Junuxx

Unsurpassed to this day. At least when it comes to fantasy-themed turn-based tactics, anyway. I've completed every official scenario and campaign now, and definitely got a lot of hours of entertainment for what I paid! That it's still so engrossing, charming, stable and even visually pleasing, almost 20 years after it came out, is no small feat. By my book, it loses a few points for having a meh random map generator, and some pretty overpowered spells that make some skill choices too obvious. The fact that Earth Magic and Wisdom are basically required for your main hero on most maps is somewhat unfortunate for strategic diversity. But IMHO, the outstanding quality of everything else still makes this a must-play for strategy fans.

Overall, a soulless and bland rehash of Alpha Centauri that won't last nearly as long. I did like the gameplay innovations like a worker only harvesting a single yield type from a tile, and global resource stockpiles; these were surprisingly fun and sensible deviations from the Civ standards and made the game as a whole more interesting. I also liked the initial struggle against native life, but it becomes irrelevant pretty soon, even with the expansion and even on the hardest setting. Artwork like the unit models and leader portraits get old really fast. The story is very lame, the leader backgrounds are exaggerated and annoying stereotypes. While this game directly copies the personalities of Alpha Centauri's faction leaders, it changes two non-white leaders to Caucasians (Morgan→Preston and Santiago→Heid), and drops another non-white (Lal). For such a similar game, this change from 3/7 to 5/6 white characters is very obvious, and I can't think of any excuse for this other than blatant racism on the part of the devs. Finally, victory was unrewarding and lacking. No end game cinematic, no replay, not even a high score table to make my playthrough memorable. Entertaining for maybe one or two games, but too empty and disappointing to have real replay value.

A classic. Still holds an interesting challenge for hardcore strategy fans: Exploration, designing ships, specializing planets, customizing your race a huge tech trees that eventually lets you manipulate wormholes and entire stars, and great mods to boot. But the graphics and user interface are really ancient - you will often feel like you're manipulating figures in a spreadsheet instead of playing a game. If you're new to the genre or born after 1990, better skip this and play Galactic Civilizations instead.

Painful and slow gameplay make it incomprehensible that this game actually came after Age of Empires I. To me it feels like a primitive predecessor of that classic game in every way.