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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2887 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 19, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Great list. Surprised not to see Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999) on the list, given that you've listed a lot of strategy and some other Sid Meier.

If @samesies wants to catch up on recent gaming history, it's probably worth playing a couple of "modern military shooters" to get a sense of what Doom 2016 was a reaction against and return to. Maybe add a modern boomer shooter too.

There's also a bunch of good remakes out these days, which might be a good way to pick up games you missed that might not run as easily. Many of LucasArts' classic adventure games now have remastered editions that run on modern machines. I'd recommend Day of the Tentacle, Secret of Monkey Island 1 and 2, and Full Throttle from that set. I think System Shock 1 and 2 got decent remakes if you want to play through some pretty influential first-person horror.

Speculative not-necessarily-recommendations: Brutal Legend, Oni, maybe one of the Hitman games?

How well does Tron 2.0 run these days? I never could get my pirate version to launch on my machine when I was a broke student.

Great list. Surprised not to see Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999) on the list, given that you've listed a lot of strategy and some other Sid Meier.

SMAC is a funny game to me. Very much a direct sequel to Civilization II specifically. So much so that, IMHO, you almost need to have played Civilization II first to have gotten you feet wet with the mechanics, before SMAC turns them up to 11. It's also from that era where you really probably should read the manual. Preferably all 200 pages of it. You could probably get by with wiki articles or modern strategy guides, or even watching youtubers tell you how to play. But that just all feels suboptimal to me.

I also haven't played it in forever, so it's just not really top of mind for me.

All true. I think I just have a soft spot for the worldbuilding and the faction leaders, and how much depth there is in there if you want to chase up all the references.

Alpha Centauri's writing is fucking incredible, but the gameplay is sadly outdated, with a lot of annoying micromanagement (units are supported by their home bases rather than by the faction as a whole, air units must return to a base every other turn or crash, etc.).

I don't mind the micro, but there are a bunch of balance issues which really detract from the depth, even without the expansion.

(Standard terraforming is supposed to be stronger but more time-consuming - and polluting - than forests, but forests are too strong for this to work. Condensors' bonus to their own square is too strong, so nobody ever uses their interesting rain effect in favour of simply spamming condensors everywhere. Air power is kinda OP. And there's an ICS problem later in the game because of the Hab Dome limit and then the one-unit-per-turn limit binding excessively-hard.)

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