I’m not sure if this counts as a “patient gamer” because I played them to death years ago…but I’ve been playing both again recently and they’re just perfect little games with a ton of replayability. They’re not retro (FTL 2012, ITB 2018) but they’re old enough to regularly go on sale which is great!
Highly recommended if you like roguelite strategy games.
If you have any similar games to suggest, please leave a comment. I’m sure there’s tons of great strategy games I’ve missed over the years
I hate strategy games but I love Into The Breach. It’s a perfectly executed game packed into a single screen.
Is it even winnable? I always get killed before clearing all the islands. Still love it, though.
I think FTL might have been my overall favorite game of the 2010’s. Anything with a space setting can immediately get my attention, but I think it also managed to be just the kind of roguelite gameplay I love, too.
Fights in Tight Spaces and Nitro Kid are the closest I’ve seen to Into the Breach’s puzzly/must-think-ahead style. Both are card-based battlers, though.
It’s not exactly the same, but Slay the Spire scratched some of the same itch for me. It’s got the same meta-structure as FTL, but the fights use a deck-builder format. It’s really well done.
One Step From Eden seemed like it should be even better for me, since it borrows the positional strategy stuff from the Mega Man Battle Network games, but I couldn’t get into it. Mostly I remember it being just way too fast. I really wanted to like it, but basically didn’t.
And yeah, as someone else mentioned, Advance Wars is good, too. The thing that Into the Breach did that Advance Wars didn’t, for me, was that Advance Wars basically depended on the AI being a bit crap so that you could overcome an initial disadvantage and work up to victory. Into the Breach gets around that by making the enemy wholly predictable instead, which is arguably more fun. The only other game I know of that worked that way was an Android game called Auro, but I don’t think that’s playable anymore and I believe the dev has abandoned it. It’s a shame, as it was really well made.
Other than that… you could try learning Go (aka igo, baduk, or weiqi). It’s a board game with very simple rules, but very deep strategy that emerges from those rules. The main disadvantage is that it’s multiplayer only, but there are puzzles, problems, and AIs you can use to turn it into a solo time killer.
Maybe not so similar but more like Xcom is The last Spell.
Can highly recommend that and it is weird not many people are covering it.
I adore FTL, can’t believe nobody else tried to do something similar all these years.
Well, not 1-to-1, although there were some clones.
But plenty games took on the idea behind it. The most direct would probably be Crying Suns, which features a type of character-to-station assignment, real time placement element and roguelike generated galaxy traversal. It changes each element, but the pieces are all there.
Other games take more indirect inspiration. The Bomber/Space/etc Crew games focus on the move-people-around-the-ship part of FTL, clearly. There were a few games where something chases you through generated levels so you cannot linger and explore it all.
Well, there have been many games that have been influenced by the whole point to point event based rogue like map ideas, but most games don’t handle the combat the same way exactly, or have that same extremely punishing balance.
I’d love to see a full on FTL 2.
I don’t play the genre much, I didn’t even get that far in FTL itself, but Convoy is one I know of off the top of my head, if I think of any others I’ll come back and edit.
