OT: other shrapnel games

[djtool]

do any of you play another shrapnel title that you think is a really great product? i'm indifferent to the genre i'm just curious.

thx

[Ragnarok-X]

Space Empires 4

[liga]

Space Empire IV (but is more than 6 months I have stop to play) and The War Engine ... both are really good games!

Liga

[PvK]

My Favorites:

Space Empires 4 Gold is very good.

The War Engine I have enjoyed a lot (actually, the earlier Version - Armies of Armageddon, and some mods).

I found the Coliseum demo dangerously entrancing. I may buy it the next time I have to take a plane trip with a laptop that has a good battery. It's a very different sort of game, though - some people will like it a lot (statistics, gambling, hidden character attributes), and others might not see anything in it (no animation and not much control over the fights), so try the demo if it sounds interesting.

The Combat Command 2 games (Danger Forward and Desert Rats) are good wargames at their level of scale and abstraction. Try the demos to see if they suit your tastes. I think the abstraction works well for just about everything except armor details (sadly, I'm an armor detail nut). I still had a lot of fun with them.

Remote Assault has a very challenging AI, it seemed to me. The style of the setting (futuristic robotic pseudo-modern forces) was the only thing that kept it from becoming a personal favorite. Maybe that and getting slaughtered by the AI over and over while trying to learn the effective ways to use the unit types.

PvK

[Gandalf Parker]

I get to play them all (but its in my job description).

Still I would recommend Space Empires IV. I really like that so much of it (images and AI) is BMP and TXT files. Im debating doing a Version of Poke-in-the-Eye or WEvsTHEM for SEIV. A randomizer for the AI's. heehee

And The War Engine is way cooler than the attention it gets. Im especially tempted to mention it to the people who want to MOD Dom2 into a whole new game (Fading Suns replacing magic with tech?!?). But in the TWE forums here you see reference to a Traveler Version, a medieval one, a paintball one, a MechWarrior one

[ColdSteel]

Space Empires 4 is a modders dream come true.

A ton of the game internals and graphics for ships and races are exposed in text and BMP files. I had a lot of fun writing some component, ship and race viewer utilities in Python/HTML for the SE4 community. One of them (done with Raynor) even made it onto the SE4 Gold CD. Now THAT was just really unexpected and very cool.

The SE4 game itself could have been the absolute best of its genre if only the AI were a bit better. It's just way too passive and doesn't put up much of a tussle. That pretty much takes all the fun out of the game for me. Some of the game mods do make the AI more agressive, but there's only so much you can do with the AI in mods. I have some high hopes for SE5, which is currently in developement.

The Dominions 2 AI I find to be VERY aggressive. This, and the the overall depth of the tactical and strategic options in the game, makes up for a whole lot of other shortcomings in the AI department, IMO.

I'm still learning the game so the sense of AI ennui I've read about in the Posts here hasn't quite hit me yet. So far it's a whole lot of fun.

-CS