When items seemingly disappear after uninstalling, you can sometimes bring them back from the void by using your orders to cue up an installation of the kind of item that has gone missing. This happens most often when you are uninstalling while the floor around you is cluttered to the point that the freshly uninstalled item has nowhere to go and ends up in "limbo" where you can't interact with or even see it but your character can still grab it, if they receive the order to do so. Mind you, sometimes the item also just vanishes completely, but it's worth a shot for items you care about. As for my recent games... + Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries because of its perfect blend of engineering and war crimes, plus awesome modders + Baldur's Gate 3 because it's just good and finally patched to the point that I can enjoy it properly + Metal Gear Solid 5 TPP because of the nostalgia
I have most of those! Battle Brothers is a great little game, isn't it? It reminds me of Darklands (circa 1993). I also play WarTales which has a similar feel. None of them have captured that wide-open feel that Darklands gave, though, which is disappointing.
Maybe I should have asked this directly in my video--what other games would you want to see Let's Play videos on? That's sort of what I meant when I asked that, but I'm realizing, that's a completely different question in a lot of regards.
Hey Chad. My not on channel games that I play are Factorio (it's been five years but with Space Age I've jumped back in) and EUIV. I play 7 Days to Die co-op with a lot of my spare time.
Hey DG! Good to hear from you! I've started watching your 7DTD series. For those that don't know, @DecathlonGamer inspired me to start my channel, and has been instrumental in me sticking with it. Please check out his channel!!
i played stranded thought was ok game... then i finally decided if that game is ok. and everyone says rimworld is same but so much better. i guess i finally break down buy rimworld. and yes. rimworld is so much better game lol it makes alien dawn seem like childs play. other than the visuals for alien dawn. everything else is lesser game compared to rimworld. that said i still enjoyed both games. 0 regrets playing either.
if you ever have a spare 100 hours its worth a revisit. loving the Ostranauts series, you keep making me go back and play it. as for you ship expansion, i try to have the cargo closer to the airlock, having it at the bottom of the ship takes longer to haul the items and i have noticed on larger wrecks there seems to be a limit on the distance auto haul will work at
and watch out with the new 0.21 version, keep your crates at good quality, i had one getting destroyed in my hands. i had it full of floor tiles to upgrade my ship and halfway through i was left with some scrap carbon fiber in hand and my remaining floor tiles scattered around me.
I'm loving the convo here! I'll try to keep up to speed on what folks are suggesting. It looks like I need to get Project Zomboid. It's been on my wishlist for quite a while now, but with it being so much older, I've hesitated to grab it. If I do, I'll be sure to mention it!
A vote for Shadow Empire! I really enjoyed that game, and thought of doing a Let's Play of it. However, when I play wargames (boardgames), I almost always get wiped out by my opponents. I have a great time, but I'm not sure getting pwned by the computer makes for interesting content.
I've found when bins dissappear they end up in the wall it was attached to, try uninstalling the wall (granted it's interior) and I've found lost bins during ship renovations after removing the walls.
for me right now, favorite games Kenshi, and satisfactory. o x4 foundations is great space sim game Kenshi imo is the best game ever made. nothing i have seen comes close. the freedom to do whatever, whenever, however. the learning skill ups. complexity. world atmosphere. stories u can learn through playing. chars interact with one another. how u are not the hero. u can die. there no quests. its legit up to the player to do what they want. how the game world lives and breaths with or without player input. the 1 downside is the game economy just doesnt work well. but there are mods to fix that. or work around it. which is another thing, huge mod data base to choose from. satisfactory took their idea from factorio. made it look way nicer, 1st person. and more casual setting. go at ur own pace. doing ur own thing. again like kenshi. no quests persay. no time line no 1 set way to do it. up to the player to do what they want. but ofc its a building game. u cant just build endgame stuff at the start so there is a character learning curve, so to speak. u cant just day 1 build end game factorys. there is progression. x4 foundations. as far as i know best rpg space sim out there. u can be miner, cop, bounty hunter, space pirate, business tycon, explorer, or essentialy king of empire, ruler. or u can be all at once.... or at least in 1 playthrough. u can play 1st person or from management aspect. controlling ur hired crews, ships. u can legit do 1st person zero to hero stuff. or go put ur char in space station, and never leave essentially safe zone... and just play from there giving out orders whole playthrough lol. with space stations u can watch ships come and go. landing offloading etc. its really cool imo to just stand and watch on balcony as ships come and go. if u are on station that has place for u to stand to see all that. which most do. just dpends on the layouts. game does have quests. at least for me i skipped most. boring. for u to play? honestly just stick to what u want to play. i cant imagine u like kenshi from what i see u playing. but never know. satisfactory seems like it be up ur ally. casual play. but for most part probably be boring vids. that said ostranauts isnt exciting either i guess lol. and i watching all ur vids. x4 is what u make it. def fun game. but i doubt to many watch for long. cause they buy the game and get sucked into their own universe
I played a good amount of Kenshi when it first went to EA. I've mentioned Darklands in some other comments--Kenshi is probably the closest relative to it, in my opinion. I feel like there was a reason I stopped playing, and I can't recall what it was. Definitely a good game! I like X4, as well, but I got frustrated trying to get my joystick/throttle working with it. At some point, I moved away from playing it. I could see falling back into that universe at some point.
DF is one of the best games ever. It got me playing Rimworld, which is my second most played game on Steam. I love this concept. I've never finished a play-through. I think I get too impatient, and start to make mistakes. (You may see that's a common thread in games I play--- ;) ).
Current games I really enjoy that people who enjoy this might like as well: - Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic - Farming Simulator (anything 22 onwards will be fine, modded is better) - Factorio - Eve Online if you don't want to have a life :D
Workers and Resources--I'm seriously considering doing a series on that one. Farm Sim -- I'm waiting for the next one to drop in a little over a week. I get a yearning to play this when I drive through the Midwest (which I did last weekend). For whatever reason, I find playing this one relaxing. I know that actual farming isn't all that "fun," (my wife's family has more than its share of farmers), but I like having the time to just "wonder" about all the things that go into the process, etc. Eve Online--I had to ban myself from that game at one point. I got way too invested. I'm also realizing that was...18 (WOW) years ago. For a similar, single player experience, check out Astrox Imperium.
@@mochad The main advice I would give for W&R that I heard from a different UA-camr is not to let people tell you you're doing it "wrong". Sure there are more or less optimal ways of doing things, but the goal should be about having a good time, and I know someone who was driven off the game by commenters telling him he was doing it "wrong". FS - definitely looking forward to FS25, and yeah, it's a game, and you have to look at it as such. EO - waaayyy too easy to lose too much time in that :D - I have the benefit of not working these days so I have time, but if I was, I wouldn't have time. Well, I look forward to whatever comes next!
@@IanEdmonds I'm trying to get ahead enough on Ostranauts to be able to give FS25 a fair amount of time, and decide if I should do videos on it. There's nothing worse than doing videos no one is interested in. (Actually, there's lots of things that are worse, but...you get the drift.) Eve Online--yeah, I was legitimately addicted to it at one point. I sold my account. I picked it up again about 6 years later, and got in with a good group. I was able to balance playing it with the rest of my life. That's about the time my Mom was going through her last days, and my EO group was very supportive. Several of those guys were going through similar problems. When my Mom died, I kind of stopped playing (a few reasons--number one being Dad moved in with us), and relayed that to the group. Oddly enough, most of them were calling it quits at about the same time. We sat our corporation down nicely, I think. I regret not keeping in touch with many of those guys. I've since found that single-player games are much easier for me to manage. I will play a few games, like Railroader and Farm Sim, with friends and my brother, but overall, MMOs are AMAZING, but just not my thing anymore. If I do a Farm Sim or Railroader series, it'll probably be about co-op play.
I have Space Engineers, and haven't looked at it in years. I tried to convince my brother to play with me. Bannerlord is a ton of fun, right up to the point it isn't fun anymore. I do highly recommend it, though.
A month late but you might like Barotrauma! Not so much the ad-hoc building up of your spaceship (submarine in Barotrauma), since the sub-builder is a separate tool from the game itself. But, you can design a sub and add it to the list of submarines you can buy and/or play with. The sub editor is a completely different beast, especially the wiring, and can be really complicated. Aside from that I definitely second Rimworld. Amazing game!
Agreed. Neo Scavenger tells the story of what is happening back on Earth around the same time you are ripping up ships out here in space. The gameplay feels surprisingly similar to Ostranaunts, despite the entirely different setting, but there is a bigger focus on survival.
I checked out the Quasimorph store page. "Nothing in this Endless Space is belongs to you" may have sold me on the game. :) I quoted the original to a co-worker that's into video games, and he had no idea what I was talking about. Kids.... ;)
in my opinion crew is a little too "unfinished". They need way too much babysitting at the moment for me. But i generally try to get 1 person as soon i can´t keep up with restoring my own ship, so i can scavenge the derelicts and let the crew member take care of keeping my ship in a good state. But their AI is too stupid most of the times. I have one career with 3 Crew members, one is running between my 2 jukeboxes forth and back and changes the songs for hours instead of working. They tend to equip a helmet as soon the envoirement isn´t 100% perfect and then they trey each food object they can find to eat through their helmet. Or if they get hungry they won´t go to the meals i store on the ship instead they run out into the derelict and try to eat again through the helmet. They love to sleep on Clothes or backbacks instead the beds or bunks i installed. And if you don´t have weber laser tools for them you spent more time changing the batteries on their tools then working on important stuff, and when you try to change the batteries they try to run away as soon you open the inventory of the battery charger or the tool. And i don´t know if it´s just me or others have the problem too, but i need to restart the gamer each time i want the HAUL order to work.
@@darkeolas6587 this is exactly why I don't tend to use Crew too much. It is a great idea, but it requires too much hand-holding right now. What I might consider is hiring a crewmate for a very specific task, like building out a section, then get rid of them when the work is done. But honestly, it's just easier to do it all on my own. I could be entirely missing some of the larger points of having crew. But they don't tend to work well for me. I will hire one at some point, but not sure when.
i was wondering this too. i since read the replys underneath. 2 days of videos i seen....40+ vids on the game. i obviously want to really like the game and buy it. but i can see it just not for me as of yet. after looking, reading about last game he did. may never be for me lol but thats ok. i still enjoy watching this series. its a neat game concept.
If you dig the Expanse like, near-future sci-fi, I recommend Terra Invicta, a war / politics Grand Strategy (meaning it simulates a theathre, in this case, Earth / Solar System, in real time, but with pause). It's kind of two games welded together. In first, on Earth, you coordinate humanity's response to sudden alien invasion as one of 7 ideologies (pertaining to stance about aliens) - you propagandize your choice out of 129 simulated nations (based on real life census data about economy, education, sociology, military power, and so on), if they accept your stance, you control their research, military, and part of their budget, while other 6 ideologies do the same in pursuit of their solution. Other part is building mining bases, space stations, warships, and duking it out with aliens in Solar System, faithfully modeled to scale, kind of like in Ostranauts, but way more detailed. It features realistic tech tree that starts with current day chemical rockets armed with naval guns, and ends with alien tech hybrid fusion torchships armed with laser, plasma cannons, and railguns. And Nuke Torpedoes Did I forget to mention you can start Nuclear conflict if you take over nuclear superpower☢☢☢
Terra Invicta is a great game! As I understand it, it was created by the people who did "the long war" mod for X-COM. I'd be willing to do a Let's Play on this one, but I haven't been very successful in the game--it'd probably be another "How NOT to Play..." series. :P X-COM: UFO Defense was my first "I can't stop playing this!" game. I had previously played a game called Twilight 2000, which was an isomorphic 3-D view of a post-apocalyptic Eastern Europe RPG that was absolutely FANTASTIC. (Twilight 2000, is a pencil and paper RPG, for those that didn't know.) Twilight 2000 would have been my first "can't stop playing" except....it was badly broken. The storyline was driven by the characters, and progressed as you moved through Europe. But, at some point, I'd always get to a point where none of my squad members spoke the appropriate language to move forward. And, this wasn't a simple fix--it had dozens of languages for your characters to choose from on creation. It was the first time I realized what a blessing it is to live in a country where I could drive almost 1000 miles in any direction, and still be speaking my native language. I was heartbroken that the game didn't move any further along. Then XCOM came out (1994). Probably the game I played the most ever. Microprose was amazing.
@mochad IKR, TI, as most Grand Strategy can seem intimidating. But there is a solution. If you ever have time, watch TI introduction playthrough by Perun Gaming (that's first of his two TI series). He's true master of the game, he's even IN the game, even watching part of his run will make sure everyone is as ready as it gets. Because he not only explains WHAT to do, but also WHY.
When items seemingly disappear after uninstalling, you can sometimes bring them back from the void by using your orders to cue up an installation of the kind of item that has gone missing. This happens most often when you are uninstalling while the floor around you is cluttered to the point that the freshly uninstalled item has nowhere to go and ends up in "limbo" where you can't interact with or even see it but your character can still grab it, if they receive the order to do so. Mind you, sometimes the item also just vanishes completely, but it's worth a shot for items you care about.
As for my recent games...
+ Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries because of its perfect blend of engineering and war crimes, plus awesome modders
+ Baldur's Gate 3 because it's just good and finally patched to the point that I can enjoy it properly
+ Metal Gear Solid 5 TPP because of the nostalgia
thank you for the tip
Love these videos! I've been playing and making videos for Abiotic Factor which has been a lot of fun.
Roguetech, Rimworld, Victoria 3, Crusader Kings 3, Automation, Battle Brothers.
I have most of those! Battle Brothers is a great little game, isn't it? It reminds me of Darklands (circa 1993). I also play WarTales which has a similar feel. None of them have captured that wide-open feel that Darklands gave, though, which is disappointing.
Maybe I should have asked this directly in my video--what other games would you want to see Let's Play videos on?
That's sort of what I meant when I asked that, but I'm realizing, that's a completely different question in a lot of regards.
games I like the most... Out of Ore, Transport 2, Europa Universals IV, Going Medieval
Hey Chad. My not on channel games that I play are Factorio (it's been five years but with Space Age I've jumped back in) and EUIV. I play 7 Days to Die co-op with a lot of my spare time.
Hey DG! Good to hear from you! I've started watching your 7DTD series.
For those that don't know, @DecathlonGamer inspired me to start my channel, and has been instrumental in me sticking with it. Please check out his channel!!
Stardeus, Stranded Alien Dawn, A Legionary's Life
i played stranded thought was ok game... then i finally decided if that game is ok. and everyone says rimworld is same but so much better. i guess i finally break down buy rimworld.
and yes. rimworld is so much better game lol it makes alien dawn seem like childs play. other than the visuals for alien dawn. everything else is lesser game compared to rimworld.
that said i still enjoyed both games. 0 regrets playing either.
Cobalt Core is a fairly short and warm space game. A roguelike, but the synergies can be fun to play with. Thnks for the video.
only autovents close if they detect a big pressure loss at one side, and they need to be opened by hand again.
If you have never tried factorio you really should, it really is an amazing game and the new dlc could easily have been a sequel
I binged Factorio for a while, Watching KatherineOfSky videos. It is still installed, but I haven't played it in a very long time.
if you ever have a spare 100 hours its worth a revisit. loving the Ostranauts series, you keep making me go back and play it. as for you ship expansion, i try to have the cargo closer to the airlock, having it at the bottom of the ship takes longer to haul the items and i have noticed on larger wrecks there seems to be a limit on the distance auto haul will work at
and watch out with the new 0.21 version, keep your crates at good quality, i had one getting destroyed in my hands. i had it full of floor tiles to upgrade my ship and halfway through i was left with some scrap carbon fiber in hand and my remaining floor tiles scattered around me.
I'm loving the convo here! I'll try to keep up to speed on what folks are suggesting.
It looks like I need to get Project Zomboid. It's been on my wishlist for quite a while now, but with it being so much older, I've hesitated to grab it. If I do, I'll be sure to mention it!
Other than Ostranauts, Shadow Empire, Stellaris, and Going Medieval are my present top 3 usual go tos. =)
A vote for Shadow Empire! I really enjoyed that game, and thought of doing a Let's Play of it. However, when I play wargames (boardgames), I almost always get wiped out by my opponents. I have a great time, but I'm not sure getting pwned by the computer makes for interesting content.
I've found when bins dissappear they end up in the wall it was attached to, try uninstalling the wall (granted it's interior) and I've found lost bins during ship renovations after removing the walls.
6:30 happened to me 3 or 4 times that a bin disappeared after uninstalling, seems to be a common bug
Check out Space Station 14
for me right now, favorite games Kenshi, and satisfactory. o x4 foundations is great space sim game
Kenshi imo is the best game ever made. nothing i have seen comes close. the freedom to do whatever, whenever, however. the learning skill ups. complexity. world atmosphere. stories u can learn through playing. chars interact with one another. how u are not the hero. u can die. there no quests. its legit up to the player to do what they want. how the game world lives and breaths with or without player input. the 1 downside is the game economy just doesnt work well. but there are mods to fix that. or work around it. which is another thing, huge mod data base to choose from.
satisfactory took their idea from factorio. made it look way nicer, 1st person. and more casual setting. go at ur own pace. doing ur own thing. again like kenshi. no quests persay. no time line no 1 set way to do it. up to the player to do what they want. but ofc its a building game. u cant just build endgame stuff at the start so there is a character learning curve, so to speak. u cant just day 1 build end game factorys. there is progression.
x4 foundations. as far as i know best rpg space sim out there. u can be miner, cop, bounty hunter, space pirate, business tycon, explorer, or essentialy king of empire, ruler. or u can be all at once.... or at least in 1 playthrough. u can play 1st person or from management aspect. controlling ur hired crews, ships. u can legit do 1st person zero to hero stuff. or go put ur char in space station, and never leave essentially safe zone... and just play from there giving out orders whole playthrough lol. with space stations u can watch ships come and go. landing offloading etc. its really cool imo to just stand and watch on balcony as ships come and go. if u are on station that has place for u to stand to see all that. which most do. just dpends on the layouts. game does have quests. at least for me i skipped most. boring.
for u to play? honestly just stick to what u want to play. i cant imagine u like kenshi from what i see u playing. but never know. satisfactory seems like it be up ur ally. casual play. but for most part probably be boring vids. that said ostranauts isnt exciting either i guess lol. and i watching all ur vids. x4 is what u make it. def fun game. but i doubt to many watch for long. cause they buy the game and get sucked into their own universe
I played a good amount of Kenshi when it first went to EA. I've mentioned Darklands in some other comments--Kenshi is probably the closest relative to it, in my opinion. I feel like there was a reason I stopped playing, and I can't recall what it was. Definitely a good game!
I like X4, as well, but I got frustrated trying to get my joystick/throttle working with it. At some point, I moved away from playing it. I could see falling back into that universe at some point.
Maybe perhaps [ dwarf fortress ]
DF is one of the best games ever. It got me playing Rimworld, which is my second most played game on Steam. I love this concept. I've never finished a play-through. I think I get too impatient, and start to make mistakes. (You may see that's a common thread in games I play--- ;) ).
Current games I really enjoy that people who enjoy this might like as well:
- Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic
- Farming Simulator (anything 22 onwards will be fine, modded is better)
- Factorio
- Eve Online if you don't want to have a life :D
Workers and resources is great now with the realistic mode 🙂
Workers and Resources--I'm seriously considering doing a series on that one.
Farm Sim -- I'm waiting for the next one to drop in a little over a week. I get a yearning to play this when I drive through the Midwest (which I did last weekend). For whatever reason, I find playing this one relaxing. I know that actual farming isn't all that "fun," (my wife's family has more than its share of farmers), but I like having the time to just "wonder" about all the things that go into the process, etc.
Eve Online--I had to ban myself from that game at one point. I got way too invested. I'm also realizing that was...18 (WOW) years ago. For a similar, single player experience, check out Astrox Imperium.
@@mochad The main advice I would give for W&R that I heard from a different UA-camr is not to let people tell you you're doing it "wrong". Sure there are more or less optimal ways of doing things, but the goal should be about having a good time, and I know someone who was driven off the game by commenters telling him he was doing it "wrong".
FS - definitely looking forward to FS25, and yeah, it's a game, and you have to look at it as such.
EO - waaayyy too easy to lose too much time in that :D - I have the benefit of not working these days so I have time, but if I was, I wouldn't have time.
Well, I look forward to whatever comes next!
@@IanEdmonds I'm trying to get ahead enough on Ostranauts to be able to give FS25 a fair amount of time, and decide if I should do videos on it. There's nothing worse than doing videos no one is interested in. (Actually, there's lots of things that are worse, but...you get the drift.)
Eve Online--yeah, I was legitimately addicted to it at one point. I sold my account. I picked it up again about 6 years later, and got in with a good group. I was able to balance playing it with the rest of my life. That's about the time my Mom was going through her last days, and my EO group was very supportive. Several of those guys were going through similar problems. When my Mom died, I kind of stopped playing (a few reasons--number one being Dad moved in with us), and relayed that to the group. Oddly enough, most of them were calling it quits at about the same time. We sat our corporation down nicely, I think. I regret not keeping in touch with many of those guys.
I've since found that single-player games are much easier for me to manage. I will play a few games, like Railroader and Farm Sim, with friends and my brother, but overall, MMOs are AMAZING, but just not my thing anymore.
If I do a Farm Sim or Railroader series, it'll probably be about co-op play.
Timberborn
Space engineers, project zomboid, mechwarrior5, bannerlord, avorion
I have Space Engineers, and haven't looked at it in years. I tried to convince my brother to play with me.
Bannerlord is a ton of fun, right up to the point it isn't fun anymore. I do highly recommend it, though.
A month late but you might like Barotrauma! Not so much the ad-hoc building up of your spaceship (submarine in Barotrauma), since the sub-builder is a separate tool from the game itself. But, you can design a sub and add it to the list of submarines you can buy and/or play with. The sub editor is a completely different beast, especially the wiring, and can be really complicated. Aside from that I definitely second Rimworld. Amazing game!
Wishlisted! Thanks! It has a familiar look to it, but I'm pretty sure I'd remember a "space submarine" game. :P
Wishlisted! Thanks! It has a familiar look to it, but I'm pretty sure I'd remember a "space submarine" game. :P
If you like Ostranauts, you could try Neo Scavenger, it is from the same developer. Or Stellaris, another nice space game
Agreed. Neo Scavenger tells the story of what is happening back on Earth around the same time you are ripping up ships out here in space. The gameplay feels surprisingly similar to Ostranaunts, despite the entirely different setting, but there is a bigger focus on survival.
I'm horrible at Neo Scavenger. I've thought of having a "How NOT To Play" series....
Stationeers, Distant Worlds Universe, and Quasimorph
I checked out the Quasimorph store page. "Nothing in this Endless Space is belongs to you" may have sold me on the game. :) I quoted the original to a co-worker that's into video games, and he had no idea what I was talking about. Kids.... ;)
@@mochad I must be one of the kids because I have no clue what that references
@@shrike6243 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
When would you suggest hiring crew? Is it better to wait? Can you discuss crew in a future episode?
in my opinion crew is a little too "unfinished". They need way too much babysitting at the moment for me. But i generally try to get 1 person as soon i can´t keep up with restoring my own ship, so i can scavenge the derelicts and let the crew member take care of keeping my ship in a good state. But their AI is too stupid most of the times. I have one career with 3 Crew members, one is running between my 2 jukeboxes forth and back and changes the songs for hours instead of working. They tend to equip a helmet as soon the envoirement isn´t 100% perfect and then they trey each food object they can find to eat through their helmet. Or if they get hungry they won´t go to the meals i store on the ship instead they run out into the derelict and try to eat again through the helmet. They love to sleep on Clothes or backbacks instead the beds or bunks i installed. And if you don´t have weber laser tools for them you spent more time changing the batteries on their tools then working on important stuff, and when you try to change the batteries they try to run away as soon you open the inventory of the battery charger or the tool. And i don´t know if it´s just me or others have the problem too, but i need to restart the gamer each time i want the HAUL order to work.
@@darkeolas6587 this is exactly why I don't tend to use Crew too much. It is a great idea, but it requires too much hand-holding right now. What I might consider is hiring a crewmate for a very specific task, like building out a section, then get rid of them when the work is done. But honestly, it's just easier to do it all on my own.
I could be entirely missing some of the larger points of having crew. But they don't tend to work well for me.
I will hire one at some point, but not sure when.
i was wondering this too. i since read the replys underneath. 2 days of videos i seen....40+ vids on the game. i obviously want to really like the game and buy it. but i can see it just not for me as of yet. after looking, reading about last game he did. may never be for me lol but thats ok.
i still enjoy watching this series. its a neat game concept.
Minecraft (both vanilla and gregtech new horizons) and Workers & Resources: Soviet republic
Top 3 for me, right now are:
Satisfactory
Uboat
Distant Worlds 2
Oh...U-Boat! That's a great one. I haven't played it in a year or so now. I should give it a peak again.
Project Zomboid!
Project zomboid. Is recommended by the ostranauts dev.
If you dig the Expanse like, near-future sci-fi, I recommend Terra Invicta, a war / politics Grand Strategy (meaning it simulates a theathre, in this case, Earth / Solar System, in real time, but with pause). It's kind of two games welded together.
In first, on Earth, you coordinate humanity's response to sudden alien invasion as one of 7 ideologies (pertaining to stance about aliens) - you propagandize your choice out of 129 simulated nations (based on real life census data about economy, education, sociology, military power, and so on), if they accept your stance, you control their research, military, and part of their budget, while other 6 ideologies do the same in pursuit of their solution.
Other part is building mining bases, space stations, warships, and duking it out with aliens in Solar System, faithfully modeled to scale, kind of like in Ostranauts, but way more detailed.
It features realistic tech tree that starts with current day chemical rockets armed with naval guns, and ends with alien tech hybrid fusion torchships armed with laser, plasma cannons, and railguns. And Nuke Torpedoes Did I forget to mention you can start Nuclear conflict if you take over nuclear superpower☢☢☢
Terra Invicta is a great game! As I understand it, it was created by the people who did "the long war" mod for X-COM.
I'd be willing to do a Let's Play on this one, but I haven't been very successful in the game--it'd probably be another "How NOT to Play..." series. :P
X-COM: UFO Defense was my first "I can't stop playing this!" game. I had previously played a game called Twilight 2000, which was an isomorphic 3-D view of a post-apocalyptic Eastern Europe RPG that was absolutely FANTASTIC. (Twilight 2000, is a pencil and paper RPG, for those that didn't know.) Twilight 2000 would have been my first "can't stop playing" except....it was badly broken. The storyline was driven by the characters, and progressed as you moved through Europe. But, at some point, I'd always get to a point where none of my squad members spoke the appropriate language to move forward. And, this wasn't a simple fix--it had dozens of languages for your characters to choose from on creation. It was the first time I realized what a blessing it is to live in a country where I could drive almost 1000 miles in any direction, and still be speaking my native language.
I was heartbroken that the game didn't move any further along. Then XCOM came out (1994). Probably the game I played the most ever. Microprose was amazing.
@mochad IKR, TI, as most Grand Strategy can seem intimidating. But there is a solution. If you ever have time, watch TI introduction playthrough by Perun Gaming (that's first of his two TI series). He's true master of the game, he's even IN the game, even watching part of his run will make sure everyone is as ready as it gets. Because he not only explains WHAT to do, but also WHY.