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.
Once your power is depleted your team travels back through time to try and save the world again. It's challenging, bite-sized, and dynamic. There are other games with a strategic layer and turn-based tactical combat, sure, and there are plenty of games that treat mercenaries, guns and ammo in an almost fetishistic fashion — but is Jagged Alliance 2 still the best of its kind? Doubts creep in every once in a while and, inevitably, that leads to a swift re-installation and several days lost in the war for Arulco.
Jagged Alliance 2 is still in a class of its own and despite the years spent in its company, it's hard to articulate the reasons why it has endured. The satisfaction of gaining territory in the slow creep across the map is one reason and the tension of the tactical combat is another.
Even the inventory management feels just right, making every squad the equivalent of an RPG's party of adventurers. But it's the character of the squad members that seals the deal. It'd be easy to dismiss them as a cluster of bad jokes and stereotypes, but each has enough personality to hang a hundred stories on — remember the time Fox bandaged Grunty's wounds in the thick of a firefight a turn before he bled out, or the time Sparky made an uncharacteristically good shot and saved an entire squad's bacon?
If you don't, go play Jagged Alliance 2 and make some memories. It pushes a lot of the same buttons as Total War. You build up persistent multi-unit forces on a campaign layer, then position them on a tactical map and shove them into the enemy in a long, grinding bout of micromanaged carnage. As well as offering competitive real-time city-building against both AI and human opponents, Anno also has an extra layer of built-in maritime RTS where you direct a small fleet of ships to trade, explore, carry out reward-based missions, fight pirates, or assault your competitors.
If you had to describe Neptune's Pride in a few words, it'd sound like almost any other game of galactic conquest. Planets and ships can be upgraded, and, as ever, you'll be trying to gather as much science, industry and money as possible. The twist in this particular tale is the speed of the game — or, perhaps, the distances involved. Sending a fleet to explore, invade or intercept takes hours. There's no way to speed up the passage of time so what to do while waiting? Neptune's Pride is not one of those freemium games that allow you to buy gems why is it always gems?
Instead, most of the game takes place in the gaps between orders, as alliances are forged, promises are made and backs are stabbed. Due to the long-form nature of a campaign, Neptune's Pride will live with you, needling at the back of your mind, and you'll find yourself switching strategies in the anxious early hours of the morning, betraying friends and playing into the hands of your enemies.
The Banner Saga is an epic turn-based strategy series whose story spans across three separate games. While The Banner Saga 2 is arguably the best one in the trilogy, introducing more enemy types and classes to keep things interesting, this is very much the second act of the game's wider narrative, so it's definitely worth playing right from the start.
A disaster-strewn trek across a dying land, multiple, oft-changing perspectives, awful decisions with terrible consequences made at every turn, more a tale of a place than of the individual characters within it. A few punches are pulled, perhaps, but The Banner Saga has far more substance than might have been expected from a game which seems so very art-led. For five seconds at a time, Frozen Synapse allows you to feel like a tactical genius.
You provide orders for your team of soldiers and then watch as enemies waltz right into your line of fire, or find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place, right on the killing floor.
The next five seconds might flip everything around though, leaving you feeling like a dolt. The beauty of Mode 7's clean and colourful game is that it plays on confidence and intuition rather than detailed analysis.
Each 1v1 round of battle takes place on a randomised map, both participants draw up their orders and then execute simultaneously. Maybe you'll have to take on the aggressive role, knowing that this particular enemy commander prefers to set up an ambush and wait. In a few short minutes, you'll perform flanking manoeuvres, lay down covering fire, attempt to breach and clear a room, and watch in horror as everything goes wrong again. But when a plan comes together?
You're a genius again, for at least five seconds more. Six Ages works as a strategy game because it's about influencing people, not just accumulating resources. Cattle and horses and food are vital, sure, but they're not everything, and you need to gauge many things that can't be counted. How the Grey Wings feel about you isn't presented as a number or bar, but what your traders and diplomats have to say.
You're leading a village in a dangerous land of magic, religious conflict, and looming environmental crisis. Yes, it has bags of personality as your advisors snark and ramble and complain, and you explore the alien values of this colourful, yet malleable culture, but there are hard strategic decisions to make every year, even if the decision is to stay the course. Success is about making good decisions in its many events, but also directing your clan's long term efforts behind the scenes.
Where do you explore and when? Will your precious magic supplement your crafter this year, or is it time to risk a ride to the gods' realm to secure a special blessing? And those decisions can never be fully divorced from the wider situation.
The ideal solution might be obvious but unaffordable, or contradict another plan you have going. Measuring all these political, economic, military, religious, and sometimes personal factors up against your long-term plans is a storytelling delight and a cerebral challenge all at once.
Creative Assembly's historical Total War games have been going from strength to strength in recent years, and 's Three Kingdoms is arguably the best one yet. Set during China's titular Three Kingdoms period in the second and third century and based on the fourteenth century novel Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, this is the most dramatic and personal Total War game yet, making for some thrilling, real-time combat and some truly incredible stories.
For the most part, it's classic Total War. A large part of your time will be spent building towns, recruiting soldiers and moving your armies across a map of China as you try and unite your shattered land, but what sets Three Kingdoms apart is its intense focus on your individual clanspeople, giving each campaign a very human and emotional core from which to build your strategy from. Never before have we felt so invested in our Total War soldiers, and victory has never tasted sweeter or defeat more gut-wrenching as a result.
Sure, it ends up leaning more toward the 'romance' side of history than the cold, hard factual take we're used to seeing from a Total War game, but for us, it's all the better for it. If you're new to the series, Three Kingdoms is also the best place to start by a country mile, as both the campaign and its combat are easier to understand than ever before.
Reinvigorating a sub-genre left dormant since the glory days of Commandos and Desperados, the German studio remind us of the pleasures of shuffling tiny murderers through dioramas, under the watchful - not to mention very green, and triangular - eyes of nervous bandits.
A couple of vital tweaks see the cowboy-flavoured variation win out over the ninja adventure: for starters, the ability to fully freeze the action and program in multiple character moves for grand coordinated takedowns. While a key feature of Shadow Tactics, time continued there, making this the more surgical application.
Achieve it without mind control darts and we salute you. By allowing the player to hand over the reigns of responsibility, Distant Worlds makes everything possible.
It's space strategy on a grand scale that mimics the realities of rule better than almost any other game in existence. And it does that through the simple act of delegation. Rather than insisting that you handle the build queues, ship designs and military actions throughout your potentially vast domain, Distant Worlds allows you to automate any part of the process. If you'd like to sit back and watch, you can automate everything, from individual scout ships to colonisation and tourism. If you're military-minded, let the computer handle the economy and pop on your admiral's stripes.
As well as allowing the game to operate on an absurd scale without demanding too much from the player in the way of micromanagement, Distant Worlds' automation also peels back the layers to reveal the working of the machine.
It's a space game with an enormous amount of possibilities and by allowing you to play with the cogs, it manages to convince that all of those possibilities work out just as they should. Europa Universalis IV is far better now than it was at release. Over the years, Paradox had started to develop a reputation for launching games that required strong post-release support. Even though that's no longer the case and the internal development studio's teams are now in impeccable condition on day one, the strong post-release support continues.
Now it's in the form of free patches and paid-for expansions. The Europa series feels like the tent-pole at the centre of Paradox's grand strategy catalogue. Covering the period from to , it allows players to control almost any nation in the world, and then leaves them to create history. A huge amount of the appeal stems from the freedom — EU IV is a strategic sandbox, in which experimenting with alternate histories is just as if not more entertaining than attempting to pursue any kind of victory.
Not that there is such a thing as a hardcoded victory. Providing the player with freedom is just one part of the Paradox philosophy though.
EU IV is also concerned with delivering a believable world, whether that's in terms of historical factors or convincing mechanics. With a host of excellent expansions and an enormous base game as its foundation, this IS one of the most credible and fascinating worlds in gaming.
A duck and a boar walk into a bar Of course, walking in anywhere is ill advised in Mutant Year Zero, a game that hinges on you sneaking through large playpens to choose your angle of attack or pick off stragglers to thin the horde before noisy turn-based tactics commence.
How many games in this list can claim that? Watching expert players at work is bewildering, as the clicks per minute rise and the whole game falls into strange and sometimes unreadable patterns. According to the StarCraft Wiki, a proficient player can perform approximately productive actions per minute. StarCraft II may be included here because it has perfected an art form that only a dedicated few can truly appreciate, but its campaigns contain a bold variety of missions, and bucket loads of enjoyably daft lore.
Though its dour single-player campaign is a big ol' nope in terms of storytelling, most recent expansion Legacy of the Void has an Archon mode that even offers two-player coop, so you can share all of those actions per minute with a chum. Technically, this game is more like an absolutely titanic piece of DLC for the original Total War: Warhammer than an actual sequel.
While it has its own set of factions and its own campaign map, its true glory is arguably in its Mortal Empires campaign, which mashes together the maps and faction sets for both games for a beautifully bloated experience. It would be worth the asking price for that alone. As well as adding a bewildering variety of fantastical unit types, from dragons to giant spiders and towering undead crabs yes, mate , Warhammers I and II fundamentally changed the dynamics of the battlefield from their historical stablemates.
Hero units are of dramatic importance to armies, capable of holding their own against hundreds of bog-standard troops, while a robustly designed magic system allows for game-changing battlefield effects to be deployed, at the cost of yet more micromanagement.
At their worst, these remakes and remasters are simply the bones of games left long behind by the evolution of the strategy genre. AoE2 was the high water mark of the 2D, isometric-ish, gather-and-mangle format. It was superbly balanced, perfectly paced, and offered just the right mix of economic and military play.
Definitive Edition, however, is more than just AoE2's glammed-up zombie. It's a giant sexy Frankenstein, with the contents of five separate expansions four of which were originally made by extremely talented fans , and a whole castle full of brand new content, sewn onto the body of the original game and no, you're wrong: Frankenstein was the monster's name. Check out our best free PC games list for some strategy games that won't cost you a dime.
Then round out your rig and get the ultimate gaming experience by investing in the best gaming mouse and the best gaming keyboard around. It's impossible to talk about strategy games without mentioning Age of Empires 2. This classic title first defined real-time strategy in and thanks to numerous expansions and a recent remaster, it's better than ever.
Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition allows players to command numerous civilizations as they rise to the top of the Imperial Age, from the clashes of the Scots and English to the Spanish invasion of the Aztec Empire. Age of Mythology is an odd offshoot of the Age of Empires franchise. Eschewing real world history for myths and legends, players command terrifying monsters like Minotaurs and Frost Giants while currying favor with Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Atlantean or Chinese deities.
It's a great change of pace from its more realistic sister titles and the perfect game to try if you're not sure about the many historically-focused strategy games. Maybe you don't want to command the minutia of different soldiers, you'd prefer to oversee the grand research and construction of monuments across hundreds of years.
That's where Sid Meier's Civilization 6 comes in. The latest installment in the Civilization franchise provides thousands of hours of possibilities in a game best defined by "just one more turn. Westwood Studios' original game has been remastered for modern hardware in a bundle with its expansion packs. While it might still be a little rustic compared to the more modern titles on this list, it's well worth checking out if you want to see just why this was so defining back in So, maybe you looked at Civilization 6 and thought to yourself "I want a more realistic art style and even more control over the most minute details, including the ability to run my kingdom in an absolutely depraved way.
Forge a royal line then Build a kingdom, an empire, backstab your allies and suffer mental breakdowns, that just barely scratches the surface of what is possible. Top 10 Anime of Presented by truth. IGN Logo Recommends. Matt Kim Superbad Joseph Knoop Dexter: New Blood Review 7h ago - Dexter traded heat stroke for frostbite in a bonus final run that righted the wrongs of Season 8. Dexter: New Blood Matt Fowler Game of Thrones Jared Moore
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