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This is Armageddon Empires, an indie turn based strategy game that was all the rage last year in the PC gaming chattering class for very good reason. There is a new patch/expansion out and I am back to playing the crap out of it-such an awesome mix of wargame and card game.
i am intrigued. can you tell me more?
But of course-always willing to evangelize a good game.
Armageddon Empires (AE) is, as you can see, a hex-based turn based strategy game. You start the game by creating and selecting a "deck" to play with-this deck is a set of cards chosen from a selection of four different sides-man, mutant, machine, and alien, each with their own themes. Decks are created with a system of point counts, so you can only have so many points per deck for a standard game (though you can also play nonstandard games too). You can choose from cards that will let you field infantry units, vehicles, buildings, heroes that can command armies or garrisons, and gear that you can add on to your units to make them more powerful.
Once you pick out a deck, the board is randomly created and you place your starting fortress, which always provides a base level of income at the start of the turn. In each turn, you take your units and armies and recon and uncover tiles to see if they have resources or buildings on them, enter into combat with other players or independent units, create technology or tactics (which results in new cards), draw more cards , field new units etc. Each of these actions consumes points from your global action point pool , which is replentished at the start of each turn.
Fielding new units or buildings/structures/upgrades/tactics requires resources, which are gathered by buiding collector buildings on tiles that have the resources. So you have to get out there and explore and claim the land or fight over it to get ahead. This also helps to expand your range of supply-if your armies get too far away from a resupply point, they will get large combat negative modifiers.
Speaking of combat, it works on an initative system based on the leader and the cards in your army. Each unit has defense/offense/life numbers associated with it along with varying abilities. During combat you roll dice per unit of offense/defense you have, and can choose which card of your opponents you want to attack on your turn. It's pretty straightforward but has a lot of depth and tactics.
More on the game here:
http://www.armageddonempires.com/games/AE/ae_Overview.htmlIt's not the prettiest game in the world, and the UI is pretty dismal at times, but man oh man I spent a good month straight playing it in December.
