I feel like there's 2 camps of 4X players, those who play it as a minmax optimal numbers game, and those who play it for the roleplaying. Right now the genre is pretty solid for the former players, but it's lacking quite a bit for the latter. Things like random events and story beats might suck for the minmaxer, but I think it will help a lot for the roleplaying group, which I fall in part of.
Yeah I tried roleplaying as an Isolationist Japan with one city going for a science victory and failed miserably lol. (that's the game where Greece beat my science victory by just bribing every city state for diplo win, meh). You can roleplay in Beyond Earth though, little story notifications pop up regularly giving you choices that give you various buffs, and your cities and military units visually change the more you raise your affinity in a philosophy. Game is so underrated. :(
Last night I won my first Emancipation victory, two of my cities were under attack, while I was sending my strongest military units through a warp gate back to Earth. Meanwhile a nearby city had built a beacon and was going for the Contact victory, so I had to consider sending troops there to sabotage them, or focus on my own victory. Tense and fun stuff!
I'm going to play EU4 next, but my next game of BE I'll try for the Promised Land victory which involves building a warp gate again, but this time sending Earth colonists to our planet to settle. So I'll need to make sure I have enough territory for them to do that, and enough armies to defend them on their journey as colonists can only move 1 tile a turn.
EU4 is awesome, as is CK2. Would skip the Total War-games though, the 4x stuff in those are pretty weak.
I didn't know much about the Total War series other than that it's a real-time strategy game so I always avoided anything about it, because when I've played RTS in the past I always got overwhelmed quickly and just sucked. But I decided to watch Lets Plays of Shogun 2 and Rome 2, and to my surprise I learned you could slow the combat speed down to a crawl, and that the map had turn-based gameplay. This appealed to me greatly, so I'm interested to see what I think of Shogun 2 whenever I get round to it.
I don't know if it's because I'm getting older or what, but I'm really into strategy games right now. I like that they keep my mind sharp, and ideally I can apply lessons learned in game to real life. If a colleague at work is annoying me, I'll simply wait 6 turns while amassing my troops and invade his territ....wait.
Morfeo said:
This is an interesting, but ultimately very flawed game. The major problem is that the map is too big/expansion is too restricted. This means there is always tons of unclaimed land, making conflict superfluous - why bother making war and spending tons of resources taking their land, if you can just send out a few settlers and claim land that way? This problem plagues Civ5 too by the way.
Yeah, I watched a LP/review of this game, and the combat AI seemed really dumb, but something about the game looks appealing, probably the China setting alone. I'll probably get it when its on sale for cheap, and I don't mind lack of war, sometimes I want a chill game and no conflict. In fact I always play defensively in Civ, because war seems such a hassle, getting all your troops in position alone is time-consuming, nevermind actual combat. Probably a personal preference, as I don't know how they can revamp combat in a turn based 4x game really. (although I enjoyed it in X-Com)