the strategic elements?

 

[Olav]

If you have EU2, I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Instead of describing the strategic elements myself, check out this great AAR. It was this story that got me hooked on EU2...

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=130751

 

[GoodGame]

I strongly dis-recommend Victoria. The AAR's are fun to read, but the managment of popup-windows is worse than Civ3 tile management.

 

[Luckymoose]

Dwarf Fortress

 

[RedRalph]

RRW: What about EU2? I have that but I haven't taken the time to learn it. How would you describe the strategic elements?

I only have EU3, its very deep. Royal marriages, vassals, diplo annexations, complex alliance systems (since 3.13), naitonal policy sliders, complex colonisation, restricting manpower limits, etc etc. Research is fairly abstract but still adds another layer to the game. well worth getting.

 

[ArneHD]

Hearts of Iron II is comparatively simple, but the tutorial does omit a lot of details such as: That you have to move your transports out of harbour to get divisions into them, that ctrl and shift increase slider movement, that you can only launch paratroopers in certain kinds of weather, and that transport planes have to have full organization, just to name a few.