Beastro
Arcane
- Joined
- May 11, 2015
- Messages
- 7,952
I have played a fair share of stragety games in my time (AoE 1-3, Medieval 2, EU3, Vicky 2, Civ, etc.), and I must say that my favorite part of playing strategy games is the building/turtling aspect. I love the micro-managing and watching all the numbers go higher and higher as I develop my cities/units/whatever more than I like bum-rushing my opponent in the first part of the game.
BANISHED
Duh. How comes nobody even mentioned that game yet? Just drop the rest and go play it, if you're into building.
One where map-painting isn't the best or primary goal?
Even better - you don't have to paint map at all. There are no enemies or combat in Banished.
If you want smth similiar, but with a bit of combat involved - can't go wrong with Rimworld. The other suggestions like Settlers/Stronghold/Inspirations/whatever are gud and all, but they are all more or less classical strategies that just happen to have a deep building aspect in them. While Banished and Rimworld are builders.
Dwarf Fortress doesn't need to be mentioned, I suppose.
And also Dominions 4sorry, reflex
Came here to mention Banished and lament it's lack of combat.
It really needs a mod with it, put the community are militant pacifists and it's the ultimate taboo thing to bring up with them.
Thing is, the combat doesn't have to large scale or central, just have it there as an added element and model it after the early wars between the English and Indians, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Powhatan_Wars.
The thing about the game is, it's so good with resources that it would be perfect to make the player avoid large scale combat and instead have both player and AI work on low intensity skirmishing to fuck up each other up and ruin their ability to feed one another until one collapses.
I do recommend Rimworld, but it's heavily reliant on modding to make it better and even then the games not very hard. I'd advise anyone playing it to play it enough to get acquainted with the mechanics, the download the Hardcore SK mod that adds tons more complexity to a very simple game. https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=12996.0
The only thing I can say that is still not there with Rimworld is that it's still focused on base defence, which gets old in time and the game really needs the ability for you to send out your own raiding parties that would really add to the RPing aspect of the game - like having a colony of cannibals who don't grow their own food and instead rely on raiding to bring home the bacon.
There's also good material for an expanded sequel where you work to build different settlements and take over a planet in competition with other powers, you could have something like TWs turn based over world that zooms into real time combat. The world maps that already exist give the feel that that could even be done in the game already.