RTS: Zero-K

RTT: Steel Division 2 and Warno

TBS: Dominions 6. Songs of Conquest if you want a modern casual HOMM3 clone.

TBT: Battle Brothers and Field of Glory 2

Grand Strategy: Basically everything from Paradox. Victoria 3 is my current favorite.

Maybe a more reasonable question: Is there anyone here self-hosting on non-shit hardware? 😅

As a millennial, I’m probably not alone when I write Red Alert, Atlantis, Diablo and Fallout 2 on a computer without internet connection. Also endless demos from PC Gamer CDs.

The more unusual game I want to add is Warlords 3. Got it as a Christmas gift from my cousins boyfriend (he was maybe 20 years older than me). Probably because he wanted someone he could play shared screen PvP with. Spent a lot of time with that game. The same guy also gave me a pirate copy of Diablo. I should probably give him a call today and thank him.

Also playing Tibia on a 33k dial up connection was special. A very laggy and expensive experience. Always afraid that mom would just turn off the connection because she had to make a phone call. And the true horror I felt when I encountered another player or a new monster deep within an unexplored dungeon. I didn’t like WoW when it came out. Probably because of emotional bluntedness that free PvP in combination with gear + xp loss causes.

And I’m still chasing the dragon.

That must have been really awesome. ❤️

Guix! Yay!

WH40K: Chaos Gate

Total war: Warhammer 3? Baldurs Gate 3? Maybe those are available on console as well…

Is that still true though? My impression is that AMD works just fine for inference with ROCm and llama.cpp nowadays. And you get much more VRAM per dollar, which means you can stuff a bigger model in there. You might get fewer tokens per second compared with a similar Nvidia, but that shouldn’t really be a problem for a home assistant. I believe. Even an Arc a770 should work with IPEX-LLM. Buy two Arc or Radeon with 16 GB VRAM each, and you can fit a Llama 3.2 11B or a Pixtral 12B without any quantization. Just make sure that ROCm supports that specific Radeon card, if you go for team red.

Also went for BG1! Seemed like a really good deal.

Lots of CRPG and TRPG. A few experimental indie RTS. And a few indie auto-battlers. Plus a few casual co-op shooters. Oh, and some indie horror as well.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Caves of Qud or Path of Achra (I got them both). Aren’t we hipster enough?

Found the answers in the Bar FAQ: https://beyondallreason.info/faq/what-are-the-differences-between-bar-and-zerok

TLDR: Zero-K and BAR are based on the same FOSS engine. Zero-K is less micro with better unit AI. BAR delivers a more vanilla and micro intensive Total Annihilation experience.

Supreme Commander is proprietary closed source and has some different mechanics. Larger but worse maps.

It must be playable for casual and single player gamers for sure.

I’ve never seen a casual friendly multiplayer RTS I believe. The FPS genre manage to do this, so I think it should be possible. Hmm… Nothguard, Dune: Spice Wars, Line Wars and maybe Total War. These could maybe be considered casual friendly multiplayer RTS.

Though I must admit I want a good e-sport RTS I can watch and maybe dip my toes in, now when SC2 and AOE both feel quite dead. It’s the only e-sport that really entertains me. (we’ll maybe chess is an e-sport as well nowadays)

I hope we will se more non-micro RTS games. More like HOI4, but that takes less than 1 hour to finish a game. Dune and Line Wars are on the right track.

How does it differ from Zero-K or Supreme Commander (or any other TA clone)?

Yeah, I’m only interested in the “least bad” here. Taking usability, libre and performance into account. I don’t think that even the Framework Laptop 13 RISC-V will be completely libre.

Thanks for input though!

Actually, it is not true from what I’ve learned. For example, Intel is about to push chipset/bios upgrades to boost the performance of the new Core Ultra 9 285k. And that kind of driver can at best be open source and in the upstream kernel or at worst closed source and only installed by some windows only bloatware.

Nice website! Thanks!

Having to use windows when upgrading firmware is very Linux unfriendly.

Actually I did. Not thanks to you though.

Probably good, but I want to stay away from anything related to Kubernetes. My experience is that it’s an overkill black hole of constant debugging. Unfortunately. Thanks though!