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Those days never left. There's been a ton of TBS games released throughout the years, some of them very very good. It's my most played genre by far.

Endless legend, XCom 2, Fallen Enchantress, Age of Wonders 3, Age of Wonders: Planetfall, battletech, some tbs rpgs like divinity original sin 2, the total war series is a hybrid RTS/TBS genre, card games, tower defense games, and auto battlers.

Endless Legend / Space2 / Humankind too.

Let me add

M.A.X. - Mechanized assault and exploration.

Best TB strategy game and AI. Sadly there source of this is lost as well.

Age of wonders 1 & 2 are what got me to stop play HOMM, same feel with better graphics

Sometimes the devil is in the details, I've always been a huge fan of HoMM, but AoW never really clicked for me. (I think I tried 1,2, and 3).

These games never stopped and are arguably better than ever. Just of the game designers you mentioned:

The Lead Designer of Civ 4 just released Old World. It's designed around reducing end game slowdown by limiting the number of orders you can place each turn, mechanically you play a series of leaders who can only give out so many orders and have to manage their dynasty, Crusader Kings style. An excellent game. https://mohawkgames.com/oldworld/

The designer of Fall From Heaven made Fallen Enchantress and I think a modern Star Control remake. Can't speak to their quality personally.

The designer of the original XCOM recently released Phoenix Point. Haven't tried this one yet but it's on my list.

Turn based tactics games in general are extremely popular. Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous has a HoMM2 style army battles built into the RPG campaign (though it's reportedly quite buggy and unbalanced...) The game overall is fantastic, and the party-level combat is also turn based if you like. Baldur's Gate 3 is turn based. Some personal favorites are all the Long War variants. XCOM 1 Long War, XCOM 2 Long War, and now XCOM 2 Long War of the Chosen.

Edit: If you're looking for something specifically like Fall From Heaven, I'd say give Endless Legend a try. It has a similar feel in the way it combines theme and mechanics. It came out in 2014 but it's still getting updates and content to this day.

Endless Legend is amazing as well as all the other games from Amplitude. They just released Humankind which is a Civ style game but instead of playing a single civilization the whole game your empire evolves with traits from societies of each era as you play through history.

> The Lead Designer of Civ 4 just released Old World.

Looks like an Epic exclusive to me. I don't want to condone that so I'll sadly have to avoid it.

Polytopia is my current solitaire (casual game).

I've long been looking for a game like Final Fantasy Tactics with "native" controls. Meaning not a recreation (port) of the gamepad controls.

Basically a prettier Wesnoth. Wesnoth is great. I just prefer the isometric grid.

The Final Fantasy WotL for iOS also has too much fussing with unit's gear.

Said another way, the UX of Polytopia with the campaigning of FF WotL.

The Battle for Wesnoth

https://www.wesnoth.org/

> The Battle for Wesnoth is an open source, turn-based strategy game with a high fantasy theme. It features both singleplayer and online/hotseat multiplayer combat.

> Explore the world of Wesnoth and take part in its many adventures! Embark on a desperate quest to reclaim your rightful throne... Flee the Lich Lords to a new home across the sea... Delve into the darkest depths of the earth to craft a jewel of fire itself... Defend your kingdom against the ravaging hordes of a foul necromancer... Or lead a straggly band of survivors across the blazing sands to confront an unseen evil.

> The choice is up to you...

Wesnoth is too heavily based on RNG for me (and apparently a lot of others who have tried it). Different terrain tiles changing your chance of getting hit is a cool idea in theory, but in practice it makes strategy less important and lucky dice rolls more important, especially when some tiles can give you a 70% or 80% chance to dodge. Increasing defense based on the tile you're on (and maybe a small dodge chance boost like +5% or +10%) would make it much more about strategy.

Both exist; see this for more details: https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Defense_and_resistance

Wesnoth is great and nicely balanced.

Complaining about Wesnoth RNG is for losers. Wesnoth gives you an estimate of how much damage did you do against the expected. In long games, luck always evens out. In short games, it evens out across other games. Just accept it as a stroke of fate, and to your best with what you get.

That hasn't been my experience. From what I've dealt with, a run of bad luck early will leave your army perpetually behind the curve. Since units need to survive battles to level up you can be totally destroyed by some bad luck. Sure, your dice rolls will even out over the long run but the effects of early bad luck will compound throughout the game.

One game you are unlucky, another one you are lucky. I've played hundereds of BW 2p matches, and lost/won only due to extreme run of good or bad luck maybe in 3% of games. Just move on and play the next game. Or play chess.

That’s called metagaming. In NetHack you would see people drinking from fountains all the time in the early game. Occasionally you’d get a wish which you could spend on some powerful artifact or silver dragon scale mail (SDSM) and win the game. Most of the time you’d unleash a bunch of water moccasins or a water demon and die immediately.

Needless to say you could win games of NetHack by doing the metagaming strategy. The problem is that it wasn’t going to help you win the current game in front of you, the one you’re playing right now. And that’s where some players (like myself) part ways with metagaming. We are interested in winning the current game. That is, taking every game as a unique puzzle to solve and attempting to win. So a game that randomly decides “haha you lose” is unsatisfying.

Well, it's battle for you. Your knight clad in iron is almost invincible on the field, unless some lucky arrow strikes him in the visor, killing him instantly. Real life is full of accidents, and BoW more or less honestly imitates that.

(I mostly used save-scumming in the campaign, due to overwhelming odds anyway, so I'm speaking about luck in multiplayer games)

I think we’re speaking at cross purposes then because I was mostly speaking about the campaign. If Wesnoth was designed only for one-off battles and units were meant to be sacrificed like chess pieces in singular pursuit of a victory then a campaign is wholly inappropriate.

The original point of comparison here is Heroes of Might and Magic which does not have this problem since the game is designed as a campaign with many battles and the leveling up aspect only applies to heroes which are essentially generals that do not directly participate in battle.

Yes, I was speaking about p2p. Campaigns in Wesnoth can be tough, but I always used save scumming to beat them. I think they are an afterthought and clearly main developers' focus is multiplayer, and all factions are balanced with it in mind.

That said, that Double Suns campaign with desert elves is quite great and I enjoyed it, even if it uses rather different settings from the base game.

How would you improve Wesnoth?

It’s hard to say. The combat variance is pretty fundamental to the game design. If you took it away the battles would be pretty routine.

Other games manage to incorporate a lot of randomness while keeping the basic interactions (combat etc) deterministic and predictable. For an example of this, see Slay the Spire. In that game the cards all have completely predictable effects. The randomness comes from the cards you’re dealt. Furthermore, you can control the randomness of card draw in numerous ways, potentially making your deck very reliable, possibly at the expense of full potential.

Yeah, it makes it so you have to play extremely conservatively or just keep save files to roll back to. At least, that's my memory of playing the campaigns as a kid

Long-time Wesnoth player here.

I noticed you and Andrew seem to be talking past each other here. Andrew is talking about Wesnoth in player vs player mode. You seem to be talking about the scenarios. From a balance perspective these are two completely different games.

For anyone reading here who hasn't tried both modes, the PvP mode is a fairly good and balanced standard wargame. You can play against the AI, which is decent but not great, or against other players online.

The scenarios on the other hand... what everyone is complaining about is true. But this is a problem with the scenarios, not with the game. In order to make them "interesting", pretty much every scenario has a bunch of gotchas in it, like if the objective is to get your general to the other side of the board in 25 turns, on turn 10 some event will happen like a dam breaking and blocking off the main path or a new enemy appearing on your flank. On a first time play through, it is very hard to anticipate what gotcha will appear and how to mitigate it. To make it worse, most scenarios are ten or more battles long, and you need enough survivors and gold from the early battles to win the later ones. So, if you barely win an early battle you've basically lost the scenario, but you won't find that out until later.

To sum up, when people are loving on Wesnoth, they are talking about the game, and mostly play it in PvP. When people are hating on Wesnoth, they are talking about the scenarios, which are truly unbalanced. Tell people to try the PvP first.

Thank you for your comment.

Of course I was talking about p2p! You can always savescum in campaign, so why complain at all? :-D

Damn. Now I need to install Wesnoth and play some games... .

If you know exactly, in advance, with certainty, how a battle between two units is going to end up, that means your strategy is much shallower. You are much less likely to need backup plans for anything.

But it's even more than that. Some units cause the same amount of _mean_ damage, but one may do so in fewer shots. And on the defense side, two units may take the same mean damage on a hex, but one unit has a higher dodge percentage, while the other has damage resistance.

That makes for a much richer variety of units: Reliable hitters vs opportunistic shot-takers; tanks which will are sure to survive an attack, and pestering nuisances which, once swatted, will go away for good. You can't have that without the randomness.

The town tiles growing over time mechanic of Civ 4 was amazing, and made war costly even if you didn't lose cities or units.

> once you got ranged/siege units to range 3 I felt like it was game over

It wasn’t game over, but it made military strategy exceptionally one-dimensional. Early game was all about getting a set of range 3 archers as quickly as possible, mid game was all about getting a set of range 3 catapults as quickly as possible.

Master of Magic, Master of Orion II? XCOM?

I wanted to like 4X space games but I honestly never found one I particularly liked. Too quickly they descended into tedium. That includes MOO/MOO2. YMMV.

I did play Master of Magic and really enjoyed it. Adamantium halfling slingers anyone?

I also played the original XCOM and enjoyed it although it became simple once you had the right tech (blaster bombs?). They allowed you to breach spaceships at any point you want, which was way easier.

Chooch to Create Artifact as fast as possible while building Skill Points as much as possible and hope to god you last early game because if you can get CA with high SP you are about to win.

> Adamantium halfling slingers anyone?

With Alchemist guide, of course, otherwise you would lose the benefit. Yes, best unit ever. And Life spells.

Orion 2 might still be the GOAT.

You might try Great Big War Game on mobile. It's simple, but fun.

Also, did you ever get into Tank War style games? I used to love Worms.