Hey guys,

I've lately had the urge to play a stategy/sim type game, and I'm wondering which ones from the GOG catalogue might be recommendable given my taste. Perhaps the thing that best demonstrates what I love is that I adored playing the Age Of ______ games when I was younger, but the beginning of a stage more than anything else -- building, gathering resources etc, the fighting not as much.

I've tried SimCity in the past but couldn't get into it (it was like seven years ago, I didn't know what I was doing) but I am willing to give it another shot (though I don't think it's *quite* what I'm looking for).

Anything along those lines that focuses heavily on resource gathering and building? Fighting is still *okay*, I just want those build-up stages to be pretty sophisticated and reasonably lengthy.

Would turn-based games appeal to you? Those tend to be heavier on the resource and building aspects of strategy games in my opinion. I will go with TBS games for my suggestions, mostly because I have a better understanding of them than RTS games.

First off, I think something like Dungeon Keeper 2 and Evil Genius would suit you, in that they have a heavy focus on managing a base of operations. The idea is to form a settlement of some kind for your minions, and then expand your dungeon block by block.

Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic has you operate multiple cities, somewhat similar to the Civilization series. However, you have a variety of magic spells that have a wide variety of effects. For example there is one that enchants roads so that your creatures can travel more quickly within your territories, fog-of-war spells to obscure your lands from the enemy, and so on.


The Empire Earth games, specifically EE1 and EE2 would probably appeal to you. They are similar to the Age of Empires series.

Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 should be pretty good when it comes to designing and building. I am not so sure about resource management however, since I haven't actually played it. As the name implies, there is no combat.


I have two suggestions, but they are non-GOG, but Indie instead. The first of these is Solium Infernum, in which you play as a demon who is attempting to become the ruler of Hell. The game itself plays similar to Magic: The Gathering, in that you have to manage a number of resources in order to purchase items, monsters, and to cast spells. Management is definately key to the game.

My other indie suggestion is Gnomoria. The concept is you act as an overseer for an number of individual gnomes and give them general suggestions and tasks about what they do. For example, you put down a workshop to be built, and any free gnomes that have the appropriate tasks assigned to them will consider working on the building. The gnomes basically handle the priority and actual details of getting things done. You can't directly interfere with their activities, so managing them is key to getting your colony off the ground and living longer than a year. If you like Gnomoria, I would recommend looking at Dwarf Fortress, which is much deeper but more difficult due to a bad interface and ASCII graphics.

To sum up:

GOG
*Dungeon Keeper 2
*Evil Genius
*Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic
*Empire Earth I or II
*Roller Coast Tycoon 3
*Populous
*Alpha Centauri


INDIE
*Solium Infernum
*Gnomoria

The most obvious would be Stronghold, (not Crusader though) and I believe it`s still on sale on GOG. In some ways it is similar to Age of Empires, although you have no direct control under your "peasant" units. It has one economic and one battle focused campaing, so it should suit your preferences in that regard as well.

I`d also say you could give Patrician 3 a try, which is a trading game, the point of which is to buy and sell goods in a way that you would make a reasonable profit and in turn advance the economy and community of your town(s) and expand your influence to other towns as well. There are some ship battles involved, but I believe you can avoid that alltoghether if you want to. It has a bit of maths involved, so if you do not like doing too much of that while playing a game, it might not be for you.

I can recommend you Caesar, Pharaoh and Zeus. In most case you can actually choose whether you want a peaceful or battle mission so you can focus on the city building part. My favorite is Pharaoh which allows you to build epic monuments but some people claims it takes too long and it's boring. Well, not for me - I adore it! But if it doesn't appeal to you try Zeus instead.

The first Lords of the Realm game has a heavy focus on building up a strong kingdom. There's also the army thing, but the focus is more on just producing a large army, rather than actually having much skill there.

I love the second one, but that is more troop focused.

Tropico 3 would fit your criteria.

If you don't want troops at all, perhaps try Capitalism 2.

Thanks guys! And Sabin, thank you for your in-depth post.

I think Dungeon Keeper sounds like all round fun, so I might grab that in the near future, but those indie games sound great (Dwarf Fortress is intimidating as anything though!) as well as Stronghold.

...And all the other games too.

Now my problem has quickly gone from "I have no games I can think of!" to "I have way too many!" but thanks very much, everyone. :)

Yeah, DK is one of the best. DK2 wasn't too bad, but they lost most of the humor when they did it.

Well, I myself am a big fan of management sims, so I can probably give you some personal recommendation, but I need to know what kind of strategy sim(s) you're into. Do you like city builders? (Not every one of them is like SimCity.) Trading sims? 4X games?

check out settlers and knights and merchants

I'd think of the Anno series (I only tried 1404, but I think the others are similar).
You create colonies to harvest resources and trade, with a relatively low focus on fighting, and a lot of different resources to harvest and refine.

edit: didn't read the part about the game being from the gog catalogue properly, damn me

Seeing that no one has mentioned it yet, I recommend the game Conquest of the New World, which is even discounted right now. You have to establish successful colonies in America, and the main focus of the game is on resource gathering and building, with much less emphasis on actual fighting. It is also very informative, thanks to the Colonial Gazette, bringing you new historical facts and trivia at the start of every turn.

Majesty. It's not on GOG unfortunately, but you can buy it from GG for 10 euros, DRM-free and modified to work on newer systems.