OT-New Computer needs new games

[Taqwus]

A 5000-point assault in _Combat Mission_, with hi-res mods and all graphical features maxxed (resolution, smoke, weather, et al) might be visually impressive. At least if you forget that the beautifully camoed Panthers (I use a lot of Fernando's and GEM mods, for instance) and so forth are killing machines... Good gameplay, too.

EU I was decent, but a) it's not for nothing that people joke that it's *real-time* strategy gaming over 300 years, and b) it has a variety of AI cheats (most notably, AI fleets suffer zero attrition -- a huge advantage for AI colonial powers, which can explore the world much faster that way; especially Portugal, as all their ships can explore) and AI weirdness (highly asymmetrical diplomacy in which bribes are expected to be a one-way street, for instance). The manual is also more of a short history book than, say, a game manual (e.g. there are screenshots, sure... but not a single one is actually labelled with respect to parts of the game interface.) There are other quirks as well, such as outrageously unrealistic missions (for instance, getting something like "Make sure there is no Spanish presence in the Caribbean"... as Russia... in 1500...) EU II may or may not have resolved these; I wouldn't know, since I don't own it.

My main beef w/ Shogun:TW is that the old publisher basically broke repeated promises and bailed on supporting it, leaving behind a number of known issues such as units routing far more easily than they should; a complete lack of configurability (no way to disable the wildly ahistorical T-1000 Geisha/Terminators); and a rather blatant AI cheat (it's a "simultaneous" move game, but the AI tends to take into account your moves when choosing its). Activision may be better than EA when it comes to support, but that remains to be seen.

Do not underestimate the processing power required by Shogun:TW when doing Civil War battles (8 sides, 16 squads ea., 120 musketeers per => 15,360 musketeeres => LOTS of smoke and hideous frame rate on many systems). Of course, that's not exactly a normal battle...

Illwinter's _Dominions_ is good, but it won't come even close to stressing your system. Priorities are similar to SE:IV (scope, depth, micromanagement, and most of all, gameplay).