When I bought my first desktop back in the days, I got a free boxed edition of a game of choice from the guy who sold me the desktop. It was Warlords III I picked and I never changed genre since. Warlords III paved the road for me to many hours of turn-based strategy gaming for me and I was waiting so much for a rerelease of this game. It's finally back again and brought by my favorite publisher. Warlords III offers 4x elements on huge random maps with multiple factions. It uses a random quest system, unit upgrades, experience, construction and much more. It was it's time far ahead. My only wish left for now is a Warlords V.
Aggressors is a turn based strategy game produced by a small team. The main developer designed a boardgame a decade ago and slowly turned his ideas into a strategy wargame sandbox for PC. There is a fixed campaign map with 20 of tribes to choose from (many difficulty settings per tribe) and you can also start variable custom maps with small, large, populated or barbarian maps etc. All randomly generated. Game is very easy to mod. There are no hardcoded limits in tribes to add, resources to add and all this in a simple text editor, paint.net program or if you want to script in Visual Studio. Maps can exist of 6000 + tiles and there is no slowdown in turn times after 200 - 500 turns. Perfect match for GoG and their audience. It has a lot of influence from the classics, while offering a unique experience on his own and offering a not before seen freedom to modificate the game to your liking. The game is complex and behind every gameplay mechanism there is a chain of depth that require some investement to learn the game. But it comes with a 240 page manual, a simple and advanced tutorial (both upgraded to support all ingame mechanism), everything ingame has tooltips and there is a (friendly) small modding and player community already that offers help for newcomers. The engine seems a bit aged for todays standards, while most players will not even agree with me, but I think the reason of this is twofold. The creation of it started many years ago and the team is really small. If any of the triple A games out there offered the same gameplay and depth as Aggressors with the same modern pixelshaded unitmodels it was even better, but it's not. Absolutely no reason to avoid the game because of that imo. disclaimer: I was tester in beta (around 600 hours) and received a copy on Steam as a gesture.
