Favorite games

[das123]

Ahhh, what a list. Some of those games brings back memories.

My current playlist of favourites are:

1. Age of Wonders Shadow Magic (patched and modded). This is my all-time favourite game and the game I keep going back to.

The rest are in no particular order...

Dominions 3
Advanced Tactics
Call of Duty 4
Sins of a Solar Empire
Battle for Wesnoth
Knights of Honour
Galactic Civilisations
Star Wars Empire at War

Past favourites have included:

Chaos Overlords (does this still run on modern computers?)
Stars! (I played this for years)
Dungeon Keeper (why didn't they make version 3)

[Lingchih]

How is Sins of a Solar Empire? It looks interesting, but rather challenging.

[lch]

Lingchih said:
How is Sins of a Solar Empire? It looks interesting, but rather challenging.

It's quite good. It's like a RTS game but without the agitation that's usually part of playing one. The pace is quite comfortable. They're supposed to release a demo later.

[Stryke11]

Sins of a Solar Empire, in my opinion, is not nearly as good as GalCiv2, which is made by the same people.

I found the difficulty to be a bit much, and any more than 1v1 nearly impossible, as they tend to gang up on the human. Maybe I just suck at playing it.

Also, the weird scrolling/zoom thing is unwieldy, as if you zoom in close enough to see the actual ships (and not the icons representing them) you can't even see a battle, as the ships are too far apart to both be seen in the screen.

That being said, the research system is cool, and I like the storyline - a campaign would have been nice.

[lch]

Stryke11 said:
I found the difficulty to be a bit much, and any more than 1v1 nearly impossible, as they tend to gang up on the human. Maybe I just suck at playing it.

That must be it. I played it three times, and I won three times.
Actually, the game gets easier the more AIs you add (FFA). You'll have an easier game with 8 players than with 4. Less than 4 might be easier than 4, too. I started with normal AI and then mixed hard and normal half and half. Interestingly, three of the hard AIs were out even before the normal ones.

Stryke11 said:
Also, the weird scrolling/zoom thing is unwieldy, as if you zoom in close enough to see the actual ships (and not the icons representing them) you can't even see a battle, as the ships are too far apart to both be seen in the screen.

I wouldn't say unwieldy, but this game definitely makes you use the mouse wheel much more than any other game. You don't need to change all three axis, though. I usually have one rotation fixed so that it plays just like a 2D game.

[Potatoman]

How is Sins of a Solar Empire? It looks interesting, but rather challenging.

It's alright, but the game balance is very poor. Missile frigates are among the cheapest and lowest-tech ships in the game, but are very powerful compared to almost everything else. Capitol ships are terribly cost-ineffective, and most technologies are not worth the cost of researching. Single player is alright, but the AI is not very strong. A friend who had never played the game and I defeated 6 allied "hard" AIs without much of a fight.

Didn't live up to the hype, in my opinion.

[Lingchih]

Thanks. I'll save my money then. The new Gal Civ expansion is about to come out. I'll spend it on that.

[das123]

Lingchih said:
How is Sins of a Solar Empire? It looks interesting, but rather challenging.

There is a bit of negative discussion about the game on their forum but I enjoy it. I think that the reason I like games like this, Gal Civ, Age of Wonders and Dominions is that each time you play it the parameters shift so a strategy that worked one time may not work a second time. Personally I find Dominions much more difficult to play than Sins. There are choke-points that need to be secured. If you have low resource planets you need to change what you build to compensate. The more you expand the more you need to manage the composition of your fleets etc (although it isn't a micro-manage game by any stretch).

[Agrajag]

das123 said:
Dungeon Keeper (why didn't they make version 3)

They (Bullfrog) were acquired by the Evil Arts corporation >