The Golden Age of Strategy and Management Games

We are living in a new golden age of Strategy and Management games. This niche sub-genre of gaming has seen a resurgence of some amazing games and updates, and fans are absolutely spoilt for choice. Doesn’t matter if you are a 4x strategy, grand strategy, turn-based strategy, real-time strategy, city planning, settlement management, colony management, or civilization planner fan, all these areas are well covered.

There are a few games I want to highlight and give special mention to which you may be interested in should you like or have any interest in any of these genres.

Homeworld 3

The next installment of the highly rated Homeworld franchise is coming (hopefully) next year. The game features a fully 3D environment and insanely gorgeous graphics for an RTS game and promises to build on the already great gameplay the franchise is known for.

Farthest Frontier

Farthest Frontier is currently in early development and is one of the hottest games in the city-building/colony management genre. The developers of Grim Dawn are at the helm of this highly details game with deep and intricate systems. You are in charge of building a new settlement for your group of settlers within a Kingdom in the middle-ages. The game features a very in-depth farming mechanic, where you will need to worry and plan for crop rotation and soil composition etc. There are also many other challenging and highly details systems for trading, supply chains, and even combat and defense.

Terra Invicta

This is the most ambitious grand strategy game coming out in a while. It poses the question, what would humanity do if aliens invaded the world? You play as a faction that needs to get as many countries around the world on your side, and then prepare to deal with the invasion by either inviting the aliens, destroying them, defending the earth or just getting out of dodge as fast as possible. The game is huge with a stupid amount of tech trees and decisions. Plus there are distinct 2 phases to the game; one where you play on earth dealing with politics and alliances, and in space, where you deal with the aliens themselves and build massive spaceship armadas and various space stations, etc.

The Wandering Village

Something a bit less difficult and massive in scope, The Wandering Village lets you live out your best Discworld impressions by building a village on the shell of a wandering beast. Some great aesthetics and some surprisingly deep gameplay mechanics will keep you busy for many hours as you build a happy colony on your giant wandering different biomes.

Manor Lords

Another extremely popular and hyped colony builder, Manor Lords lets you handcraft another medieval town, but with detail not seen yet in a game of this kind. Realistic weather conditions, organic crafting, detailed buildings and resources management, and strategic planning of warfare across multiple maps are just some of the features of this game. Also still in Early Access, but the developers are committed to community feedback and they have a very clear roadmap.

Diplomacy is Not an Option

Still in the feudal age, this strategy game is a horde-survival game in the same vein as They Are Billions, where you have to build up your feudal castle with defenses, buffs, and buildings to survive the attacking hordes of enemies.

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These game types are SUCH a weird place for me. I love the idea, I fantasize about playing them but an hour after playing a management/4x game I quit.

It is very confounding behaviour to myself.

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Building on this, there are some great DLC’s out for established games in the genre.

Europa Universalis 4 needed a win after a few disappointing and hater DLC’s. But with The Lion Of The North DLC, the game overhauls the Scandinavian countries, with a few additions to some much-needed overlooked systems and balancing fixes. First DLC for EU4 in a while that’s been positively received and reviewed.

Hearth of Iron 4 also got a new DLC, called By Blood Alone, and it overhauls the Italian and Ethiopian tech trees completely. It also introduces brand new air combat mechanics and new ways of building and researching new planes.

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Quality listicle there Hammerman.

Worth noting that Manor Lords currently has a Demo available as part of the current Next Fest event.

(I am currently doing a similar post to yours to highlight some selected demos that are out at the moment - Manor Lords is one of them.)

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I’m also drawn by these games, but definitely have to be in the right mood to play them. They are perfect to lose a day to, but it’s not too often that I get that time. Still love them though

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Civilization is the only game that has successfully drawn me into these types of games. Civ II was amazing and the “email your turn” feature was great back in the day!

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