What is your favorite tinkering game

[Rukh]

I don't know if there's a genre title for this, it seems to cut across genres. What is your favorite game to sit down and create and test builds?

My favorite so far, by far, is Forza 4. The forza series has a few things that make it a fun build game. The rating system is vital because it gives you a limitation to work within. You build just under the rating cap and then try to find the right parts and tuning to maximize your performance at that rating. I spent hours and hours in that game making builds and testing them, then when you find the one that's just right, another hour making a cool livery.

The Armored Core series is all about this too. If you haven't played them, they're giant mech games but with hundreds of parts to choose from to build your core/next/raven. The different games have different stats but often you have to trade off armor or mobility or weapon power for weight, energy usage or heat. I loved this series because of the same thing. I could spend hours balancing parts to get maximum performance out of energy or heat usage then testing them against arena opponents.

If you are in to this sort of thing in a game, what are your favorite games for tinkering with builds and spending hours getting that extra 1% performance?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

EVE, Diablo, and WoW. WoW lately because of the new talents/perks that have great synergy with previous talents.

[Nirawen]

Kerbal Space Program would have to be my favourite. Designing vehicles that can fulfil a purpose/mission in the most efficient way possible, using the least amount of fuel and being comprised of the lowest amount of parts etc.

[Rukh]

Yes Kerbal is fun too. I think I'm just not good enough at it to fully enjoy it though. XD

[Korgoth]

Skyrim, because the game itself can be tinkered with a 1000 different ways. Everything from expansive new talent trees, to setting the number of blades of grass.

[DiscoGhost]

simcity 2000

seriously

[Fencers]

Cities XL, Sword of the Stars, Democracy and Path of Exile for more serious play.

[Remilia]

Dark Souls / Demon's Souls I guess?

[May90]

Doom 2. Since my childhood I loved to challenge myself with some ridiculous restrictions, and I still love doing it from time to time. For example, I would start Doom 2 with one restriction: I am allowed to only use Shotgun and I am allowed to shoot from it 1 time on the 1st level, 2 times on the 2nd and so on, up to 30 times on the last one (ridiculously hard, I must say, but I did it on the easiest difficulty!). I used to do the same for Diablo 2, such as naked weaponless run or max mouse sensitivity run - but it took too long to do these runs, so I abandoned it eventually.

Also, Europa Universalis is a lot of fun. To start as some poor German kingdom and to conquer China - there is a lot of things to try. Unfortunately, the game mechanics are quite simple, and, once you've figured them out and learned how the AI works, the game is no challenge at all.

[Pony Soldier]

Without a doubt the Little Big Planet games have been the most fun to just sit down and create stuff. Creating levels in that game is just so fun and they don't even have to be actual platforming levels, it's really anything you can think of and with LBP 2 introducing different gameplay style to your levels like making it a FPS, RTS, or whatever genre you want, it made it so much more fun. In addition to that you can have or even make your own music. So it's not just games but you can also just make "levels" where it's just the music you created, it's really awesome. It has to be one of the best or if not THE best creating game out there. Can't wait to get LBP 3.

[Sharde]

mechwarrior 3 and 4 for me. mechwarrior online is not worse in the complexity but it feels different. could be the interface ...

just for the tinkering it would be space chem though. creating complex reactors and get them to work without failing is one of the most satisfying things one can do on a pc atm i would say. especially the later lvls where it can take days to get through one reactor configuration. and then you have to completely scrap it because there is a nonfunctional ending in the last line of the logistics chain. ...

but when it works ...

[Rukh]

mechwarrior 3 and 4 for me. mechwarrior online is not worse in the complexity but it feels different. could be the interface ...

just for the tinkering it would be space chem though. creating complex reactors and get them to work without failing is one of the most satisfying things one can do on a pc atm i would say. especially the later lvls where it can take days to get through one reactor configuration. and then you have to completely scrap it because there is a nonfunctional ending in the last line of the logistics chain. ...

but when it works ...

Did you ever play MechCommander, 2 specifically? This was a really fun game for creating builds and testing them out. Its sort of a top-down view and you have a squad. It was fun creating interesting combos of short range loadouts with LRM support mechs. The game had lots of room for innovative tactics.

[Ciddy]

My friend and I have done it in the Starcraft / Warcraft RTS games a lot. We have these conversations like "what would happen if you upgraded this unit 3 times and faced it off against this unit 1v1?" and have "duels" based on that. We know how many Zerglings it takes to kill an Ultralisk, what sort of difference it makes when those Zerglings are fully upgraded, etc. We've spent hours in the games just doing stuff like that.

We've also done things like set up crazy nukes with Ghosts. Like...get to control cap with units until they clog the center of the map, strategically place ghosts around them, and nuke everything.

[Oggiva]

Robot Arena 2. The things you can pull of when you learn about all the glitches makes it really fun.

[Sharde]

Did you ever play MechCommander, 2 specifically? This was a really fun game for creating builds and testing them out. Its sort of a top-down view and you have a squad. It was fun creating interesting combos of short range loadouts with LRM support mechs. The game had lots of room for innovative tactics.

played both. but as it turned out i just can't cope with the feeling of loosing parts of my mechs even with a successful mission. and when you really want that salvage and your mechwarriors are so bad at shooting that they destroy every weapon before they disable the mech ...

when it comes to strategy i prefer huge amounts of disposable units (zerg etc) instead of small tactic teams.

[Deleted]

I'm having fun with Prison Architect as for now.