Thanks for the suggestion. Stated playing XCF and I'm hooked. I previously bounced off an attempt at playing open xcom, but XCF has been a good experience so far.
EU4 is one of mine as well. Been slowly working through the achievements, but they keep adding more!
Yeah Gargoyles! My first ascension was Gargoyle Earth Elementist, but I think EE has been nerfed since that ascension.
Silent Storm was a fun turn-based tactics game! Not as polished as something like the Firaxis xcoms, but more complete than a lot of other non-fantasy tactics games I've tried.
Sounds a lot like the TerraFirmaCraft minecraft mod. Actually, after some light searching, it seems Vintage story was inspired by the Vintagecraft mod which was inspired by TerraFirmaCraft.
Subserial Network. A weird little pseudo-indie game with an odd retro-futuristic vibe. It mixes cyberpunk post-humanism with web 1.0 nostalgia. You're part of an organization that deals with subversive synthetics, and your task is to locate a leader of this movement by infiltrating their online spaces. The game presents you with a handful of windows (email client, browser, lo-fi media player, etc.) and the gameplay mostly consists of reading to find clues to piece together and keywords to search.
I greatly enjoyed the vibe and world-building, and was pleasantly surprised by some of the reveals. The ending was a little abrupt for my tastes, but overall this has been one of my favorite gaming experiences this year.
I highly recommend it if you enjoy cyberpunk (the literary genre), early internet nostalgia, or epistolary storytelling.
I've gotten sucked into The X-Com Files. It's a megamod for the original X-Com game from 1994, built on OpenXcom Extended (an open-source re-implementation).
My first attempt at the old X-Com game lost my interest a few years ago, but OXCE brings plenty of QoL changes and the difficulty of the XCF mod ramps up slower than vanilla. Now I'm having a blast hunting cults, cowering from aliens, building bases around the world.