Years / Decades:
70s , 80s , 90s , 00s , 10s , 8th Generation, 2020
Genres:
2D Platformers, 3D Platformers, Board Games, Bullet Hell / 2D Shooters, Card, Casual, City/Attraction Builders, Dungeon Crawlers, Fighting, Flash, Handheld, Horror, Indie, Metroidvania, MMOs, MOBA, Point and Click , Puzzle, Racing, Real Time Strategy, Rhythm, Roguelikes, RPGs (Turn Based), Shooters (1st Person), Shooters (3rd Person), Simulation, Souls-Bourne, Sports, Stealth, Tabletop RPGs, Visual Novels, Walking Simulators
Welcome back. This part of the series will be primarily focusing on genres. So far I have [Action RPG, Arcade Game, Action, Text dungeon, Survival, Sandbox, Shoot/beat 'em up, Adventure, Turn Based Strategy, Real Time Tactics, Grand Strategy, Tower Defense, and Miscellaneous] as available genres. Let me know if I missed something, and I will try to get it added.
This is eventually all going to get compiled into one megathread for people who want gaming recommendations from Chapos specifically. Other consoles and genres will come in sporadic subsequent threads. Please contribute to previous threads if you missed them. This is meant to be an exhaustive list.
Expanding on your choice(s) is definitely a plus. Not everyone knows about or has played non-mainstream titles.
I have a soft-spot of the original Master of Orion from 1993. It's exactly as deep & complex as it needs to be, can be set up for a really quick game(by 4x standards so like, 1-2 hours), and is emulatable on a potato.
I keep coming back to it every few months. It's just so well built. The AI is surprisingly decent for a game from 93', still challenges me on the higher difficulties.
I never played the original, but Master of Orion II is one of my favorites and I still play it too
Master of Orion is the "space conquest game" that traces its lineage all the way back to Stellar Conquest the boardgame. Master of Orion II is more Master of Magic II than it is MoO2 honestly.
Seconding this. I've played many 4X games in my time, and Master of Orion still stands out as a masterpiece almost 30 years later.
Banished is arguably 4X game and it's not imperialistic (I know what 4X originally stands for but I feel like it's not exclusively used like that any more)
Civ 5 is awesome. Sins of a Solar Empire if you like your 4x with some RTS flavor. Stellaris and the Endless franchise have some of the coolest sci-fantasy aesthetics in the genre.
Sins really was good. Wish they'd kept developing it, haven't found any other game quite like it.
personally I have always loved this jank but extremely ambitious game from the 90s Imperialism II . the thing that's really interesting is you have to manage a labour pool that has increasing demands, you have to feed that labour pool, you can only recruit units from that labour pool, the economy is physically built on the map by connecting resources via roads to the capital so they can then be worked by the labour pool. you then use the products your workers make to produce more units, more roads, and continue the infinite expansion of imperialism. the diplomacy and war systems are very very dated, but I have always adored the economy in this game so much and the early game scramble for the new world
Civ 4, which is better than 5 or 6. Everytime I've played a session of 5 or 6, every Civ I meet declares war on me within 5 turns of meeting them, refuses to ever make peace, and then when I inevitably destory them all the other civs are like "OMG WARMONGER!!!!!!!!!!!"
MOO2 of course, but I'd like to give a shout out to Imperia Galactica II as something that has never been surpassed in terms of actually feeling like youre ruling an empire (If only Nexus: The Jupiter Incident (not 4x but worth playing) had become IGIII as initially planned.), and Emperor of the Fading Suns for those who like a Dune aesthetic. For fantasy I love the Warlords Series.
More modern ones I like include Stellaris, which has grown steadily better despite a rocky start and has great narrative events, Galactic Civilisations for an update on the MOO formula, and Sins of a Solar Empire which merges RTS and 4x mechanics into a really fun multiplayer experience
Master of Magic. It's a 4x despite them totally ripping off Magic the Gathering and Civilization. Still one of the greats. Fan patch for bugfixes and computer opponent improvements.
And some dude modded the game heavily so much that it got renamed into Caster of Magic instead. It's pretty weird, the guy took it in a different direction.
- Civilization IV (this is the only correct answer for this franchise)
- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
- Master of Orion II
- Crusader Kings II
- Europa Universalis IV
- Victoria II
Are CK2, EU4, and V2 really 4x games? I thought they fit more in the "simulation" category
Maybe? Turn-based grand strategy for sure, but I don't think I'd call them 4x.
They're usually not turn based. I like calling them RTS games to open discussions about genre.
Sci-fi: Distant Worlds is the best in theory, execution is poor due to small dev team. Endless Space 2 is worth playing.
Aurora 4x is free, despite the dev being an insufferable entitled boomer I believe it has the best implementation of custom ship design ever by far.
Endless Legends is by far my favorite Civ like 4x. It's got interesting aesthetics and mechanics that I think really influenced the development of the genre, while feeling unique and fresh to play itself.
It's really hard to go back to the rest of the genre after playing MOO1. The sliders are just so much faster than the list of buildings model that everything switched to afterwards. Being able to get through the whole game in 4 hours instead of 40 really makes a difference.
