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[Frumple]

In terms of games that allow you to manipulate rather than directly control the action - it's tricky. It's something that I've wanted for a while - something where I can actually feel like the commander rather than some weird sort of micro-manager.

That's more or less the basic conceit behind the AoS style of design, the stuff that got sidetracked by DotA. RTS/strategy scale battles where you don't have to command every little freaking thing happening, and can instead influence the fight in other ways. It's also visible in stuff like the mentioned Ogre Battle, as well as a lot of mobile games coming out these days (though those pretty much inevitably fuck the game sideways in the name of monetization ).

It's just that, yeah, most/just-about-all incarnations of the concept have been kinda' shit for some reason or another. Engine/AI limitations have driven a lot of it on that front, people interested in doing game dev just not being interested in cobbling together that kind of design a good chunk of the rest of it. Then there's the money angle that's just brutally destroyed a lot of games that have inclined themselves in that direction -- relatively hands off gameplay is basically ideal for mobile gaming, due to input/UI concerns, but people keep screwing the games over in the name of making a buck. Good-ish for their pocketbook but even when you pay what's done to encourage paying just screws the gameplay itself hard.

If coding didn't give me very literal headaches, I'd probably be doing my damnedest right about now to put some out, bleh. My want for more of that general realm of gameplay is pretty intense, and has only become stronger as I get older and slower.

[wereboar]

I absolutely love Majesty's gameplay. I am also instantly reminded of Dungeon Keeper and Evil Genius. And (surprise!) Dwarf Fortress, where you formulate tasks and assign dwarbes to jobs but ultimately do not directly control their activities.

[Majestic7]

Zorgn corrected me correctly, I meant Distant Worlds.

Thinking outside the box, Mount & Blade kind of fit the bill since you can concentrate on being a leader and less at fighting yourself.

[Retropunch]

Yeah it's a tricky one. I'd also suggest Kittens Game - it's an idle game but it gets pretty in depth. Quite interesting to see how it changes from 'gathering wood' to trade ships etc.

I've always thought that if someone made an idle game with just like...15% more interaction it'd be incredible. I don't enjoy the mindless clicking, but I do enjoy coming back to it and fixing everything that's gone a bit off the rails, thinking strategically etc.

[Rince Wind]

King of Dragon Pass: You manage a tribe and have a bunch of counselors that have their own ideas of what to do, depending on their position and their beliefs. The game runs by seasons, and you can order certain things. Send your weapon thanes raiding in summer, tell your guys to build a shrine and read the lore, so you can perform rituals. A lot of the game is played out in text events where you have to make decisions. Usually you can ask your advisors, but they hardly ever agree. And if you try to get by using modern moral standards you'll probably loose.

[sambojin]

Settlers/Serf City had a fair bit of this. You'd assign the buildings and make the roads, but your people would kind of go about their business to set up the supply chains of everything. Sending out geologists and setting where to attack was under your control, but it was more-so a choice of where and how many, with very little specific input after that.

I guess the grand-daddy of hands off gaming would have to be Populous. You controlled the terrain, but not the units (all that much).

While neither of these games really gives you a "let the AI ally do your work for you" thing, since your entire empire was essentially your AI buddy anyway, it kind of counts.

[EnigmaticHat]

Galactic Civilizations 2 lets you bribe civs to go to war with other civs.

[George_Chickens]

Bribery plays an enormous part in Hegemony 3. I believe you can bribe other Roman tribes to war for you, or pay them to stop attacking you, or even turn on their own friends with a big enough payment. I can't remember for sure, so research this yourself before you buy.

[Kagus]

I dunno, I love Dungeon Keeper, but there's definitely a lot of direct interaction going on there... Not the same sort of "left click, right click" as StarCraft and the like, but clutching 18 bile demons in your fist and dumping them on top of someone still had a certain controlling aspect to it.

And while you were still paying for everybody (and their training! Goodness that got expensive at times...), DK2 did have a more "chaff" option in the form of skeletons. War for the Overworld has a lot of similarities, and includes the added fun of stuff like beast masters who drag your animal minions off to the fighting pits on their own in order to improve their experience levels. Dwelvers takes a slightly different approach to the DK formula, and the individual denizens have a bit more agency as a result.


Settlers though... Now there's a series I'd completely forgotten about. I suppose something could be said of city (village?) builders like Banished or whatnot since the peeps are moving around with their own plans, but there's no warfare going on so... Eh. Settlers seems to have a bit more personality on that side of things, at least for some of the titles. Dunno, heh, I don't actually have much experience with the games...


You can do a lot of bribery and finagling in The Guild 2, but a lot of it is extremely blunt due to the way the game's limited by broken/destroyed/demolished coding. There's also some amount of free agency there with your employees, but your fighty types are usually going to be under your direct RTS control... And with good reason too, geez. The AI is absolutely suicidal.

[Sharp]

Kenshi, you can hire mercenary bodyguards to protect you or your base but you can't directly control them so it's always hoping they do a good job and are in the right place. You can also run around following friendly/neutral people or lead your enemies into people who are also enemies of the enemies while you try to escape unscathed and then come back and loot what is left, and can also sell unconscious people as slaves.

You could just live out as a trader or miner with bodyguards and meatshields, the world will continue without your input.

[Frumple]

Settlers though... Now there's a series I'd completely forgotten about. I suppose something could be said of city (village?) builders like Banished or whatnot since the peeps are moving around with their own plans, but there's no warfare going on so... Eh. Settlers seems to have a bit more personality on that side of things, at least for some of the titles. Dunno, heh, I don't actually have much experience with the games...

I can tell, given you seem to be saying there's no warfare in the settlers games

... mind you, I can't recall how much there was, given I've played all of one demo of their junk back in like the 90s, but there was definitely warfare involved. Iirc it was vaguely frustrating to direct, manage, etc. Even more so than the rest of the gameplay. _{you might be able to tell but I've never been exactly fond of settlers or its general design direction :V}

[Kagus]

I meant more that there's no real warfare going on in other citybuilding titles like Banished et al., whereas Settlers had its fair amount of chubby champions.

As an aside, there's... Well, I suppose there's Kingdom. You just pay for people and their equipment, they take care of ineffectually combating evil themselves... For the most part.

[Frumple]

There is that old stronghold game, now that you mention it. Not the castle builder/defender thing, but the D&D styled sorta' proto-Majesty. Think it was fairly hands off in terms of directing your minions... though I couldn't say for sure 'cause I don't think I every managed to puzzle out how the UI worked.

I never could figure out what the hell was going on and how to do stuff, but it was pretty neat anyway...

E: This thing.

[Jimmy]

Oxygen Not Included is very much in the style of this genre, ala Dwarf Fortress. Your options as the player are pretty much only directing which areas to mine and where and what to build. All actual work is done by your Duplicants (a.k.a. "Dupes") who perform the actual physical labour.

At its core the game is a severely challenging resource management base builder, with the requirement for the player to monitor base gases, heat exchange, and workflow of various substances to manufacture refined resources.

Not really a combat style game if that's what you're looking for, but otherwise ticks a lot of the boxes of a basic Dwarf Fortress with a shiny cute art wrapper.

[Sean Mirrsen]

The Space Rangers series features this, in a rather roundabout, broad-strokes way. As a game fundamentally in the "space combat and trading" genre, it has you have direct control over only one thing, your own character. Everything else in the world lives and works on its own, and when it comes to defeating the principal threat of the game (Klissan in SR1, Dominators in SR2, Dominators and pirates in SRHD), tackling that threat all by yourself is only one, very hard way of accomplishing it. You may even put yourself at a severe disadvantage if all you try to do is make yourself more powerful, and ignore the rest of the universe.

You can dump the money earned from quests and trade into various support projects. Building new military, research, and ranger stations helps NPC rangers and military ships get better equipment promote trade. Sponsoring new defensive fleets increases a system's chance to fight back an invasion past the usual 'snowball's chance in hell'. You can also directly throw money at the military to put together an assault fleet to take back an occupied system, and either let them do their thing or join them in blasting the enemy. You can also directly donate equipment to the stations instead of selling it, improving their chances of survival during an invasion.

It's basically a very meta RPG, where the entire universe is your "party", but outside of very specific instances you can't really tell them what to do, you just give them money and equipment and hope they succeed. And/or go and do everything yourself.