Most strategy games are fun during the early game. Your workers' first moves, the first things your scouts find, the second city you settle... matter a lot, and every action feels rewarding because they have a large impact on the game.
But the longer they last, the more tedious they get, because empires get large and armies are huge, and games have so little automation that doing something as simple as gathering your army next to the action feels like work.
I really like Civ4's game mechanics, but pic related makes me bored to death without even playing it.
Most of the effort here needs very little thinking, but so much clicking.
And it's always about the military. Managing a modern city should be a complex task, but moving riflemen still takes 95% of your clicks like it's a damn RTS.
What are strategy games that don't spiral out of control and become a chore before you win?
I think Sins of a solar empire and Supcom FA do a decent job at it, but I welcome more suggestions.
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that guy is well past the domination limit
Domination limit and vassalage is what makes civ iv really tolerable for me. You only need to take so much land and when it comes to fighting civs just knock them down a peg and get them to capitulate and boom. No need to actually paint the map. I find that modern wars in IV only end up against one other civ because that’s all I need to kill to win.
>What are strategy games that don't spiral out of control and become a chore before you win?
I don't really think there is such a thing. Eventually you hit a point where you can no longer lose and it's just a grind towards the victory screen. There's a reason why people forfeit after a certain point in competitive RTS games or chess matches. You know when you're beaten.
That's a good point anon, would you say the player also has to know when to quit when he thinks he's winning against an AI that never forfeits?
I wouldn't say we HAVE to know when to quit when facing an AI, it's sort of just a natural "okay I'm bored now" feeling and then start a new game.
For the same reason, human players often just start a new game if they get their asses handed to them in a war against the AI where they lose a lot of their cities/progress.
I've never really felt the unit micro in Civ IV to be overwhelming, even with huge armies in the late game. Group actions and rally points help to keep it manageable. If anything, contrary to your post, late game city micro is what really takes up most of my attention, what with constantly changing worked tiles, specialists, rushing production, etc. I find that to be one of the main reasons the game is fun for me though, so your mileage may vary.
Against the Storm has impressed me by actually just having the game end once you hit that point where everything's stabilized and you're just knocking off objectives.
then stop playing against ai lmfao
Both games in the AI War series.
SupCom, especially with the LOUD mod.
Factorio and the likes, if you're into that.
play Rhye's, a decent amount of UHVs are fun until the end
This, the biggest appeal of Rhyes & Fall and Dawn of Civilization to me is that it prevents the inherent Civ problem of basically winning very early on and spending the rest of the game just mopping up. Even if you form a super strong empire early on it's actually challenging trying to keep up with stability and rising competitive powers. It can be gay as frick in that new civs will just get the freely steal your cities but it works to keep things interesting.
i'm going to be honest, i don't mind lategame in total war. it's just a matter of adjusting your mindset for me.
early game is the best part for me too, don't get me wrong. it's intense, hectic and it keeps you on the ropes for a good long while.
but when you've stabilized, when you've grown huge, and when it comes to the late game and i'm no longer in danger of dying, there's still fun to be had.
at that stage of the game, i think of a war against one of the ai factions as a short military operation. i plan it out (which routes i'm going to take and the sequence you're going to take the ai strongpoints in), i devote the smallest amount of troops i think i'm going to need and i go for it.
sure, you're never going to lose your empire regardless, but there's always the chance you're going to face setbacks. the enemy might outmaneuver you and strike at an exposed front because they had an army where you didn't expect, one of your stacks might end up facing more forces than you expected and get overwhelmed, leaving you having to scramble to fill the gap in your army disposition, etc.
however one thing that's been bugging be in some recent total war titles is that by the time endgame arrives, there are no longer any coherent factions around to fight. i'm thinking specifically of attila and warhammer (i've only played the first one). when atilla/chaos come around, they raze half the map, leaving you basically alone in a wasteland as soon as you've defeated the big bad. this only applies to these two total wars, thankfully and not all titles.
Good gameplay in this type of game is having to make interesting choice (early every choice is meaningfull), when the end game arrive a lot of action aren't choice but just boring action, the ratio number of click/choice to order your army in late game is near 0 when it is around 1 in early.
>so much clicking
Try autobattlers.
I think that Imperialism does this really well. Once you're a great power the other nations basically recognise this and submit, provided nobody can reasonably challenge you. The game's relatively simple mechanics make the computer players behave very sanely.
map looks like the game of thrones world
I have grappled with all these issues. I thought about how to make a strategy game that avoids these types of pitfalls. Best I came up with is something akin to Spore, where you graduate to next stage, rendering the scale of previous stage insignificant to current stage. Thus you do not get bogged down with Minutiae.
So Imagine Solar System scale. You start on your home planet, but the home planet is divided into areas. Not all are settled. Not all settled are friendly even. You get technology to colonize areas of your solar system. Bigger planets have more areas, moons have 1 or 2. Asteroid with 1. You spend some time expanding here and fighting, researching. Once you master you graduate to full planetary stage. You become capable of administratively controlling entire planets. And the smaller celestial bodies are just appendages of the big planets. You start to travel to nearby solar systems. After that you start to control entire solar systems, everything on smaller scales gets abstracted. Ships no longer even hit your radar, you just build entire fleets. So on and so forth.
dawn of war
civ 5
vanilla
no city states
>Games that are fun until the end
veganal sex
Again, it's a matter of choosing a dumb victory condition like "eliminate all enemies". Do what the excellent design of Emperor of the Fading Suns did and have a victory condition that pushes you to struggle for victory against the odds rather than do boring chores after everything has been decided.