Humble Bundle Weekly: Slitherine

Slitherine is a publisher than I'm personally quite fond of, as they tend to release games in niches that no other publishers seem to care about. Hopefully with more sales we can get them to release more games on steam (and also lower their darn prices, because that is an issue that I often have with their games. Amazing games, but a bit too expensive).

same

I'm a big fan of historical strategy games. I find the challenge of trying to outwit my opponent in strategy games to be very enjoyable (even if that opponent is just an AI). The skill involved here is not one related to reflexes, but rather strategic or tactical thinking, and that appeals to me.
Historical strategy games also have the added bonus of actually giving you a relatively good insight in why things were the way they were back then. While no game can perfectly simulate historical events, those that try to stay relatively close to history can be surprisingly educational. Some games, similar to the ones in this bundle, are actually used in classrooms.

There are actually several different sub-genres represented in this bundle:
Battle Academy & Hell are turnbased tactics games. Most of the planing you need to do is relatively short-term, you fight each battle as a self-contained unit (I don't know if there is any persistence in Hell). You want to find the best possible way to defeat the enemy, while minimizing your losses, and you need to be able to spot potential traps and have units support each other properly. Turnbased, so you can take your time planing your next move (it's like a more complex version of chess with hidden information).

Close Combat is similar to the above two, but it's real time, you need to constantly keep an eye on the battlefield. Slow paced though, so fast reflexes don't win over proper planning (this can be compared to something like Men of War that is on an even smaller scale and where things move a lot faster).

Rise of Prussia is the opposite. It's a strategy game that covers a far larger timespan. Here you don't worry about the tiny details, but you need to have a far greater time perspective in mind. You're in control of an entire nation, and you need to make sure that it does not collapse, and that you can supply your troops. It's war focused though, and it deals with the entire 7 years war. As it aims for an accurate simulation of the era, it's not very user friendly.

And then we have Frontline, which I've not played, but it looks like it will be somewhere in-between. You're dealing with a large chunk of land, and you'll probably have to worry about keeping them in supply, but things like the internal state of your country won't really matter. The game sadly does not seem to have great review scores. If you're interested in trying something similar, then I can highly recommend taking a look at Unity of Command, which was both accessible and very fun to play.

I love strategy as well, but not euhm... this kind of strategy :p

thanks for informing me their lack of sales.