Where are ciV competitors?
- Thread starter Ermak-
- Start date
ImperialGuard
Prince
I tried out a demo version of an earlier version of the game (2010?), it's not like Civ (sadly).
would recommend getting the demo before paying for it, in case you don't like it
blind biker
King
- Joined
- Jun 27, 2009
- Messages
- 609
I tried playing SC 2020, and I feel utterly stupid at it. I will admit, I thought I was an idiot or a contard - I just wasn't able to lift the economy one inch, or develop my country in any way whatsoever.
Anthropoid
Grognard fantome
That sounds like a fun game.
Doctor Phibes
Prince
Fits my personality type too. I'd also expand on the history simulation thing you mentioned - even if you're 'losing' (whatever that means in a game with no properly defined winning conditions), there is still history going on, and in an alternate timeline to our own, so there's a big spectator element.
I've already marvelled at not just the impending Portuguese United States, but the unlikely annexation of Corsica and the French Riviera by the Ottoman Empire - but nothing else west of the Adriatic. Which everyone else in the western Med left unchallenged for 50 years. Brilliant - if you're into alternate history (which I am), you could have fun making up a narrative to explain that. And I loved it how Cleves (entirely landlocked unimportant little Flemish state) ended up owning all of Iceland, bought it from Norway I think. Mad. I love it. Wish it had airships, though.
Yep, exactly that for me too, and it was my very first EU3 game. And I thought I was doing so well creating Great Britain in the 15th century too, but that was a lesson best learnt early.
Hoping my Httt download comes through soon. Think I'll be playing this game for a long while.
ObCiv5: Will definitely be giving the poor old thing a quick play after any new patch out of technical interest at the very least. Apart from that, I'm elsewhere.
EU3 has some of the best AARs. The game lends itself to that sort of thing.
Oh and I highly recommend HTTT and the newest expansion Divine Wind.
Doctor Phibes
Prince
EU3 has some of the best AARs. The game lends itself to that sort of thing.
Oh and I highly recommend HTTT and the newest expansion Divine Wind.
Just got HTTT tonight Thormodr, only skimmed thru the manual. Have to play at least 1 game of that before getting DW.
But much thanks to you especially for bigging Paradox's stuff up. I'm a convert, will be passing the creed on to others. (Mind you, you may have used up a few missionaries there...)
Lol. Good stuff.
There are many excellent game suggestions on this thread and I have only played a small part. I guess if I am using missionaries though, that means I am narrowminded. Lol.
Religion is a very cool aspect of EU3. Papal Controller, Holy Wars, Excommunication, tolerance levels, etc. Pretty in depth.
Anyway, I am going to check out a game called Distant Worlds. It is getting good reviews from people. Professional reviews I am not so sure of but I've learned to ignore them now.
http://www.matrixgames.com/products/379/details/Distant.Worlds
I am intrigued.
Doctor Phibes
Prince
Lol. Good stuff.
There are many excellent game suggestions on this thread. I have only played a small part. I guess if I am using missionaries, that means I am narrowminded. Lol.
Religion is a very cool aspect of EU3. Papal Controller, Holy Wars, Excommunication, tolerance levels, etc. Pretty in depth.
Anyway, I am going to check out a game called Distant Worlds. It is getting good reviews from people. Professional reviews I am not so sure of but I've learned to ignore them now.
http://www.matrixgames.com/products/379/details/Distant.Worlds
I am intrigued.
Me too. And I'd be interested in your opinion of Distant Worlds. But I don't want to go there right now, I've read various reviews and it sounds like I'd lose too much of my life to it.
You know we are (righteously I think) knocking Civ5 for its lack of immersion. But OTOH too much immersion can lead to drowning...
Of course. Like most things in life, there's always a fine line.
Anyway, if Distant Worlds has a demo, I'm going to try it out.
EDIT: Alas, no demo.
Otherwise, I'll follow their forums for awhile.
You might be right though. I don't have the spare time either if I get hooked on the game.
ezwip
Prince
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2006
- Messages
- 389
There are many different style of play to the game. I think it has very high replayability. It has completely replaced my Civilization addiction. I only wish it had more fighting.
I've heard good things about the game. It's very nice to hear about the re playability aspect as it was something I was concerned about. Thanks.
ezwip
Prince
- Joined
- Oct 4, 2006
- Messages
- 389
You have to keep different factions satisfied or they will form guerrilla groups and start blowing up buildings. Eventually they'll come after you. Then you have the whole economy to look after. You've got to make the US and USSR happy. Housing, tourists, factories, entertainment, etc. You can be cruel and set up prisons with guard towers all around it. Kill anyone. Put hits on them, label them nutballs, arrange accidents, bribe them. You have to figure out the best way to set up farms, communities, roads, and how to tie it all together with trees and statues to be appealing to all. It's a beautiful game. Simply amazing how smooth it runs. There is a way to splice your music into the game. So when the guerrilla or someone makes an announcement it lowers your radio and they begin talking. This really needs to happen with Civ 5 to increase replayability. When you can listen to your jams it just makes it better. I splice Bob Marley and Appetite for Destruction, some Babu Yetu, ton of crap into it and sit there drinking a beer. The USA will pay you 10k to blow up a nuclear bomb next to you and radiates the whole island for a few years.
Doctor Phibes
Prince
Oh, I like the idea of that, sounds wicked. Think I'll schedule it for March or April tho...
j51
Blue Star Cadet
What of anything that's both turn-based and historically oriented?
Anthropoid
Grognard fantome
I loved EU3 HTT and played the heck out of it for about 6 months after I got it. It is fun to "rewrite history" according to a reasonable and fairly constraining set of abstractions in a game; as opposed to creating a "empire" in a fantasy world. My favorite game was where I managed to create this southwestern Med Empire with Castille that included all of southern France provinces, all of northern Italy, and of course all of Iberia.
My only gripe with the game engine is the size of the militaries once you are a century or two into the flow. I don't know if this is representative, but I had stacks of ~100K troops in virtually everyone of my border provinces. Probably somewhere close to a million troops in total. It would be a complex design problem to get the game to represent with more reasonable force levels though.
My only gripe with the game engine is the size of the militaries once you are a century or two into the flow. I don't know if this is representative, but I had stacks of ~100K troops in virtually everyone of my border provinces. Probably somewhere close to a million troops in total. It would be a complex design problem to get the game to represent with more reasonable force levels though.
Ha! That's great. I love those kinds of odd little games. I've still only managed to get as far as JUST starting to colonize the New World and the protestant reformation (boy was THAT a pain...can't you people all just live and let live?! Why all the rebellions?!), but when the Portuguese got Delaware, I was pretty irritated. I ended up getting into a VERY costly war with them. Bad idea, considering the empire they'd built up along the coast of Africa. I probably should've tried getting them to duke it out with the Spanish somehow.
Actually, that raises two small complaints about the game. I wish diplomacy was a bit more nuanced, to allow you to, for example, spark off wars between two other nations while keeping your hands clean. Although maybe that's more of a 20th century approach.
The other complaint is that I wish there were more ways to directly affect economies. For example, while you can blockade ports (after learning enough about naval tech), I haven't seen a mechanism to allow you to do things like raid trade routes. I want to send out my privateers to take Portuguese treasure fleets, dammit! If that was an option, I'd have built up my fleet more to challenge them. Navies seem somewhat important, but not as essential as I'd like. At least in the early game. Maybe they improve later in the game.
Definitely. I did the same thing. Formed Great Britain very early on (thanks to trouncing the Scots and Irish early). Then I was minting money like crazy, and had HUGE armies. Managed to take over pretty much all of France, which was great....right up until I realized that I was about three tech levels behind everyone else and had essentially no way to catch up due to insane levels of inflation. So, yeah, France was defeated, but I'd crippled myself for the rest of the game. I gave up on that one and learned to play a far more conservative game.
I'll probably try future patches, but I really don't see how they can fix what I see as the core problems for the game.
See above: EU3. Seriously. Actually, there's a whole series of games from Paradox, including the Rome games, EU3, and the Victoria games. I THINK you can port your saved games from one era to the next, but I'm not 100% sure about it. So, conceivably, you could start a game in Rome, port it to EU3 and play through, then play the Victorian age in Victoria.
EU3 goes from 1399 (with the coronation of Edward IV of England) up through
Like I said, I've only managed to get to about the mid 1500s right as you're starting to really colonize the New World. I've only played as England so far, though, so the issue of 100,000-man armies sounds like a lovely little dream to me.
England's provinces aren't so great for manpower, and unless you grab France -- which is difficult and costly in and of itself -- you can have a hard time expanding that. Or at least I have.I suppose other nations like France or Spain (well, France/Burgundy, and Castille/Aragon, more precisely) do better in this regard. Certainly the bastard French never seem to run out of troops when I'm invading...
j51
Blue Star Cadet
I played EU2 a lot, but couldn't get into Rome. EU3 looked exactly the same as 2 though. Anyway, I was asking about Turn Based Strategy not real time. Specifically. Are there any other historical 4X tbs games?
I don't know of any 4X ones, no. That's not to say they don't exist, I just don't know about 'em. I'd love to find out if they do exist, though!
EU3 is real time, but you can slow it to a virtual crawl so that it's easily manageable the same way a turn-based game is. Plus, you can pause it, issue orders, etc. So, I suppose that the more accurate description is that it doesn't have distinctive "turns" because each side is "moving" at the same time, but you can make the game move incredibly slowly. The game models each individual day in each individual year, and pretty much any activity usually takes at least 3 days to accomplish, and most of the time takes a lot more than that. You can make each day take something like 10 seconds, or even pause the game entirely to issue orders. That said, if you want absolute TURNS, then yeah, EU3 ain't your game.
I never played EU2, so I can't really say how close to it EU3 is. I will say that each successive expansion of EU3 has made the game more interesting by adding new features and layers to the game.
For example, in all versions prior to Divine Wind, when you declared war on an enemy, the game automatically requested your allies to join you in the war. However, the game DIDN'T always automatically request that YOU join an ALLY when THEY went to war. The problem was that, if you declared and the ally said "No thanks", your relationship with them takes a major hit. Plus, saying "No thanks," (1) terminates ALL agreements (royal marriages, trade agreements, and I think even military access agreements), and (2) gives you a casus belli against them for breaking the truce. Plus, if the AI said YES, then sometimes, even as the "junior" partner in a war, they could end up nabbing provinces that you were trying to conquer. In several early games as the English, I'd have Portuguese allies landing troops in the Scottish highlands -- lands that I wanted for MYSELF -- which they'd then capture for themselves. So, now I've got to deal with subduing the Scots AND at some point kicking the Portuguese out. Thanks guys. Next time, just stay home and send us a bottle of port, ok?
Divine Wind changed that so that now you can specifically request that an ally join you in a war. Meaning that you won't take the negative hit to relations/agreements if they say "no", and you won't have to deal with them nabbing lands you want if they say "yes."
I still haven't picked up Divine Wind, but I plan to.
Oh, side note: I found out that there is apparently a "Freeware" version of Master of Orion in development, called "FreeOrion." It doesn't use any code or, I believe, graphics from the previous games, but it uses the same design concepts as, I think, MOO2.
EU3 is real time, but you can slow it to a virtual crawl so that it's easily manageable the same way a turn-based game is. Plus, you can pause it, issue orders, etc. So, I suppose that the more accurate description is that it doesn't have distinctive "turns" because each side is "moving" at the same time, but you can make the game move incredibly slowly. The game models each individual day in each individual year, and pretty much any activity usually takes at least 3 days to accomplish, and most of the time takes a lot more than that. You can make each day take something like 10 seconds, or even pause the game entirely to issue orders. That said, if you want absolute TURNS, then yeah, EU3 ain't your game.
I never played EU2, so I can't really say how close to it EU3 is. I will say that each successive expansion of EU3 has made the game more interesting by adding new features and layers to the game.
For example, in all versions prior to Divine Wind, when you declared war on an enemy, the game automatically requested your allies to join you in the war. However, the game DIDN'T always automatically request that YOU join an ALLY when THEY went to war. The problem was that, if you declared and the ally said "No thanks", your relationship with them takes a major hit. Plus, saying "No thanks," (1) terminates ALL agreements (royal marriages, trade agreements, and I think even military access agreements), and (2) gives you a casus belli against them for breaking the truce. Plus, if the AI said YES, then sometimes, even as the "junior" partner in a war, they could end up nabbing provinces that you were trying to conquer. In several early games as the English, I'd have Portuguese allies landing troops in the Scottish highlands -- lands that I wanted for MYSELF -- which they'd then capture for themselves. So, now I've got to deal with subduing the Scots AND at some point kicking the Portuguese out. Thanks guys. Next time, just stay home and send us a bottle of port, ok?
Divine Wind changed that so that now you can specifically request that an ally join you in a war. Meaning that you won't take the negative hit to relations/agreements if they say "no", and you won't have to deal with them nabbing lands you want if they say "yes."
I still haven't picked up Divine Wind, but I plan to.
Oh, side note: I found out that there is apparently a "Freeware" version of Master of Orion in development, called "FreeOrion." It doesn't use any code or, I believe, graphics from the previous games, but it uses the same design concepts as, I think, MOO2.
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