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[Astral]

Short of making my own games that fit my taste for the platform, I haven't seen a whole lot of games for Android that aren't mindless money/time wasters. I suppose I'm looking for a turn based strategy fix, and I've overplayed the Romance of the Three Kingdoms VI for the ePSXe emulator a bit much.

Does anyone have any suggestions for fulfilling this fix? I'm currently looking into getting DosBox and installing Master of Orion 2, having never played it before, but I have played PC games that took obvious inspiration from it (Galactic Civilizations, Endless Space, and Sword of the Stars, to name a few). When I had a crappy iPad Touch, I found great joy in Starbase Orion (a turn based strategy heavily based off Master of Orion), which doesn't appear to ever be coming to Android.

I suppose what I'm looking for are games with a depth closer to Dwarf Fortress than Angry Birds. I realize there's not much of a market for that, with the short attention spans required for most mobile gaming, but anyone have any recommendations or gems that they've found when sifting through the mountains of crap that floods the Google Play store? I'm okay with one time payments, if the game is worth it, but freemium games are right out, as they burn past my patience quicker than MMOs these days.

I find myself lacking for things to do on a relatively new tablet (with fairly limited internet connectivity), aside from using it to browse the SCP wiki and TVTropes while at work with nothing to do.

Aside from that, general Android gaming thread? I wasn't able to find any within the last year or so (there is one for a year to the day, January 2013, but I could maintain a list of suggestions in the main post sorted by genre). Google's own categories in their store are a bit lacking, so it'd be nice to have a small list of go-to games with short descriptions, if anyone's interested. Currently, it'll look like crap due to needing to go to bed at 6am, but here goes:

Games I've played/currently have:

Real Time Strategy:
Autumn Dynasty (Interesting RTS with a graphical style reminiscent of old Chinese scrolls/paintings, with a fairly basic sword beats pikes beats horses beats archers rock-paper-scissors dealy, and so far a decent campaign)
Plague, Inc (Kill the world with a custom tailored, genetically engineered plague, before those pesky humans discover you and develop a cure)
Most Kairosoft games (Ninja Village, Dungeon Village, etc; Once you've played one, you know what the rest will have, for the most part, but fairly addictive every now and again)
Majesty: Fantasy Kingdom Simulator (Port of the original game for PC)
Endgame: Singularity (Port of the PC version; similar to Plague, Inc, except you're a true artificial intelligence who has to essentially buy its way into becoming a god)
Star Command (Manage your crew and ship as you battle through puzzle based weapon firing and a fairly lengthy {for a mobile game} campaign with more than a few pop culture references and in-jokes; sorta like a FTL-lite with less randomness)

Turn Based Strategy:
Rebuild (Zombie survival where you lead a band of survivors in an attempt to take back the city, one block at a time, while training yourself and other in order to more quickly perform actions each day)

Tower Defense:
Sentinel 3: Homeworld (Basic TD with persistent upgrades across playthroughs; play at easier levels to build up cash/experience for your giant, moveable mecha)

Puzzle:
Dungeon Raid (Fairly addictive match 3+, with class based systems, levelling, and the ability to customize your class
Waking Mars (Bit of platformer too, you are an astronaut on Mars who has been tasked with building up the plant life after something bad happens [better description later])
World of Goo

Sandbox/Free Roam
GTA: San Andreas (Not exactly work appropriate, but a good port, better if you have a controller)
Minecraft Pocket Edition (Terrible in comparison to having played the PC version and Feed the Beast modpacks; a reminder of why I dislike vanilla)

Emulators (Self Explanatory):
Mupen 64 + (Nintendo 64)
ePSXe (Playstation 1)
VGBA (Gameboy Advance)
SuperGNES (Super Nintendo)
PPSSPP (PSP)
GENPLUSDroid (Genesis/Megadrive)

[BigD145]

We had a topic likes this in the past although it ended up being renamed/cluttered with iOS stuff. "Hey let's make an Android topic." "No, let's talk about iOS stuff and roll them together." "WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?! This will only get cluttered and useless."

I stay away from the emulators mostly because I own a PSP and absolutely prefer the PSP for its buttons when playing PS1 games and really any console game. It's also got longer battery life compared to an Android device.

Star Command is blech. Goals were not met. Blah blah. There's just not much of a game there and it's almost impossible to lose. One of the last versions for Android ctd'd the moment after you touch the icon. It couldn't even load. It just crashed. The iOS version of the game seems to be the creators' priority.

Some games to add to your list:
Humble Bundle has been good for Android games
OpenTTD
Transport Tycoon
Avernum or Avadon (RPGs from same guy)
Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, Condado, Tigris, Sky Hiking, Through the Desert, Hey That's My Fish, Freebloks, Kingdom Builder, Hive, Godroid/Go Free, Catan, (board games)
Liberal Crime Squad (any Bay12er should know this one)
rymdkapsel (strip down RTS)
Rogue and it's roguelikes (get yourself a bluetooth keyboard)
Lords of Midnight
Star Traders RPG and the other games made by the Trese brothers
Weird Worlds (coffee table roguelite-ish)
Organ Trail
ScummVM (lots of adventure games like Quest for Glory and Kings Quest)
Legends of Yore
Dweller
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
DosBox Turbo (DOS games, YEAH! I suggest Hackers keyboard, it has arrow keys)
Aquaria (RPG/adventure)
Aardwolf RPG (online MUD/MUSH whatever)
Sword and Sworcery
Uplink
Andoku 2 (sudoku)



Wall o text. Sorry. Many of those are long games and often enough were PC games first.

[Carlos Gustavos]

I have the same problem as you and I agree the categories in the store aren't really helpful when trying to browse for something. Some games you could try are:

Lords of Midnight. It's kind of part tbs and part adventure. Very Lord of the Rings inspired. You start with four characters, one has a quest to destroy the source of the bad guy's powers and the other three need to rally more people and armies to fight the bad guy's armies. I haven't gotten far into myself so I don't know how much depth their is to the strategy though. There are two versions in the store, one is free and looks like the original spectrum version and the other is a bit updated and plays better.

Spacechem. A programming puzzle. You set up sort of assembly lines to manipulate atoms and molecules into other atoms and molecules.

Liberal Crime Squad. A port of a strategy/rpg originally developed by Toady. Create a terrorist organisation and terrorise USA into becoming a liberal utopia. The Curses board here is mostly about this game.

[bagele]

You can try ravenmark - mercenaries, its got a good warhammer fantasy vibe to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PdoCf33IvA

This video is for the ios version but it looks exactly the same on android

[Mephansteras]

I've been playing a good bit of Kingdom Rush on my kindle, if you like tower defense games.

[timferius]

SpaceTeam is a free game. You need 1-3 other people in the same room each with an android device. You sync your devices through wifi or bluetooth, then yell commands at each other while flipping switches/pushing buttons on your own device with random spacey type names. Good fun.

[jocan2003]

I cant believe i havent seen any games from kairosoft, that company simply released a bunch of good game, most if not all their game are a must-buy, there is all kind of game but most can be half considered as a mix of god game and RPG etc.

[BigD145]

I cant believe i havent seen any games from kairosoft, that company simply released a bunch of good game, most if not all their game are a must-buy, there is all kind of game but most can be half considered as a mix of god game and RPG etc.

They get repetitive and boring very quickly. I suppose they are more entertaining than Star Command.

[Astral]

I cant believe i havent seen any games from kairosoft, that company simply released a bunch of good game, most if not all their game are a must-buy, there is all kind of game but most can be half considered as a mix of god game and RPG etc.

They get repetitive and boring very quickly. I suppose they are more entertaining than Star Command.

Most Kairosoft games (Ninja Village, Dungeon Village, etc; Once you've played one, you know what the rest will have, for the most part, but fairly addictive every now and again)

They're fun for a quick fix, but having bought one and found another for free during one of their deals, they pretty much reskin the same game with a different theme (making games, ninjas, fantasy, etc).

Having a blast with a DosBox Turbo emulated Masters of Orion 2; can't believe I haven't played this before, and see where Galactic Civilizations (and many other space based TBS games) have gotten their inspiration from. Ended up spending way more time than I thought I would learning the game through the tutor level bots; well on my way to Doom Stars as a modified Psilon race type.

On another note: Does anyone know of a way to get Alpha Centauri running on Android? My Google-fu fails me, and I haven't seen anything other than possibly using an emulated Windows environment to even attempt getting this thing going.

[sambojin]

There's been plenty of people that have gotten win95/98 booted on android, so that's probably your best bet for SMAC.

Under dosbox, give Master of Magic a try. Fantasy MoO2 basically. Chuck Civ1 and Simcity2000 on there while you're at it. You can pretty easily boot win3.11 under dosbox, so try out Stars!(one of the better space 4Xs, even with the horrible spreadsheetyness).

GBC has a version of HoMM 1+2 to emulate, although you could probably dosbox them anyway. M.U.L.E on the NES is always good for a laugh as well. If you don't mind the retroness, then there's a suprising amount of TBS games on the C64 (plus, like BASIC on an android man.....) and a few on the Amiga500. The NES/SNES also has quite a few ports of pc games as well. SimLife and SimAnt are pretty cool, and there's a really downgraded version of Syndicate as well. Risk! perhaps? Definitely get the Hacker's keyboard for games (and typing messages on B12). Those arrow keys are a saviour, as is the pop-up numpad.

[Astral]

I have an Asus Transformer Pad with a keyboard dock (and a USB 3.0 port, currently using a basic mouse on it, though the ability to easily swap flash drive files is amazing) so the keyboard portion is no issue. It's practically a laptop, and the keyboard acts as a secondary battery that powers the tablet until it is drained.

Not much luck with finding Win95/98 emulators so far, will attempt a 95 through DosBox at some point later, if I ever stop playing Master of Orion 2. Aside from that, anyone have personal experience getting this to work? Looking to also run some other old-as-I-am non-DOS games, such as Pharaoh+Cleopatra, alongside SMAC.

Would love for the King of Dragon Pass guys making an updated release for iOS to push it to a real operating system... hell, if they coded it in Java for Android, it'd be a fairly easy push to make it work for Windows, Linux and Mac as well. I can't blame them though, as I dislike Java yet am attempting to learn it in order to code for Android without having to use Unity.

[BigD145]

I'll have to get back to you on win95. I posted the links somewhere on the forum. My personal backup install was eaten when my sd card suddenly died, or I would just zip that up and hand it over to you.

We've had this conversation before.

Try the instructions here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f21K1Exq2jA  Links will start looking lazy but it does work. I've seen no viruses or malware.