Victory at last! Not just over the individual gaming session but over the whole idea of strategy gaming.

My experience with strategy games has not been a good one over the years. Oh I have played Civilization when it first come out and fell into the whole “just one more turn” trap. But Sid Meier is the king of 4x games. (the type of strategy games where everyone takes a turn at a time instead of real time). Sid (can I call him Sid? I feel like I have known him for so long) knows how to make a game easy to play. But other strategy games aren’t quite so generous. It tried Total War: Warhammer simply because I was a fan of Warhammer from back before Mythic Entertainment made a gigantic mess of the whole Warhammer Online concept. I think those games assumed a bit of knowledge about strategy games. As a result the game now sits in a dusty corner of my Steam Library. Unlike

Recently I thought I would give strategy games another try. One of the games I bought on sale a summer ago during the great Steam Summer Sale was Endless Space 2. Unlike the developers of Total War: Warhammer (Creative Assembly and Feral Interactive) the developers of Endless Space 2 (Amplitude Studios) thought to put this friendly little fellow in the game (whom you can turn off) to guide you through the process. Even so the learning curve made me feel like I was taking a header off Mount Everest. Fortunately the developers also thought to have a discord server and put a link to at the beginning of the game. The helpful community told me everything I ever wanted to know and more when I got stuck (which was often at first)

“When I was finally able to split the atom, I built me a bomb and I dropped it on every mother f….. who got in my way.” – Civanon Commercial

As virtual time rolled along I began to feel the lay of the virtual land – or rather space in this case. I found myself wrapped up on the politics of the game. Soon “one more turn” led to “OMGosh is 1:30 am!”. When one of my opponents broke a truce and declared war I found myself venting the same attitude as the woman in the Civanon Commercial. Even after I won the came by achieving economic superiority (I still can’t quite figure out how I did that) I was determined to build an Obliterator missile and wipe my opponent off the map (another ally did it before I could). I reached the point where I told myself aloud “Back away from the computer”.

So finally I achieved victory – not just over a gaming session but over being put off by strategy games.

See you online,

The No Prisoners, No Mercy Team.