u/RepulsiveAnything635

Kill the enemy lord, keep your own alive. It's such an elegant way to make the win/lose conditions as clear cut as they can be in a strategy game, and TBH I still think no game commits to this as fully as Stronghold does. (Its closest “descendant” Diplomacy is not an Option also does it, except there’s no king, just the castle keep you need to protect)

Of course Age of Empires 2 has its Regicide mode, which is basically this exact idea. It’s kind of fun? I guess, but it never hits that same capture the king feeling. Maybe it just works better in city building games? where you can see the physical barriers separating you from the enemies outside, AKA from utter annihilation.

Warcraft 3 and some others were also very hero-centric (also who remembers Warlords Battlecry 3? I think that’s the game that actually jumpstarted this trend), even though killing the enemy hero was rarely the literal loss condition and they just had well designed heroes. So this comparison is kind of off. In Stronghold your king is just a stronger unit, but it’s a bad idea to ever use him in combat.

I’ve just been thinking about this and (maybe just personal experience) but I don’t remember many true capture the king style RTS - were they just more numerous in my head? What strategy games revolve around protecting your leader and hunting theirs?

Insert that caption of that Tyrion quote - I got a soft spot for cripples, bastards, and broken things. 

I mean that in the most literal way here though. I love crafting and repairing and scavenging and dumpster diving in games. The most hardcore experience I had was probably in Stalker GAMMA which basically dumpster diver, Slavic tinkering man the Game ™ and I loved that part of it. Or maybe I just love ductape, I don’t know.

What I know is I have a craving for a game that’s about tinkering with busted electronics, coaxing dead machines back to life with my own two hands. My Summer Car is probably the peak of all peaks for the realism it gave me, “world’s hardest roguelike” some call it, and as a driver obviously I’ve been amazed by how much I DON’T know about cars, lmao

It doesn't have to be realistic though, and I really don’t care about the genre label either. Even stuff like Loftia for the while it was in Beta scratched some of that itch. Admittedly my gf was the one who got me to play it with her, but gathering plastic, wires, all sorts of trash and then using that to create a sustainable farm and for crafting was kinda wholesome NGL, so that crafting element was spot on in how it was executed. But not much of actual repairing/tinkering though, more baseline good crafting.

Basically, I want something where I can take a wrecked, useless thing and patiently making it work again. Or turn the parts into something else, something functional and beautiful in its own way.

What would you recommend me? Beside My Summer Car, obviously…

Been chasing a specific kind of game and every search just turns up the opposite for some reason, so I'm asking here. (the AI slop era has made searching for specific themes painful, as keyword searches just give you literal sloppedy slop that doesn’t even have a connection to what I want… but excuse this rant)

I'm after games that refuse to make violence fun and make the whole thing feel as grim and pointless as it actually is, in reality. The first one that opened my eyes was Spec Ops The Line. Bolding the game just in case someone doesn’t mention it out of reflex. I played it, I loved it, and it changed the way I view shooters. Another of this kind is This War of Mine, which I remember vividly years after playing it. You're not a soldier, you're civilians trying to survive a siege, and the game is built so that every violent option costs you something that doesn't grow back. 

One other I'd point to is Hollow Home, which is a Disco Elysium like narrative game set during the siege of Mariupol in Ukraine, so it hits extremely close to home, as in geographically close (I’m from Poland). Less about survival mechanics and more about the human texture of a city under bombardement and the small awful decisions ordinary people get forced into. Same vibes as TWOM but different genres completely, yet both games leave you feeling like you've witnesed something terrible to behold rather than won anything.

Basically I'm hoping to find more of that thematic honesty, games where violence is shown for the ruin it causes rather than the thrill. 

It doesn't have to be mechanically similar to any of these games I mentioned, I want the underlying anti-war themes they espouse. How war and killing are horrors to be reckoned with, not just gratuitous fun as it is so often the case with games, right.

It can be any genre really, as long as it has the guts to let me, the player, sit in discomfort and think about that I’m witnessing.

The current state of the genre is great, everyone agrees. Path of Exile (2) is the maximalist complex best that you can probably sink the most hours in, Grim Dawn carrying the Titan Quest legacy forward and getting a new DLC soon (and TQ2 is getting new acts semi regularly), Last Epoch still there in the middle ground with deterministic crafting that actually respects your time and just great for shorter runs in between other games.

But what I find interesting is the number of ARPGs that were legitimately awesome that just don't get talked about anymore. I don't mean bad game that flopped, but those that had their moment, had ideas that were ahead of their time in some cases, and then just kind of faded out.

Sacred 1 and 2 will always be my prime examples. That game was doing open world ARPG before open world was a checkbox on every publisher's feature list, and the build variety across seven classes was ridiculous - the Temple Guardian was probably my favorite though and it’s one of the most unique fantasies (you’re literally a robot Egyptian god) that played completely differently depending on which aspect you specced into. The console ports were shitty though and the PC version needed community patches to really shine, but the ambition was there and the people who played it loved it. What came afterward truly buried the series though…

I also remember another one called Nox, and that one got absolutely buried by timing. Westwood released it in 2000, basically the same window as Diablo 2, and it never had a chance. Completely different game though, much tighter, with a fog-of-war system that made the different playthroughs feel truly different. I've met maybe three people who've played it and all of them remember it fondly.

What are some others you remember that were better than good but just aren't part of the ARPG conversation anymore (ain’t been a long time in some cases) ?

Unique, exceptional, one of a kind, super stylized, distinct... I can't really pick a catch all adjective to describe what I'm after but it's all of that in a can.

Also, let me just mention the legendary game that is Okami. That's the first game that comes to mind that impressed me on PS2 with how the art style interacts with the gameplay and, in a way, IS the very gameplay itself, with the brush strokes you make being the main way you interact and change the world, fight and so on. It's the perfect synergy of unique art style + unique gameplay all combined into one.

Another that comes to mind is Cuphead, the only game to take the vintage Disney style and turn it into something super unique, and that rubber hose style hasn't been replicated to the same effect. The only game that comes close is perhaps Croak (one of rare demos I played for 15+ hours so I could 100% it) but that's only because Croak has some of the same artists that Cuphead had, but here again - it's not the same style, just the same approach to style but the result is a wholly unique look with a feeling that you can't replicate if only something else was off about the stylization of the game.

Some others off the top of my head

• Journey
• Gris
• Kentucky Route Zero
• Child of Light
• Hyper Light Drifter

What are some other games like this that you would recommend me just because of how well the art design flows with the story/gameplay (basically makes the game what it is)?

I’ve been playing random lobbies for a while and it’s absolutely chaotic, in good and bad ways. Same as any random multiplayer, you don’t know what to expect and how meta people will go, whether they’ll just mess around or if they’ll just brute power play to win. 

It’s alright but that lack of a coordinated effort to make one *experience* is what’s missing for me. And I need a premade group for what I want out of multiplayer, except (other than this sub) I don’t really know where to look for people. I use some apps like Gameram to find premade groups for Darktide and Helldivers 2, but for something as  specific as themed matches, I’m thinking there must be some niche I don’t know about.

I also don’t know if it’s just my luck but I haven’t had success on Disc either. Somehow all people I chatted up either end up ghosting me or the date (of our match) gets pushed, they add some more people, then they change the whole idea behind it and disregard what we were talking about. Not a reflection of the community since I had mostly good times but… no luck yet in actually setting up a premade match.

When I say roleplay, I of course mean creating factions that are well thought-out, have their own backgrounds and context for existing in a given setting, and of course being appropriate for the map. A kind of set of self imposed limitations on each of us for the sake of making a more fun game (so no BS stuff that just holds you back). 

More specifically, I want to play a fully underground themed run. Partially cuz I want to finally get to use TOME OF THE DUNGEON DEPTHS, the best named tome in the game but partially because I already have an idea in my head about the setting and its implications, and a postapocalyptic cannibalistic Moleman faction just ready for that playthrough. 

TBH I probably just need to get more IRL friends who also play AoW4, because the more I’ve been playing it - the more I’m certain this is one of those particular 4x games that are completely different when you play them with your pals.

I binged hard on Battle Brothers in the previous few months, my first runs with mods and I don't know how but I racked up a combined 700 hours (more then double of what I had before my mod-less runs) and I'm in that rut where it's all about minimaxing for the late-late game ruins.

It's too much, like something I know I plan on returning to but if I went on I KNOW that I would just end up hate-playing instead of playing as intended for fun.

But - hear me out - I still want to play a highly tactical, highly strategic squad based game and preferably one in a similar setting but a bit more lite-fied and casual? Somehow all the ones that are looking interesting right know (notably Happy Bastards, which I already burned through their current demo) and others that are still TBA like Space Scum, also a superb demo experience.

What do you have to recommend me? Is there something similar to Final Fantasy Tactics perhaps - I'm open to JRPGs but I'm currently PC locked so my choices might be kinda slim.

Thank you in advance yall!

I was playing a SC match today that turned into a half hours slogfest of us just moving capped armies around the map. We were annoyingly avoiding each other because neither me or the other dude wanted to risk losing the game on one bad engagement and it was more like a test of patience than actual RTS gaming with a capital G. Although truth be told, I did win in the end because the guy kind of gave up and walked into my siege tanks, lmao.

This really made me miss the superweapons from the old C&C games (especially Generals). In most games I feel like you just get better units in the late game, but the map/environment itself doesn’t change. Honestly, just giving both players better units doesn't do much to stop a stalemate. If we both just build our giant deathballs, they basically cancel each other out, which just makes you even more terrified to actually commit to a fight.

Anyway, I keep thinking it would be cool to see more environmental hazards or shrinking maps in RTS to force a conclusion. Company of Heroes kind of does this with the Victory Point drain, which puts a hard stop to a stalemate. I liked the demo for Atre Dominance Wars where the map itself literally starts falling apart in the late game, destroying safe zones and forcing everyone into the middle. Maybe not the best example since this one is RTS with pause, but the merge was an interesting mechanic in the way it incentivizes you to be always on the move. Even something like Northgard uses brutal winters and map events to naturally punish you if you just try to sit in your base forever. 

I would love to see more games try something drastic to force an end instead of just letting us mill about, caps or no caps on army size.