Looking for 4X games

[Gurgeh]

So I am wondering does anyone know any good 4X games that are good? Here are the following that I have played
1. Galactic Civilizations II
2. Civilizations III, IV
3. Civilizations: Call to power
4.Sins of a solar empire
and that is pretty much it. I have heard of MOO and Sword of the stars and I was wondering if they are any good. What other 4X games are there that are good?

[Stofsk]

Alpha Centauri and Master of Orion 2 were great, for their time. Both were also very broken and once you knew how to exploit it the AI was no challenge. But it was pretty rad all the same. Galciv2 is essentially better than MoO2 in particular in every way though.

Stark in another thread was talking about Distant Worlds so that might be worth checking out.

[Covenant]

Distant Worlds sucks beyond comprehension. It's basically a giant game that plays itself, yet requires you to do the most insane drudgery to get the game set up properly to do that. It's like a toy train that you have to assemble from the screws up.

I'm also not a fan of Galactic Civilizations. I'd rather play broken ol' MoO2 than GC any day, even when you take the lack of difficulty into account. The actual Civ games feel a lot better though, and those are fun. Of course, there are also the Grand Strategy games out there, but they're a little less 4x.

[Dave]

I played with the demo/shareware version of Spaceward Ho! once upon a time. That was a very long time ago, however, it might be something to look into.

[Stark]

Distant Worlds sucks beyond comprehension. It's basically a giant game that plays itself, yet requires you to do the most insane drudgery to get the game set up properly to do that. It's like a toy train that you have to assemble from the screws up.

Why is troop management so hard for UI designers to handle? In a game that does everything itself, why can none of the AI do it? Madness.

I'm also not a fan of Galactic Civilizations. I'd rather play broken ol' MoO2 than GC any day, even when you take the lack of difficulty into account. The actual Civ games feel a lot better though, and those are fun. Of course, there are also the Grand Strategy games out there, but they're a little less 4x.

Playing MoO2 is basically masturbation; at least different things happen in GC2. I prefer high-level games that don't force you to manage all the way down (ie every Paradox game ever).

[Gurgeh]

I just downloaded Sword of the Stars. It is pretty epic.

[Stark]

It's like you didn't even read the other thread.

Let me know how much fun you're having when you have 80 planets and scores of fleets.

[Artemas]

Why is troop management so hard for UI designers to handle? In a game that does everything itself, why can none of the AI do it? Madness.

I'm not a huge fan of the way they handled fuel either. They really should have added automated tankers, or something.

[Covenant]

Why is troop management so hard for UI designers to handle? In a game that does everything itself, why can none of the AI do it? Madness.

I'm not a huge fan of the way they handled fuel either. They really should have added automated tankers, or something.

Honestly they just should have said "You know, this isn't fun. It's not fun in any way to have a quintillion things to do all at once, nor is it fun to have barely any sense of control over any of the things involved. Like, I could build the stations the game suggests, sure. If I wanted to fail miserably. Or I could use a properly re-designed research platform that I need to re-do each time I play for some crazyass reason despite there being a save function (I must be doing it wrong) and even when you finally get stuff humming along it's still like juggling ten bowling balls at once. Someone does something, someone attacks someone, and the careful equilibrium is thrown off and my swarming Ant Farm Space Nation goes into panic mode and nothing is sensible again.

If they wanted to keep that space combat element, hooray for them. But for crying out loud just let me throw down Research Platform and Fabrication Station or something like that so I don't need to constantly re-tool everything in the game because it was horribly improperly designed.

The most fun part of the game was, for me, the exploration aspect. It almost felt like a game. But there's almost no reason to play that muddle. If you're the kind of person who really gets off on all those kinds of detail then you're basically a lunatic that I have no understanding of. It's way way too complex for next to no payoff. The digital masturbation of MoO2 is well noted, especially since the AI is dumb as bricks, but at least it's flashy and manageable.

GalCiv is just... I dunno. For some reason, I just don't like it. I've tried it several times and I can't enjoy it. Something about the map and the gameplay and everything else, just none of it is that fun to me. I'm not going to say it's worse than MoO because it's not, but for whatever reason I just don't give a shit about it whenever I play.

It's like you didn't even read the other thread.

Let me know how much fun you're having when you have 80 planets and scores of fleets.

I really feel bad for the people who think SotS is a good game. It's not epic. It's slightly better now that they rolled a bunch of my mods over into their xpacks.

[Stark]

I liked DW because of the high-level, low-touch nature of it. It's clearly an indie game made by crazy people, so yeah I often simply abandon games when fruity shit happens (like the military nags for war for ages, I declare war, my attack force is slaughtered and capital captured in five minutes) but I like the sense that you can just make decisions while things are rlling along by themselves. Its an illusion, because you can't (as Artemas says, the advisors are too stupid to even look at fuel status so if you play the game really highend everyone will run out of gas and you'll lose) but I don't have any real problem at all getting an empire competing with others. It's just that the AI the whole game hinges on is pretty bad, so the events that emerge aren't particularly meaningful.

I think it's important that you're the kind of guy who designs 'proper' platforms. I took one look at the unit designer and said 'too hard' and went back to playing the game a few times. It's just a shame that they tried something interesting that sort-of works, and everyone's too busy being fat and saying 'OMG MOO' to create a market for actual good games.

Actually, did SotS ever fix tankers? I remember the amazing lol of the manual fleet tanker refueling when it came out.

[Covenant]

I don't think they ever changed fuel enough to be meaningful. You just want to have an inordinate number of tanker ships along with your fleet to make sure they can never run out of fuel even if they tried.

I got bored with DW before I ever got far enough into it for my proper platform design to matter or not. I like the feeling of control so the game is clearly not for me. Even if it was just a "make top-level decisions and see how things go" sort of dealie it'd annoy me for the reasons you state. The whole thing felt way too complex. Maybe if they had a multiplayer mode where 5 people could each run a single faction to keep the dumb thing from collapsing in on itself. I certainly had no idea what was going on. None of the normal intuitive stuff seemed to work.

So I'm not sure it really worked at all. Is it performance art or is it a game? The thing seemed more like a barely interactive screen saver to me. I've always liked the idea of being the Emperor that didn't have to constantly tell each factory world how many Air Conditioners to build so as to restore the planet to habitable temperature, but DW was just too far the other direction from MOO. Even if the AI sucks, fine. Just give it less to do, remove those fuel concerns, and make the game just more of a game.

[Stark]

I didn't see any real complexity (outside of obtuse shit like managing troops) because lots of shit in other 4X games doesn't even seem to matter. Upgrading your weapons might do nothing... but upgrading your shields might render you literally immune to damage, because the comabt is awful and unbalanced. Whatever backend AI is generating 'actions' for the other groups and your own advisors kidn of sucks, so everyone is doing stuff that doesn't really make sense, and the actual wars seem more like roulette than any kind of strategy, not least because 'military power' index doesn't include 'can your guns even hurt them at all'.

The only trick to planet development seems to be building an assload of shit everywhere, at least until the construction system breaks on that planet and you can never build anything every againg.

It's funny you say 'screen saver', because I enjoy playing it while I'm doing something else. This is hard, because the way it draws to the screen is totally FUCKED so no windows, but it's sort of Defcon-y in the way you can set some policies and know things will tick along until you have to decide on whatever element you've chosen to manage. It falls down after about an hour when a war breaks out and none of the AI can manage it for shit and the system collapses, but I just start again.

[Covenant]

To me the complexity is mostly just how badly the AI managed thing son it's own, and without the AI managing things (I had tried to play more manually than was able) you have tons and tons of behaviors to do. I was able to get Empires that would trundle along at their own pace while I took over the fun job of managing my scouts, but the game still felt obtuse to me. Probably because I'm able to influence things but I'm not able to literally force them to happen due to the way the civilians seem to want to do things for themselves. I don't know. It wasn't worth it to me to bother learning it since the payoff wasn't high enough.

I have no real desire to beat a dumb AI or struggle through muddled interfaces. I'd rather play something brainless but flashy, or actually strategic and challenging (as opposed to just difficult to control). I think we all would, but yeah, if you just putter with it, it can be a fine diversion. For my gaming minute however I'd rather allocate that elsewhere.