Sulis is a turn based Role Playing Game with an engine written from scratch in Rust. The game is in a fairly mature state with several available campaigns to play through.
I wanna give a shoutout for a new and upcoming gaming studio from #Turku who are currently developing a turn-based tactics adventure game Orcs on a Train.
I'm currently playing #Wartales and really enjoying it.
Wartales is a turn-based tactical #RPG that offers an addictive and entertaining gameplay experience. Players who like tactical RPGs should definitely consider trying out Wartales.
The Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth or BfW, is a fantasy themed 2D turn-based strategy game started by David White in June 2003.[1] The game is programmed in C++ and its code and media are licensed under the GPL.[2] This game does not require 3D hardware acceleration....
A classic, turn-based strategy game with up to four armies fighting against each other. Challenge yourself in a campaign against AI, or a hot-seat battle with a friend. Using the easy map editor you can create any imaginable scenario to play!
Wildermyth, Vagrus - The Riven Realms, and our own Star Traders: Frontiers partnered up to offer a new Steam bundle for players who love deep & replayable RPGs. If you already own one game, you still get the discount on the others.
All three of our games offer hundreds of hours of playtime; check 'em out!
I just started #AgeOfWonders4 yesterday and really liking it so far. (AOW: Planetfall was my first 4x game). I love that there are toad, rodent, feline, and penguin classes in addition to the usual humans/orcs/dwarves. I just allied with this guy.
The Battle for Wesnoth is an open source, turn-based strategy game with a high fantasy theme. It features both singleplayer and online/hotseat multiplayer combat.
Always take a moment to look around the map. Evaluate enemies, security devices, objective locations of course, but also keep an eye out for tucked-away lockers.
From extra medkits to rare crafting blueprints, the extra loot you find in these can sometimes be worth the risk of straying from your objectives.
With #DiceFolk I was almost certain I’d like it – and didn’t get disappointed! I’ve a soft spot for tactical, #TurnBased games, and this one certainly has the potential to become one of the staples of the genre! A bit on the easy side, but for a demo that’s probably the right choice. It’s a #DiceGame where you control the order in which the dice take effect – both for yours and the enemy one's. Battles are fought in teams of three, so proper positioning and thinking ahead are a must. :)
In the full game, you can work your network of contacts to earn or trade favors; use them for advantages on heists! Bypass security, get a resupply between stages, suppress alarms or reinforcements…
I'm not one for "New Year's resolutions", but I am one for overly ambitious projects.
For 2023, Project365 is "One New Game Per Day".
Given that I have 634 unplayed games in my Steam account and {mumble} unredeemed bundle Steam keys, there's a reason my unplayed collection is tagged "Pile of Shame".
I'll pin this to my profile, and give a brief summary here each day (or x, if I miss x days due to work or stuff).
I'll play 15-30 minutes of (at least) one new game I've never played before (or played less than 15 minutes of). I'll give every game at least 15 minutes, even if I hate every minute of it.
I'm also open to suggestions; if you reply to this thread with a game, I'll schedule it, or tell you what I thought of it.
One of the things that's come up is that I have a bunch of games that I've played once, and not touched again.
May 7, 2023 - Day 127 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 142
Game: Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Relics of War
Platform: Epic Games Store / Steam
Release Date: Jul 13, 2018
Library Date: May 7, 2023
Unplayed: 0d (0d)
Playtime: 6h17m
Gladius - Relics of War (GRW) is a turn-based 4X (apparently) strategy game, as opposed to Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters' (CGD) tactical strategy.
Oh no...
After getting my head around CGD on Thursday night, I remembered I had a Steam key for Gladius - Relics of War (GRW) in my spreadsheet of shame (think pile of shame, but Steam keys I haven't even redeemed).
Not only that, I'd also gotten it free on Epic Games Store at some stage. On the chance I wouldn't "get" it and/or like it, I installed it on EGS (and I despise using EGS), with a view to adding the key to my giveaway list if I hated it.
4 hours and 46 minutes later, just after finally completing the tutorial, I discovered a missed alarm, when I got a phone call from the appointment I'd missed.
Tonight I installed it on Steam, started over, & completed the tutorial in 91m.
It's not quite as pretty as CGD, but it's incredibly engrossing, and I'm not entirely sure why. Civ 5, Civ 6, Age of Wonders: Planetfall didn't grab me like this, and Stellaris did my head in.
I tried Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus at some stage last year, and I hated it; so much so, that it did what I do with any of the games that I "nope" out of: leave them running until I've got all the card drops, sell the cards on the marketplace, then uninstall it, and hide it from my library.
I reinstalled it today to see if maybe it made sense to me now, and it absolutely does.
While it's not as pretty as Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters, it does make sense to me now, but it's just not quite as engaging as CGD.
Total War: SHOGUN 2 (TW:S2) did not get off to a flying start.
As this was the first run, it wanted to install Flash Player. I refused to allow that, and it seemed to run OK. Turns out that it was included to show ads on the main menu, so no loss.
In the case of TW:S2, I knew it was a strategy game, going in, and since I've had a pretty good run with strategy games over the weekend, I thought I'd give it a go.
That good run ended today.
I started with the tutorial, and it was just teeth-grindingly slow. I tried to persevere, and finally, after 15 minutes, I was about to engage the enemies on the main battlefield of the tutorial, after a couple of skirmishes.
...and it crashed.
I started it again, went into the campaign, one the first battle, but what little forward motion I had was gone, and I quit out a few minutes later.
TW:CS2 is, apparently, a "blend of real-time & tactics strategy, but it just hasn't grabbed me, and the random crash was enough to leave me wanting to spend time in other strategy games.
July 31, 2023 - Day 212 - NewPlay Review
Total NewPlays: 231
Game: Möbius Front '83
Platform: Steam
Release Date: Nov 6, 2020
Library Date: July 31, 2022
Unplayed: 0d
Playtime: 30m
As I mentioned in my Opus Magnum review, I own most of the Zachtronics games. I went through the list, and there were four I don't own, and I recognised Möbius Front '83 as a key I had in my spreadsheet, so I installed it.
I read an interview with Zach Barth (not to be confused with Zach Braff) about ending Scrubs.
Oops... I mean ending Zachtronics. In it he mentioned that Zachtronics was known for a particular kind of game (correct), and that if he were to go back to development again, he'd want to explore a different genre of game.
Ah, there's the rub. I wish him all the best in his future endeavours, but everything about Opus Magnum that endeared the game to me is missing from Möbius Front '83.
It took me half an hour to complete the tutorial. I probably could have completed it faster had I not been exhausted, but it just felt like a grind.
Möbius Front '83 is a hextile turn-based strategy wargame. You've got infantry squads that can move only move one tile at a time, or shoot, but can move through forests and hide in them to ambush others, and can also load into a troop carrier to go further. In addition, when hiding, they can only be shot at by units in the next tile. Also, they have rocket launchers as well as rifles.
The troop carriers can go further, but appear to carry the a single rifle's worth of damage, and you lose a turn when it deploys the troops.
Tanks have guns and missiles (?), can move multiple tiles in a single turn, and then shoot in the same turn.
That about seems to kind of be it. I was just bored by the end of the tutorial.
After finishing a NewPlay, but before writing a review, I'll read one or two other reviews about the game. Not to crib from them, but to see if there's something I missed, some aspect to the game that I would have seen if I'd played longer.
It's disappointing how often a game turns out to be more of the same.
As such, with Möbius Front '83, it's interesting to note that apparently the game introduces some more interesting sci-fi stuff later in the game; the title isn't just something that sounds vaguely cool, but is actually relevant.
Unfortunately, it turns out that my initial feelings aren't that far off the mark. There is quite a bit of a grinding involved to get to that point.
Grinding in service of a storyline isn't a bad thing, per se. I played WoW for a very long time, and that's just par for the course. The key is to hook the player with the storyline first. Not just force them to grind.
In any case, Möbius Front '83 was a bit of a disappointment as a Zachtronics game. As a turn-based strategy game, it's just:
Hero's Hour bills itself as "A fast turn-based strategy RPG with real-time combat."
It was included in the Humble Choice March 2023 bundle.
I've repeatedly said that nostalgia does nothing for me, and it turns out I was wrong about that. Nostalgia can piss me off.
One of the growing trends at the moment in gaming is to remake old games. The most important thing about taking a game someone loved and remaking it for "modern" gaming, is to understand what made the game tick, then update the things that were limited by technology of the time, while keeping the elements that made the game tick intact.
For instance: The Quake II RTX "reimagining" took the first three levels of Quake II and made them pretty. Ho-hum.
The Quake II re-release updated the game itself and pretty much nailed bringing an ancient game into the modern era, without losing the character of the game.
I didn't know what to expect going into Hero's Hour, other than the pixel-art that featured in the header graphic, but within a couple of minutes of starting the tutorial, I realised I didn't need the tutorial, because I knew exactly how to play the game.
Describing Hero's Hour as "A fast turn-based strategy RPG with real-time combat." sounds better than "A pixel-art knock-off of Heroes of Might & Magic III".
I sank countless hours into Heroes of Might & Magic III. It might even have been the first "one more turn" game for me.
If you want to create a knock-off of a classic like HOMM3, you need to understand what makes it tick, what gives it that "one more turn" element, and the devs of Hero's Hour clearly don''t.
Desktop Dungeons demonstrated that a great gameplay loop overcomes the limitations of pixel art.
Hero's Hour made the art worse, and breaks the gameplay loop.
In HOMM3, your pixelated hero explores the pixelated map, but when entering a town, each kind of town has a character all its own, that grows as you expand the town.
Hero's Hour has almost-identical little boxes for each building.
HOMM3 battles were a carefully managed hextile-based strategy affair that could leave you elated or exasperated.
Hero's Hour replaces that with chaotic real-time battles that leans into the exasperation, and adds frustration. You can speed them up to 2x, but that still feels like an eternity.
Heck, some of the sound effects during map exploration feel like a straight rip from HOMM3.
Ultimately, Hero's Hour feels like the Temu version of HOMM3, and if I wanted to play a game that felt like HOMM3 without understanding HOMM3, I'd play HOMM VI.
Sulis: Turn based tactical RPG (github.com)
Sulis is a turn based Role Playing Game with an engine written from scratch in Rust. The game is in a fairly mature state with several available campaigns to play through.
The Battle for Wesnoth Release 1.16.10 (forums.wesnoth.org)
The Battle for Wesnoth, or simply Wesnoth or BfW, is a fantasy themed 2D turn-based strategy game started by David White in June 2003.[1] The game is programmed in C++ and its code and media are licensed under the GPL.[2] This game does not require 3D hardware acceleration....
FreeOrion (sourceforge.net)
FreeOrion is a free and open source community-developed 4X turn-based galactic empire strategy game.
Open Realm of Stars by Reemax (reemax.itch.io)
4X turn-based space strategy
Tanks of Freedom II (czlowiekimadlo.itch.io)
A classic, turn-based strategy game with up to four armies fighting against each other. Challenge yourself in a campaign against AI, or a hot-seat battle with a friend. Using the easy map editor you can create any imaginable scenario to play!
ASCIIlization (pigalore.miraheze.org)
ASCIIlization is a game made by Piga Software for the June 2023 LibreJam. It is a terminal based hotseat mutliplayer turn based strategy game.
The Battle for Wesnoth (www.wesnoth.org)
The Battle for Wesnoth is an open source, turn-based strategy game with a high fantasy theme. It features both singleplayer and online/hotseat multiplayer combat.