It’s surprising to see a licensed game to be available for free, considering that most would get the game out of name recognition alone, yet we have the good fortune to have this in our hands. The board game Risk comes to life from your coffee table to your monitor. Not to mention the massive amount of content available, considering that this game is free, I have to say it’s pretty impressive the number of hours you can dedicate to this strategy game and still be nowhere close to scratching the surface of all you can do. They also seem to be heavily involved with the community and the game itself, which is a nice change of pace for the gaming industry. It’s easy to tell that the developers have put tremendous effort into creating a great experience for every player. The smooth gameplay, combined with the physics-based combat, the way the player can interact with the terrain really makes every battle feel organic, intense, and epic. There are a lot of quality of life features that set this game apart from others. Not only that, but Zero-K also provides a lot of freedom that most RTS don’t. Compared to a lot of other RTS games, this one is pretty balanced.
Thats why I found the early Totalwar games so refreshing as they combined turn based strategic play with realtime battle resolution which in my opinion is the perfect combination.Zero-K is a free-to-play Open Source game that has clear inspirations on Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander. That's not been my experience of hex-based games, my enduring memory is of careful counter/token placement to optimise combat odds and the deliberate sacrifice of weak counters elsewhere to force the AI to waste its attacks. Does 35 accuracy make sense? lets try it. As opposed to continous open map style games where perhaps the game devs often cant calculate exactly whats happening. Careful number crunching is kind of annoying, but if the game dev is doing the number crunching himself, you can actually eliminate that as a threat. Having said that I much prefer turn base campaign movement, and hate games like Universalis and Age of Empires that have real time strategic movement. Lots of careful number crunching to get the optimum combat odds and expliots like leaving supply wagons in critical positions to break up enemy attacks. My general opinion is that they are open to expliots and abuse by players. Originally posted by Didz:Used to play a lot of AH boardgames and Talonsoft online boardgames. Personally I had enough of this type after a while with The Operational Art of War. Also too time-consuming compared to active pause.īut don't worry about hex-based games, they are still being developed. It just looks natural and "one moves / other watches" model is just stupid simplification necessary in archaic, pre-computer and early-computer eras. Scalable time flow with active pause is so much better in terms of ergonomics, perception and logic that I simply cannot play turn-based games anymore. It also goes to other genrees, such as RPG - last turn-based RPG that I've enjoyed was Betrayal at Krondor, later games such as Daggerfall or Baldurs Gate (and similar) proved that it can be done better.
#Hex strategy games on steam series
Turns are a no-go for me, even turn-based campaign in TW series is IMO biggest flaw of this series. I've played so many turn-based games that currently I hate turn-based games of any sort.
Games such as Close Combat series, Paradox grand strategies starting with Europa Universalis, Total War series and many more proved that strategy or tactical game could be done better than with turns and hexes. But with increasing power there was no point in keeping to that style.
Early computers couldn't move forward due too lack of computing power. Honestly, turn-based hex-grid games were good as boardgames.