I’ve been on a horribly long hiatus from gaming, due mostly to a lack of time. That having been said, now that I have a bit of free time I’ve been trying to get back into the loop with any particularly good PC empire building/strategy games that’ve been released in the past ten years.
As a means of gauging my tastes: I played Alpha Centauri and loved it, but chafed at the piss-poor unit management system that made large-scale military unfeasible.
I loved the heck out of Civ4, and would easily play it again. My only complaint this time around was that the tech tree pretty much forced you to keep all of the technology types relatively equal. (Gone are the fond memories of the SNES civ, in which I always ended up using a modern aircraft carrier to transport my vast legions of knights and spearmen to the enemy continent.)
I played Shogun, and enjoyed it once, but the lack of open-endedness bothered me a bit. Given your territory, your clan’s specialty, and the poor enemy AI, the winning strategy tended to be pretty obvious.
Soo… any suggestions? I’d heard a couple of years ago that someone’d released a what-if scenario in which the Japanese mounted a land invasion of the US during WWII…