PopTop. Railroad Tycoon 2&3 and Tropico 1&2. They got bought by 2K, which eventually killed the studio. The Railroad Tycoon series is dead. Tropico is still around, but I’m not excited about the latest interation. Some of the guys tried to kickstart a new Railroad Tycoon but it didn’t fund. Phil Steinmeyer was an underrated developer, though I believe he’s retired today.

It’s too bad it worked out that way. I think they could have been on the level with Paradox as far as strategy games are concerned, but focusing more on economic games, city builders, and the like. On Steinmeyer’s blog he said he didn’t think there was demand for heavier games anymore about mid 00s. That might have been true then, but so many games out now prove that wrong.

Yeah, mechanism is a lot more objective way to classify board games. We can argue all day about, say, what exactly a wargame is, but what games have hex grids, area control, and resource managements is a lot easier to agree on.

Must be a day of the week that ends in y.

Yeah, modded Minecraft is still a big deal. You can join us over at !moddedminecraft@sopuli.xyz if you want. The mod Create is a big deal right now, and rightfully so. It may well be the greatest of all time, as far as Minecraft mods go.

!strategygames@sopuli.xyz

Edit: didn’t mean to make this a comment reply instead of post reply, but it still counts

There’s a pair of Beatles albums in this list. I don’t mind “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” or “Revolution 9,” but “Tomorrow Never Knows” on Revolver counts for me. Frankly, it’s the worst Beatles song. I prefer the Daniel Johnston and Jad Fair cover of it on It’s Spooky to the Beatles version. It’s just that bad.

Yeah, it’s hard to get people to care about stuff sometimes. Sometimes you just have to let it die.

Tichu is the bomb, literally.

Mostly just Minecraft out of the box. I feel that resource packs and certain performance mods like optifine could be accurately referred to as “vanilla with optifine” or “vanilla with such-and-such pack.” Once you get into datapacks or Forge or Fabric or hacked clients, it’s not vanilla.

Serverside, it’s a little more dodgy. How many server plugins can you have before it’s not vanilla?

That said, I don’t think there’s much reason to play Java Edition over Bedrock other than mods or wanting to play on older, pre-bedrock versions. Then again, I almost solely play modded anymore so I don’t have a lot of vanilla Bedrock under my belt to compare the two.

New plays were:

• Mahjong
• John Company
• Sol
• Nana
• Kreigbot
• Kremlin
• Lifeboats
• Category 5
• Fresh Fish
• Santiago

My list looks similar. Splotter is at the top. I did preorder Horseless Carriage back before we had much info about it and don’t regret it. John Bohrer would be up there as well, but though various connections I’ve played enough Winsomes to know they aren’t an instant buy. (Iberian Railways, Italian Railroads, and 1836)

Tangent, but I’m very split on 1836. The opening is incredible, but once you get past the first stock round all the interesting decisions have been made.

Kinda going back to that post I did the other day about Ska, but The Clash’s cover of Wrong Em Boyo, which was originally by The Rulers.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JNp9ymVrugQ

I just use VLC and organize my music by folders. If I want to listen to a certain album, I go to that folder and have VLC play it.

I haven’t played many, but it does lead to some interesting cases of board games being adapted to video games and back to board games, like Civilization and Europa Universalis.

Intrinsically, definitely. Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, Victoria 2, and etc.

Pretty sure Forge is dead in the water. The majority of devs left for NeoForge, and it’s likely the majority of moddevs will follow.

The best mobile games tend to be ports. Stick Ranger is a good example.

Warsim deserves love. It’s a real passion project: a text-based kingdom management sim with lots of things to do and nooks and crannies to explore.

I loved John Deere American Farmer back in the day. Unfortunately it doesn’t work on modern machines. The menus don’t display right. If it wasn’t for that, it would be half-playable. The deluxe version might not have that problem, but I never got around to trying it.

One funny quirk was that family members would gain happiness from certain items (housing, bbq, pools, etc) and lose it from working. If happiness dropped too far for two long, you’d get an event about them leaving to join the French Foreign Legion or some other nonsense (there were a handful of variants.) The thing is, though, the happiness gained from these material possessions would degrade over time, meaning that it quickly evolved into a materialism simulator as you built pools (or giant statues of Paul Bunyan) to replace the pools that no longer where providing happiness.

You could also just hire people. That was usually the way to go if you wanted to get any serious work done. As long as you could pay wages, the hired help would stick around.

I’m a big fan of Age of Steam myself. I plan on heading to Age of Steam Con come September.