yeah I kinda agree with you.Kiju said:
A lot of "strategy" games are really tactics games. That doesn't make them bad (just look at frozen synapse, it's tactics and it's AMAZING), but they're not strategy.
As for TW, I haven't played enough to form an opinion, but I'd say that Sword of the Stars brings Grand strategy and realtime strategy together really well. You should check it out.
Another strategy game that I think does it well is star ruler.
Star Ruler is a Real Time Strategy/4X hybrid that, two me, has the following attractions:
Scalability: You can play with a 2 system galaxy for a quick and brutal fight, or a 10000+ system galaxy for a long, epic game.
Customisability: Most ships you're going to be using will be designed by yourself. The ship design system is quite good. you're not just swapping out weapons on hardpoints, you're designing ships almost completely from scratch. You place subsystems, including life support, crew quarters, bridge, power generator, engines, etc on a grid to your liking. Where you place a subsystem matters. Got a big gun at the front? It'll be taking hits first, so you better put a reinforced bulkhead on it. armour however, is spread homogeneously.
There's a wide range of weapons and utility subsystems to research too. See your enemy using missiles? Research reactive armour. They using reactive armour on your missiles? whip out beams or rapid fire smaller weapons.You can also steal enemies designs by analyzing their wrecks. Oh, and ships can be as big as you want (and have resources for):
On that note, bigger isn't always better. A big ship designed to kill big ships won't be able to deal with a swarm of smaller ships, and a swarm of smaller ships will get massacred by a ship designed to kill smaller ships, but it won't do too well against a ship its own size.
Depth: Every planet has its own economy. It's not super deep on a single planet scale, but it's there, and when you consider that there's multiple planets per system and that there can be tens to hundreds of systems, it gets pretty good. Find your enemy's farm planets? Take them out to starve his empire. Find his metal mining system? Take it out to cripple his economy, or chemical bomb it to kill the population, then take the planet, with its structures for yourself.
Thing is, micromanaging is pretty easy, Unlike other games (sword of the stars included unfortunately), building on a large scale, or revamping your economy on a large scale isn't that hard. You can group planets and systems together to give them orders en-masse. There's a 'pinning' system that allows you to quickly switch and zoom between important things, be it a fleet, a single ship or an entire system.
Similarly, you can add minimaps for specific systems, so you can always keep an eye on important systems.
Edit: You can also blow up everything; from planets to stars. The devs say that they're planning on adding a quasar in the middle of the galaxy that will blow up nearly everything.
/edit
Yeah... I really like this game.
http://starruler.blind-mind.com/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/70900/
