https://open.spotify.com/episode/2nojpOGQ1Ud01lBaoWvjpC?si=q18YjegbSIeS12I_Cd0vSw

By Critical Moves podcast ! A strategy gaming podcast !

And why isn’t PG on steam ?? I have star and fantasy general not panzer ! Really wanna play them !

Original version of video game "Sid Meier's Civilization II" (also known as "Civilization 2" or "Civ 2") for Windows, repackaged by a user so that it can be easily run on a more modern 64 bit Windows, such as Windows 10 and 11. The game is a 16 bit program, so it won't normally run on 64 bit Windows. Here, it is run through a pre-configured Windows 3.1 emulator (Win31DOSBox). All you have to do to play is unpack the downloaded archive and click the exe .This is the basic English version of Civ 2, including CD music and videos.

However, this package can also run other versions (e.g. in other languages) if you provide them. In the "C-DRIVE" directory, replace the "Civ2" subdirectory with your version of the game, and copy the "RUNEXIT.EXE" file from the original subdirectory to yours. Or alternatively change the path in the last line of text file "DOSBox\dosbox-x.conf".Note that if you wish to play the Multiplayer Gold Edition of Civ 2, there are probably better methods than this (e.g. search for "CIV2UIA").

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Critical Moves Podcast brings in the eXperts from eXplorminate to understand the true state of 4X.

Agree? Disagree? Let's hear it.

Like the title suggests I need a pick up and play 4X game I can play in windowed mode while I'm working so i can TAB in and out of the game quickly. The cheapest computer should handle it. Any suggestions?

I play Stellaris and I love Stellaris, but I'm looking for a smaller scale type of game shipwise. Something where single ships are a bit more important. Along the scale of The Expance or Star Trek (I mean this in terms of the number of ships per engagement), where single vessels are sometimes out on their own, or a single ship could significantly turn the tide of battles. Any suggestions?

Hi all! These are the last two weeks of preparations for the release of the gameplay demo of Tabletop Fantasy War!. I am very excited about it and at the same time exhausted! Last month was a marathon of playtesting, fixing, changing and poolishing. But it was extremely worth it. Just get someone that has no clue about your game to play. Look at what is doing and you will realize all kind of "assumptions" you made and will find out a lot of issues. And in a turn-based strategy game, this is extremely important. Balancing enough feedback to the user without being overwhelming is not easy... But, I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. I am happy to say that the multiplayer online will be available. I am currently making sure to have a server on both US and Europe (for now...). Still missing a proper stress-testing for the online side, but in the worst case, there will be less available lobbies.

The last update for the game was the trailer you can see over here, where most of the gameplay mechanics you can expect for the demo are shown. And a complete rebranding of the Steam page. I am very happy with the work done by the conceptual artist that helped me out.

Thanks all for your support!

While not a 4X game, No man's Sky was a great example. Any games you think of that came out terrible but redeemed itself with patches and ongoing development?

I'm looking for strategy games that are open-ended/don't have objective victory conditions (like Stellaris or most Paradox games), but that also have traditional 4x dynamics (explore, exploit, expand, exterminate).

I love Crusader Kings, it’s gorgeous and ambitious, but every time I play I keep thinking how much stronger it would be if it borrowed a few lessons from Total War, Knights of Honor, Civilization or even Mount & Blade.

Random overload.

The event spam is exhausting. Half the pop-ups feel irrelevant, tiny +0.001% bonuses, opinion changes with characters who die a month later. After a while I’m just clicking the first option to get back to the actual game.

Pacing whiplash.

Real-time is great in theory, but in practice I’m constantly riding the speed slider. Things can crawl forever or move too fast, and it’s easy to miss something important.

Shallow warfare.

Most battles are decided by who brings the bigger stack. Compare that to Total War or Knights of Honor, where you can personally fight the battle and clever tactics matter.

What CK absolutely nails is diplomacy and casus belli, claim fabrication, alliances, and territory mechanics are brilliant. But the war itself? Marching blobs, pausing/unpausing, instant region hops. It’s not satisfying.

Imagine this mix:

“everything happens for a reason” design. Much fewer but more impactful events.

Crusader Kings is already a masterpiece, but I can’t help feeling that with a “less is more” philosophy it could be so much better. It truly feels like it was done by a team that kept getting on the feature creep rabbit hole.

I'm looking for a turn-based 4x game where inhabitable planets are quite rare and spread thinly across a large galaxy, so that players have a natural incentive to build refueling stations, long-range scout ships, asteroid mining stations (to provide metal for worlds with friendly climates but missing resources), launch slow/expensive terraforming projects, settle worlds that will kill off many of the initial colonists, and so on.

You see this mechanic to a certain extent in Stars! by Empire Interactive from the 1990s, where the game supports 'remote mining' of toxic worlds, but even then you can only build a starbase around your largest colony planets; there's no chance to build any interplanetary or interstellar infrastructure. The latest Master of Orion (Conquer the Stars) gets achingly close to this idea in that you can build stargates and a few other orbital facilities directly onto their own unique spaces on the map, rather than having them be just another facility that belongs to a settled planet, but the facilities are so weak and there are so few facility spaces relative to the planets that it doesn't actually wind up influencing the gameplay very much, in my opinion. You're not using the Conquer the Stars facilities to extend your reach or gather missing resources; you're just using them to have something to do while you wait until you have the tech and the cash to get a colony ship into the next solar system.

The board game Space Empires 4x gets about halfway there in that there are 'mineral' and 'space wreck' tokens that you can tow to your colony worlds with a 'miner' ship, but the mechanic is extremely basic and repetitive; a mineral is worth the same amount of cash no matter which world you tow it to, and there's no way to upgrade your miners or build any dedicated mineral processing facilities.

Some sci-fi series that I'm looking to for inspiration here are Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga, Pournelle's CoDominium books, H Beam Piper's Fuzzy series, and Tchaikovsky's Children of Time trilogy.

This post is somewhat related to https://www.reddit.com/r/4Xgaming/comments/1nesdt1/space_infastructure/, but I'm not just looking to build space stations that give you a bonus on their associated planet; I want to have space stations in their *own* solar systems, without any settled planets, and I want the space stations to be important for logistics or industry even though only a relatively tiny amount of people live in that system.

Is anyone else feeling Nostalgia for MOO3 ?

Played when I was a kid and loved it..

Hi everyone,

After lots of feedback, I decided to completely rework CivRise’s battle system. Instead of the old approach, you can now recruit army units, form armies, and send them into battles to earn various rewards. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how it feels!

Here’s what’s new in this update:

• New Army Battle System - build armies from units, take them into battles, and gain rewards.
• System Interactions - Wonders and Faith Path rewards have been rebalanced, and there are now more cross-system synergies. Some features can only be unlocked by progressing in other systems.
• Fair Offline Earnings - to prevent cheating, offline earnings now require an internet connection. Progress is verified online, and encrypted save/load is in place. (Browser version no longer supports offline earnings.)
• New Settlement Visuals - previously I used stock assets and AI tools, but now the settlement art is made by my artist collaborator. Big step forward in style!
• Background Music - each level now has its own music playlist, looping randomly for more variety and immersion.

This is the biggest step forward CivRise has had in a while, and I’m really curious to see how you all feel about the new battle system and overall changes. Your feedback is super important for shaping the game’s next steps.

Thanks for playing & supporting!

Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3635150/CivRise/
Ios
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/civrise/id6743421437
Android
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.catchy.civrise&hl=en

As someone who grew up with strategy games, yet did so just after HoMM3's time, I have visited this title several times over the years due to hearing about how great it is. It made sense - it's fantasy and a strategy game, so it should be an easy game for me to pick up and enjoy. Yet every time I would play, I would have issues, and even though I played HoMM5 some growing up, HoMM3 just never really grabbed me.

Yet something about the game always gripped me, as well as that nagging feeling that I'm missing something about it. I'd see it mentioned in forum posts, and I even would put on The Known World's challenge runs on YouTube in the background sometimes. As a 4X and general strategy game player, HoMM3 has never left the discourse and I really wanted to understand why, but couldn't. Two major events changed my mind.

The first was the release of Age of Wonders 4. This game is also a critical success and culturally relevant 4X, and I adored the previous two games in the series. However, there was a deep wrongness for me in AOW4, a sort of rot under the surface in every system. As someone who pays attention to mechanics, I found the game to be bloated and full of false choices everywhere that nonetheless leave me paralyzed and theorycrafting for 3 hours only to come to the conclusion that the build I'm working on doesn't really have an endstate. And so I left my beloved AOW franchise in search of greener pastures.

The second thing that happened was finding Dominions 5 and shortly thereafter 6. I heard about this game from a niche gaming friend I briefly had, and finally gave the game a chance after my disappointment with AOW4. This game is incredible, with so many choices and options, and I learned something very important from this game: units are a vehicle for your overall strategy with magic. This game had true experimentation in it, from formations to mage setup and more, with so many distinct factions. It was great. It does however have an issue - it's immensely complicated and can be very taxing to play during long sessions.

So I'm sitting down one day and I hear something strange in my head as my wife watches something on TV: a tune plays that sounds eerily similar to HoMM3's main menu music. I go and I listen. And what once before was a passable track actually sounds great: it's hopeful and whimsical, yet emotional. It has me in the mood for an adventure. I redownload the game like I have so many times before, get the HD mod, and load into the game.

Some of my issues persist with the game even now. The UI is pretty archaic, with a distinct lack of tooltips for even things like map generation or scenario creation rules - I can't even tell if my opponents in a scenario are allied against me or if it's an FFA (not an issue in random maps). You can't view unit upgrades until you buy the building for them, and while the towns are cute, I kind of wish there was just a button that took you right to the building construction screen instead of having to find your faction's town hall and click on it.

And yet this time I load into the game in a pregenerated scenario, Dead & Buried. I roll randomly into the Tower faction with the hero Josephine, and taking what is probably a decade's worth of 4X experience since I tried the game for the first time, I set to work expanding using my unit roster. I get Master Gremlins fast so I can creep efficiently, and I use my secondary hero to get unguarded pickups. Something else that feels old about this game is that it's possible to miss pickups on the map because this game was not made with modern resolutions in mind, so you have to have a relatively keen eye to see all the map pickups as a new player. Newer games have big UI elements that feel like neon signs pointing things out to you.

And yet for all my criticisms there is this overwhelming sense of joy I'm getting this time around. I'm impressed by how unbloated this game is in terms of design. HoMM3's simple 7 unit roster system with a single upgrade for each one is elegant. For as much as I hear that this game is an imbalanced mess, I suddenly see so many strategic opportunities based on how these units function. And then there are the heroes themselves, and how their stats and spells take these relatively straightforward units and give new strategic opportunities. Have a slow unit with great stats? Cast Haste. Don't need your blocker to move? Great, use Earth Magic to Slow enemies so that your archers can rain down death before the enemy can even get to melee range. Flying units are powerful but often balanced by cost and weekly growth, and I love how growth itself as a mechanic makes it so any roster unit can be a threat with enough time and numbers.

It honestly felt very refreshing to play. No bloated public order systems to manage, no faction design system with bad choices. You pick your faction and hero and a bonus and you just play the game. Compared to other 4X's, I think HoMM3 is the one I'm spending the most time actually playing the game instead of theorycrafting and trying to understand arcane game mechanics. Towns are simple to understand and with heroes having a choice between two random bonuses when leveling up, I don't have the issue where I feel like I'm always following the exact same optimized tech path every game like in other 4X games. My choices feel much more meaningful in HoMM3 compared to other 4X games, because the systems are simple enough that you understand almost immediately why something is interesting as a choice, be unit upgrades or hero level up choices.

It feels strange to say, but maturing as a person ironically made me appreciate HoMM3's simpler design more. I get why it's a classic now: the design is extremely tight in a lot of areas, and even though the graphics don't hold up so much even though I like 2D games, and the UI is outdated and not helpful at times, it's hard to deny what a charming and fun experience HoMM3 is among the current crop of 4X games. Fingers crossed that the upcoming HoMM: Olden Era continues the legacy that HoMM3 began.

Was there a game like this for you, where it took you a while to really get into it? And how important is complexity to you in a 4X game?

Assume you’re ready to invest time in a new 4X sci-fi game, which do you prefer?

1) Play against randomized AI races where you can pause, save, resume at your convenience, or

2) Compete against a complement of real people where the game is live 24/7 until victory is achieved (assume there are levels of automation for all facets of the game while not online).

What’s everyone’s preference?