If you like battleship, check out captain sonar. A real time, 4v4 (possibly with fewer), submarine vs submarine board game that’s sort of like battleship with movement.
Real time as in you can make moves as fast as your team can execute them. But at the cost of giving information that signals your location.
It's a space-based strategy game that has a lot of diplomatic elements, and the thing we really like is everything about it is completely deterministic, other than one researchable ability that gives you research points in a random field every turn.
Anyway, the default one turn per day is fantastic, and the game "ticks" once per hour, meaning it can take between a few hours and a couple of days for your fleets to transit between stars. It's a great pace for checking in a few times a day, and the game has calculators to help with timing coordinated attacks.
Finally, and I think this is key, do not enable formal alliances. They allow allies to share vision and they require a 24 hour notice to break the alliance, which takes all the fun out of it :)
We played a game of Neptune's Pride, and had a similiar result, with a few differences. Neptune's Pride is played over 24 hours, and most actions (attacking/moving ships) require a great deal of time. It's also completely deterministic.
Highlights include:
- People covertly supplying weapons technology to the people fighting their allies to prolong the conflict, so that they would be weaker when they had to betray them. There was a lot of dealings at the coffee machine regarding trading technology.
- A cold war standoff between myself and our lead frontend dev. I'd setup an ambush by setting up ships on a star out of his radar range, but close enough that I would be able to reinforce the juicy target I had setup for him. The only catch was that I only had an hour to move the reinforcements once he began his attack, so I had to constantly watch the game. We had a Game Of Thrones finale event that I was going to attend, but he skipped. Knowing I would be distracted, he launched the attack 15 minutes after the scheduled start of watching the finale. Luckily I checked the game on my phone in the middle, saw the incoming attack and was able to defend successfully.
This kicked off people checking the game as the last thing they did before they went to bed, and the first thing they did in the morning. A few of us even set alarms so we could launch surprise attacks.
We definitely had a similar sort of breakdown of relations. There were accusations of screen-cheating (if you can call looking at a map of everything in your empire on a 27" monitor in the middle of an open-office screen-cheating). One game even collapsed into anarchy when one of the players dropped out rather then attack one of her coworkers.
Either way, it was a ton of fun. Definitely wasn't great for productivity though.
A more accessible wargame simulator would be the recently released Hearts of Iron IV(http://store.steampowered.com/app/394360/), a very realistic WW2-era military grand strategy game. Playing a game or two and you will quickly realize how shallow basic analysis and games such as Civilization, in terms of warfighting, are.
If you go back to WWII, there are more options (and many more games). I'll just make one suggestion: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3670/battlewagon (A print-n-play edition is available from WargameVault.) (It's moistened Star Fleet Battles, if you know that game.)
In my group of friends we have more than 50 games, most of them involving complex strategy (as we do like that). Here is a list of my personal top 10:
1) Shogun. Archetypical Risk-like game of moving soldiers and conquering provinces, but with a unique twist that makes it outstanding in my view: instead of dice, it uses a cube tower to generate randomness. The outcome of fights is based in the number of cubes from each player that come out of the tower. If you get bad luck in a battle (because your cubes stay inside) then the tower will be loaded in your favor for the next battles (those hidden cubes can come out at any moment). I love this because, although I think some randomness is good in strategic battle games to spice things up and so that the game doesn't turn a chess-like prediction game, I don't like the winner being dependent on luck. The tower introduces randomness, but guarantees that no one will be too lucky or unlucky, which is great. Combine with a setting in feudal Japan, complete with rice farming and starving populace revolving against you, and you get an amazing game.
2) Imperial 2030. Another typical Risk-like game of moving soldiers and taking countries... except that it's not. You don't control the empires themselves, instead you are a banker that buys each empire's bonds. At a given point in the game, the banker that holds more bonds for a particular empire is the one controlling its politics. So maybe right now I control China, but I know that you have a lot of cash and are looking at Chinese bonds with greedy eyes, so I send the Chinese army on an unnecessarily painful military campaign to wither down its power in case you are going to control it in the next turn. This makes for awesome mechanics in a really strategic game. By the way, it doesn't have any random elements at all, so it's a good game if you are against that.
3) Galaxy Trucker. This game is great due to its sheer concept... first you use pieces from a scrapyard (competing for the pieces with the other players) to build a spaceship with its cannons, shields, cargo holds, etc. and then all of you have to fly them in a journey littered with space pirates, meteorites than can tear off pieces of your ship, merchant planets, smugglers and more. The feeling when one of your rival ships is tore in two by a meteorite is unbeatable.
4) Star Wars: Imperial Assault. When a friend of mine got this game, I thought "they have the Star Wars franchise so it will probably be a crappy game - they will sell anyway". But no. It's actually a very good tactics game with lots of choices, characters with very different styles, special abilities, and a set of rules that (albeit unspecified at times) go very well together.
5) Robo Rally. A classic from Richard Garfield, the guy that brought you MtG. OK, maybe this doesn't fit that much into "complex strategy", but it's also a game that hackers should like because it's about programming after all! You have to program your robot with randomly-dealt cards to try and survive pits, traps and the other robots' lasers. A huge strong point of this game is that the maps and missions are hugely customizable, supporting different sets of rules like races, capture the flag, deathmatch, and others that you can come up with. It supports up to 8 players, you can build different maps putting together map boards, and there are editors online to print your own map boards, so it's the ultimate customizable game. I think it's out of print but a new edition has been announced, although it only supports 6 players sadly.
6) Carcassone. One of the best known modern board games, together with Catan. But while Catan is IMHO too shallow and too random, featuring few meaningful decisions, in Carcassone every tile you place is a meaningful decision. The experience is very different in 2-player games (much more offensive) than in games with more players. Some expansions (the builder, the granary and pig, the mayor, the resources, etc.) really enhance the game although others are prescindible.
7) Discworld Ankh Morpork. A deception game: you have to work towards your goal and the other characters don't know what it is. You don't have to know Discworld to like it (one of my friends hasn't read any of the books and loves it). Drawback: unbalanced, it's easier to win with some characters than others. If you care much about that, it's probably not your game.
8) Goblins Inc. Similar mechanic to Galaxy Trucker (probably inspired on it), but with goblins that build robots of doom instead of spaceships, and with direct combat. Contrary to Galaxy Trucker, it's team-based (2v2) but it also gives you the possibility of being a traitor to your partner. Less flexible than Galaxy Trucker (this one only really works with 4 players) but loads of fun!
9) Power Grid. A classic game where you have to build a power network. Lots of strategy and decisions, although the beginning depends too much on player location and the endgame turns a bit too much into an arithmetic-fest counting to the last nickel IMO.
10) Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space. A quite original board game in that it doesn't have a board, the board is in each players' head. Some players are humans and others are aliens, but they can't see where each other is, except with certain clues (people making noise) and items. The humans must escape the aliens. It's a lot of fun and it involves both abstract thought and psychology/bluffing/etc. The drawback is that some maps and situations can be unbalanced, especially if you play with the stock rules (a door to exit the ship can randomly work or not) a player can lose very unfairly. It should be pretty easy to customize the rules though.
Also go is awesome, but I don't think it's the kind of game you were looking for advice about (and it's difficult to compare to the others as it's on an entirely different category).
Wesnoth is tactical, not strategy. Its a good game (albeit too luck based IMO... Just get used to the "luck swings" of battle), but a totally different genre than 4X / Strategy.
Civilization is on the easier / simpler end of 4X / Strategy... and believe me, this is a good thing!! Things get really complicated. Paradox games (Victoria, Hearts of Iron, Crusader Kings, Europa Universialis) are the "complicated" games, technically realtime but the underlying simulations "feel" turnbased. (Hearts of Iron progresses the simulation in 1-hour increments. They're "realtime" only because it'd be too boring to hit "next turn" so often, but you can hit the pause button and really think about a situation at say: September 1st 1939 @ 1pm if something terrible is going on)
Romance of the Three Kingdoms is also a strategy game: war, tactics, resources, diplomacy, etc. etc. The elements you'd expect.
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"Tactics" games that focus on a singular battle as the core gameplay loop. Fire Emblem, Wesnoth, Wargroove, Advance Wars, Heroes of Might and Magic, Panzer General, Starcraft, Age of Empires.
"Strategy" games approximate the battles and focus on larger scale elements.
A good rule of thumb is that Strategy Games have an element of siege and supply lines, while Tactics games often just "teleport" the resources where needed. Tactics are about maneuvering your troops to get an advantage, Strategy is about finding / securing resources (ex: placing your defensive Pikeman on the enemy's mine in Civ2, or in their districts in Civ6)
Civ leans towards the simpler/tactics side, but is just barely enough "Strategy" that I'd group it in the strategy side of things.
Hex of Steel. Turn based hex wargame, very niche but with a fairly large worldwide community into such games. Only the solo developer is doing plays on youtube and twitch. The game has been seeing a slow upward sales trend as the niche wargame community realizes how good it is. If you've played SSI and Avalon Hill hex games as a kid you should get this.
Samurai Swords (aka Shogun) by Milton Bradley. It's a Risk like game, but way better balanced, where troop strength is limited to territory held, units are bought (you have cheap, but weak units, or strong, but expensive units) and turn order is randomized each round (although one can bid for turn placement). And there are two variations, the short game (first one to 35 territories wins) or the long game (first to hold 35 territories through a complete round wins) which can change the strategies used in the end-game.
If you are looking for more wargames like this, https://www.wechall.net/ has a large index and allows you to keep a persistent score based on which challenges you have completed.
I've heard of this 80s game time and time again. Often times, its called the first computer strategy game. A cold-war era video game about cold-war era politics, it was immediately relevant back then and taken as a historical lesson today... and also one of the major inspirations for 90s-era strategy games.
Maybe one day, I'll put forth the effort to find it and play it. For now, I'm satisfied with an old version of Hearts of Iron 3.
Given how many times this game pops up in 1980s-era computer discussion threads, I feel like I'm missing something each time its brought up.
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In the realm of "process intensity", the crunch-to-bit ratio of Factorio, OpenTTD, and now my current game (Hearts of Iron 3) is pretty high. In Factorio: all mistakes are correctable: just order your bots to deconstruct everything, and place everything down again. Once you have your defense system automated, you can continuously update your designs to more-and-more optimized results.
Hearts of Iron 3 is similar though punishing instead. You spend an inordinate amount of time looking through your commanders's skills, experience, and organizing brigades / divisions / corps / armies / groups / theaters, and the commanders of each stage of the hierarchy. You consider production, and which groups the weapons will go towards.
Then you unpause the game, and hope for the best. Hopefully your organization was good and your commanders / troops can do their thing. If not, you restart the game, or accept the results as you get strategically bombed or whatever.
Slow, real-time 4x strategy game with no randomness and lots of fun.
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