Poll: Strategy Games and Reloading

[SckizoBoy]

There's a reason there's only ever one save game for each campaign I play...

Bearing in mind that the only strat games I play these days are the TW titles, part of the fun for me is going "fuck! fuck! fuck! shit! shit! shit!" for about a dozen turns while I cede ground and manically reorganise my armies. Actually, that's a lot of the fun. Hence why everything's on the hardest level setting possible and me shouting 'come at me, *****' at the monitor.

The really weird thing being that I beat the N:TW campaign on hard faster than on easy...

Anyway, the only time I quick-load is when one of my characters (one I'm attached to, at least) dies. Can come as a real shock... even on replays.

 

[GLo Jones]

I definitely do in Europa Universalis, and my Civ and Total War games, maybe even Warband if things somehow collapse spectacularly.

That article definitely raises some good points though. I'm gonna have to try and refrain a bit more. I hope more games have modes which disable player saves, just to help save us from ourselves.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

I will occasionally reload, but only when the AI plainly cheats, e.g. Civ 5 2 city babylon beating me to science victory when i have 15 cities with 26 pop and all science buildings.

I was pumping 5000 beakers a turn and measly babylon with 2 cities smaller than my 4th and no wonders pumps out a spaceship.

fucking hate that. that game caused so much rage sometimes (partially why i liked playing civ revolution on the console, the AI was curbed so it didn't pull shit like that, it actually required a decent chunk of cities to pull shit in that manner.)

i quicksave/load all the time, depending on the game of course, but honestly there are some games where it's almost expected, while some games it helps you ease off the stress a bit if your getting hammered by the AI when you reach a certain point each time.

I understand what the article is saying but doesn't mean i agree with it.

 

[Da Orky Man]

Most of the strategy games I play tend to e the longer ones, where there's always a chance to retreat, rearm, and return. In one particularly memorable game of Sins of a Solar Empire, I almost re-enacted the plot of Homeworld.
Really. A couple of AIs teamed on me, and blew almost everything I had to Hades, with only a few light frigates, and two capital ships - a colony/battlecrusier and a carrier. I ran to an obscure corner of the map and hid in a star system no-one had bothered to colonise yet. And so I bided my time and rebuilt my fleet as the half-dozen AIs or so beat seven kinds of shit out of each other. And as soon as they were weak enough, BAM! Massive invasion force consisting of a dozen or so capitals, several dozen cruisers and hundreds of frigates smashed straight through their weakened empires and wiped out everything they could find.

Fun times...

Still, reloading all the time just ruins the flow.