Imperialism 2: The Age of Exploration

Better than Civ. My vote for the best 4X strategy of all time. Great balanced nail-biting gameplay. Like chess, all units/decisions meaningful. I've happily lost many hours on this one. If you think the Total War games have too many units/too many meaningless stats/too much "this game is playing me", try this gem out. At $2.99?????? C'mon, its worth 10 times that....

Soo much fun, this is what a strategy game should be, You start in this game as an old wold power on the beginning of the age of exploration. So hard to master, expansion and new industry make you stronger. You are tasked to explore and exploit a new word, while the goal is to dominate old European countries. This game gives you the feeling of exponential growth. It is challenging, strategic, and fun. I can lose a whole day playing it, even 20+ years after its release.

Imperialism 2 is one of the few 4x titles in which decisions stay meanigful up to the very end of the game, avoiding the usual unit-stacking and city-production-line-micromanaging which in many other similar titles bog down the late-game. It's mainly the UI design which elevates Imperialism ii above its predecessor and lets you play more efficiently. A big plus is the choice of music. I'm tired of pseudo-epic always samey game music of nowadays and would trade in for Imp ii historically informed approach at any time!

I have seen a number of others say it don't work in windows 10. I will say that yes, it works, for me. I did not do anything I just installed it onto the C: Drive in it's own folder NOT IN Program Files! and opened it. I was on for HOURS! It's great fun and I like the turn-base type play. I just wish that we would get a remasterd HD copy.

Start out on easy mode and gradually learn the game. Either read the manual up-front or use Ctrl-F and search it for whatever you want to know. The "set goal" option in the research tab is very useful, as you don't have to keep checking the research tree to see what you want to research next. There's a lot to learn in this game. Apparently even the developers of the game did not have enough time to really get good at it, as they named the max difficulty setting "nigh on impossible." If you get really good at the game, you can beat the "nigh-on-impossible" difficulty setting fairly easily. I'm at the point where I have to choose maximum difficulty AND choose a nation that has next to no starting resources to make the game challenging. The random map generation is a great feature. If you don't like the map for whatever reason, just generate a new one. No two games will be alike, and there's always the excitement of using your explorers to prospect for the various minerals, gold, gems, etc. I recommend selecting the option to fight battles manually, rather than automatically, because the AI makes certain mistakes. For example, if you have light artillery that out-ranges the enemy's heavy artillery, the enemy will often just sit there and let you destroy numerous heavy artillery units before retreating. They will also sometimes press the attack against a superior force and let their units get destroyed, rather than retreat. If you find military strategy boring, by all means let the computer fight the battles automatically. Just know it will make the game more difficult.