Pre- Orcs Must Die! Titan Attacks! Hell Yeah! Club Steam Rankings are automatically updated at least once a day from live Steam reviews data. Learn more. Instead, the focus is on controlling smaller groups of troops and hero characters that can be upgraded with gadgets and special units. The story and design are recognizable as Warhammer 40, through and through, with Space Marines, Orks and other Xenos slaughtering each other in brutal and pointless battles.
Dawn of War 2 had a competitive esports scene for quite some time and was even a discipline at the World Cyber Games, with the multiplayer battles being as merciless as the grim darkness of the 41st millennium. The game also had an innovative Horde mode to offer, in which players could team up with their hero characters to fight off waves of enemies.
In team games, hundreds of units could go into battle at once. Unfortunately, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance has not aged well. Performance on modern systems is bumpy and resembles a slideshow more than a smoothly executed battle plan. With this style of RTS having largely fallen out of favor, fans may have to hope for someone putting on a remastered version at some point. As the successor to the immensely popular Warcraft 2, Reign of Chaos had huge shoes to fill — and mastered this task with flying colors.
The included editor could not only spit out exciting multiplayer maps, but create fun and complex minigames. The entire MOBA genre as well as many classic tower defense games have been refined in Warcraft 3 before standing on their own feet. The title also has a long and successful tradition as an esports discipline that continues to this day. Warcraft 3 stands out for its focus on micromanagement, with battles being able to last minutes before even one unit falls, and a minimized economic component — yet the classic construction of bases and workers gathering resources is still present here.
The release of the Reforged version was unfortunately a disaster, but even in its original form, Warcraft 3 is still a very fun title with an active community today. The release of Total Annihilation was a technical quantum leap for the RTS genre: for the first time, 3D models moved across a 3D map and verticality mattered.
Not only did projectiles have to be fired over structures or hills, their ballistics had to be taken into account so that they actually hit their targets.
Units could be controlled individually or in groups, and there were different commands, such as attack and patrol. Chief developer Chris Taylor was later in charge of Supreme Commander , where he further developed the perspective ideas of Total Annihilation. With Supreme Commander and the more recent Planetary Annihilation it has received spiritual successors, but Total Annihilation did not become a cornerstone of a popular series despite its huge importance.
Today, Wargaming owns the rights to the brand — so far, nothing has come of it. Instead, small groups of units and vehicles must be controlled to capture and hold nodes on the map, which in turn generate income. These troops earn veterancy levels over time, which give them additional abilities or stats. Civ in space is a convenient shorthand for Alpha Centauri, but a bit reductive. Brian Reynolds' ambitious 4X journey took us to a mind-worm-infested world and ditched nation states and empires in favour of ideological factions who were adamant that they could guide humanity to its next evolution.
The techs, the conflicts, the characters— it was unlike any of its contemporaries and, with only a few exceptions, nobody has really attempted to replicate it. Not even when Firaxis literally made a Civ in space, which wasn't very good. Alpha Centauri is as fascinating and weird now as it was back in '99, when we were first getting our taste of nerve stapling naughty drones and getting into yet another war with Sister Miriam.
More than 20 years later, some of us are still holding out hope for Alpha Centauri 2. Pick an Age of Wonders and you really can't go wrong. If sci-fi isn't your thing, absolutely give Age of Wonders 3 a try, but it's Age of Wonders: Planetfall that's got us all hot and bothered at the moment.
Set in a galaxy that's waking up after a long period of decline, you've got to squabble over a lively world with a bunch of other ambitious factions that run the gamut from dinosaur-riding Amazons to psychic bugs.
The methodical empire building is a big improvement over its fantastical predecessors, benefiting from big changes to its structure and pace, but just as engaging are the turn-based tactical battles between highly customisable units. Stick lasers on giant lizards, give everyone jetpacks, and nurture your heroes like they're RPG protagonists—there's so much fiddling to do, and it's all great. Set in an alternate 's Europe, factions duke it out with squishy soldiers, tanks and, the headline attraction, clunky steampunk mechs.
There are plenty of them, from little exosuits to massive, smoke-spewing behemoths, and they're all a lot of fun to play with and, crucially, blow up. Iron Harvest does love its explosions. When the dust settles after a big fight, you'll hardly recognise the area.
Thanks to mortars, tank shells and mechs that can walk right through buildings, expect little to remain standing. The level of destruction is as impressive as it is grim. To cheer yourself up, you can watch a bear fight a mech. Each faction has a heroic unit, each accompanied by their very own pet.
All of them have some handy unique abilities, and yes, they can go toe-to-toe with massive war machines. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 's cosmic battles are spectacular.
There's a trio of vaguely 4X-y campaigns following the three of the Warhammer 40K factions: The Imperium, Necron Empire and the nasty Tyranid Hives, but you can ignore them if you want and just dive into some messy skirmishes full of spiky space cathedrals colliding with giant, tentacle-covered leviathans.
The real-time tactical combat manages to be thrilling even when you're commanding the most sluggish of armadas. You need to manage a whole fleet while broadside attacks pound your hulls, enemies start boarding and your own crews turn mutinous.
And with all the tabletop factions present, you can experiment with countless fleet configurations and play with all sorts of weird weapons. Viking-themed RTS Northgard pays dues to Settlers and Age of Empires, but challenged us with its smart expansion systems that force you to plan your growth into new territories carefully.
Weather is important, too. You need to prepare for winter carefully, but if you tech up using 'lore' you might have better warm weather gear than your enemies, giving you a strategic advantage.
Skip through the dull story, enjoy the well-designed campaign missions and then start the real fight in the skirmish mode. Mechanically, Homeworld is a phenomenal three-dimensional strategy game, among the first to successfully detach the RTS from a single plane. If you liked the Battlestar Galactica reboot, or just fancy a good yarn in your RTS, you should play this. Thanks to the Homeworld Remastered Collection , it's aged very well.
The remasters maintain Homeworld and its sequel's incredible atmosphere, along with all the other great bits, but with updated art, textures, audio, UI—the lot. Everything is in keeping with the spirit of the original, but it just looks and sounds better. The different factions are so distinct, and have more personality than they did in the original game—hence Soviet squids and Allied dolphins.
They found the right tonal balance between self-awareness and sincerity in the cutscenes, as well—they're played for laughs, but still entertain and engage.
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak sounded almost sacrilegious at first. Over a decade since the last Homeworld game, it was going to take a game remembered for its spaceships and 3D movement and turn it into a ground-based RTS with tanks?
And it was a prequel? Yet in spite of all the ways this could have gone horribly wrong, Deserts of Kharak succeeds on almost every count. It's not only a terrific RTS that sets itself apart from the rest of the genre's recent games, but it's also an excellent Homeworld game that reinvents the series while also recapturing its magic.
Only Total War can compete with the scale of Supreme Commander 's real-time battles. In addition to being the preeminent competitive strategy game of the last decade, StarCraft 2 deserves credit for rethinking how a traditional RTS campaign is structured. Heart of the Swarm is a good example of this, but the human-centric Wings of Liberty instalment is the place to start: an inventive adventure that mixes up the familiar formula at every stage.
In , Blizzard finally decided to wind down development on StarCraft 2 , announcing that no new additions would be coming, aside from things like balance fixes. The competitive scene is still very much alive, however, and you'll still find few singleplayer campaigns as good as these ones. Most notable today for being the point of origin for the entire MOBA genre, Warcraft III is also an inventive, ambitious strategy game in its own right, which took the genre beyond anonymous little sprites and into the realm of cinematic fantasy.
The pioneering inclusion of RPG elements in the form of heroes and neutral monsters adds a degree of unitspecific depth not present in its sci-fi stablemate, and the sprawling campaign delivers a fantasy story that—if not quite novel—is thorough and exciting in its execution. Shame about Warcraft 3: Reforged , it's not-so-great remake.
Some games would try to step away from the emotional aspect of a war that happened in living memory. Not Company of Heroes. Age of Empires gave us the chance to encompass centuries of military progress in half-hour battles, but Rise of Nations does it better, and smartly introduces elements from turn-based strategy games like Civ.
When borders collide civs race through the ages and try to out-tech each other in a hidden war for influence, all while trying to deliver a knockout military blow with javelins and jets. It was tempting to put the excellent first Dawn of War on the list, but the box-select, right-click to kill formula is well represented.
In combat you micromanage these empowered special forces, timing the flying attack of your Assault Marines and the sniping power of your Scouts with efficient heavy machine gun cover to undo the Ork hordes. The co-operative Last Stand mode is also immense. If you need a 40K fix, we've also ranked every Warhammer 40, game. Like an adaptation of the tabletop game crossed with the XCOM design template, BattleTech is a deep and complex turn-based game with an impressive campaign system.
You control a group of mercenaries, trying to keep the books balanced and upgrading your suite of mechwarriors and battlemechs in the game's strategy layer. In battle, you target specific parts of enemy mechs, taking into account armor, angle, speed and the surrounding environment, then make difficult choices when the fight isn't going your way. It can initially be overwhelming and it's undeniably a dense game, but if that's what you want from your strategy games or you love this universe, it's a great pick.
A beautifully designed, near-perfect slice of tactical mech action from the creators of FTL. Into the Breach challenges you to fend off waves of Vek monsters on eight-by-eight grids populated by tower blocks and a variety of sub objectives. Obviously you want to wipe out the Vek using mech-punches and artillery strikes, but much of the game is about using the impact of your blows to push enemies around the map and divert their attacks away from your precious buildings.
Civilian buildings provide power, which serves as a health bar for your campaign. Every time a civilian building takes a hit, you're a step closer to losing the war.
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