Hi!

Kinda bored at work to times and wish I had a good strategy game to pass my time. Anything really, but preferably turnbased and modern (not a dosbox mod). I want it to run easily windowed in the background, and be easy to jump out- and back into... you know, for playing at work ;)

Any tips? Hows FTL? That's not a turnbased game, now is it?

FTL is not turnbased.. its quite good.. I would probably recommend sid meier's alpha centuari

Definitely HOMM games, I'm recommending the 3rd one.

Man I love HOMM, is BoW a good clone? Is it stable? Or very beta-ish? Maybe I underestimated the window-ability of HOMM? I already have the 3rd on GOG, downloading to give it a try now ;)

I'd recommend FTL. It's really good. I could play it at school, easy to jump in and out of :D

Battle FOR Wesnoth is actually not like HOMM at all. It's a combat-oriented TBS, with individual units on a single map(no separate combat/kingdom maps like in HOMM) and it's being constantly worked on. It's been fully playable for years now :)

Stars!. It is turnbased, had very low system requirements when it was first released (mid 90's), can easily be alt-tabbed out of (runs in a window), is incredibly deep & rewarding and for anyone who does not know what you are playing, it might actually look like you are working.

HOMM 1 and 2 can be windowed naturally with Dosbox, but I think HOMM 3 needs a mod to make run right. Read in the game-specific forum, but can't remember what it's called now.

FTL Auto pauses so is easy to jump in and out of, but I don't know if I would consider it a strategy game.

Another one I would recommend that isn't a strategy per se but really fun and easy to pop in and out of is Desktop Dungeons. Currently its in beta, and thus they are doing an online unity plugin thing, but its really fun and easy to walk away and come back to later.

The good thing about dosbox is that you can have complete portable versions of your games. That's maybe very interesting for your purpose to play on a working machine. Also you can be sure to play windowed and to have the option to change the window-size without any problem. So, I wouldn't abandon dosbox games, especially some games like Master of Orion II look very nice.

My recommendations would be three great games from three different settings:
- Heroes of Might and Magic III (there's a mod somewhere to play it windowed in the subforum)
- Master of Orion I & II (I know, DosBox, but especially MoO II looks very nice)
- Jagged Alliance 2 (not out of box, but I believe there's also a mod to played windowed)

Edit: Quicksearch about the mods. For HoMM3 the mod is called 32bitPatch, you can find it . For Jagged Alliance 2 it's the [url=http://www.moddb.com/mods/ja2-113-mod/downloads]JA.1.13 mod. To be sure you maybe should take a look in the subforum first, didn't played both games for a long time and don't know if these mods are up to date.

Great! A lot on my list now :) Will try FTL for sure, $5 on GOG now. My kind of game I think, raw and brutal!

To run HOMM 3 in windowed mode, one needs to set desktop color depth to 16-bit, start the game and press F4.

Didn't know that, thanks :)

Yah, Alpha Centauri, MOO 1 or 2, maybe Eador: Genesis but thats quite addicting and you may end up playing it way too much for your own good at work.
Not that the others aren't addicting either but Eador is something else. I'm sure alt-tab should work for any of these if they can't be windowed.