are there any strategy/4x games that remain engaging in mid to late game?
i love total war and civ v and more recently endless legend, but all of them suffer from late game boredom. at a certain point, it becomes abundantly clear that nobody poses a threat to you anymore, and it just becomes a tedious slog of managing a million cities and steamrolling what little sad resistance the AI can still throw at you
the best part of all these games is the first 30-50 turns, when you're still on roughly equal footing with everybody else, trying to scrape out your empire, and the skirmishes are (relatively) small.
what games keep that feeling throughout? or how do you keep your total war/4X games interesting?
bump
>>332709146
idk i think all 4x games suffer from this, its really bad in civ 5 because even if multiple civs are still at roughly even power levels almost every civ's unique units have obsoleted so everyone's pretty much the same, BNW helped this a little bit with the ideologies but it didn't do enough. Endless legend fares a bit better since the civs are much more fundamentally unique from one another but I've always had problems really getting into that game.
Have you ever tried Alpha Centauri? Its pretty difficult to get into now because the ui is very dated but it does manage to deal with this problem because every civ isn't just unique from one another they're so focused that they're basically all pursuing different victory types.
>>332709146
I don't really have any recommendations but ways I've enjoyed Total War/Civ is usually through co-op campaigns with friends or coming up with weird restrictions for myself. Though I do agree that endgame is a mindless slog of stomping peasants
You could try and venture into gsg's but if your problem is boredom you might not be very fond of them.
>>332709897
i have enjoyed a couple co-op campaigns in shogun 2 and civ v with a friend, but it can be frustrating if you don't start out near each other. often it can just end up exactly the same as playing on your own, with the added bonus of having to sit through somebody else's turn.
still better than single player though i guess
>>332709146
A good rule of thumb with 4X games is if the mid/late game is too easy then you're playing on too low of a difficulty.
I suggest offworld trading company. The games are forced to a short timespan but are highly strategic, the end result being you sacrifice some comfy for excellent pacing.
If you want competition and challenge then you need a real multiplayer community.
Dominions 4 has some of the issues you describe sometimes but it actually ramps up into fun endgame things like empowering a goat into blood magic or raising a titan from the underworld. Most importantly its multiplayer community is probably the best 4x multiplayer I've ever tried.
It has a thread on vg, /domg/
>>332710323
>>332710701
looks interesting. thanks.
I wish there was something like Civ without AI civs. I just want to research tech and clear out barbarians without this annoying political stuff.
>>332709146
Crusader Kings II is so good that I can't play Total War or Civ because of it. Those games lack features I've come to expect from strategy games.
800 hours clocked in, and I'm still learning shit about CK2.
>>332709146
this is why realm divide was such a good idea. fuck everyone who hated it
>>332709146
I sort of feel like that's a feature of 4x games at this point. I mean it's my favourite genre, but most of the games suffer from boring late game.
>>332712310
the only reason i hate realm divide is because it makes protecting your trade routes a fucking nightmare and the naval combat in vanilla shogun 2 is absolute ass.
on land, fuck yeah, bring it on
but at sea, realm divide makes me want to shoot myself
and don't tell me to just autoresolve my naval battles because ships are fucking expensive and naval autoresolve is broken as fuck, causing all your ships to get like 50% hull damage every time you do it. it's ridiculous.
>>332709146
CK2
Once you get an economic advantage and hold onto it for a bit you start to steam roll everything else.
I think that's an inherent problem with any strategy game where your power is generally tied to resources. Something like static defenses where you get more value from it can help sometimes, but static defenses usually suck in strategy games.
>>332712791
what's wrong with your portraits
>>332712160
I wish that Eu4 was as good as CK2, I think that the 30 years war needs more representation in media.
>>332709882
SMAC also has the problem where you can boom really fucking hard, and then no one can touch you. Supply crawlers are one of the most broken units in the genre I think. And every wonder is on par with the most broken shit from CIV 2.
what 4x games need is something like the demon army from sengoku rance, or the dark knights from M&B's native expansion. Basically a super powerful force that appears late in the game and starts off small, but grows ridiculously fast, and essentially becomes the challenge in the late game.
>>332712979
anime mod for autists
>>332713479
GalCiv has that and it makes the game annoyingly unfun most of the time.
>>332713479
Distabt Worlds does this, and it's great. You have to rally the galaxy together to stand a chance.
>>332713479
Like the Mongols in TW Medieval II?
Fuck I should reinstall Medieval II
>>332709146
If you play with friends: Star Ruler 2.
Its the only game that I've found that regardless of how you play, people can still pull intelligent high skill wins out of their ass.
Nothing quite like it too, since you can design all of the ships in the game.
>>332709146
It's what I hate about the genre. Either the AI is too easy, and victory is going through the motions, or they get like bullshit advantages and the nearest dumbass civ just bogs you down with constant war. And if you finally capture or raze a city, everyone else (who is now an era tech ahead of you and Montezuma) denounces you and eventually declares war. If you stay on the defensive, every other civ dog piles you anyway.
>>332713479
Call of warhammer for medieval 2
Only one of the forces of chaos will expand along the top of the map, but they might be beaten by the elves, so there's that
>>332713479
Atilla Total War does this and it's pretty horrifying. The Hunnic hordes can really ruin your day.
>>332709146
Have you legitimately tried versing yourself in Hotseat? Works for me.
>>332709146
My pet idea for this is to make the internal politics of your empire more interesting. I now people think it's silly to talk about historical accuracy with regards to Civ, but I maintain that part of the game's appeal is that it makes you feel as if you were playing out the great forces of human history. Yet the idea of internal change or revolution never really occurs. There is not room for, say, a French or Russian Revolution-style scenario. You never get a sense for the society of your nation.
Civics in civ 4 were a step in the right direction before getting replaced by the dumb social policy system. Ideologies attempted something like it too, but was really an international thing. There should be some way in which the game can simulate internal pressures.
>>332717182
TW does this, but Civ is a different kind of game and I don't think it would fit.
>>332717072
There is something fundamentally wrong at a species level with this, but I can't figure out what.
>>332717320
People say that, but I feel that that kind of attitude of saying "X feature isn't Civ" or "X feature isn't 4X" is what causes these series to stagnate
>>332709146
>Playing below Immortal difficulty in Civ V and probably the same on the other games.
Step up faggot, also try Crusader Kings 2
>>332717412
It will eat at you, until you try it. Trust me, it's harder to try and win against yourself than you think.
>>332717639
all that changes with civ is how long it takes to get the steamroller going.
>>332717669
How do battles even work? Do you just have to auto resolve everything?
Apropos Civ 5
>play game for the first time
>have fun, capture cities etc.
>wasted early game on having said fun
>late game rolles around
>suprise motherfucker, you aren't allowed to have fun in the early game
>ideologies hit me, get to -20 happiness in no time
>game fucked
>start another one
>don't have fun and abstain from warfare
>dominate every other Civ
>late game hits
>80 happiness
>culture dominates all other Civs
>far ahead of them in science
>can build up an army that'd be vastly superior to their combined efforts in no time
Was this game made by retarded monkeys with brain aids?
>>332717639
>try Crusader Kings 2
Have fun paying 100 bucks for Mongol faces
>>332719086that's why 4 is better
>>332719352
I also don't understand the game's AI
>denounce my rival that you are allied with for me
>'no'
>hurr durr traitor
Or, in case you say yes, you get
>hurr durr honourless scoundrel
20 turns later
>>332719230
>not pirating the dlc
Also, the DLC is made after the game's release, what's the issue with them charging for it?
>>332719230
>not waiting for the important DLC to cost a couple dollars
>not reading which DLC have actual content and which are just music/portraits
okay
