Games with scaling

What are some games with great scaling?
I'm talking shit like Total War, where you manage things on the level of an empire, but you still get detailed (if somewhat mediocre) combat.
Or Hegemony, where the line between managing the empire and the individual combat is a turn of the mousewheel away.
I can't think of many other games that let you manage things on both a grand scale and a small scale like this, aside from maybe Dwarf Fortress.

Distant Worlds

Does Supreme Commander count? The default RTS view is there but if you zoom out enough you get the strategic view that lets you see the entire map. It is absolutely possible to play the game entirely from this view, however most people will zoom in to precisely place buildings and, rarely, to micro their units.

is medieval 2 the only total war game worth playing? Are the newer ones any good or not?

Age of Wonders and Knights of Honour maybe?
I only played them for a bit, so I don't know the details.


Med 2 is the pinnacle. Add mods when vanilla gets boring. Stainless Steel and Europa Barbarorum are probably among the most popular, although there are Warhammer and LotR mods as well.
Besides that, Rome 1 is also very good and was the game that got most people into the series.
There are some decent games among later releases, like Napoleon, but they are bad Total War games.

Now the Shogun 2 masturbators are going to lynch me.

Stellaris and Oriental Empires seem to be also games with "great scaling". Also Black & White 1/2.

shit now I feel like reinstalling Black and White. Also rip God Games, so many in development right now but barely any decent ones released.

I'd argue Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai is worthwhile. Original Shogun 2 suffers from a lack of unit variety but the standalone expansion basically has the same units while adding different types of riflemen, pistol/rifle cavalry, effective cannons, and effective navy ships. Factions are still just color swaps but not much they could do given the setting. In any case the new units provides a nice dynamic between melee and ranged units.

I agree that the campaign has less depth than medieval 2 or rome but on the whole its a well polished game with good battles and good art direction.

I can understand why people don't like it as much though.

that why you get the mod for anime battles and completely ruining balance

Aurora 4x. You can go from loading individual missiles into magazines to tractor-pulling a massive, engineless space station with tons of terraforming modules to another planet with a dozen tugs.

Shogun 1 is too dated for most people. Medieval 1 does some interesting things but you can safely skip it.
Medieval 2 and Rome 1 are the games pretty much everyone should play and both have great mods to dabble in (Third Age Total War is practically another entry in the series for example). 2's Kingdoms expansion pack is also worth getting, Rome's expansions are fine but not 'you must play'. Medieval 2 does have some niggling annoyances people like to gloss over (pikemen and diplomacy issues would be the two most obvious) but they're unlikely to be a problem for the first few campaigns you try out and after that you'll be moving onto mods that fix them anyway.
Empire and Napoopean will either be great fun or terrible for you depending on what parts of the gameplay you value, they push more towards a GSG. Also Empire benefits hugely from mods, the naval combat particularly swaps from terrible to actually quite fun once you can no longer sail into the wing and you know how to play (group your ships up so they'll sail in lines and use basic period tactics like crossing the T and moving in an S shape).
Shogun 2 is only worthwhile for the proper coop campaign something they originally promised for Empire but Empire's release was a shitshow and maybe Meme of the Samurai and everything after it is crap.

im probably gonna get lynched but hows warhammer 2?

Fuck them anyway, anything with the newer engine cannot model melee fights the way the first engines could.


Yeah, if you were lucky enough you signed up for the beta keys for empire.

What is the best third age mod for Medieval 2? It seems to be at least 4 different versions.

The best modern WHFB strategy game, which is to say the second one (unless you count Warhammer 1, then it's the third).
It's pretty OK, as long as you prefer field battles over sieges. Sieges are fucking atrocious. Every race and every tier of fortification gets the same 3 meter high walls, and there only a few meters of it. Oh, and every unit has magical ladders up their ass, so siege units aren't actually worth that much.
It's particularly frustrating because for the most part you fight in front of actually impressive walls that are off-map.

That sucks. The warhammer fantasy setting sounds perfect for awesome siege battles.


But honestly, all TW titles had terrible sieges after Medieval 2. In Medieval 2 you could storm an entire fortress city, in all other titles you're teleported to a random fort when sieging anywhere.

Katamari Damacy has this easily where you go from tiny blob rolling up thumb-tacks and ants to unstoppable beast rolling up the land and clouds. Simple but effective and great presentation.

Wargame is great for scale. Individual bushes and groups of treees matter just as much as the sweeping manouver around a wide flank.

...

Aurora 4x?

There are mods that add a ton of custom sieges. The AI has trouble with a few of them, but it performs no worse than it did in Attila or Rome 2 at them (which is saying very little).