Civ
It’s got to be Civilization. You start off as a hunter-gatherer tribe, settle down to your first village, grow into a massive empire, splatting rivals on the way, and finally set off for another planet on your spaceship.
It’s always been the marker for XXXX games: expand, explore, exploit, exterminate and the first four versions by the great Sid Meier were excellent. You had to balance expansion, conflict, diplomacy, the economy, research, and of course building the Wonders of the World.
Sadly since V.5 it has become dumbed down. Religion, a major parameter for you to negotiate as ruler, was missing from the release. Sadly I gave up on it then. Better graphics but much worse gameplay.
Alpha Centauri
This was the sequel to Civ. On the way to Alpha Centauri the spaceship breaks down, the captain is murdered and the colonists split into seven hostile factions. This wasn’t Civ in Space but a marvellous adventure as you land on Planet and have to survive both the strange ecosystem, and the other factions. It had immensely complex and subtle game play, and a wonderful narrative derived from Arthur C. Clarke to thrill you.
You had to develop your society – you could go for democracy and eventually eudaemonia, but a police state and repression, or rampant capitalism might work better.
Wonders were replaced by Secret Projects. When you completed one you got a little movie – some of which were quite brilliant – to crown your achievement. Another feature was the Workshop – where you could bash together your own custom vehicles, including batty things like a submarine aircraft carrier or a flying tank. Towards the endgame I tended to build a gigantic space battleship monstrosity, which never did anything and often didn’t get finished before I won the game.
Although there are several ways to win the game Transcendence gives me shivers right now: you unlock the secrets of the planet and this triggers humanity’s evolution to its next stage. Brilliant, and still worth playing despite dated graphics.
Total War Games
The original turn-based strategy and real-time battles. Shogun I and Rome I really were a huge step forward for computer gaming. Although war and conquest is at the heart of these games, you can’t neglect the economy, and there is usually a technology tree to be climbed.
Medieval 2 is probably the pinnacle of the series. People are still making mods for it ten years on. Some of those mods are huge games in themselves: Third Age Total War completely reimagines the game as the LOTR War of the Ring. It’s a gigantic game drawing on Tolkien’s canon and the films, and when you have 500 stoic Dwarves facing a mammoth horde of orcs and Uruk Hai commanded by the Witch King of Angmar, you quake in your boots.
After Shogun 2, a gem of a game – who doesn’t want to be a Samurai warlord in the Sengoku Jidai period (about 1500-1614), when all Japan was aflame? Incidentally though it is normally translated as “The Great Age of War” a colloquial version is “The Low Oppress the High” or in English, “The Peasants are Revolting.” It had a really good late-game mechanism, The Realm Divide. Basically, when you get too powerful, all the remaining clans gang up on you. This is really tough, stopping the late-game-grind that many strategy titles are prone to.
Sadly, from Empire onwards the games got dumbed down. It was hard to feel the same enthusiasm for battling the AI, which seemed to get worse, not better. Rome: Remastered, just released, is full of bugs, and I am seething because my copy crashes every time I start a battle.
Paradox Interactive Games
Paradox have an outstanding reputation for building deep and complex strategy games, including Crusader Kings, Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron and Stellaris. Unfortunately I never seemed to get into them. So I’ve had a few attempts, but just then gave up. So I can only report that many people love them. I might try Stellaris, space exploration and grand strategy – that certainly appeals.
Combat Mission
Not strictly a strategy game, more a tactics game series. From WW2 to modern combat, this is the wargame nerd’s game of games. You control military units from a few squads up to around a brigade and micromanage the fighting, with command, communications, morale, a huge variety of vehicles and weapons, as well as air and artillery support. It is grindy, particularly in the modern period where the weapons are extremely deadly and the slightest mistake gets heavily punished.
Most players fight later WW2 in Normandy, Italy, the Bulge and the Eastern Front. It is possible to fight hundreds of battles, some meticulously researched real ones, and some imaginary but challenging.
Although the graphics are rather poor by today’s standards, the gameplay is so good that the British Army are using a version of it as a training aid. Shock Force 2 is interesting because it allows you to create assymetric warfare in the Middle East with insurgents against regular forces, either Syrian or NATO.
The modding community is really hard-core and makes up for the tiny developers’ limited resources.
Battlefront’s latest release is Combat Mission Cold War – a hypothetical storyline that postulates a shooting war breaks out in the 1970s between NATO and the Soviet Union. I’ve only played a couple of scenarios but it is an interesting counterfactual.