@Galaki: I have yet to play Afterlight, but I did get a chance to play Aftershock recently. It was impossible to plan things out similarly to x-com because you have no real metric without movement points. You are forced to make incremental plans for all the units if you want to play it as a turn-based strat, which I found to be frustraiting and it limits the number of units you can reasonable control. It felt to me like I was playing a RTS that paused alot automatically.
@takkxyz: There were tons of Indie turn based strategy games too back in the day. It's just that nobody remembers them because they were mostly crap (except vgaplanets). With Indie games the refinement just doesn't seem to be there in interface, music, or just general artwork. I'm not asking GTA investment here, just some nice 2d artwork which doesn't make my eyes bleed. These all seem to be works of love done by 4x or whatever fans that, none of whom seem to be good artists or HCI people. I have heard some good things from Space Empires, so maybe I will eat my words in a little bit.
We still havent seen anything as good as MOO2 (no galciv is just not even close, and I say this after a tour at IBM). There are no "casual" wargames of the likes of panzer general, V for Victory, Wargame construction kit, etc. Are there really less people alive now who enjoy these types of games or are game developers led by humans who seek glory in working on "in" things?
This all started with Wolfenstein which I admit I played non-stop for about a year straight. By the time Doom came out I was already pretty bored of the genre. Halo and Crysis are both pretty much the same game.
