If you have not played Silent Storm and expansion Sentinels, you are in for a treat. GOG.com (Good Old Games) has finally restored one of the best overlooked games of all time. A game Nival pretty much neglected after a couple of years. After a few years SS was unplayable on most newer machines and video cards as Nival never offered a fix for the issue (although someone developed a hex editor fix). GOG has remedied this and added SS Gold to the catalog. Gamespot voted SS "Best Game No One Played" in their 2004 Annual Awards. It was the reason, at the time, that I tried it out. It became my favorite game of all time.

If you are a fan of XCOM, Jagged Alliance and TBS in general, this is a must play. Even if you just want to try something new. The amazing engine holds up quite well even today. A revived Jagged Alliance game was supposed to use this engine but the developer abandoned it or went belly up or something.

I should note that the game is challenging, especially Sentinels, which IMO is one of the best and most intense expansions to a game ever.

I highly recommend this game and to top it off GOG has SS Gold on sale for $4 bucks right now.

It would be great to see the SS community revived again and enlarged. The game can be modded.

SS really is a rare gem and I know that there are many out there that never played it or even heard of the game that might really enjoy it. It's a shame it was not more popular in the first place. It was poorly marketed in the US and had more of a cult following overseas. Really Really Great Game!

If you have not played Silent Storm and expansion Sentinels, you are in for a treat.  GOG.com (Good Old Games) has finally restored one of the best overlooked games of all time.   A game Nival pretty much neglected after a couple of years.  After a few years SS was unplayable on most newer machines and video cards.  GOG has remedied this and added SS Gold to the catalog.  

If you are a fan of XCOM, Jagged Alliance and TBS in general, this is a must play.  Even if you just want to try something now.  The amazing engine holds up quite well even today.  A revived Jagged Alliance game was supposed to use this engine but the developer abandoned it or went belly up or something.

I highly recommend this game and to top it off GOG has SS Gold on sale for $4 bucks right now.

Wouldn't happen to be a Samsung laptop? I have almost the exact same model if so. I too dislike the GPU switcheroo. It's still a very good laptop and plays the many of the games I like to play. However, I went out a bought another stronger laptop for current games. I never figured out how to stop the switching and I tried several things.

I've been curious about this for some time, but have yet to ask simply as my current pc/laptops have been sufficient. However, I'm getting to the point where my gaming PC needs to be replaced for various reasons, including the fact that it's 32-bit. The Velocity Micro PC was pretty decent and I added some parts - GPUs and Power Supply namely - that are still very up to par. However, overall the PC is starting not to keep up and, ofc, can't do the latest graphics.

So, basically what I'm asking is if any here are aware of folks that put together gaming pcs independently for cheap. Obviously, there are many here who can do it and I know it is not rocket science. Still, despite not being clueless on the parts themselves I've never trusted myself to put a PC together. The new PC could use some of my existing parts - SLI GPUs (Nvidia 460GTXs) and nice new Corsair power supply. Maybe even the case, although I may need a slight larger one. The GPUs are rather tight fit, but that's partly due to the motherboard. Otherwise, everything else would be replaced with hopefully reasonable priced but decent parts. I know many folks here know how to shop for them.

Please let me know if something like this exists or trusted dealer out there that I could look into. I just don't trust most of the corporate retailers in terms of both price and installation.

thanks

Civilization IV: Beyond The Sword has a delivered scenario/mod called "Road to War" that is a large scale World War II scenario. It was a bit overwhelming for me as it was so big, but sounds right up your ally. Check Civfanatics.com for updates to the delivered mod as several of the community-made delivered scenarios were updated after release.

Civ IV BTS is a great game regardless and you should own it if you like TBS.

If you are interested in a more squad-based tactical TBS game, I highly recommend Silent Storm Gold, which is also set in WWII.

Company of Heroes is always worth trying even though it is RTS. It's just a fabulous WWII strategy game. "Soldiers: Heroes of WWII" is also pretty darn fun as well.

Here are some similar games you might like:

Commandos 3 - A bit shorter than the predecessors but still all the fun

Desperados has sequels with Desperados 2 and Helldorado. Not quite the charm as the first one, but still decent. Deperados 1 is one of my favorite games.

Silent Storm Gold (with excellent expansion) - my favorite game of all time next to Civ IV, you must play this one. TBS in the Jagged Alliance/Xcom mold, but I think it is even better than those games. "Hammer & Sickle" is a sequel of sorts with a tad more RPG like elements and set in the Cold War (it is challenging)

Soldiers: Heroes of World War II - Very solid squad based game and predecessor to Men At War

Men at War and expansions.

Company of Heroes

You will find some Jagged Alliance type clones in recent years, but I have not tried them. They did not look all that appealing.

***Unfortunately, I see little to no true squad-based games out there any more. A favorite genre of mine. A Jagged Alliance remake is coming out soon I believe. Hopefully, it will live up to the first and hopefully this genre will make a comeback.

Civilization 4 Complete (play BTS) can be had for very cheap now with sales and if you like it will provide literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of replayability - really limitless actually. Visit civfanatics.com to pick up some key basics and strategies, as well as mods, and you will be having fun and kicking butt in no time.

With that said, when it comes to PC games, Strategy is the big unique genre that makes it stand out from consoles or whatever. RPG is much better on PC as well, but strategy games are what I love the best and there a a ton of great ones from Real-Time (RTS) to Turn-Based (TBS) like CIV 4, plus Grand Strategy and Wargames. Multiplayer is pretty big on PC as well, but i'm not really into it.

In addtion to Civ 4, try:

Dawn of War I (get Platinum Edition)

Company of Heroes Gold (don't need Tales of Valor unless you get into MP)

Medieval II Total War

Napoleon Total War

Silent Storm Gold

Men of War/Heroes: Soldiers of World War II

All of these games can be had pretty cheap and most are availabe from Digital Download sites. In addtion to Steam and Impulse, check Gamersgate.com and D2D.com. All these sites run various sales weekly so it is good to have options and they are all good.

D2D is good. I've used it for years. I also use Steam and Gamersgate. Basically, just shop the sites for the best deals. Gamersgate is definitely a site you should check out - they always have stuff on sale.

The first one. An absolute classic.

The second one is pretty decent but suffers from some issues in the story late game.

I'm bumping this to see if anyone has found a fix for Sentinels. The fix mentioned about for Silent Storm works great and you don't have to monkey with the memory settings. However, Sentinels will simply not run at all....no error message at all.