Many thanks to Imperialis on the Discord for coming up with this.
The intent of this ongoing article series is for the community to highlight those forgotten, overlooked, weird, zany games that hold a place in their heart. We’re talking games like Eador Genesis, Rise of Legends and Remnants of the Precursors.
If you have a 4X, grand strategy, rts (yes, even rts!) or tactics game that you absolutely adore, that few people know about, email explorminate@gmail.com
So, number 2 in our series:
Not one, not two, but THREE games, from James Coote, who in on the Discord (same name) and is the developer of Critias Empire.
I played the heck out of a game called Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain as a kid. Almost never hear anyone talk about it. I guess because it was a MoO-like, but MoO did not appear on my radar until far later, so for me it fits that slot of “space 4x from my childhood”. I spent so long playing this game over and over that I can still hum the battle music like I’m right back there in the game.
I also want to shout out to an RTS called KKnD. Again from my childhood, I have a weird association between it and Oasis album Definitely Maybe as I discovered if I put a music CD in my family’s computer CD drive, it would play the music in the background automatically whatever else was running in the foreground. We didn’t have many CD’s and about the time Definitely Maybe CD appeared in our household, I found a demo disk from a magazine with the KKnD demo on it. The demo was quite difficult for a kid, so 10 year old me I would spent hours trying to win this one level while Liam belted out about doing cigarettes and drugs in the background. Thus the two are forever linked in my head. KKnD is also worth a shout out for having the Aussie-infused strain of Mad Max as it’s aesthetic. The mammoths with rocket launchers in their tusks were frikkin cool.
And on the tactics front, I played a game called Fallen Haven. It had a great mix of turn-based base building and battles. The base building and light strategic layer gave a sense of progression and fed really nicely into the tactical battles. In turn, these weren’t littered with arcane numbers and stats and effects, and were much more about positioning and getting the right unit types to face off against one another. Hover laser tanks vs artillery vs tough-as-nails turrets etc.
Those games:
Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain
Your universe is as vast as you deem it to be. Explore and colonize hundreds of inhabitable worlds in one of the largest game universes ever created. No two games will ever be the same!
Ahh, the post-nuclear army life where you meet strange-looking mutants and kill them. Welcome to Hell, soldier, and mind the radioactive dust.
The planet New Haven was supposed to be a paradise, an idyllic, peaceful new home for colonists from Old Earth. But that was before the wars broke out, before the provinces turned on one another, and before the aliens arrived…
