I know folks love them and good for them, but I've done nothing but bound pretty hard off of most 4X games for a while. The last Civ that really grabbed me was IV.
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One thing for both: the factions are significantly more asymmetric than most 4Xs. Endless Legend especially - the playstyles are often orthogonal to each other, which is good.
I personally found out that I'm more interested in the roleplay/story aspect of taking a civilization through history than optimization of build points and turns.
Which is why Endless Legend is my favorite 4X lately - they weaved a story for each faction and the planet into their game.
Have you tried Old World? The setting would give you lots of historical assumptions to consider and the orders system helps by allowing eg some turns to be focused more on moving armies
I think the thing that tends to stop me up these days is the nature of the turn structure - I end up just pounding the 'next turn' button waiting for armies to slowly creep over the map, for buildings to slow finish, etc.
I'm with you on that too. Very hard to go back to ponderously waiting through turn after turn after you've played a couple in-game months of Hearts of Iron
Well and it drives me kinda nuts in the early game that it takes 200 years for my early army to march to the next city over because of how many years early turns represent.
I also get a bit frustrated with Civ in that historical eras run by so fast.
I find with Civ I have to totally detach from historical context because it makes no sense whatsoever. "Start walking toward those fluffy white animals, when your 16-great-grandchildren get there we'll probably have figured out what to do with them."
You can almost imagine it shifting from the early ages being sort of a "over the next three centuries, the Cypriots expanded into the neighboring islands" sort of scale, to like actual literal armies in the modern age, but it still doesn't work right.
In a Civ 5 game I played, we got beyond stretching the front from the Alps to the sea -- by the time I got to the second continent, the AI player (Bismark) had conquered all their rivals and filled *every* hex on the continent with a military unit.
In past versions of Civ I've always installed a mod that slows down scientific progress, so you have more time to play with your toys before they're obsolete. It doesn't solve the timescale problem but makes it better.
Ultimately Civ isn't a history game, it's a history-themed game.
HoI's 'strategic move' and maneuver move separation is something that honestly more games need. I get why you need to slow my guys down moving into enemy territory in a lot of strategy games, but surely I can move them much faster over my *own* logistics networks!
That's where the roads and rails come in, but yes. Early game before the roads is awful but by the late game I can move forces across the empire in one or two turns.
Games like this hold on to you because there's always a Next Step, and when the Next Step is "hurry up and wait for 20 minutes" you have time to realize it's actually 2 in the morning and you need to go to bed.
Civ V was more my ally. I played Civ Revolution on the 360 as my first entry in the series, so the combat was completely different. I couldn't make towers of dozens of units to take over a city.
Had a bunch of fun setting up LAN games between my siblings and nuking their capitals.
Comments
One thing for both: the factions are significantly more asymmetric than most 4Xs. Endless Legend especially - the playstyles are often orthogonal to each other, which is good.
Which is why Endless Legend is my favorite 4X lately - they weaved a story for each faction and the planet into their game.
Honestly, deeply prefer PDX's real-time-with-pause.
I also get a bit frustrated with Civ in that historical eras run by so fast.
Ultimately Civ isn't a history game, it's a history-themed game.
Had a bunch of fun setting up LAN games between my siblings and nuking their capitals.