StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I'm probably really late to this sort of thing, but I'm old.

Anyway, someone recommended a game called Starbase Orion to me, and I laughed because it looked like a soulless MoO2 clone. Ages later I actually bought it and it is amusingly mechanically superior to MoO2, with really cool ideas around combat and technology research. :V

However, what interests me most is the cloud-based asynchronous multiplayer. It's (essentially) play by email, but is done in the background by Game Centre. The game is a 'universal app', so I can play it on my ipad at home and on my phone when I'm out and about, which combined with the remote storage means downtime on turns is pretty small. The game lets players skip turns where they have nothing to do, so one player can set long-term stuff and another player can micro every turn without slowing the game as a whole down.

So I'm curious what other games do this. iOS has all the backend for this stuff natively, and I still can't think of many other decent games that even try it. PBEM is a big thing among the terminally boring on PC, but it strikes me that otherwise horrible games like Paradox or Dominions games would be far more palatable with this kind of mobile, play-for-a-few-seconds-at-a-time style multiplayer.

Frozen Synapse is the only recent game that's not just a 4x with PBEM.

Uh isn't Frozen Synapse that appallingly terrible 'tactical' 'game'? Can you play that multi? Dear me.

You asked for examples.

You didn't ask for good ones.

I hear that he's still against porting to non PC platforms because of the dumbed down for tablet/console babies argument.

You'd think any turn-based guys would be all over it; it apparently isn't hard to get working on platforms like iOS and it makes these games waaaay more accessible and fun to play since you don't have to sit down with the computer for four hours of waiting fro your turn.

The funniest is the Serellan guys who Kickstarted a new hardcore tactical shooter game. I've been on their forums a) for comedy and b) because I am interested. But it's such a hilariously insular community which doesn't understand why games like the old R6 and SWAT went away.

Not to mention the fact they the budget is miniscule, but idiots want CryEngine3, destructible terrain and every other feature.

Oh, it's fucking glorious stupidity.

But I guess having your head up your collective arse = no fucking clue.

That kickstarter stuff is a lot more interesting to me now that it seems they set up an organisation to frontend smaller groups' kickstarting attempts.

Anyway in short I spent hours looking through appstore and wondering why the search is so dead useless, and then GSB on iPad got pulled for memory leaks right before I bought it. :V

I cannot understand why it's so hard to put Strange Adventures In Infinite Space on phone/tablet. Seriously. Money left sitting there with that stuff.

WIERD adventures is on iPad actually. Thy didn't put any work into the UI at all though so it's really fiddly hitting bullshit small buttons.