2 reactions
Games with lots of low-stakes battles
I've been playing a lot of Raiders of the North Sea lately, and I'm finding that I really enjoy the overarching game loop of "get some crew and food and GO A-VIKING!!!1!!... and then some of your crew dies and you spent all your food so you go back to town, build up, and GO A-VIKING AGAIN!". Like yeah, you have to go raiding, and you take some losses, but it's whatever.
After reading another post this morning about games with space battles, it got me to wondering if there are more games out there with this feel. Some examples I can think of that are close (which of course came up in the other post) would be:
Twilight Imperium: especially in 4e, you *can* earn enough resources to build a fleet, throw it at someone, blow everything up, and then build another fleet. But mostly, fleets are better used for pointy-stick diplomacy and threat deterrent, and TI is more of a diplomatic and political space opera than a battles game... and of course plays in 4-16 hours.
Eclipse: I haven't played 2e, but in 1e you could reliably have a couple fun battles per game. Again though, they were expensive, and there were usually better things to do with your fleet.
Space Empires 4X: Pretty close! Having the maintenance cost of your fleet be so high definitely cuts into your ability to continue producing units, and often either a) a 2p game is short enough you don't get many battles, or b) a 3p game can drag on, and be more about tentative pokes and a surgical strike than just throwing units into the grinder. Not knocking this game at all, but it's not quite the vibe I'm describing.
Total War: Rome: honestly this one captures the feel I'm looking for pretty closely. You get so much money per round that you can throw a couple armies together pretty easy, and then you've got nothing better to do with em than chuck em at your neighbor. Nobody really takes it personally, cos they're all doing the same thing. Once you've got the feel for the battles, they aren't even *all that* fiddly. Lord Almighty though, that rulebook is an absolute disaster, and for my group, has rendered a cool game nearly unplayable.
So I don't know if there's a golden squirrel game out there, that has that perfect combination of being not too rules-heavy, not too tactically intense, ideally seats up to like five or six, and is kind of light-heartedly punchy. It might actually feel kind of like a MOBA, where you're just throwing waves of units out to push a battle line. I think Adrenaline might have kind of the right feel, but I haven't had the chance to try it yet (and of course it's one character rather than battalions). What do you think, do you have a game you like that does this?
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I've been playing a lot of Raiders of the North Sea lately, and I'm finding that I really enjoy the overarching game loop of "get some crew and food and GO A-VIKING!!!1!!... and then some of your crew dies and you spent all your food so you go back to town, build up, and GO A-VIKING AGAIN!". Like yeah, you have to go raiding, and you take some losses, but it's whatever.
After reading another post this morning about games with space battles, it got me to wondering if there are more games out there with this feel. Some examples I can think of that are close (which of course came up in the other post) would be:
Twilight Imperium: especially in 4e, you *can* earn enough resources to build a fleet, throw it at someone, blow everything up, and then build another fleet. But mostly, fleets are better used for pointy-stick diplomacy and threat deterrent, and TI is more of a diplomatic and political space opera than a battles game... and of course plays in 4-16 hours.
Eclipse: I haven't played 2e, but in 1e you could reliably have a couple fun battles per game. Again though, they were expensive, and there were usually better things to do with your fleet.
Space Empires 4X: Pretty close! Having the maintenance cost of your fleet be so high definitely cuts into your ability to continue producing units, and often either a) a 2p game is short enough you don't get many battles, or b) a 3p game can drag on, and be more about tentative pokes and a surgical strike than just throwing units into the grinder. Not knocking this game at all, but it's not quite the vibe I'm describing.
Total War: Rome: honestly this one captures the feel I'm looking for pretty closely. You get so much money per round that you can throw a couple armies together pretty easy, and then you've got nothing better to do with em than chuck em at your neighbor. Nobody really takes it personally, cos they're all doing the same thing. Once you've got the feel for the battles, they aren't even *all that* fiddly. Lord Almighty though, that rulebook is an absolute disaster, and for my group, has rendered a cool game nearly unplayable.
So I don't know if there's a golden squirrel game out there, that has that perfect combination of being not too rules-heavy, not too tactically intense, ideally seats up to like five or six, and is kind of light-heartedly punchy. It might actually feel kind of like a MOBA, where you're just throwing waves of units out to push a battle line. I think Adrenaline might have kind of the right feel, but I haven't had the chance to try it yet (and of course it's one character rather than battalions). What do you think, do you have a game you like that does this?
#games
source
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