What is your opinion on the 4X genre?

[Deleted]

I enjoy the genre, but it's stagnating.

[Deleted]

4x is great, some of my favorite games in there and i easily have a few thousand hours between all the games i own. however it has a few pitfalls you should be aware off:

-it's a niche genre but the games themselves are complex and thus require relatively much money to make. on top of that most companies that make 4x games are small companies. This leads to the common situation that 4x games on launch are buggy or unbalanced (because the devs chose to get more features in instead),and typically need a year or a expansion to be a truly good game. You can say what you want about this situation but imo it's just a financial necessity. Firaxis is really the only company that makes 4x games that can't use this excuse but they just don't seem to give a shit.

-no one 4x game is perfect and they all seem to have one issue or another that can't/won't get fixed. turns tend to slow down lategame. lategame often becomes boring or a micro hell. sometimes combat just takes forever making late game wars take a long time. often there is a snowball effect and you know you will win the game long before youre actually done, etc.

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I enjoy the genre, but it's stagnating.

what do you mean? there are more 4x games now then there have been in years. there are like 4+ a year now (of varying quality), compared to maybe one every couple of years 5-10 years ago.

[Deleted]

4x is great, some of my favorite games in there and i easily have a few thousand hours between all the games i own. however it has a few pitfalls you should be aware off:

-it's a niche genre but the games themselves are complex and thus require relatively much money to make. on top of that most companies that make 4x games are small companies. This leads to the common situation that 4x games on launch are buggy or unbalanced (because the devs chose to get more features in instead),and typically need a year or a expansion to be a truly good game. You can say what you want about this situation but imo it's just a financial necessity. Firaxis is really the only company that makes 4x games that can't use this excuse but they just don't seem to give a shit.

-no one 4x game is perfect and they all seem to have one issue or another that can't/won't get fixed. turns tend to slow down lategame. lategame often becomes boring or a micro hell. sometimes combat just takes forever making late game wars take a long time. often there is a snowball effect and you know you will win the game long before youre actually done, etc.

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what do you mean? there are more 4x games now then there have been in years. there are like 4+ a year now (of varying quality), compared to maybe one every couple of years 5-10 years ago.

Not in terms of titles, but in terms of innovation. They're all starting to feel very similar to me, maybe it's due to playing too much, or too little.

[Deleted]

Not in terms of titles, but in terms of innovation. They're all starting to feel very similar to me, maybe it's due to playing too much, or too little.

genre is mature enough that major innovation won't really happen anymore. some innovation i've seen over the last couple years is adjacency bonusses for city/planet buildings. obviously the move to 64bit has allowed much larger maps/units/details. games like ES2 go the route of vastly different factions which is nice, ES/ES2 also have a cold war system i really like. i hope someone puts the warscore system from stellaris into a regular 4x sometime.

but yeah for the rest it's mostly a mixmash of features other games have tried before in a new setting.

[Blazur]

I like to just lump it in with RTS games but I love them. I wish there was a game like civ but only in the modern era. There's tons of ancient times games, and tons of sci-fi games, but I can't find a single one that goes only from like 1900's to now. The ancient/future games aren't bad, I can play them for hours on end but sometimes I just get the itch to conqueror the world in waves of modern tanks and planes without dealing with the other stuff. I'd spend anything for a game like Empire Earth, with the political aspects of a civ or hearts of iron, or even just a new hearts of iron set in the modern era.

[endersblade]

It's one of my favorites. I have most of the good ones on steam - the latest edition was Stellaris. Absolutely loved it. Endless Space is probably my favorite though, I continually go back to it.

[Deleted]

I love 4X games. Played Civ 5 for 2200 hours in total. Civ 6 is not as well designed as Civ5 or Civ III but i believe it gets better with the next expac.

[Nutri]

Last (and maybe only) 4X game I played was Master of Orion 2.
I loved that game, 3 never grew on me and I'm a bit hesitant of buying the latest one due mixed scores everywhere.

[Wilian]

While this is the standard definition it's slowly becoming outdated. You hear it more so used to refer to a set of usually science fiction based strategy games that include MULTIPLE PLANETS not just one like in the Civ series, which I believe is completely considered a 3x game because of this very thing, in fact I don't think that 4x strategy was even a thing before you hit the level of multiple planets with full civilizations on them that had to be managed.

This is bollocks. I'm an active consumer of 4x games and I've not come across this idea of 'it being getting outdated for Civ" anywhere else but in your post. I think this is more about something you have made up in your mind about the concept.

[Sorrior]

I adore the genre. Typically I buy almost every new 4x game released.

I am playing some Beyond Earth right now. But I haven't deleted Sword of the Stars from my hard drive in like, years. I play SotS all the time and find it totally compelling in a way few since GalCivII have managed to tickle the logistics orientated part of my brain.

Have to ask know any good fantasy themed ones? I really loved the civ 2 sands of time fantasy maps

[Lollis]

Have to ask know any good fantasy themed ones? I really loved the civ 2 sands of time fantasy maps

Endless Legend is one.

[XDurionX]

I enjoy the genre, but it's stagnating.

That was what i thought as well, until Stellaris reignited my love for the genre, 200h in and still haveing a lot of fun, still new things to explore. And i won GalCiv 3 on steamgifts recently, but haven't had the time to check it out yet.

[Ninjavitis]

Depends on the game for me, typically real time over turn based. My first 4X experience was with Imperium Galactica 2 way back. Had been searching for a game that comes close in gameplay that has space exploration and colonization, research, diplomacy and my favorite Spaceship design. There's more aspects to it, but those are the ones that stand out the most for me. Then Stellaris came out and it hammered every single one of my 4X buttons. The only thing I missed that it didn't have was actually building and designing a colony yourself simcity style. But I am completely okay with that. The rest of the game more than makes up for it in my opinion.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

It's my main timespender outside of WoW gamingwise. I do like to play my singleplayer RPGs/story based games like Witcher, Mass Effect etc., but those are usually completed within 30 hours, without any reason to replay them.

Clocked over 2k hours of EU4 so far, 600 in CK2 (don't play it any more because imo EU4 is better), and a lot of playtime in other titles like Civ5/6, Endless series, GalCiv3 and the other Paradox titles like HoI3/4, Stellaris and Vic2.