Renowned Explorers: International Society is on GOG Connect. Considering it was in a HB bundle not too long ago, most should have it by now.
Nice. It's also a pretty darn good game.
I'd call it a cross between early game Civilization mechanics (basically just exploring) and a grid based tactical strategy RPG. It's a little simplistic when it comes to combat, but it has really polished gameplay and decent balance. Expeditions consist of randomly generated maps (or possibly a pool of possible layouts) made up of a pretty wide selection of choice based challenges that rely on your team's skills (i.e. A challenge involving collecting supplies from the environment around you would benefit from a party member with naturalist skills), encounters, stat bonuses, etc, followed by a set challenge at the end involving a boss battle.
The neat thing about the game is that there are three types of approaches to battles, friendly, devious, and aggressive. Friendly and devious are speech based attacks, so basically it's befriending the enemy so they won't fight you and will leave the battle, or breaking their will so to speak. Whichever way you cut it they're still just attacks doing damage, but attitudes factor heavily into battles. For example, friendly abilities will push attitudes like excited or confident, which may be used to heal your teammates and give them boosts (such as excited units dealing extra speech damage), but there also may be enemies with a weakness to excited type moves, so while you may be boosting their stats, you could be doing way more damage. And on top of that, there's a "mood" that the player party and enemy party hold depending on the moves they're using. So if you use a bunch of friendly abilities, your mood will be friendly, and depending on what mood the enemy has, there are sweeping bonuses and debuffs that affect all units. For example if the enemy is using a friendly mood and you're aggressive, you'll do extra combat damage, or if both moods are devious, friendly moves will deal more damage, etc.
It all makes a fairly simple combat system really interesting and challenging (the final boss, for example, changes moods a hell of a lot and forces you to change your mood quite a bit as the battle progresses). In addition to mood, your mood and usage of friendly/devious/aggressive abilities will influence how you beat the encounter, so while beating the enemy in a friendly manner in one encounter may give you bonuses and doing so in an aggressive manner may get you nothing (or even penalties), it varies depending on the encounter. It definitely challenges you in making a team that may focus on a certain type, but also is adaptable.
Out of battle and in between expeditions there's a lot to the game as well that's very similar to Civilization mechanics. You build up research points, gold, campaign points, etc as tokens as you go through the game, which you then you use to buy equipment and upgrade shops, move through research trees to unlock boosts to various aspects of the game (usually involving token collection and renown boosts), and hire passive team members who have similar boosts and also are able to teach your team various skills to help in challenges. In the end, the entire point of the game is to build up as much renown as possible, which you gain through most tokens but also in various other ways (like discovering special artifacts on expeditions), so it's vital to build up all of your passive boosts to maximize your renown at the end of the game.
The game definitely has its downsides. Percentage based rolls on the challenges can be aggravating, since failure sometimes results in awful penalties, but that's kind of unavoidable. The final level's difficulty jump is also a little silly. You go from the game being real easy, to being decent challenge, to suddenly being hard as balls unless your team is perfectly constructed. If you're playing on the ironman type no-saves, death is permanent mode (which is where the game shines, since each playthrough isn't very long), it's a little ridiculous. You don't actually have to do the final expedition (you're free to choose whichever lands you travel to for your expeditions, which are ranked by level of difficulty and possibly rewards), so the ironman mode is definitely still doable and the game is still winnable if you skip the final level.
tl;dr, Renowned Explorers is pretty neat and unique. It combines my favorite parts of Civilization with some solid strategy RPG mechanics and unique mechanics. Definitely worth a play if you got it in the Humble Bundle.
type quitter.
