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Equendil -> RE: Time to buy? (7/31/2010 8:25:24 PM)
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In my opinion, nothing beats Civ IV in terms of strategy and variety. On the higher difficulty levels, you *need* to pick an objective, define a clear strategy towards that objective, and carefully use your resources to support that strategy and not get distracted over expanding before your economy can support it, building everything everywhere, researching every tech, waging pointless wars, etc. You will have to carefully plan your research path, specialize your cities, trade techs you'd rather keep for yourself, give away settlements to convince an AI to end a war or start one, defend your one source of iron or whatever to the death, the AI will strike you hard at the worst time, and playing conquest on an archipelago map is definitively a very different game from trying to score a cultural win on a "pangea" one. There isn't a one-size-fits-all military unit, techs bring widely different advantages, as do buildings, wonders, government types, etc.
I have yet to find another 4x game that even come remotely close to it, though some are pretty interesting in other ways (Europa Universalis comes to mind). I tend to quickly lose interest in games like the Total War series, or Galactic Civilization II, where very little actual strategy is involved. Total war because it's mostly about battles (where achieving local superiority and cause the ennemy to rout is generally way too easy for tactics to truly develop), GalCivII because I found there isn't much to it beyond expanding as fast as possible (and luck, planet bonuses can be silly high). That said, they're not bad games at all, well designed and everything.
So anyway, DW belongs to the more "straight-forward" sort of 4X games in my opinion. Entertaining for sure, but not very strategic. A bit like GalCivII, it's mostly about expanding fast and building the most powerful military in the galaxy. Still, because research and to a lesser extend your economy do not directly derive from the size of your empire, because logistic (fuel) can become an issue in the vastness of space, interesting situations can arise (or you can make them arise out of starting parameters). Ship design, just like in GalCiv, is an interesting gimmick as well. If you enjoyed GalCiv, I can see no reason you wouldn't enjoy DW, definitively a nice space themed 4X game.
As for being a polished game... DW is a bit of a resource hog, though that shouldn't be a problem on a modern PC, the patches have definitively improved a lot of things, and the developer(s?) is clearly working on ironing out the remaining issues, so I'd say, go for it.
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