Looking through some of my old game manuals today, I saw that I bought 3 CD compilations many years ago, which was as follows:

Critic's Choice: Archon Ultra, Chessmaster 3000, Dark Legions, Serf City, Ultimate Domain;

Best of Microprose: Command H.Q., Pirates!, Railroad Tycoon, Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender;

Ultimate Strategy Archives: Civilization, Conquest of the New World Deluxe, Dark Colony, Heroes of Might and Magic, Jagged Alliance Deadly Games, M.A.X., Railroad Tycoon Deluxe, X-Com UFO Defense.

I had obviously spent countless happy hours playing most of these games and Serf City still remains my all-time favourite, but there are 3 of these games that I've never played yet, namely Conquest of the New World, Dark Colony and M.A.X. How much fun did I miss? Should I make time to address these oversights?

M.A.X is one of the best strategy games I've ever played. I only vaguely remember Dark Colony but it wasn't too memorable. I never played Conquest of the New World.

Thanks for your reply. Thanks for the reply. I don't mind reading manuals, in fact I get irritated when games don't have one. What you say sounds interesting. I think I should give that a try sometime. Thanks for your reply, but it seems slightly off topic, lol.

I have that cd as well, and I played all those three games. I loved them all each actually and only Dark Colony isn't on GOG (*sniff). My personal favorite is Conquest of the New World, where you develop colonies and expand your lands in the new world. The grid combat is really fun and it is very satisfying all around. M.A.X is a must play too. Definitely you should buy them here while you can (if you haven't yet)!

MAX is an extremely well made turn based strategy with an awesome atmosphere, incredible sound effects an a unique take on resource gathering. I mostly played skirmish levels because I never could get past that blasted first campaign level. I'll have to give it a try again someday.

Dark Colony is a fun RTS game with 2 sides (humans and aliens) and with a very cool dynamic: the day/night cycle. Humans see better during daytime and worse at nighttime whereas for aliens it's the other way round. What I remember was that during the day (I played human) I would explore the map and take care of base business, but when the sun went down I would call everyone back to defend the base from the inevitable alien attack. It made for some pretty memorable levels. Quite difficult from what I remember though.

Also thanks for your input. I still have the cd and a PC capable of playing these on, so perhaps that's what I should do. And thanks for your response as well. Sounds very interesting...

np :)

MAX was odd in that the tutorial felt so different from the campaign. Ok so I had played the tutorials, but when I started the proper campaign, I was still lost what exactly I was supposed to do, what to create etc. Isn't the point of the tutorials to teach you how to play the game? :) To me it felt like I was re-learning to play the game a second time.

I think i got quite far in the MAX campaign, but on certain mission I lost interest for some reason. Maybe it felt too hard or confusing or something, and i got distracted. It is still there, waiting for me to continue...

One thing that I _didn't_ like in MAX was how missions normally seemed to have limited turns, ie. you must beat the opponent before certain amount of turns. To me it is about as maddening as arbitrary mission time limits in RTS games (like Rise of Nations: you always seem to have exactly 90 minutes to beat your opponent, or otherwise you lose the mission. Why? Why doesn't the enemy lose as well, if he is not able to beat me in 90 minutes?).

Lol I can't even remember the tutorials anymore.

That's why I couldn't beat the very first mission though. I never could manage to do what I was supposed to do within the max number of turns. Still, I think I might be able to make some headway into the campaign now. Unlike back then when I first tried MAX I now have a fair amount of HoMM3 experience under my belt, and HoMM3 is one game that beats you completely senseless every time you don't use your turns efficiently :P

Now that's one quirky game. The premise sounds cool and the presentation is great but all in all it's pretty meh. The game's big unique feature is that you move units on a turn-based strategic map but during encounters it switches into a top-down 1-on-1 action game. If that sounds silly and gimmicky to you - it really is. I believe you can deactivate the action-oriented real-time combat and make the computer calculate the outcomes, making it purely a turn-based strategy game but why bother? What you end up with then is a highly unremarkable strategy game.

Is it possible that I might have found my first gog friend? Not only are you also from the good old R of SA, but you're also a Tintin fan! lol

Oh yes I sure am a Tintin fan, but how did you know that? I check in here most of the time, when there's no load shedding :P Currently stage1 till 10pm but luckily my area isn't hit :D

Ah nevermind, it's the'blistring brncls' right? Well kudos to you sir, because only a Tintin fan would've noticed that :)

lol, yes, that's what gave it away. Not to talk too soon, but at least we've not had any load shedding for more than a week now. Which is good as I've had nearly 40 new games from gog to download since this sale started. The 14Gb of Sacred 2 await for tonight - let's hope there are no interruptions as gog downloading does not have a pause option and with the files all being 4Gb big and data costing as much as it does, it rends my heart whenever a download gets interrupted.