Mindustry is a really fun automation/tower defense game
Second Mindustry, I played it up once and it was great. Basically Factorio for phones.
thirded. played it years ago and got into it again recently. you should check it out again, there’s a lot of new stuff they’ve added.
I agree, it’s incredibly underrated
Thirded, works well on steam deck also!
Shattered Pixel Dungeon ! And its origin, Pixel Dungeon.
A really nice rogue-like, among the best Android games I know, it’s still fun after all those years and very actively developed !
Great classical roguelike
You can also fairly easily get Shattered Pixel Dungeon to run on a PinePhone or PinePhonePro!
Would love to checkout the code for this thanks for the suggestion
OpenTTD is good
I get the itch for this game every year or so and everytime its amazing
I love OpenTTD, came here looking for it.
For the uninitiated, it’s a reimplementation of Chris Sawyer’s Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Build a transportation empire of trains, lorrys ships and planes.
There’s also a modern spiritual successor in Transport Fever (commercial, not open source)
I love that game. I’ve put so many hours into it
Cataclysm DDA Is THE open world zombie survival experience. So long as you like obtuse roguelikes with nearly no graphics.
Although Im obviously biased what with being a dev and all.
CDDA is mind bogglingly cool. I play a weekend of it every few months. I know it won’t ever happen, but if it got the Dwarf Fortress Steam treatment one day, it could be the last game I ever bought and I’d be happy.
I’ll just leave this here ;) https://store.steampowered.com/app/2330750/Cataclysm_Dark_Days_Ahead/
I wish that there was a way to take better advantage of the Steam Deck controller with this version. I bought a copy to check it out, as I don’t really like playing on mobile but would love to take it on the go. It was… Harder than just playing on my phone.
To the uninitiated: despite my comment, Cataclysm DDA is still worth trying out! Where else could you skateboard down the street naked while holding a plank covered with nails?
Aaaah, I love that idea, I wonder if there are any good controller configs for it that might help for that
Beyond All Reason is AMAZING. I can’t say enough about it. Its my favourite game, and totally annihilates (!) the competition.
Though I guess the competition is pretty small for large scale RTS. Maybe:
- Total Annihilation
- Supreme Commander
- Ashes of the Singularity
- Sins of the Solar Empire (sorta)
Had too scroll way too far for BAR. It’s amazing!
Its also gone gangbusters over the past few months, unsure why. Hundreds of concurrent players at any time which is pretty amazing.
I don’t really like this type of games but the game looks pretty cool
Yeah its a specific type of person that would enjoy it, perhaps a Factorio/Factory Must Grow genre mixed with small scale RTS.
Still, playing 20v20 games are incredible.
Also ZeroK, on the same springRTS engine
Zero K is also great, but they’ve changed the gameplay a lot from the original TA
ZeroK has some of the nicest QoL features I’ve seen in an RTS game, I’ve always wanted to see if the other big Spring games are similar.
I found all the ZK ones made it to BAR, right click formations, area mexes, repeat queues, fancy waypointing etc. Maybe its just an inherent part of Spring RTS so they all share the benefits, who knows.
Did you guys tried Endless sky? Awesome game if you love space
And minetest+mineclone2 is pretty good if you want to play minecraft but don’t have the license
Minetest in general has such a good mod selection it’s insane! My siblings and I never fail to have a good time goofing around with the plugins people have created.
Yeah that’s cool
Thank you for this! I have already logged hours playing with my kid since seeing your suggestion. We have only played mineclone2 so far. I will look into veloren next.
Nice to hear it! Mineclone is actually very good mod and you definitely should try veloren, good luck
Such a great game.
Came here to mention Endless Sky. Great game!
Don’t be misled if you were a fan of the old Mac games Escape Velocity or EV:Nova, Endless Sky is inspired by/derivative of EV but is not the same and you’ll (well, I did) find out the hard way that the old strategies don’t carry over.
I grew up playing the EV series and I love Endless Sky. Is there something about the clone that you don’t like? I can’t thing of a change that I dislike. For example, fleet management is improved. Being able to dock your various ships and escorts is pretty cool.
I recently got into that game quite a bit. Playing it on steam. Just the other day I discovered I can board pirate ships and kill the crew to claim the ship as my own. That has been a significant power boost for me and really unlocked the game.
Even before that I was having fun trying to survive with limited power while still exploring the world
Beyond All Reason
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
It a grand scale RTS game with robots and insects loosely inspired by Total Annihilation.
Holy shit, this looks awesome! Maybe I can scratch that TA itch - thanks!
Mindustry is an awesome strategy game that combines Factorio with tower defense.
Sonic Robo Blast 2 Kart (ridiculous name I know) is one of the most underrated games ever. It’s a super polished, high quality Kart game with an insane amount of mods and maps. The online isn’t that populated but the singleplayer time trial is TONS of fun. If you like hunting for medals, it can be a pretty deep rabbit hole. There’s a sequel in development but no release date.
GzDoom is the most popular Doom source port and there’s a practically infinite amount of user generated content. If you don’t know where to start I highly recommend Doom: The Golden Souls Remastered and Castlevania: Simon’s Destiny. They’re good enough to be premium games.
Several, but my number one fav so far is Battle for Wesnoth. An old school hex tile turn based strategy game. Like something out of the 90’s or very early 2000’s.
Great art, awesome music, solid gameplay, and runs on a potato.
My best friend and I play it whenever we want a casual chill, play n’ chat gaming session.
It runs great on the Steam Deck too with a few interface tweaks.
I’ve installed wesnoth on at least 10 different computers and laptops over the years. My son’s enjoying it now, what a classic
Glad he’s having fun with it! I hope to share it with my kids one day. :)
It is from the 2000s. Its first release was in 2005.
I feel old now, thanks (:
Battle For Wesnoth is such a nostalgia hit. Great game too.
Totally!
If you like RTS games similar to Total Annihilation, you should definitely check out Beyond All Reason, it’s gorgeous and fun: https://www.beyondallreason.info/
Another supcom similar is zero-k. Didn’t know there were so many open source options! Available on steam or at https://zero-k.info/
ZeroK uses the same engine as BAR, my game, and quite a few others. 😋 And yes, definitely should check out ZK, it’s a mature project with a nice community and awesome devs.
Recoil is pretty much the only foss engine purpose built for modern rts games of all types.
Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a while. I sank way too many hours into this (started off as a TA clone but branched off into other game modes too) a decade or two ago, and it looks like it’s still going.
Spring is dead. The fork Recoil is going strong and fast. :-)
Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead has been mentioned so I’ll add OpenMW to the thread. It’s a open source engine rewrite of Morrowind and requires the base game to run Morrowind but it has the potential to be used to create new games and the devs are looking to expand it to allow the creation of ARPGs as well.
Another worthy mention is Endless Sky, it’s an open source game inspired by the classic space trading and combat game Escape Velocity.
Since you mentioned OpenMW I thought I should mention Daggerfall Unity. It’s an rewrite of Daggerfall using the Unity engine, also requiring the original files. The best thing about is that the developers have made it easily moddable and a very healthy modding community has sprung up for it, some of which really make the game feel like what the original developers were going for but had to deal with the technical limitations of the time.
Endless Sky was surprisingly addictive to me, it really scratched the exploration itch. Sadly I played through most content at some point, so now I’m waiting for there to be enough new stuff for me to play again. I really enjoyed it, including the stories and lore and universe!
I also played through most of the content at some point, but when they eventually updated with new content I couldn’t get back into it. Maybe I should try again because that was such a fun game.
Battle of Wesnoth. Haven’t played it in a while, but I remember spending hours playing that at one point.
And there are so many campaigns, it is incredible.
Cube 2 Sauerbraten is pretty good!
The original Cube is also fun, at least as a singleplayer game and comes with a lot of SP maps. The SPMP (or MPSP, i don’t remember :-P) mode also allows playing the MP maps with randomly spawned bots.
The AssaultCube fork adds more realistic environments (relatively to the original game anyway), though it is fully MP oriented. But you can still play with bots.
There are still people playing AssaultCube?
TBH i have no idea, i only played with bots myself.
It used to be really fun and there was a glitch used in competitive and in a separate community altogether called “hax jump” that allowed you to jump higher than normal if you crouch jumped twice in succession.
One of the developers, stef, led a crusade against it and tried to squash the bug. IIRC it les to people forking the code to include it.
Finally, the amount of ACTUAL hackers was so prevalent that it was annoying. I think in the new version they ended up adding a login feature that wasn’t required. However, I had quit before that happened. I tried to download it again recently, but I can’t even access the masterserver. Maybe they finally banned VPNs
Oh I am saving this post! It’s a goldmine
Oof, I have a huge boner for roguelikes, and most of them are open source. My biggest time sink is still Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, playable online at https://crawl.develz.org/
This one is great, I have spent many hours on it!
