What are your favorite games of all time?

I'm hooked, count me in haha. Might as well give this a try, it looks really interesting.

 

An even toss up between DoD and King's Bounty Armored princess atm. Only a real man can finish Armored Princess on impossible, but DoD is the Rogue-like that keeps on growing because of dem mods.

 

I have several favourite games. Divided into genres for better orientation.
RTS:
-Company of Heroes - I love WW2 and CoH is for me the best WW2 RTS to date. The feeling when you call in a Jagdpanther or Königstiger......
-Dawn of War series - again, best of WH40k RTS to date. Voice actings, sync kills, etc. If liking both Coh and DoW makes me a Relic fanboy, then so be it
-Total Annihilation - Supreme Commander's precedessor (sp?). Does not need powerful PC, yet it can deliver mass battles. Also one of the first RTS where terrain actually mattered. Jeremy Soule's orchestral soundtrack is the icing on the cake.
-Original War - heavy RPG influenced Czech RTS. No "mine, build, destroy" but you have to look after your people because you can't just produce some more and for example cars without drivers are worthless.

TBS:
-Heroes of Might and Magic series - HoMM 2 was my first HoMM game. While it suffers from some imbalances and it misses some mechanics from next games, hand-drawn graphics and soundtrack with opera help me not to think about it. Note: I don't consider Ubisoft's crap (to put it mildly) as another HoMM games, but as a mere using of a famous name.
-Age of Wonders series + Master of Magic - what is missing in HoMM games, the AoW games have. Very good diplomacy, research, many races with their own flavour.

RPG:
-Might and Magic series - while I did not play them all, JVC did a great job. Only the story sometimes made some WTF moments.
-Albion - Blue Byte's sci-fi + fantasy RPG with beautiful story and quite hard. At least it was hard for me when I played it as a 12 years old. No random generated loot, no clickfest combat, puzzles.

 

http://www.tomenet.net/
Do grab the audio pack too. There are times you will be blinded and need the sounds to tell when things are about to brutally rend your flesh.

Read the Guide. At least the parts about Races, Classes, Skills, and Macros. It will pull your arse out of the fire more than you know.

Here is the Skill Builder page. It lets you plan your character somewhat after you read about classes, races, and skills.
http://tomenet.ielf.org/skill_builder.php

Here is Mikaelh's site. It has other goodies to read and search through.
http://koti.mbnet.fi/mikaelh/tomenet/

And finally, here is C. Blue's site. It again has some useful stuff. (Links to Moltor's stuff mostly.)
http://www.c-blue.de/rogue.html

We will miss you here on the forums if you get infected with TomeNET's eternal lack of free time curse. I will likely see you there though. Check the @ page in the game to see my username, since characters have different names most of the time.

*Edit* BTW, Windows users that have *.txt files opening with Notepad would be well advised to rename the TomeNET-Guide.txt to TomeNET-Guide.doc as this will make Wordpad the default application to open it. Thus the formatting will stay in place, and the program will not instantly crash due to the size. Yes, Notepad locks hard when you try to open a file that large. Wordpad does not. And yes, it is plain text. But when I say formatting, I mean the line width and escape characters and line feeds and such. Linux users are likely painfully aware of the differences, but I doubt they know how bad it is on Windows due exclusively to laziness.

 

No. Sorry Daynab. No tiles whatsoever unless you count those tiles we more commonly refer to as fonts.

The depth of the game is enough to more than make up for that though. Your call. I hope to see you there one day nonetheless.

 

I'm going to have to try that. About a year or so ago I tried playing Fallout 2 again, but kept having problems with the screen going wonky. That said, I don't know that I have the patience for most real old-school games anymore.

I've also had lots of problems getting Daggerfall to run well on my PC -- in that case it's the mouse that goes wonky and not very responsive, not the screen. I've tried playing with the mouse sensitivity settings, and that made a little bit of a difference, but not enough.

 

There are a few other games that I should mention. I'm not sure where they should go on my list:
1. Master of Orion 1 and 2
2. Master of Magic
3. Alpha Centauri -- essentially Civilization on an alien planet, and in some ways, I liked it better than Civilization
4. Civilization (1, 2, and 4 were best, imho)
5. Warlords series (the turn-based games, not the later rts games).
6. Rogue (of course)
7. Empire (I actually went to school with the creator of the game, Walther Bright. I knew the guy, played the game, but never realized that he created it until many years later). It was a simple and addictive strategy/war game with ascii graphics and randomly-generated maps.
8. Elite

 

MoO 1&2 are excellent for their time. I played 2 for months before moving on to the next game. I would love to see the same game remade for TCP/IP multiplayer. (If my memory serves me correctly, it only had IPX at the time.)

 

GoG carries 1 thru 4. I actually picked up those games last year, and especially played the hell out of both Moo 1, MoM and Alpha Centauri. Only the graphics feels dated, the games themselves are still just as good as ever. Moo 2, imho, just isn't as fun as I thought it was when I first played it. Seeing the short films in Alpha Centauri also brought back good memories.

 

MoO 1 sucked badly in that you could win against anyone and anything by amassing a huge fleet of the cheapest ships possible with the cheapest weapons. The best technology equaled nothing at all.

MoO 2 was infinitely more challenging and required a bit of thought and planning. No fleet except the one with all the Uber tech could beat everything.

The third felt like playing an endless, crashy spreadsheet. Yuck.

I was not aware there was a fourth though.

 

Talking about 4X games in space, like Moo, the best of those in recent memory is Sword of the Stars (stay away from SotS 2, though). Sins of a Solar Empire is decent, but I prefer turn-based games. Only negative for SotS, I suppose, is that games can take forever to complete, but I kind of like that.

 

Lol, I meant #4 on my list, Civilization. You are right, there were only 3 Moos (Moo 3 kind of killed the franchise).

 

Lol. MoO 3 was like they took the theme and only let accountants write the actual code. And then they threw a boatload of bugs in to make it even worse.

 

Not true. First of all, the AI could always outproduce you so tech was the primary way to win. Fall behind too much in tech, and you were dead -- it was only a matter of time. Good tech could swamp any planetary defenses without too much difficulty. But there were also diplomatic tricks, such as knowing that the AI always sued for Peace before doing major upgrades on its fleet, which meant that it was actually a good idea to backstab them about a turn or two after a truce, if you were in a position to do so. The AI was kind of dumb like that. They also didn't know how to utilize the power of certain advanced technologies. But they tried to make up for that by cheating lol.

 

If you ever play it again, get all the tech like you say. Then build a billion puny fighters with a puny laser cannon each. Send it to the highest tech enemy you have. Instant win. I stopped playing once I discovered and tested this. There is no way around it. The game is simply broken in that regard. I really did try to find a way to make higher tech beat it, but it is impossible. I tried it against the AI, and I tried it against other Humans. It works. I promise.

 

Tiny lasers can't penetrate even light shields, no matter how many you have, though. I'm thinking you may be confusing this game with another one.

/edit the way it works is that for normal weapons, you must exceed the shield amount with the individual weapon. So if the shield value is 5, and a laser can only do 2 to 4 points of damage, you can never ovewhelm the sheilds no matter how many ships you have. You need better weapons.

 

Hmmm. I must be remembering wrong. I just searched and found nothing that would confirm my findings. Surely I am not the only one who discovered this issue. MoO 1.0 cannot use more than 32,768 ships. So I must be remembering something similar, but not MoO.
http://www.jonsullivan.com/misc/moo13.html#TooMany

Hmmm. What game am I thinking of then? I remember that in multiplayer at least, there was an option to have the computer auto-finish combat. No, not like it would play for you, but that it would evaluate the fleets and decide. This is how the exploit worked. You skip combat since sending a literal billion ships in an attack fleet would be a royal pain to handle. It would not matter if they had the entire civilization on one singular planet with uber defenses and a massive fleet of top of the line huge ships. A much bigger and cheaper fleet of pea-shooters would wipe the entire race out in a single turn.

Any ideas? I know it was unpatched, and there may well have been a patch to fix the problem, but I had no Internet at the time. This was back in the BBS days. I remember not downloading the patch from the official BBS since it was a long distance call. I also remember using the stupid picture to match to an image of a ship as the copy-protection. Really, what else did that?

 

It may have been something that was patched. Contrary to everyone's shining memories, yes, games were shipped with bugs even in those 'good ole' days'. The version I have is from GoG, so I assume it has all of the patches.

/edit That reminds me -- Microprose did not have the greatest record for their games. MoO, I know, still has some bugs. But their biggest bugfest by far was Master of Magic. It eventually got better, but it used to crash fairly often. For some reason (maybe it's that I no longer have that old crappy PC) the GoG version running in DosBOX is extremely stable.

 

I think that there is even a link to some patch on the GOG forums in the MoM section. It is probably an unofficial one.