14 February 2025 ~
Yes it’s Valentine’s Day; no, it’s not that kind of XXXX fantasy! Brant, Mike, and Sam chat about their favorite 4X games in the fantasy genre (as opposed to historical or space).
What distinguishes a fantasy 4X game from the other kinds? What are some hallmarks of the genre? Which games were our favorites and why? Which ones had particularly good graphics? Most of these are digital, but what about on the tabletop? What parts would we pull from different games to create our ultimate fantasy 4X game?
We love your feedback, over on the iTunes page for our podcast or on Spotify, or even Amazon or Castro, drop us a rating and let us know what you think. Thanks!
Thank you for visiting the Regiment of Strategy Gaming and riding with The Armchair Dragoons.
Rather than list a bunch of social media links, the easiest thing to do is to check out our LinkTree, which connects you to all of our various locales around the web.
You can also support The Armchair Dragoons through our Patreon, and find us at a variety of conventions and other events.
Feel free to talk back to us either in our discussion forum, or in the comments below.
My only 4X experience has been on the computer, namely Empire and, later, Empire Deluxe. After those came the original Civ, then Civ II and then Civ III, which I not only still play, but was playing while I listened to this podcast. I never progressed past Civ III because after that the games were BROKEN because they disallowed units to travel onto or across mountains, which I find absolutely unrealistic and in fact a game breaker. Despite many denials within the Civ community, the developer did that solely because it made it easier to program the artificial opponent.
I remember also having played SSG’s Warlords, mentioned early in this podcast. I don’t remember anything about the actual gameplay, but I do know that it suffered from the same issue that most SSG games suffered from, namely, that their games tended to play themselves and that the “player” was largely just along for the ride. This was true as well for their wargmes, such as Carriers At War, which I found very inferior to SSI’s Gary Grigsby’s treatment of the same topic. SSI and SSG were competitors in those days, and imo SSI was far superior, mainly because of this issue of allowing players to manage more details.
Also, SSG was known for making games with “good AI’s”, but this was undeserved praise, imo, because what they really did was simply limit a player’s options to level out the field compared to the programmed opponent.
Or, to put it another way, SSG didn’t make the AI smarter, they made the player dumber. It’s amazing how many people fell for this and repeated the notion that SSG’s AI’s were better.