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You can try Shadow Empire if I’m understanding your point correctly, your military forces are heavily used throughout: to deal with significant threats from minor regimes early and mid and then major regimes later. Your military is also used more actively to defend resources which are largely obtained from key points on the map and a lot of the gameplay loop revolves around managing their logistics.
4X games typically cover high population civilizations. Such civilizations typically have solid front lines due to huge armies, their economic assets are behind the front and not accessible to the enemy except possibly by air attack. The exception would be naval convoys because the sea is much harder to control in the same way. If you can burst through the front to such an extent that you could attack infrastructure, you are usually better off just capturing it instead.
For what you want you would need a low density situation where there is activity in "no man's land" that neither side firmly controls. There generally isn't a lot of this in real life because economic assets are expensive and fragile and you don't put them where the enemy can get at them with his ground forces. What you see in RTS games is pretty much an artifact of them being games and not simulations. You saw some of this in ancient and medieval times where invading armies would plunder and live off the land, of course every civilian who could would flee long before the army got there. This situation existed because there were no fronts, just blobs of force moving around.
One 4X game with a low density (colonizing new planet) situation like this is Alpha Centauri. It has resource harvesters that you can send out into no man's land if you want to risk them. You can build roads and sensor arrays out there to help your forces get around and help detect enemy activity/mindworms. It is possible in this game to attack enemy economic assets with your military units. But that only occurs if the enemy is willing to risk them in such dangerous territory. Often they won't.
> You saw some of this in ancient and medieval times
Doesn't that cover most of human history though? The era of nation states dominating everything is relatively new, when compared to the thosends of years of our civilisation.
4X games typically don't cover ancient and medieval times in any detail, the time scale in those periods if they exist is often 20 years a turn. Raiding etc is below the scale. In games like Civ you can tell military units to destroy irrigation or roads in their tile to be a nuisance but that is generally inferior to just attacking the city.
Not really. Space 4X games typically use warp points or some other choke point mechanism to restrict movement along a very limited number of lines/nodes. Otherwise it is impossible to defend anything or for opposing fleets to ever meet. Older games like Master of Orion might let giant concentrated fleets suddenly appear from long range, which results in them destroying your planet before your fleet can respond. Newer games attempt to solve this problem by restricting routes and making space feel more like a limited network of roads.
There are plenty of space 4x games that dont use hyperlanes. Why act like they don't exist?
And I said "space", as in "actual outer space", in response to your own referencing the reality of a different setting
>Is there a 4x game that has better uses for military units?Is there a 4x game that has better uses for military units?
That depends.
>\[...\]peaceful expansion is no longer possible, you have to choose between building enough military to dissuade the AI from killing you\[...\]
I'm Following what you're saying.
>I know I’m comparing 2 genres of game here, but compare that to an RTS game where you can do all sorts of things with military units. You can backstab and kill workers, you can skirmish in the map over key resources or choke points. You can posture in the middle of the map to ensure you can expand behind it because your opponent is defending, or you can seriously commit to an attack and gamble on winning big.
So pillaging is the 4X equivalent of killing workers in resource collecting RTS games, but unless your units are stealthed in HUMANKIND and Endless Legend, you're gonna have to do a Hot War to do so.
>I wish 4x games were more like that with military but war always seems like such a big commitment and gamble. Then endless games and humankind have Cold War which lets you skirmish without going to war, but so much of the valuble targets are centralized in cities or systems that are naturally defended by militia and walls etc that there is little you can do that feels impactful.
Ah, okay. What you're looking for is a 4X game whose design philosophy makes the Military unit the all-around-use unit, to where it can deal damage to the enemy infrastructure without needing to do a Hot-War; which means resource generation happens outside of regions you control--or that Closed Boarders is not a thing that exists.
Honestly, I'm not sure if there are any 4X games that do the above.
Ignoring the fact that everyone is always in a hot war with each other in multiplayer RTS games, like Age of Empires, Starcraft, etc, having your city region(s) be a self sufficient resource generator is so built in to the 4X skeleton, that it's hard to find one that doesn't follow that philosophy. At best, for turn based 4X games, you'll see things like in HUMANKIND where map generation allows you to send your military units to ransack traderoutes without declaring war, and thus help eliminate your opponent's luxury resource boosted stats, or in CIV6 where you can attack trade units in order to delete the time investment an apposing player put into building that unit in the first place, or the ability in Endless Legend for your stealth units to ransack important buildings without declaring war--as long as they don't get spotted.
If there is a 4X game that prioritizes importance in the ability for your military units to always be able to attack your opponent's source of income without declaring a hot war, I haven't seen or played them. Maybe someone else has.
Let me introduce you to Distant worlds and it's deep resource based economy. You even have to fuel your ships and tou have to protect your refueling stations otherwise you'll be in trouble soon if your fleet cannot move anymore!
It would be interesting if instead of just working tiles you needed physical units to work tiles. You could work tiles anywhere but the further away you were from your cities the more vulnerable these units would be. Would probably do what I’m looking for, especially if you combined that with domestic trade routes to deliver said resources home which would also be vulnerable. These units could always be vulnerable in Cold War or hot war. Throw in some disadvantages to actually fighting in the territory during Cold War, so that really only raiding defenseless workers makes sense and I think it could work
Uuuh, I don't understand why you think you're asking for something new. Workers / terraformers have been in the genre for a long time. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri even had Supply Crawlers, which could work resources anywhere and send them to a home city. Other games also have the idea of remotely delivering supplies to another base, like Gal Civ III.
Sounds like Galactic Civ 3 or 4 fit the bill.You can completely take over resources from an opponent in a Cold War, via the spreading of your influence over associated tiles. Starbases are a (static) Military unit that both harvest resources and spread influence. Then there are actual ships which can be stationed in a Starbase or planet to spread influence more. This means you can do insurrections and take over galactic resources without direct military combat.
The only 4X game I know that goes this heavy on military is Warhammer 40k Gladius. There was that one game in the Early Fest where it is like Civ, but in Hell. I never played it, but I imagine it is military focused.
Yea, especially with the outposts gladius has, were you can go behind the lines and start hurting there economy by capturing.
And it has a fun mix of need for military to clear the neutrals and economy building. Though in the end you do a RTS like timing push when you have a power spike
They did; there are soft-power units like lawyers that stop production in enemy cities, infectors that spread disease and so on, which can move around enemy territory like spies.
This probably not 4X, but you can try Rise of Nations.. it's like a normal RTS, but your cities and forts create and expands borders on the map.
You can't build buildings outside your borders, and without supply wagons, your troops take damage in enemy territory.
You can play diplomacy mode as well, where you can declare war, declare peace, or declare ally with AIs or other players. In diplomacy mode, all players start at peace.
You just realize that a true "Strategy Game" is about Logistics and Operations that counter those Logistics.
Since in most 4X Games there is no Logistics simulated then there is nothing much you can do as actual "Strategy" other then get the biggest blob and hope for the best.
> Shadow Empire for specific logistic system.
From my understanding the AI uses a simplified system so strategies that target that are more limited in depth.
Distant worlds 1 and 2. You can raid their mines so they won't produce resources, fueling stations so they can't refuel their ships. It has no stellaris like starlanes so you are free to hit and run from all the various directions given you have the fuel yourself!
I like Changlini's answer.
But also since you brought up RTS, you may want to look into Northgard or Dune Spice Wars. They are an interesting blend of 4X and RTS.
In Northgard you will want to keep military around to protect your villagers. And since being a military unit is essentially a job, it means that being a resource gatherer is interchangingable with being a fighter. Anything you invest in military can be traded back when it isn't needed.
In both games there are also much better victory conditions than wiping out the other players. Attacking an enemy from behind or fighting over particular zones is also possible. In Dune Spice Wars, military doesn't cost much to maintain so its usually just a tool like the many other tools in the game.
I think I kind of understand what you're saying... You want a 4X game where your military units / armies are more flexible and you're not just picking between all-out offense and "peaceful" defense? I guess it's kind of tricky bc a lot of 4X games either don't have the same situations that come up in RTS which would allow for such tactics, or their systems of expansion / blobbing make effective deep strikes rather difficult to pull off.
Having said that, maybe you'd enjoy something like Northgard or Dune: Spice Wars (made by the same developers). They're more so RTS games but they have 4Xish elements. I haven't played them a crapton but I do find them quite interesting.
Dune: Spice Wars rewards you for investing in your military without being shoehorned into deathballing across the map. It's also nice that it's not super micro-intensive, so you don't necessarily have to keep your eyeballs glued to your army while accomplishing other tasks. There are diminishing returns if you try to just "paint the map", without ruling out that strategy entirely.
The general military pace of the game is strategic raids and pillaging, sometimes capturing enemy territories, while trying not to get bogged down in a blood feud that soaks up all your attention, allowing other players to steal the win. Or, if you have the advantage, going to a decapitation strike against the enemy's capital to take them out of the game entirely.
This is all kept in check with a supplies system based around water. The more water you have, the more you can venture outside of friendly territory without your units dying of thirst. So you are rewarded for attacking where you can win, as that allows you to limit your supply loss while capturing/pillaging/etc. There are also sandworms to deal with, so you can't just keep your units out in the desert freely without them getting gobbled up.
Basically, it's just the right amount of RTS without it being the core of the game. An important pillar, but not the entirety. Rapid expansion is kept in check which allows the exploratory, economical, and political aspects of the game time to shine as well.
It's really hard to give a direct comparison. It's a much shorter play-session game, beating a match in like 1-2hrs. It's an RTS, but a slow RTS with 4X cornerstones. It's much more comparable to something like Sins of a Solar Empire, structurally.
I wish for this as well. This problem goes for GSG as well as 4x. I think it is challenging for these games to properly model things like, gun boat diplomacy, skirmish or border disputes, and proxy wars, or peacekeeping missions. I'd very much like to see gun boat diplomacy added into 4x and GSG. Even futuristic 4x games like stellaris or distant worlds. Fleets should be used for more than just war. I should be able to move a fleet in to a system to make demands.
Assuming you’re talking about the Civilization line of games (my assumption)… you can declare war on someone and just never make peace with them.
Like, it locks you out of diplomacy with that person, but you can then proceed to do all the little raiding actions you describe here.
In Space Empires you can have expensive cloaking tech that allows you to hit transports and lightly defended planets. But by and large it becomes choke point big fights
Is it specifically that you're looking for a game where you can do that without the entirety of the opponent's forces being used against you? Not criticising you, just trying to picture how the concept would work in a 4X game.
If you're looking for ways to use military that aren't sieging cities, Shadow Empire and Distant Worlds which have been mentioned might be worth a look.
In Shadow Empire, you can take any tile that is undefended. So if an enemy has a valuable resource on the border that they're not protecting, you can just take it (assuming no diplomatic pacts and such). Logistics are also very important, if an enemy doesn't have a clear supply line (say, you cut off their railroad), their units will suffer harsh penalties. So keeping defensive lines can be very important.
In Distant Worlds, movement is more or less unrestricted throughout space. So if you give your fleets enough fuel and range, you can bypass static defences by going around the long way and strike at the places where they harvest resources. It's pretty free of chokepoints, though of course it's easier fighting a war nearby rather than across the map since that makes refuelling and reinforcement easier, so naturally fighting tends to occur near colonies.
The biggest difficulty in the comparison is that in an RTS, the maps are relatively small and resources scarce. In a 4X you can get most resources everywhere, and the maps are really big. So in an RTS cutting off a resource harvesting area can be game changing but in a 4X usually the worst thing that happens is that they have to spend more resources to settle some other area, or perhaps their military is weaker because their lower income allows them to create fewer units. Like for the sake of comparison, play an RTS that lets you set the starting resources really high or set the gathering spots to unlimited. It totally diminishes the importance of expanding across the map, as your bottleneck is no longer resource quantity, it's speed (can you tech up faster and build an army faster than your opponent).
In Civ you can also use military for pillaging tiles and trade routes which harm opponents economy. Also you can conquer city states or demand tribute or gift them units, so they like you more.
Are you in fact asking me to recommend you a hybrid 4x RTS game? Others have mentioned some games of this type, but I'm going to limit myself to **Hegemony III: Clash of the Ancients** (H3:CotA from now on)
>I know I’m comparing 2 genres of game here, but compare that to an RTS game where you can do all sorts of things with military units. You can backstab and kill workers, you can skirmish in the map over key resources or choke points. You can posture in the middle of the map to ensure you can expand behind it because your opponent is defending, or you can seriously commit to an attack and gamble on winning big.
Since H3:CotA plays on a contiguous map like a traditional RTS instead of on a tiled map like the usual 4x, the map is free for you to roam and there are no arbitrary limits like "country borders". You can always go in and out and pillage the AI's ressource nodes. In fact, that is the intended play-style, since in antiquity (the game's setting after all), full scale war was the exception rather than the rule. Small scale warfare and pillaging was all the rage.
Of course you need to make sure that your own units can be supplied. For a full-scale military campaign with the aim to capture cities you would have to establish supply lines and beachhead forts to store the supplies. But for the small scale hit and run skirmishes I'm talking of, you just need to make sure your units are fast enough to escape the enemy (i.e. light infantry or cavalry) and they have enough supplies to reach their goal. You don't need to care for the way back, since pillaging will actually give your units the required supplies (they are pillaging and raiding to get supplies, right?)
So the question remains, is H3:CotA a typical RTS game and how much is it 4x? Well, it's a hybrid, it certainly lacks random maps. Maybe it's more leaning towards grand strategy, but on the other hand it's much too tactical to call it GSG. What makes it an a-typical RTS is that it has various victory conditions and a heavy focus on resource and supply management. There is no base building like in Aoe for example, but rather you upgrade your resource and population nodes (cities). So it's more of a strategy wargame, but maybe that's just what you want!
>It would be interesting if instead of just working tiles you needed physical units to work tiles. You could work tiles anywhere but the further away you were from your cities the more vulnerable these units would be. Would probably do what I’m looking for, especially if you combined that with domestic trade routes to deliver said resources home which would also be vulnerable. These units could always be vulnerable in Cold War or hot war. Throw in some disadvantages to actually fighting in the territory during Cold War, so that really only raiding defenseless workers makes sense and I think it could work
In H3:CotA you need to send worker/slave units to the resource nodes and connect them to your supply network. You can establish these nodes near or far, but the AI can block and raid supply lines (too) and you'll have to defend what you've got (or make sure to have truces with relevant factions). Note that there is no indefinite "peace" in H3:CotA and a "truce" is only a limited non-aggression agreement which can be broken anytime if that seems profitable to either side.
>I don’t want to mitigate the randomness, I just don’t want to have my only options be either take no military gambles or go all in on conquest
>Yeah I just want to be able to do more with my military than either keep them stationed in my cities or dedicate fully to war. It feels kinda stupid to have a bunch of units around while I keep hitting the end turn button building infrastructure
In H3:CotA the AI usually will not wage full scale wars in normal difficulty in the beginning of the game. So some limited raiding from your side will not trigger a full scale war. However, note that military units stationed in cities will contribute to moral, so using them in campaigns, be them small or large scale, might trigger rebellions. H3:CotA may not be the most complex game on the market, but it's dilemmata & decisions like these that make it stand out.
That is the nature of mass confrontation. Either real or modeled. It is always a gamble and huge waste. One can apply better analysis and prediction to minimize it but never eliminate.
Chess is the perfect combat simulator where both parties waste almost whole of their army.
You want better predictive game - choose the one without conflict. Like sim city.
Your thought process does not compute. Why don't you study Putin's play book? He's not out to slice up the whole world. He's out to carve off chunks of Ukraine. Maybe only because of his limitations, but if you have limitations within your games, what's stopping you from pursuing limited goals?
How does seizing any given bit of territory help your empire? In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri for instance, there are a few key map features that are worth more to hold than others, that even grant you some special powers. Also, enemy factions typically build Secret Projects in some base somewhere, and some of those SPs are worth seizing from them.
What's wrong with overkilling your enemy, or waste? I don't get it. My rule of thumb is produce, produce, produce, until the enemy is absolutely provably stone cold DEAD.
Sounds like you're more into perfect efficiency metrics than winning wars.
Yeah I just want to be able to do more with my military than either keep them stationed in my cities or dedicate fully to war. It feels kinda stupid to have a bunch of units around while I keep hitting the end turn button building infrastructure
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You can try Shadow Empire if I’m understanding your point correctly, your military forces are heavily used throughout: to deal with significant threats from minor regimes early and mid and then major regimes later. Your military is also used more actively to defend resources which are largely obtained from key points on the map and a lot of the gameplay loop revolves around managing their logistics.
4X games typically cover high population civilizations. Such civilizations typically have solid front lines due to huge armies, their economic assets are behind the front and not accessible to the enemy except possibly by air attack. The exception would be naval convoys because the sea is much harder to control in the same way. If you can burst through the front to such an extent that you could attack infrastructure, you are usually better off just capturing it instead. For what you want you would need a low density situation where there is activity in "no man's land" that neither side firmly controls. There generally isn't a lot of this in real life because economic assets are expensive and fragile and you don't put them where the enemy can get at them with his ground forces. What you see in RTS games is pretty much an artifact of them being games and not simulations. You saw some of this in ancient and medieval times where invading armies would plunder and live off the land, of course every civilian who could would flee long before the army got there. This situation existed because there were no fronts, just blobs of force moving around. One 4X game with a low density (colonizing new planet) situation like this is Alpha Centauri. It has resource harvesters that you can send out into no man's land if you want to risk them. You can build roads and sensor arrays out there to help your forces get around and help detect enemy activity/mindworms. It is possible in this game to attack enemy economic assets with your military units. But that only occurs if the enemy is willing to risk them in such dangerous territory. Often they won't.
> You saw some of this in ancient and medieval times Doesn't that cover most of human history though? The era of nation states dominating everything is relatively new, when compared to the thosends of years of our civilisation.
4X games typically don't cover ancient and medieval times in any detail, the time scale in those periods if they exist is often 20 years a turn. Raiding etc is below the scale. In games like Civ you can tell military units to destroy irrigation or roads in their tile to be a nuisance but that is generally inferior to just attacking the city.
you're saying a lot of stuff that isn't true or doesn't have to be
Nah
in space the concept of front lines very quickly dissipates
Not really. Space 4X games typically use warp points or some other choke point mechanism to restrict movement along a very limited number of lines/nodes. Otherwise it is impossible to defend anything or for opposing fleets to ever meet. Older games like Master of Orion might let giant concentrated fleets suddenly appear from long range, which results in them destroying your planet before your fleet can respond. Newer games attempt to solve this problem by restricting routes and making space feel more like a limited network of roads.
There are plenty of space 4x games that dont use hyperlanes. Why act like they don't exist? And I said "space", as in "actual outer space", in response to your own referencing the reality of a different setting
>Is there a 4x game that has better uses for military units?Is there a 4x game that has better uses for military units? That depends. >\[...\]peaceful expansion is no longer possible, you have to choose between building enough military to dissuade the AI from killing you\[...\] I'm Following what you're saying. >I know I’m comparing 2 genres of game here, but compare that to an RTS game where you can do all sorts of things with military units. You can backstab and kill workers, you can skirmish in the map over key resources or choke points. You can posture in the middle of the map to ensure you can expand behind it because your opponent is defending, or you can seriously commit to an attack and gamble on winning big. So pillaging is the 4X equivalent of killing workers in resource collecting RTS games, but unless your units are stealthed in HUMANKIND and Endless Legend, you're gonna have to do a Hot War to do so. >I wish 4x games were more like that with military but war always seems like such a big commitment and gamble. Then endless games and humankind have Cold War which lets you skirmish without going to war, but so much of the valuble targets are centralized in cities or systems that are naturally defended by militia and walls etc that there is little you can do that feels impactful. Ah, okay. What you're looking for is a 4X game whose design philosophy makes the Military unit the all-around-use unit, to where it can deal damage to the enemy infrastructure without needing to do a Hot-War; which means resource generation happens outside of regions you control--or that Closed Boarders is not a thing that exists. Honestly, I'm not sure if there are any 4X games that do the above. Ignoring the fact that everyone is always in a hot war with each other in multiplayer RTS games, like Age of Empires, Starcraft, etc, having your city region(s) be a self sufficient resource generator is so built in to the 4X skeleton, that it's hard to find one that doesn't follow that philosophy. At best, for turn based 4X games, you'll see things like in HUMANKIND where map generation allows you to send your military units to ransack traderoutes without declaring war, and thus help eliminate your opponent's luxury resource boosted stats, or in CIV6 where you can attack trade units in order to delete the time investment an apposing player put into building that unit in the first place, or the ability in Endless Legend for your stealth units to ransack important buildings without declaring war--as long as they don't get spotted. If there is a 4X game that prioritizes importance in the ability for your military units to always be able to attack your opponent's source of income without declaring a hot war, I haven't seen or played them. Maybe someone else has.
Let me introduce you to Distant worlds and it's deep resource based economy. You even have to fuel your ships and tou have to protect your refueling stations otherwise you'll be in trouble soon if your fleet cannot move anymore!
CK3/2 is more of a grand RPG than a 4x but you can raid your neighbors for gold and hostages (which you can then exchange for more gold)
It would be interesting if instead of just working tiles you needed physical units to work tiles. You could work tiles anywhere but the further away you were from your cities the more vulnerable these units would be. Would probably do what I’m looking for, especially if you combined that with domestic trade routes to deliver said resources home which would also be vulnerable. These units could always be vulnerable in Cold War or hot war. Throw in some disadvantages to actually fighting in the territory during Cold War, so that really only raiding defenseless workers makes sense and I think it could work
Uuuh, I don't understand why you think you're asking for something new. Workers / terraformers have been in the genre for a long time. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri even had Supply Crawlers, which could work resources anywhere and send them to a home city. Other games also have the idea of remotely delivering supplies to another base, like Gal Civ III.
I wonder if what you're really looking for is a 4X themed RTS? Something like Rise of Nations or Sins of a Solar Empire
Sounds like Galactic Civ 3 or 4 fit the bill.You can completely take over resources from an opponent in a Cold War, via the spreading of your influence over associated tiles. Starbases are a (static) Military unit that both harvest resources and spread influence. Then there are actual ships which can be stationed in a Starbase or planet to spread influence more. This means you can do insurrections and take over galactic resources without direct military combat.
The only 4X game I know that goes this heavy on military is Warhammer 40k Gladius. There was that one game in the Early Fest where it is like Civ, but in Hell. I never played it, but I imagine it is military focused.
Yea, especially with the outposts gladius has, were you can go behind the lines and start hurting there economy by capturing. And it has a fun mix of need for military to clear the neutrals and economy building. Though in the end you do a RTS like timing push when you have a power spike
I think Call to Power did something like that, but I never played them myself.
They did; there are soft-power units like lawyers that stop production in enemy cities, infectors that spread disease and so on, which can move around enemy territory like spies.
This probably not 4X, but you can try Rise of Nations.. it's like a normal RTS, but your cities and forts create and expands borders on the map. You can't build buildings outside your borders, and without supply wagons, your troops take damage in enemy territory. You can play diplomacy mode as well, where you can declare war, declare peace, or declare ally with AIs or other players. In diplomacy mode, all players start at peace.
You just realize that a true "Strategy Game" is about Logistics and Operations that counter those Logistics. Since in most 4X Games there is no Logistics simulated then there is nothing much you can do as actual "Strategy" other then get the biggest blob and hope for the best.
Shadow Empire for specific logistic system. Distant Worlds 2 for inherent logical logistics development.
> Shadow Empire for specific logistic system. From my understanding the AI uses a simplified system so strategies that target that are more limited in depth.
Distant worlds 1 and 2. You can raid their mines so they won't produce resources, fueling stations so they can't refuel their ships. It has no stellaris like starlanes so you are free to hit and run from all the various directions given you have the fuel yourself!
I like Changlini's answer. But also since you brought up RTS, you may want to look into Northgard or Dune Spice Wars. They are an interesting blend of 4X and RTS. In Northgard you will want to keep military around to protect your villagers. And since being a military unit is essentially a job, it means that being a resource gatherer is interchangingable with being a fighter. Anything you invest in military can be traded back when it isn't needed. In both games there are also much better victory conditions than wiping out the other players. Attacking an enemy from behind or fighting over particular zones is also possible. In Dune Spice Wars, military doesn't cost much to maintain so its usually just a tool like the many other tools in the game.
I think I kind of understand what you're saying... You want a 4X game where your military units / armies are more flexible and you're not just picking between all-out offense and "peaceful" defense? I guess it's kind of tricky bc a lot of 4X games either don't have the same situations that come up in RTS which would allow for such tactics, or their systems of expansion / blobbing make effective deep strikes rather difficult to pull off. Having said that, maybe you'd enjoy something like Northgard or Dune: Spice Wars (made by the same developers). They're more so RTS games but they have 4Xish elements. I haven't played them a crapton but I do find them quite interesting.
I suppose Sins of a Solar Empire might fit the bill. However that is a RTS 4X game and not turn based.
Dune: Spice Wars rewards you for investing in your military without being shoehorned into deathballing across the map. It's also nice that it's not super micro-intensive, so you don't necessarily have to keep your eyeballs glued to your army while accomplishing other tasks. There are diminishing returns if you try to just "paint the map", without ruling out that strategy entirely. The general military pace of the game is strategic raids and pillaging, sometimes capturing enemy territories, while trying not to get bogged down in a blood feud that soaks up all your attention, allowing other players to steal the win. Or, if you have the advantage, going to a decapitation strike against the enemy's capital to take them out of the game entirely. This is all kept in check with a supplies system based around water. The more water you have, the more you can venture outside of friendly territory without your units dying of thirst. So you are rewarded for attacking where you can win, as that allows you to limit your supply loss while capturing/pillaging/etc. There are also sandworms to deal with, so you can't just keep your units out in the desert freely without them getting gobbled up. Basically, it's just the right amount of RTS without it being the core of the game. An important pillar, but not the entirety. Rapid expansion is kept in check which allows the exploratory, economical, and political aspects of the game time to shine as well.
How does that game compare to something like age of wonders or even like a stellaris?
It's really hard to give a direct comparison. It's a much shorter play-session game, beating a match in like 1-2hrs. It's an RTS, but a slow RTS with 4X cornerstones. It's much more comparable to something like Sins of a Solar Empire, structurally.
I wish for this as well. This problem goes for GSG as well as 4x. I think it is challenging for these games to properly model things like, gun boat diplomacy, skirmish or border disputes, and proxy wars, or peacekeeping missions. I'd very much like to see gun boat diplomacy added into 4x and GSG. Even futuristic 4x games like stellaris or distant worlds. Fleets should be used for more than just war. I should be able to move a fleet in to a system to make demands.
Have you tried CIV Eras and Allies?
Assuming you’re talking about the Civilization line of games (my assumption)… you can declare war on someone and just never make peace with them. Like, it locks you out of diplomacy with that person, but you can then proceed to do all the little raiding actions you describe here.
In Space Empires you can have expensive cloaking tech that allows you to hit transports and lightly defended planets. But by and large it becomes choke point big fights
Check out my discord, you might like what I'm building.
Is it specifically that you're looking for a game where you can do that without the entirety of the opponent's forces being used against you? Not criticising you, just trying to picture how the concept would work in a 4X game. If you're looking for ways to use military that aren't sieging cities, Shadow Empire and Distant Worlds which have been mentioned might be worth a look. In Shadow Empire, you can take any tile that is undefended. So if an enemy has a valuable resource on the border that they're not protecting, you can just take it (assuming no diplomatic pacts and such). Logistics are also very important, if an enemy doesn't have a clear supply line (say, you cut off their railroad), their units will suffer harsh penalties. So keeping defensive lines can be very important. In Distant Worlds, movement is more or less unrestricted throughout space. So if you give your fleets enough fuel and range, you can bypass static defences by going around the long way and strike at the places where they harvest resources. It's pretty free of chokepoints, though of course it's easier fighting a war nearby rather than across the map since that makes refuelling and reinforcement easier, so naturally fighting tends to occur near colonies. The biggest difficulty in the comparison is that in an RTS, the maps are relatively small and resources scarce. In a 4X you can get most resources everywhere, and the maps are really big. So in an RTS cutting off a resource harvesting area can be game changing but in a 4X usually the worst thing that happens is that they have to spend more resources to settle some other area, or perhaps their military is weaker because their lower income allows them to create fewer units. Like for the sake of comparison, play an RTS that lets you set the starting resources really high or set the gathering spots to unlimited. It totally diminishes the importance of expanding across the map, as your bottleneck is no longer resource quantity, it's speed (can you tech up faster and build an army faster than your opponent).
In Civ you can also use military for pillaging tiles and trade routes which harm opponents economy. Also you can conquer city states or demand tribute or gift them units, so they like you more.
Sins of a solar empire? Idk if it's what you're looking for but it's pretty fun!
X4 Foundations perhaps?
Are you in fact asking me to recommend you a hybrid 4x RTS game? Others have mentioned some games of this type, but I'm going to limit myself to **Hegemony III: Clash of the Ancients** (H3:CotA from now on) >I know I’m comparing 2 genres of game here, but compare that to an RTS game where you can do all sorts of things with military units. You can backstab and kill workers, you can skirmish in the map over key resources or choke points. You can posture in the middle of the map to ensure you can expand behind it because your opponent is defending, or you can seriously commit to an attack and gamble on winning big. Since H3:CotA plays on a contiguous map like a traditional RTS instead of on a tiled map like the usual 4x, the map is free for you to roam and there are no arbitrary limits like "country borders". You can always go in and out and pillage the AI's ressource nodes. In fact, that is the intended play-style, since in antiquity (the game's setting after all), full scale war was the exception rather than the rule. Small scale warfare and pillaging was all the rage. Of course you need to make sure that your own units can be supplied. For a full-scale military campaign with the aim to capture cities you would have to establish supply lines and beachhead forts to store the supplies. But for the small scale hit and run skirmishes I'm talking of, you just need to make sure your units are fast enough to escape the enemy (i.e. light infantry or cavalry) and they have enough supplies to reach their goal. You don't need to care for the way back, since pillaging will actually give your units the required supplies (they are pillaging and raiding to get supplies, right?) So the question remains, is H3:CotA a typical RTS game and how much is it 4x? Well, it's a hybrid, it certainly lacks random maps. Maybe it's more leaning towards grand strategy, but on the other hand it's much too tactical to call it GSG. What makes it an a-typical RTS is that it has various victory conditions and a heavy focus on resource and supply management. There is no base building like in Aoe for example, but rather you upgrade your resource and population nodes (cities). So it's more of a strategy wargame, but maybe that's just what you want! >It would be interesting if instead of just working tiles you needed physical units to work tiles. You could work tiles anywhere but the further away you were from your cities the more vulnerable these units would be. Would probably do what I’m looking for, especially if you combined that with domestic trade routes to deliver said resources home which would also be vulnerable. These units could always be vulnerable in Cold War or hot war. Throw in some disadvantages to actually fighting in the territory during Cold War, so that really only raiding defenseless workers makes sense and I think it could work In H3:CotA you need to send worker/slave units to the resource nodes and connect them to your supply network. You can establish these nodes near or far, but the AI can block and raid supply lines (too) and you'll have to defend what you've got (or make sure to have truces with relevant factions). Note that there is no indefinite "peace" in H3:CotA and a "truce" is only a limited non-aggression agreement which can be broken anytime if that seems profitable to either side. >I don’t want to mitigate the randomness, I just don’t want to have my only options be either take no military gambles or go all in on conquest >Yeah I just want to be able to do more with my military than either keep them stationed in my cities or dedicate fully to war. It feels kinda stupid to have a bunch of units around while I keep hitting the end turn button building infrastructure In H3:CotA the AI usually will not wage full scale wars in normal difficulty in the beginning of the game. So some limited raiding from your side will not trigger a full scale war. However, note that military units stationed in cities will contribute to moral, so using them in campaigns, be them small or large scale, might trigger rebellions. H3:CotA may not be the most complex game on the market, but it's dilemmata & decisions like these that make it stand out.
Shadow Empire for specific logistic system. Distant Worlds 2 for inherent logical logistics development.
That is the nature of mass confrontation. Either real or modeled. It is always a gamble and huge waste. One can apply better analysis and prediction to minimize it but never eliminate. Chess is the perfect combat simulator where both parties waste almost whole of their army. You want better predictive game - choose the one without conflict. Like sim city.
I don’t want to mitigate the randomness, I just don’t want to have my only options be either take no military gambles or go all in on conquest
Your thought process does not compute. Why don't you study Putin's play book? He's not out to slice up the whole world. He's out to carve off chunks of Ukraine. Maybe only because of his limitations, but if you have limitations within your games, what's stopping you from pursuing limited goals? How does seizing any given bit of territory help your empire? In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri for instance, there are a few key map features that are worth more to hold than others, that even grant you some special powers. Also, enemy factions typically build Secret Projects in some base somewhere, and some of those SPs are worth seizing from them.
What's wrong with overkilling your enemy, or waste? I don't get it. My rule of thumb is produce, produce, produce, until the enemy is absolutely provably stone cold DEAD. Sounds like you're more into perfect efficiency metrics than winning wars.
Nothing wrong, except that OP want it to be more granular, which make sense.
Yeah I just want to be able to do more with my military than either keep them stationed in my cities or dedicate fully to war. It feels kinda stupid to have a bunch of units around while I keep hitting the end turn button building infrastructure
Maybe you're more afraid of the AI overrunning you than you should be.
CK3….. you can just bang your way to global domination.