Hieronymus
AAQC-winning posts:
User ID: 419
Hieronymus
11d ago
Well, it's not an essay – it's a novel. I think the antagonist's weak grip on this Martian tongue (I don't recall which of the two they are speaking in this scene) is symbolic and not just to make his argument look weak.
It's justified in universe because the protagonist is a philologist, specifically J.R.R. Tolkein with the serial numbers filed off, while the antagonists are mad scientists who aren't particularly trained in languages. They built a working spaceship with 1930s tech, learned a non-human tongue to at least a broken level, and survived long enough to argue with a planetary archangel/god, so they might be fools but they aren't idiots.
Hieronymus
16d ago
The German state church is to Lutherans as the German R.C. bishops are to Catholics.
Hieronymus
17d ago
Anglicanism is in an interesting category because there are priests and bishops, and the Eastern Churches are relatively warm to them on that basis, but the longstanding view of Catholicism is that Anglican orders are null and void because the Church of England, especially in the 15-1800s, relativized its understanding of what the priesthood was to more of a ministry in the Protestant sense than a sacrificial office, while the Eucharistic sacrifice was described as a "sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving" (added to the first BCP communion rite by Cranmer).
It’s worth noting the counterarguments offered by the archbishops of Canterbury and York in response, alleging that this view was inconsistent.
There's an alternate universe perhaps where Edward's minority didn't give Cranmer an in to push his agenda, or Elizabeth had a desire to impose more of her own liturgical conservatism and insisted on maintaining sacrificial priesthood as a pillar of the English establishment, and in that universe the Church of England would probably be called a "Church" by Catholic doctrine.
Perhaps. But I think that there would have been the same incentives for the pope to create a Roman Catholic shadow hierarchy to mirror the Anglican one, and given such competing hierarchies there would have been the same incentive to deny the validity of Anglican orders.
Thank you for the reply. I am sorry that I didn’t wait to post until I had time to lay out my thoughts better and to respond more promptly.
In trying to understand the Roman Catholic view of the sacraments, the best examples for me have been baptism and the eucharist, both because we Protestants also acknowledge them as sacraments – whether individual denominations use that word or not – and because the R.C. view is pretty clearly defined: There are certain requirements of form and matter, and if they are met you have a valid sacrament ex opere operato. If those requirements are met under forbidden circumstances you have a sacrament which is valid but illicit. So far I understand.
As a Protestant I regard marriage as a creation ordinance, and I do not see a category of sacramental marriage distinct from natural marriage. But Rome does, and interestingly it puts a wedding between two Protestants in a Protestant church into the sacramental category. So such a wedding must meet the requirements of form and matter, and it must do so with an officiant who is not in communion with Rome and whom Rome does not regard as a validly ordained priest.
My expectation would be that a wedding of two Roman Catholics performed by an SSPX priest would be valid but illicit. They have met at least the same requirements of form and matter as the Protestant spouses have, but they have done so in contravention of canon law. Yet the Vatican’s announcement and the canon you quoted say that such a wedding is invalid. What gives? I am particularly weirded out by this passage:
Only those marriages are valid which are contracted … according to the rules expressed in the following canons and without prejudice to the exceptions mentioned in cann. 144, 1112, §1, 1116, and 1127, §§1-2.
Does this mean that canon law can add requirements to a sacrament, affecting its validity as well as its lawfulness? If so, that’s a rather startling claim. If not, this canon law must be restating requirements of form or matter that already exist for other reasons; but then how are Protestant marriages, which don’t meet those requirements, valid? Consider two silly thought experiments:
- An SSPX priest performs a wedding of two Lutherans. (Let’s say they all want to thumb their noses at Pope Leo.) Is this marriage valid?
- The pope amends canon law to require that baptisms be performed with holy water to be valid. Does this genuinely invalidate other subsequent baptisms?
Edit: Corrected some typos, and now pinging @urquan too.
Hieronymus
19d ago
It seems clear that the Vatican wanted SSPX to die out as a movement, with its people folded into the mainstream Roman Catholic Church over time. The pope kept appealing to SSPX to avoid these consecrations in the name of unity; but, if unity had been his highest priority, Leo could have simply authorized the consecrations in the first place and avoided the problem. Given a choice between division and dying out, SSPX chose division; I think that they would quibble with the word “schism” for subtle canonical reasons that I am too evangelical to understand.
But, as someone whose understanding of the sacraments does not resemble Rome’s in the slightest, I am curious about this part:
Finally, the holy People of God are warned that the sacred ministers of the Priestly Fraternity of Saint Pius X administer the sacraments illicitly, and that the sacrament of penance administered by them and marriages assisted by them are invalid.
How, in Roman Catholic theology, does that work? I could sort of guess at a logic for penance, although I have zero confidence that I could predict Rome’s reasoning. But the rules for the validity of sacramental marriage have never made much sense to me. Rome recognizes the marriage of two baptized Protestants as sacramental, right? So why do the extra rules for Catholics affect the validity of the marriage instead of just its lawfulness? I know that rules added in the Counter-Reformation era were said to affect validity, even though they were new, and I find that difficult to explain.
Hieronymus
19d ago
It’s interesting, insightful, from an angle the Motte rarely sees, and kind of whitepilling. Fully deserved.
Hieronymus
21d ago
My dudette, I am sympathetic to some of your points, but the snark level makes it difficult to tell which are serious.
In any case I don't think the Roman Catholic justices need to worry about excommunication. Their bishops are far too institutionalist to impose it, even if they felt it were appropriate.
Hieronymus
22d ago
Well, yes, but then the pope stopped claiming to abrogate Catholics' oaths of loyalty and demanding the creation of a Roman Catholic state. If you imply similar developments within Islam, please elaborate on what you see there.
Hieronymus
25d ago
The comment above yours is still filtered.
I think your point is the most valuable in several good posts in this subthread. The more pluralist a society becomes, the less classical liberalism works for it. But America of all places is kind of in a bind on that front. A change in immigration policy might help us stop digging the hole we're in, but even that much is outside the Overton window.
That's one of the fundamental questions on the American right at present: Does classical liberalism necessarily produce a level of pluralism it cannot survive?
Hieronymus
28d ago
The fairness doctrine was eliminated in the U.S. in 1987, so modern NPR is safe.
Hieronymus
29d ago
The trads/progs, as different flavors of conservative, ...
I am pretty consistently baffled by your insinuations on this point. Could you clarify what you mean? I'm familiar with the meme of conservatives as progressives going the speed limit, and I'm familiar with the idea that conservatives keep progressives' mistakes from being corrected, and so on. But you seem to be using these words in a very idiosyncratic way.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
"Actual sin" is a theological term to describe sin one has committed personally in contrast to original sin. It doesn't imply that original sin isn't real. I just mean that no human being has just cause to execute someone for original sin.
Use logic not vibes.
If there is a logic to your objections of inconsistency, it relies on an unstated premise I can't quite get at. Maybe you're working from the basis that killing a human being is an offense only against him, whereas in the Christian view it is a sin against God also.
As for the state, God has delegated to the state some authority for capital punishment. Within those parameters, it has some wiggle room. But it's not carte blanche.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
How can you argue from Christianity and also argue the fetus is innocent? It has as much expected original sin as you do.
Original sin perhaps, but not actual sin. In any case, the child is obviously innocent of any offence that would justify his death at human hands.
How do you believe in the hereafter and still attach so much sentimentality to the body here and now?
There is a sense in which it's worth weighing temporal things against eternal ones. But, ironically given the question, Christians usually apply that principle to endure the suffering such killings are meant to avoid. Death in this fallen world is sometimes a divine mercy, but there are only a few situations where men are entitled to deal it out.
I don't know if I've managed to get at the underlying disagreement here. It's not a matter of weighing utilons.
There are many examples in the Bible of God commanding people to kill.
Agreed. I am not a pacifist.
Murder is a particular type of killing that doesn't seem to apply to voluntary euthanasia or abortion of people who would not want to live anyway.
Why not?
(As an aside, the discussion started with the abortion of a Down syndrome child, and Down's patients usually do not want to die. But the principle is worth discussing anyway.)
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Pro-lifers are framing the debate correctly, but they have the wrong answer.
Could you unpack that? My tentative reading is that you agree that abortion is the killing of an innocent human being but that you also hold utilitarian principles which allow that sort of thing.
Of course most pro-lifers are not utilitarians, and I'm no exception. I also have a relative with Down syndrome, though not so close a relative as your brother. He is blessed with excellent parents. But if they had killed him in utero they would be no less guilty of his blood than if they killed him today.
People think they can find pragmatic, utilitarian compromises with reasonable stopping points. But over the generations things don't work out that way. Rare abortions in difficult cases became abortion on demand, which greased the slope for doctor-assisted suicide, and the Netherlands and Canada are showing us how that goes.
There's now a whole social media genre of posts acknowledging that the socons were right and slopes were in fact slippery. People had believed that they would handle this or that loosening of the moral law responsibly because their culture took the issues seriously. But the culture only took the issues seriously because of its residual Christian understanding of the moral law, which that loosening eroded.
To the Christian this sounds a lot like the situation in Romans 1, where men denied God despite their knowledge and he gave them over to their sinful desires. But, Christian or not, experience shows that utilitarian principles won't hold you on the middle of the slope.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Nice! I didn't realize that. I haven't played CounterStrike since the original Half Life mod, so I only knew what I'd read.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
I never played it myself because I prefer to get headshotted by the sweats in CounterStrike...
Didn't they shut down CSGO when they launched CS2 (which was actually CS5)?
Hieronymus
1mo ago
I, once adjusted for differing sexual morality standards, don’t particularly disagree...
Isn't that adjustment extremely relevant here, though? If I were to define statutory rape of a teenager, I'd just call it seduction of a minor. Sexual morality is fundamentally tied up in defining the crime. The fact that much of secular society can't admit this muddles the conversation a lot.
Yeah, the practical consequences of seduction will vary for boys and girls, but in practice that seems to be (more than) adequately covered by consideration of mitigating factors in sentencing.
Hieronymus
1mo ago
Man, here, will say that men (or at least attractive or otherwise high status men) will fuck promiscuous women but never marry them. But that isn't really true.
I think that this used to be far truer than it is today. Yes, some men in the past married their mistresses. But for the most part mistress and wife were steps on different relationship tracks.
I am the least qualified person to summarize modern courtship mores, but the progression looks to me like this: sex, then long-term relationship, then moving in together, then marriage. In old-fashioned terms, most men in the early stages are asking, "Will she make a good mistress?" Only once that works out will they ask, "Will she make a good wife?" The wife filter is happening late in the process, and the function of marriage then is to cement a relationship that already exists.
By contrast older mores encouraged men to check for wife material earlier in the relationship, and a man who was expressly looking for mistress material wasn't putting her on the wife track.
I seriously recommend either a good intro class or a good book for self study. (My recommendations on those would be pretty outdated now, so I can't offer any names myself.)
What WhiningCoil says about programming being a diverse set of skills in practice is true. But there is a core aptitude of thinking algorithmically. Some people can do it off the bat, some people can't do it at all, and some people need to try it from several angles before it clicks. This isn't really a matter of being smart enough; once you're over a certain threshold of intelligence, there just seem to be some people who are wired for it and some who aren't.
So I'd start with that. If it clicks, you can move on to study the other stuff in whatever way is best for you. If it doesn't, you can know that you gave it a fair shake.
Edit: As an addendum, I recommend learning your second programming language soon after your first. Some people fret about this and think it will be harder than it is. But it isn't that hard, and having experienced it will change how you evaluate your tooIs.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
Page not found for me, so I'll just use the featured comments.
OP's quotes are accurate but not fully representative. Fortunately Gillitrut posted an archive link below, if you want to read the whole thing.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
In between logical proofs and personal experience, don't neglect the category of publicly available evidence, of which historical evidence is one important species. ( @WandererintheWilderness gets into this a bit below.) If you are convinced by the evidence for Jesus' resurrection, you can get at the existance of God that way.
Separately, if you are trying to understand how people work through these things in practice, it is helpful to think about how and why people move in both directions: theist to atheist as well as vice-versa. There is extra-rational movement both ways.
She is trying to break down a set of problems as she sees them among American converts to Eastern Orthodoxy. I don't know the situation there. I am inclined to give her more credit because she acknowledges the reasons we'd expect the facts on the ground to be different. On the other hand, she pattern matches to someone who treats the other sex's read of the vibes as a core part of the problem and her own sex's read as objective truth, which is a common failure mode for analysts of both sexes. So I don't know.
I think it is a mistake to take her analysis for granted and then extrapolate from her niche to the broader church.
But, in any case, the church exists to preach the gospel, to worship God, and to edify believers. None of those goals is really compatible with choosing your members to maximize your impact as a social club. If a church heeds Scripture in choosing its leaders, those will be men who have their acts together, judged by Christian standards rather than by secular ones.
Hieronymus
2mo ago
The kind of people who insist on VIM over an IDE and will argue for days about whether Python private functions should be prefixed with underscore.
My people! If the world loses them, it will be poorer for it.
I am not a professional developer. But in my IT experience, it’s helpful to have a mix of wary skeptics and early adopters for many kinds of technology. Strongarming your skeptics before you have to is a mistake. And while I believe much that I’ve heard about the benefits of coding agents, nobody knows what the final picture will look like. The grumpy old fogeys aren’t prophets, and I am not saying that they are, but they come by their battle scars honestly.
To my recollection, the Romans and Etruscans had similar levels of IE vs EEF genes, but the Romans had an Indo-European language and the Etruscans did not. This may reflect a broader difference between the cultures, but of course their influence on one another was so enormous as to kind of muddle any early differences.
Quick edit: Ah, looks like SS's citation covers that.
Man, you are in for a great time.
The two PC game digital storefronts worth using are GOG and Steam. GOG began its life selling classic games without DRM (Good Old Games), so it is very relevant to your interests. Steam can’t make the no-DRM claim, but it’s shown a level of ethical consistency uncommon in its space and its collection is enormous. I buy from GOG where I can and from Steam the rest of the time. The Steam sale (now copied by GOG) is a plague on the hobby; some vintage games will have appropriately discounted baseline prices, but many games will be left at their original retail prices so that the sales look more impressive and trigger more fear of missing out. Caveat emptor.
For older games – anything before the mid-aughts, say – I strongly recommend skimming the manual; it’s usually available with the game as a PDF. I have have had friends bounce off some truly excellent games because they couldn’t figure out one or two U.I. elements that were clearly explained in the manual. If that feels like an imposition in 2026, remember that it usually spares you from the tedious tutorials modern games use for the same reason.
Some of these you may have played on console, but I will recommend them anyway.
Role-playing Games
Diablo 1 [1997] (GOG)
Diablo is a real-time dungeoncrawler based heavily on the turn-based roguelikes that came before it. It’s a blast of a game and a polished jewel of a design. GOG sells it together with its third-party DLC Hellfire, which is fun but not as polished. I recommend going without the DLC for your first playthrough.
I haven’t included Diablo II on this list because I feel it hasn’t aged as well, but it is also a great game. I haven’t played the later sequels that are online-only.
Fallout 1 [1997] (GOG, Steam)
Fallout 2 [1998] (GOG, Steam)
Fallout is a top-down RPG in the classic style, set in a retro-future post-apocalyptic wasteland. The worldbuilding is great, the atmosphere is great, the whimsy is on point, and the mechanics are solid. Read the manual for this one. Fallout 2 is also very solid, but I feel like it’s stretching the limits of the design, particularly in the endgame; if you enjoy the first, it’s absolutely worth playing.
Neverwinter Nights 1 [2002] (GOG, Steam)
The AD&D computer games of the late 1990s have an excellent reputation, but I have not played them. This game was my first in that subgenre, and it’s based on 3rd edition D&D. It has its share of worn and cheesy tropes, but that’s why you play this kind of game, and it has enough new storytelling to keep things interesting. But NWN is very grindy by modern standards, and that holds it back in our era. It’s a charming classic, but some will bounce off.
Knights of the Old Republic 1 [2003] (GOG, Steam)
KOTOR is a Star Wars RPG that uses an adapted version of the D&D 3e rules that dominated the tabletop RPG market at the time. It’s not the ideal ruleset for Star Wars but it’s serviceable, and the characters and the writing make the game fantastic. It’s also pretty grindy; play it anyway.
Knights of the Old Republic 2 [2004] (GOG, Steam)
A more reflective, and perhaps jaded, game than KOTOR, KOTOR II makes a good sequel. It was also rushed out the door, and it shows; play it with the restored content mod (TSLRCM).
Neverwinter Nights 2 [2006] (GOG)
Another classic fantasy RPG, NWN2 benefitted from a newer engine than the original. In addition to the usual RPG wanderings, you find yourself in charge of a keep, preparing it for the climactic battle, which roots you more deeply in the setting.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion [2006] (GOG original, Steam remaster)
The Elder Scrolls series is legendary for a reason. This game’s predecessor, Morrowind is a great game that oozes character; and as someone playing years later you don’t have to suffer through the half-hourly crashes to desktop that plagued it at release. But, as immersive as we found it at the time, Morrowind has gotten rougher with age.
Oblivion filed off most of Morrowind’s rough edges, but it introduced one new one: level scaling. The level scaling in Oblivion is bonkers. The remaster updates player character leveling mechanics but not level scaling. But PCs get mods! If you like this style of open world, exploratory, first-person RPG, I very much recommend playing the remaster with a series of mods by PushTheWinButton: Ascension Remastered, Balanced NPC Level Cap - Remastered, Simple Creature Level Cap, and Balanced Unleveled Rewards - Remastered.
Mass Effect 1–3 [2007–2012]
Mass Effect is a stellar series of shooter-RPGs. You may have played them on console. The first game has more classic RPG mechanics, while the second and third favor more shootery mechanics. While the series is excellent overall, its ending is controversial and, in my humble opinion, somewhat disappointing. It’s still absolutely worth playing.
I don’t give store links here because, while you can buy the game on Steam, you have to install and play it through EA’s storefront. EA is as slimy as Valve is ethical. I still have memories of playing ME3 and being regularly kicked out of the game without a save because my Internet connection flaked out. I would dearly love to play the series’ remaster, but I won’t buy it at this point unless I can get a DRM-free version – mighty unlikely.
Fallout 3 [2008] (GOG with DLC, Steam w/o DLC, Steam with DLC)
Fallout 3 proved that it is possible to make a first-person game built on the Oblivion engine feel like Fallout. This is actually a pretty big coup, and it’s a solid game. It feels like a soft remake of the original in some ways. It also fixes Oblivion’s level scaling issue. While it’s not as good as Fallout or Oblivion, I recommend it.
Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4 came out as sequels to this one. FNV is a beloved fan favorite, but – heresy! – I don’t enjoy it as much. Fallout 4 suffered from being tied into its new base building subsystem, much as Oblivion suffered from level scaling.
Dragon Age: Origins [2009] (GOG)
This is one of the all-time great CRPGs, and if you haven’t played it yet, you absolutely have to. Mandatory. Buy it now.
At release the greatness of the game was compromised by EA’s sliminess. It was packaged with a voucher for a day-one DLC that could only be redeemed once, requiring online activation of your game – using the disc as proof of purchase was still standard then – and bringing down the value of resold copies. You would also encounter a questgiver at your camp, and when you tried to accept his quest he would upsell you on another day-one DLC. The GOG version has all of the DLC and none of the DRM. I heartily recommend it.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim [2011] (GOG, Steam)
If you are an RPG fan, you doubtless know what Skyrim is and have probably played it. It further streamlines and consolifies the game design, so it feels weaker in some respects than Oblivion, but it’s still a very solid game.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution [2011] (GOG, Steam)
The original Deus Ex was groundbreaking, but time hasn’t been kind to it. This action RPG prequel is a lot of fun and supports different playstyles. If you enjoy it, its sequel Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is worth looking into; it’s a little weaker but still a quality game.
Pillars of Eternity 1 [2015] (GOG, Steam)
This may be the best CRPG ever made. It more or less resurrected top-down RPGs as a genre. Its worldbuilding is excellent (not perfect but excellent), and its mechanics build on the old D&D CRPGs. It manages to feel classic and fresh at the same time. Timeless.
The expanion takes place mid-way through the main plot, which causes some awkwardness with level progression. But the expansion’s also excellent, so I recommend playing it at the appropriate point in the story.
Do not skip this one.
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire [2018] (GOG, Steam)
Deadfire is a sequel worthy of the original. It wasn’t the commercial success its predecessor was, partly because the publisher insisted on voicing all the dialogue this time, which adds greatly to the atmosphere but cost an enormous sum. It’s a fantastic game, and IMHO all the DLC are worth it.
Because Deadfire didn’t make bank, and because the studio is now owned by Microsoft, we may never see a Pillars 3. They did make a first-person action game called Awakened. It’s okay, but the marketing led people to expect Skyrim, and it wasn’t anything like Skyrim, so it flopped. MS recently canceled Awakened 2 in favor of putting the studio on another Fallout game. Meh.
Cyberpunk 2077 [2020] (GOG, Steam)
Think 1980s-retro-future Skyrim. It’s based on the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG of the 1980s, with its timeline pushed forward to 2077 and partly (but not fully) retconned to better agree with subsequent real history.
The suits pushed this game out before it was ready, but the studio has put in the work to overhaul it multiple times since release. (Alas, one of the overhauls introduced a version of level scaling I don’t care for; you can’t have everything.) It’s great now. The expansion is also solid; its starting quest has some QuickTime-event-style sequences I find annoying, but once you get through that the expansion opens up like the base game.
Baldur’s Gate 3 [2023] (GOG, Steam)
BG3 is a very solid, well thought out CRPG in the classic style – very well made and worth your time. Some people treat it as the seminal RPG of our era, and I wouldn’t go that far, but I sure wouldn’t skip it. Remember the jump ability or you will miss parts of the map.
Adventure Games
Quest for Glory I–V [1989–1998] (GOG, Steam)
This is a series of adventure games with RPG elements. Each one is set in a different place based on a different culture, but the protagonist is carried through the whole series. I heartily recommend them.
The first two games are a hybrid of text adventure game with graphical adventure game, using a text parser to accept commands and showing the results on screen; but the series also includes a first-party remake of the first game with the 2D point-and-click engine. The third and fourth games are point-and-click adventure games in the classic style, and the fifth is 3D-rendered.
I think Quest for Glory is criminally underrated, and I encourage everyone who likes adventure games or RPGs to pick it up. If you are put off by the need to use a text parser and EGA graphics for the second game, there is a fan remake in the style of the later games available on the Internet.
The Secret of Monkey Island [1990] (GOG, Steam)
Monkey Island 1 is a masterpiece of an adventure game. It’s the funny and adventurous story of Guybrush Threepwood, who wants to become a mighty pirate and ends up discovering the secret of Monkey Island to vanquish the ghost pirate LeCheck.
I haven’t played the remake, but if I did I would opt for the classic VGA graphics.
Monkey Island 2 and 3 are fun, but they don’t rise to the level of the original. I didn’t care for the fourth one, and I haven’t played any of the others.
Star Trek: 25th Anniversary [1992] (GOG, Steam)
Star Trek: Judgment Rites [1993] (GOG, Steam)
These point-and-click adventures deliver on the promise of feeling like an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series. They are a bit more challenging by my lights than Monkey Island or Full Throttle, and they don’t reach the same height as classics. But they are a lot of fun.
Full Throttle [1995] (GOG, Steam)
Another masterpiece of the classic adventure-game era, Full Throttle is the story of Ben, a biker who has to solve a murder and prevent the last motorcycle manufacturer from switching to minivans. As with Monkey Island I haven’t played the remake, but I would play it with the classic graphics.
Grim Fandango [1998] (GOG, Steam)
Grim Fandango is the noir adventure of Manny Calavera, who is trying to work off his sins in the afterlife as a grim reaper and travel agent. Working against a rigged system, he ends up unintentionally perpetrating an injustice himself against one of his clients, and he pursues her across the afterlife in four acts trying to set things right.
The original game had awful controls. I am told the remake’s controls are better.
Esoteric Ebb [2026] (Steam)
This is billed as an RPG, but I consider it an adventure game with RPG elements, like Quest for Glory. Its mechanics are loosely based on D&D 5e. Each of your attributes has its own personality, and the ones you are strongest in will give the most input in your internal dialogues, which can be hilarious. It has good worldbuilding and good writing; surprisingly for a modern game featuring politics, I can only sort of guess at the maker’s own views.
Strategy Games
Master of Orion 2 [1996] (GOG, Steam)
MOO2 is a sci-fi 4X game that was made at the right point in history to have a good balance of simplicity and complexity. It does suffer a bit in the late game, as micromanaging your planets gets tedious (but essential).
Heroes of Might and Magic 2 [1996] (GOG)
HoMM II is a fantasy turn-based strategy game with armies led by heroes who have some RPG mechanical elements. HoMM III is also excellent.
Civilization 3 [2001] (GOG, Steam)
The first three Civ games share the same, increasingly refined, design. This is the apex of that original design, the spiritual granddaddy of 4X games, including those that preceded its third incarnation.
Civilization 4 [2005] (GOG with DLC, Steam w/o DLC)
With Civ 4, the series started overhauling the original design and adding depth and complexity. The gap between Civ 3 and Civ 4 is much larger than the gap between 2 and 3.
Personally I bounced off Civ 5, and I haven’t played the later games.
Stellaris [2016] (GOG, Steam)
Stellaris is in some respects the great, great grandchild of MOO2. I skip over Galactic Civilizations 2 because, while that game was great, I think Stellaris does most of what it does better.
This is a space 4X game where different species can have very different playstyles. The core design has been radically revised several times through updates, for good and for ill. The DLC on this one are pretty hit-and-miss; I would read reviews before choosing which to buy.
Crusader Kings 3 [2020] (Steam)
A grand strategy game with RPG elements, CK3 is far more accessible than CK2 was. You don’t play a nation or a single immortal ruler; you play a dynasty. Interpersonal diplomacy is important, strategic marriages are important, and of course warfare is important.
Your ruler’s personality isn’t just a source of bonuses and penalties, or even just a source of events. Decisions that are out of line with your ruler’s personality cause stress, among other things, so you have to choose between the decisions that best suit your realm and those that best suit you personally. Raising your children (and your vassals’ children!) correctly will pay dividends.
The DLC on this one are pretty consistently excellent. I know I like the game, so I just buy the season passes; but, as with Stellaris, there are a lot of DLC.
Miscellaneous
Lemmings [1991] (Internet Archive)
Lemmings is a classic puzzle game. Lemmings will walk out of one door, blindly walking forward on the side-view map, and it’s your job to get them into another door. To do this, each level gives you a certain number of particular commands you can give individual lemmings, like “dig,” “block,” or “explode.” It’s a true classic.
You can download it for free from the Internet Archive, but as it’s a DOS game you will need to use DOSBox to play it on a modern PC. You can play in your browser too, but I would download it.
SimCity 2000 [1993] (GOG)
SimCity is the classic series of city builder games. SimCity 2000 added flexibility and depth to the classic game. I haven’t played 3000, so I can’t comment on it. The most recent games all went online-only.
SimCity Classic is available on the Internet Archive, and it’s a charming game in its own right; I don’t know whether it’s a legal copy or not, but I can’t find it on GOG or Steam.
Tropico [2001] (GOG, Steam)
This sim game makes you the corrupt dictator of an island banana republic. You can play individual missions with particular goals, or you can play random maps. You build up your economy and your people’s quality of life, play the Russians and the Americans against each other, thwart coups and insurrections, and try to squirrel as much cash as possible away in your Swiss bank account before the clock runs out.
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