Hello,

I'm looking for a good TBS / TBT game to pick up. From GOG, I've particularly enjoyed Incubation and many years ago I spent far too many hours on Laser Squad. I didn't really get into HOMM3 although maybe I should give it another try.

Fantasy Wars looks quite interesting but I can't quite tell what style of game it is.

I tend to prefer either fantasy or sci-fi settings to military.

I wondered if anyone had any recommendations?

Thanks!

Phil

Tried Battle for Wesnoth yet? It's great and free.

Fantasy wars is similar to Panzer General, and it is a really good game, well worth a purchase. There is also a sequel to it called Elven Legacy (which is a bit more forgiving, Fantasy wars is darn hard. If you get Elven Legacy, get "Elven Legacy collection", it contains all the expansions).

While you say that you prefer Fantasy or Sci-fi to military (I agree with you, those are more interesting), there is one particular series that I think you should check out and that is Jagged Alliance, the second game in particular. This series offers deep and rewarding tactical gameplay and it has a solid CRPG element as well. It is by many considered one of the all time greatest of its genre, and a game that I'm sure will get recommended by more than just me.

We do of course have the classic Master of Orion series. The second game is by many considered to be the best 4X space of all time. I don't entirely agree, I'm partial to Emperor of the fading suns (which is hard to find, and dislikes anything later than win98 due to its videos (you can get it to run with a bit of work)) and Stars!, MOO2 is the more popular game.

Age of Wonders 1 is my favurite "Heroes of might & magic style" game. It has its own flavour in terms of gameplay, many different and diverse factions and it also looks very nice. A small but fun thing is the fact that each unit has a description on how it fits into the world, and this can sometimes even be a bit lengthy. It does give a whole new sense of immersion which I think HOMM and the later AoW games lacks.

Sid Meier's Alpha centauri is a must play as well. It takes most of what was good with Civ 2 and transfers it to a Sci-fi setting. It is a shame that the GOG version does not contain the expansion, but even the vanilla game will last you many hours (this is one of those games that never leaves my computer).

You said that you like Incubation, have you tried the other Battle Isle games? They are not similar to incubation, in fact Incubation was a bit of an anomaly, but they are good. Think Advance wars and you will have a decent idea about how they work.

TBS/TBT is my second favourite genre, so if you want more suggestions, just give me a shout.

+1, quite worth a try. You could also take a look at Battle Isle series here at GoG.

I've played Vantage Master Online which was pretty good. It's a freeware fantasy-themed, hex-based tactical game and despite its title, can be downloaded and played offline.

The other TBT game I would recommend would be Chaos Gate, a X-COMish game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe but without the strategic layer. It doesn't really like Windows XP though :(

Blood Bowl is essentially a turn-based tactical sports game mixing up rugby/American football with the Warhammer fantasy setting. I love this one even though I get trounced nearly all the time.

There are certain elements that don't like XP or later OSs, the main one being when cultists shoot. This causes some kind of strange conflict, which crashes the game (your guess on exactly what it is is as good as mine). Some people have gone so far as to use the map editor to edit out all cultists from the game (this results in some rather empty levels, as some are very cultist heavy, it also means major spoilers if you have not already finished the game in the past)

The upside though is that it runs very will in a virtual machine running Win98. I played through the game during the spring in a virtual Win98, and it ran like a dream. The game is buggy by default, even with the latest patch, but all the bugs that I experienced were problems known around its release, and not related to the way I was playing it.

Fallout Tactics!

Are there many Turn Based Tactic games? I know of X-Com and Jagged Alliance and I really love both games but I've never played any others. Where you get characters, they gain experience, and you get missions to do?

Silent Storm, Chaos Gate and the UFO series on GOG.com. I'm pretty sure there's more.

Well to be fair UFO series are real-time with pausing

I actually own UFO:ET Gold...I have no idea why I omitted that.

Isn't Silent Storm really rare and doesn't run on modern Win 7 PC's very well?

I enjoyed Shadow Watch.

Absolutely right on that. I like real-time pausable modes for games for games that don't have facing and traditional turn-based for those that have.

There is a whole sub genre of TBT known as SRPG (or is it a CRPG sub genre? One may never know ;) ) where you have characters gain levels between missions. Incubation, Chaos gate are two prominent western outings, but we also have Fire Emblem & Final fantasy tactics that has a lot of similarities to those games (characters gains levels and gets better as you use them). A western PC game that somewhat emulates the style of the eastern games is Grotesque tactics which just recently got a sequel.

Also if you like X-com, keep an eye on Xenonauts

Heh, yeah, and I really love the new UFO series. Not only they're by a Czech studio (yay!), but I was always a fan of pausable tactical combat - reason I prefer X-Com apocalypse to older X-Com games. And the new UFO series does it just right, well except for the first part.