A friend of mine and I are looking for some kind of multiplayer game we can both play together on Windows, but we're coming up dry because of some complicating factors:
1.) I have HughesNet satellite internet, which is laggy and has long delay times (at least 400 ping) when playing a game, so I can't really do anything too fast, like shooters or RTS games (strategy games on the Spring engine like Zero-K seem to be an exception, for some reason; I can run them just fine. Or I could, until a weird error started freezing my game and kicking me out after 6 minutes each time).
2.) My friend only has a 2.30ghz dual-core processor and about 3 gigs of RAM. Kinda weak when it comes to running any big games these days. By comparison, I have a 2.00ghz quad-core processor and 5 gigs of RAM.
So if anyone can think of any good turn-based game, or at least one that doesn't require really high reflexes and a fast broadband internet on my part (shooter games are right out), we would greatly appreciate any suggestions! Oh, and it should be immediately accessible, too; as in, readily downloadable from the internet, or playable as a flash game. Though if it's good enough, we might consider ordering it online and waiting for delivery if we like what we see.
(We've already tried Battle for Wesnoth, by the way. It didn't really work for me; not exciting enough.)
(I am cross-posting this from a thread I made back in General Discussion; you can find it here, to see what has already been suggested, links and all.)
(tl;dr: Solium Infernum, THANCS, Stars!, FreeCiv, FreeOrion, Dominions 4, and Toribash. The first three looked VERY interesting, but I'm still looking for other possibilities out there.)
(Wesnoth was kind of boring for me too)
I'd second the Dominions 4 recommendation, although it's more fun with more players (4-6 is good, or even more). It's turn based strategy with a fantasy setting and plenty to do each turn (actually, it taking more than an hour to take a turn tends to become a concern for bigger maps, later in the game, or if you've taken over most of the map, etc). It's PBEM (or you can use dropbox or whatever), the system requirements are incredibly low, it takes basically no time to load (unlike Civ 5), and there's a lot of different nations to choose from with different units and access to different spell paths, so lots of variety. You don't play the tactical battles - you basically assign orders (and locations on the battle map, and formations) to your troops, and to your commanders (such as spells you want them to cast, or the like, or if you want one to cast something and then retreat, you can do that) and then in the battles they try to follow those orders (but will cast something else if a spell you chose can't reach any enemies, or they're too exhausted to cast it, for example). There's a lot of depth and I'm barely touching on it here.
It's not free, but I wouldn't be surprised if it went on sale sometime during the Steam holiday sales.
How well does OpenTTD (or SimuTrans) work for you? They're both free, and although they're real-time games, they're transport tycoon games, so there's no combat, and the hardware requirements are modest at best (like, really modest, you should have no problems). The satellite latency might not matter, but you'd have to try them to find out (I've never had satellite internet).
Author
Topic: The "Recommend me a game" thread (Read 331141 times)