My favourite game is a strategic title possibly no one knows...

Crusader Kings by Paradox entertainment


You can generally play a King, Duke or Count, over 500 or something different places to select, Medieval Europe, three diferent ages to select to start from. (1066, 1132 and 1256 or something like that) You can build, wage war, but the main point is to develop your family and all. Several traits/flaws, a clever system of claiming titles and so on and so on...it's my alltime favourite.

Sounds good, but is it majorly dated now? We should make a thread on classic games.

Crusader King's link

Doesn't look that old. Dunno.

Unfortunately, the graphic is really bad. It's a game you only play for it's gameplay, not for the graphics and all those nifty things. For example catholics can be forced by the pope to stop fighting other catholic kings, Byzantinian Empire-Vassals get boni to loyality and so on, and so on.

I'm just downloading Galactic Civilizations II. Looks good.

Eh, I didn't like that one

I'm playing Ascendancy right now - gods, that's an old game Not a bad one, but the micromanagement is hell.

Ouch. I've never seen such poor ratings for a game.

And are we talking about the same game? GC2 came out a week ago. You have it?

Erm, no. I'm thinking about something else entirely. I don't even know what. I THOUGHT that was the name of the game.

EDIT: Ooooh, that's GC1 that I'm thinking of - terrible game, it was. Dunno about the sequel.

It has better reviews, anyway. I'll treat it as my solemn duty to report to the forum on the quality of the sequel.

And btw. Classic old games I played years ago, ad nauseum:

1) LOST EDEN. Omg. This is way back, it was like some barely 3d adventure game with dinosaurs. I bet £1000 no one else has heard of or played this game.

2) Fragile Allegiance, the aforementioned.

3) SETTLERS 2. The way the little fighter guys used to walk slowly out of their huts, to the hut of the enemy, and fight them with cute little 2d moves. And when you won, you got new territory and the enemy's buildings all burnt. Way better than any sequel.

I need to try and think of more.

You seem into 4X games - have you tried Masters of Orion 2?

*looks into it*

Edit: Looks dated but good. I doubt I'd find it playable by today's standards. Retro games are like old photos, they look okay to YOU, but weird to others.

I do recommend MoO2 - though dated, I still find it amazing to play, and not because of nostalgia. I honestly haven't played a space 4X game better than MoO2. The game only suffers from being WAY too easy if you know what you're doing, except on impossible difficulty, where the computer blatently cheats Well, and large armada scalability is terrible there. But those are my only complaints.

Galactic Civilisations 2: MAJORLY OVERRATED.

How lame. The graphics are awkward. The races are dumb. The interfaces are clunky. It's basically all 2D.

MoO2 is solid actually. Hell, I liked MoO1 (playing it like 10 years after it came out...) MoO3 was kinda sucky though, sadly...and Shorlen, did you ever do MoM? (Master of magic, by the same makers...same era as MoO1.) You could probably find it on underdogs if not.

I'm looking for Baldur's Gate 2 again myself, I lost the copy I paid for.

MoM is AWESOME. I played it again recently, and I think it's better than some modern civ games I'm so sad the company fell apart, and the one with the rights to make a MoM2 is the same people who made the catastrophe that was MoO3

MoM is abandonware and runs great in dosbox, for those who are interested in retro civ-esque games. You play a wizard who builds cities, mproves them, summons creatures, moves them about, hires heros, casts spells, etc. An old predesessor to the HoMM games, but more civ-like.

Ooh, that one looks interesting.

I've considered playing one of the masters of orion games to see what they're like, too. Reminds me... need to go dig out imperium galactica again >.>

I have a thing about old graphics. I can play super-old things, like emulated SNES sprite games (Chrono Trigger as a random example) with no problem about the graphics. I can play high-end graphics games very happily. But ask me to play a mid-graphics or pseudo-3D game and it just looks and feels so weird.

Haegemonia is ok...ish.

You control various planets performing actions on them. Also you have various maps connected by worm holes. It's fun sometimes and if you bored you can always send a fleet into a sun

BG2.

Same. But it's stuck on 90%!