Cool pc strategy game

In This Article. The fourth installment in the Age of Empires real-time strategy game series, developed by Relic Entertainment, focused on historic events set in the Middle Ages.

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Due to the long-form nature of a campaign, Neptune's Pride will live with you, needling at the back of your mind, and you'll find yourself switching strategies in the anxious early hours of the morning, betraying friends and playing into the hands of your enemies.

The Banner Saga is an epic turn-based strategy series whose story spans across three separate games. While The Banner Saga 2 is arguably the best one in the trilogy, introducing more enemy types and classes to keep things interesting, this is very much the second act of the game's wider narrative, so it's definitely worth playing right from the start. A disaster-strewn trek across a dying land, multiple, oft-changing perspectives, awful decisions with terrible consequences made at every turn, more a tale of a place than of the individual characters within it.

A few punches are pulled, perhaps, but The Banner Saga has far more substance than might have been expected from a game which seems so very art-led. For five seconds at a time, Frozen Synapse allows you to feel like a tactical genius.

You provide orders for your team of soldiers and then watch as enemies waltz right into your line of fire, or find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, right on the killing floor. The next five seconds might flip everything around though, leaving you feeling like a dolt. The beauty of Mode 7's clean and colourful game is that it plays on confidence and intuition rather than detailed analysis. Each 1v1 round of battle takes place on a randomised map, both participants draw up their orders and then execute simultaneously.

Maybe you'll have to take on the aggressive role, knowing that this particular enemy commander prefers to set up an ambush and wait. In a few short minutes, you'll perform flanking manoeuvres, lay down covering fire, attempt to breach and clear a room, and watch in horror as everything goes wrong again. But when a plan comes together? You're a genius again, for at least five seconds more.

Six Ages works as a strategy game because it's about influencing people, not just accumulating resources. Cattle and horses and food are vital, sure, but they're not everything, and you need to gauge many things that can't be counted. How the Grey Wings feel about you isn't presented as a number or bar, but what your traders and diplomats have to say. You're leading a village in a dangerous land of magic, religious conflict, and looming environmental crisis. Yes, it has bags of personality as your advisors snark and ramble and complain, and you explore the alien values of this colourful, yet malleable culture, but there are hard strategic decisions to make every year, even if the decision is to stay the course.

Success is about making good decisions in its many events, but also directing your clan's long term efforts behind the scenes. Where do you explore and when? Will your precious magic supplement your crafter this year, or is it time to risk a ride to the gods' realm to secure a special blessing? And those decisions can never be fully divorced from the wider situation. The ideal solution might be obvious but unaffordable, or contradict another plan you have going.

Measuring all these political, economic, military, religious, and sometimes personal factors up against your long-term plans is a storytelling delight and a cerebral challenge all at once. Creative Assembly's historical Total War games have been going from strength to strength in recent years, and 's Three Kingdoms is arguably the best one yet. Set during China's titular Three Kingdoms period in the second and third century and based on the fourteenth century novel Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, this is the most dramatic and personal Total War game yet, making for some thrilling, real-time combat and some truly incredible stories.

For the most part, it's classic Total War. A large part of your time will be spent building towns, recruiting soldiers and moving your armies across a map of China as you try and unite your shattered land, but what sets Three Kingdoms apart is its intense focus on your individual clanspeople, giving each campaign a very human and emotional core from which to build your strategy from.

Never before have we felt so invested in our Total War soldiers, and victory has never tasted sweeter or defeat more gut-wrenching as a result. Sure, it ends up leaning more toward the 'romance' side of history than the cold, hard factual take we're used to seeing from a Total War game, but for us, it's all the better for it.

If you're new to the series, Three Kingdoms is also the best place to start by a country mile, as both the campaign and its combat are easier to understand than ever before. Reinvigorating a sub-genre left dormant since the glory days of Commandos and Desperados, the German studio remind us of the pleasures of shuffling tiny murderers through dioramas, under the watchful - not to mention very green, and triangular - eyes of nervous bandits.

A couple of vital tweaks see the cowboy-flavoured variation win out over the ninja adventure: for starters, the ability to fully freeze the action and program in multiple character moves for grand coordinated takedowns. While a key feature of Shadow Tactics, time continued there, making this the more surgical application. Achieve it without mind control darts and we salute you. By allowing the player to hand over the reigns of responsibility, Distant Worlds makes everything possible.

It's space strategy on a grand scale that mimics the realities of rule better than almost any other game in existence. And it does that through the simple act of delegation. Rather than insisting that you handle the build queues, ship designs and military actions throughout your potentially vast domain, Distant Worlds allows you to automate any part of the process.

If you'd like to sit back and watch, you can automate everything, from individual scout ships to colonisation and tourism. If you're military-minded, let the computer handle the economy and pop on your admiral's stripes. As well as allowing the game to operate on an absurd scale without demanding too much from the player in the way of micromanagement, Distant Worlds' automation also peels back the layers to reveal the working of the machine. It's a space game with an enormous amount of possibilities and by allowing you to play with the cogs, it manages to convince that all of those possibilities work out just as they should.

Europa Universalis IV is far better now than it was at release. Over the years, Paradox had started to develop a reputation for launching games that required strong post-release support.

Even though that's no longer the case and the internal development studio's teams are now in impeccable condition on day one, the strong post-release support continues. Now it's in the form of free patches and paid-for expansions. The Europa series feels like the tent-pole at the centre of Paradox's grand strategy catalogue. Covering the period from to , it allows players to control almost any nation in the world, and then leaves them to create history.

A huge amount of the appeal stems from the freedom — EU IV is a strategic sandbox, in which experimenting with alternate histories is just as if not more entertaining than attempting to pursue any kind of victory.

Not that there is such a thing as a hardcoded victory. Providing the player with freedom is just one part of the Paradox philosophy though. EU IV is also concerned with delivering a believable world, whether that's in terms of historical factors or convincing mechanics. With a host of excellent expansions and an enormous base game as its foundation, this IS one of the most credible and fascinating worlds in gaming.

A duck and a boar walk into a bar Of course, walking in anywhere is ill advised in Mutant Year Zero, a game that hinges on you sneaking through large playpens to choose your angle of attack or pick off stragglers to thin the horde before noisy turn-based tactics commence. How many games in this list can claim that?

Watching expert players at work is bewildering, as the clicks per minute rise and the whole game falls into strange and sometimes unreadable patterns. According to the StarCraft Wiki, a proficient player can perform approximately productive actions per minute.

StarCraft II may be included here because it has perfected an art form that only a dedicated few can truly appreciate, but its campaigns contain a bold variety of missions, and bucket loads of enjoyably daft lore. Though its dour single-player campaign is a big ol' nope in terms of storytelling, most recent expansion Legacy of the Void has an Archon mode that even offers two-player coop, so you can share all of those actions per minute with a chum.

Technically, this game is more like an absolutely titanic piece of DLC for the original Total War: Warhammer than an actual sequel.

While it has its own set of factions and its own campaign map, its true glory is arguably in its Mortal Empires campaign, which mashes together the maps and faction sets for both games for a beautifully bloated experience. It would be worth the asking price for that alone.

As well as adding a bewildering variety of fantastical unit types, from dragons to giant spiders and towering undead crabs yes, mate , Warhammers I and II fundamentally changed the dynamics of the battlefield from their historical stablemates. Hero units are of dramatic importance to armies, capable of holding their own against hundreds of bog-standard troops, while a robustly designed magic system allows for game-changing battlefield effects to be deployed, at the cost of yet more micromanagement.

At their worst, these remakes and remasters are simply the bones of games left long behind by the evolution of the strategy genre. AoE2 was the high water mark of the 2D, isometric-ish, gather-and-mangle format. It was superbly balanced, perfectly paced, and offered just the right mix of economic and military play. Definitive Edition, however, is more than just AoE2's glammed-up zombie.

It's a giant sexy Frankenstein, with the contents of five separate expansions four of which were originally made by extremely talented fans , and a whole castle full of brand new content, sewn onto the body of the original game and no, you're wrong: Frankenstein was the monster's name.

The scientist was called Microsoft. Oh, and they made it look utterly beautiful too, and added dozens of little UI and control improvements to circumvent annoyances such as having to manually reseed farms. With 35 civilisations to play as, single-player missions over 24 campaigns, more multiplayer maps than we can be arsed to count, and even a built-in training mode to get people up to speed for multiplayer, it's more than double the size of the original game, and hundreds of hours' worth of fun even before you start fighting other people.

If there had never been an AoE2, and this had been released out of nowhere in , it would have blown people's minds. Long live the age of king s. A few years ago, claiming that Mark of the Ninja was anything other than Klei's masterpiece would have been considered rude at best. That the studio have created an even more inventive, intelligent and enjoyable game already seems preposterous, but Invisible, Inc.

And, splendidly, Invisible, Inc. It's the kind of game where you throw your hands in the air at the start of a turn, convinced that all is lost, and map out a perfect plan ten minutes later.

The reinvention of the familiar sneaking and stealing genre as a game of turn-based tactics deserves a medal for outstanding bravery, and Invisible, Inc. Everything from the brief campaign structure to the heavily customizable play styles has been designed to encourage experimentation as well as creating the aforementioned tension.

This is a game which believes that information is power, and the screen will tell you everything you need to know to survive. The genius of Invisible, Inc.

In the beginning, there was Total Annihilation. The beginning, in this instance, is , the year that Duke Nukem Forever went into production. Cavedog's RTS went large, weaving enormous sci-fi battles and base-building around a central Commander unit that is the mechanical heart of the player's army. Supreme Commander followed ten years later. Total Annihilation designer Chris Taylor was at the helm for the spiritual successor and decided there was only one way to go.

Initially, it's the scale that impresses. Dozens of Hong Kong officials are sent into quarantine after a birthday party. Look Ahead to , at the Very Least. Newer Posts Older Posts Home.

Subscribe to: Posts Atom. Labels braking news cbn news cbn news CBNNews. About Me Unknown View my complete profile. Syrian survivors hope the verdict paves the way fo Biden is set to deploy military staff to support h A statement from Djokovic raises more questions ab Un acces The Government Denied Pundit Accountability Uganda reopens schools, but what was the cost of a A Times reporter recently traveled to the front li Additionally, if you've bought the first game, you can combine it with this one to create a massive, mega-campaign called Mortal Empires.

This is the perfect time to grab both games and get caught up and prepared for Total War: Warhammer 3. This game may have aged visually but the mechanics are still incredibly engaging, providing tons of different factions to use as you carve out a medieval kingdom to rival history. Install your own Pope, declare Crusades and crush any rival forces on your way to victory. This is also a great starting point if you want to see how Total War games have evolved over time.

Another popular Total War entry is Shogun 2. Set in Japan, you'll have your choice of the disparate clans as you work to dethrone the Shogun. Deploy armies of Samurai and subvert enemy intelligence with Geishas, while also determining how traditional or open to foreign culture — and advanced weapons — Japan will be.

Aliens are real and they are coming for Earth. You'll need to put together an elite team, build a base and do research while pulling off high stakes missions against an unknown threat and keeping the nations funding you happy. No pressure, right? This TBS title is brutal and unrelenting, making it all the more satisfying when you pull off the perfect mission. Aliens have invaded and humanity has been conquered. Now, you're not leading Earth's defenses, you're leading its last resistance movement.

Take the fight to the alien overlords and discover what they're planning before it's too late. Samuel Tolbert is a freelance games journalist.