A turn-based tactical game (squad based, if possible), multiplayer, with some sort of persistence or campaign mode.
blood bowl perhaps?
age of wonders? technically AoW is skirmishes but each 'skirmish' is really a mini-campaign where you expand on an overworld map, build troops, and use those troops to fight a number of tactical turn-based battles
Blood Bowl might be ideal, might have to check that out.
I thought AoW was a 4x, basically spun off from Age of Empires but with a fantasy theme? I admit, I never played it despite its rave reviews. Mainly because it came out right after AoE and I thought that AoE was an over-hyped warcraft clone, and I expected this to be more of the same.
I'm actually a little surprised to open up the wiki article about it and discover that it is turn based and favorably compared to MoM. Still -- isnt it more 4X and less tactical?
AoE a warcraft clone? Not really. The original Warcraft pretty much sucked balls and was a rip off of Dune 2, which created the genre. For Warcraft 1, the only reason to ever play it was because there weren't many games in the genre yet to pick from, it's not really a good game at all. My first reaction on seeing Warcraft, when it was new and shiny was a "meh" Dune 2 ripoff but with humans vs orcs. It was very underwhelming. Later I saw AoE when it came out, now at the time
that was the most advanced RTS ever released, both in graphics and gameplay. That one did actually blow me away by how fluid and immersive everything was, and it allows free-form play, with randomly generated maps. Is there anything like that in a previous RTS?
AoE was influenced by Westwood's RTS games and Sid Meier's Civilization. Sure there are similar resources to Warcraft, but with historical vs medieval fantasy you really do need basic things like wood, stone, iron, etc, and virtually every historical strategy game has these in some fashion (e.g. Settlers). I don't think it was overhyped. It raised the bar for graphics, gameplay options - the first RTS with 8 player random skirmish map, detailed and well thought out campaigns - also unlike Warcraft you can have more than two factions fighting one one map, number of units, and user interface, all by a huge margin over the RTS's that existed prior to 1997. Try playing the "beloved" Warcraft 1 and tell me that AoE just stole everything.