It marks when the WarCraft universe truly came alive and opened up beyond an ongoing conflict between orcs, humans, and their respective allies. To this day, no strategy game has told such a fast-paced, engrossing epic fantasy story with so much bravado and flair for presentation as Reign of Chaos and its expansion, The Frozen Throne.
Outside the nail-biting, ship-to-ship combat, you constantly have to make tough calls about how long to spend exploring a system for resources while the clock is ticking and the rebel fleet is hot on your heels. Each playthrough can vary wildly in tactics and tone based on the type of ship you pick and the types of aliens you bring along. FTL: Faster Than LightĪ hybrid RTS/roguelike, FTL never stops feeling tense as you order your crew around to man shield generators, repair hull breaches, and repel boarding parties. It also features a dating sim, a dungeon crawl, and some RPG elements… but even looking at it purely from a strategy perspective, it deserves a spot on this list. It’s hard to fit this one into a single genre, but ConcernedApe’s farming sim rotates around a strong strategic axis that requires you to plan ahead for the changing conditions of different seasons, decide which crops to plant where and when to maximize profits, and manage your limited time from day to day between different activities. Damage to regiments carries over from one part of the scenario to the next, and the story of the battle adapts like a branching choose-your-own-adventure based on how well you capture and hold objectives. It’s a lot of fun in multiplayer, but the campaign is particularly impressive. Ultimate General: GettysburgĪ readable, easy-to-control, tactically nuanced Civil War RTS, Ultimate General takes into account terrain, line of sight, and unit condition in ways that deepen the gameplay without ever becoming cumbersome to understand and work with. The freeform paving, zoning, and districting brushes grant fine control over the look and function of each block of your city, and like any truly great city-builder, it’s enjoyable both as a hands-off ant farm type experience and as a nitty-gritty urban planning puzzle. Colossal Order saw the void left by Maxis’ latest shot at the title and created a more open-ended, full-featured city builder that looks gorgeous with its tilt-shifted camera and offers lots of tools to optimize a traffic grid, underground rail line, or sewage disposal system. SimCity is one of the original titans of strategy, and Skylines is hands down the best rendition of the core idea it set out with today. The multiplayer de-emphasized some of the insane micro that made old school StarCraft special, instead focusing on strong economic “macro” play, scouting, and unit compositions, but it’s still a blast to play - and watch! It’s not the top dog on Twitch these days, but esports gaining traction outside South Korea owes a lot to Wings of Liberty, Heart of the Swarm, and Legacy of the Void. While ultimately divisive among fans of the original, Blizzard’s space RTS sequel and its two expansions feature some of the most high production value storytelling and entertaining, creatively-designed campaign missions in any RTS. Get your hotkeys and your End Turn button ready.
#Best strategic war games pc series#
An effort was also made not to include too many games from the same series or developer, so you can consider, for example, the Total War entries selected to speak to the position the series has as a whole in strategy gaming, even though it wasn’t possible to include all of the greatest hits. While some consideration was given to historical importance, the main factor was how enticing each game would be to pick up and play irresponsibly into the wee hours of the morning, right here and now. This list also favors games that still hold up and are fun to play today over those that are considered definitive, innovative, or trend-setting. Effort was taken to include a variety of subgenres of strategy as well, even though those can sometimes be difficult to compare to one another. As Sid Meier would say, these games present a series of interesting choices that can lead you to defeat or triumph. In terms of classification, this list contains games in which strategy is the primary concern - or at least one of a handful of primary concerns. After much consideration, they’ve been narrowed down to the best of the best. Even if we’re just limiting ourselves to the digital variety, there are dozens and dozens of RTSes, 4Xes, wargames, and grand strategy paragons worthy of high praise. What are the best strategy games? It’s a daunting question to answer, with the genre spanning back almost as long as humans have been playing games.
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