Install your own Pope, declare Crusades and crush any rival forces on your way to victory. This is also a great starting point if you want to see how Total War games have evolved over time. Another popular Total War entry is Shogun 2. Set in Japan, you'll have your choice of the disparate clans as you work to dethrone the Shogun.
Deploy armies of Samurai and subvert enemy intelligence with Geishas, while also determining how traditional or open to foreign culture — and advanced weapons — Japan will be. Aliens are real and they are coming for Earth. You'll need to put together an elite team, build a base and do research while pulling off high stakes missions against an unknown threat and keeping the nations funding you happy.
No pressure, right? This TBS title is brutal and unrelenting, making it all the more satisfying when you pull off the perfect mission. Aliens have invaded and humanity has been conquered.
Now, you're not leading Earth's defenses, you're leading its last resistance movement. Take the fight to the alien overlords and discover what they're planning before it's too late. Samuel Tolbert is a freelance games journalist. North America. If you've been thinking about getting into strategy games after, say, building a new gaming PC , figuring out where to start can be a bit overwhelming.
Samuel Tolbert. The game offered a persistent campaign that enabled your conquest of the world turn by turn. Every decision you made counted towards or against your absolute victory as you rose through the ages from prehistory to the modern age. Medieval: Total War is arguably the best game in the long-running series of war games by Creative Assembly.
The game puts you in the role of a Dungeon Keeper—an overlord, a boss, and fascist king dictator of a monster-filled dungeon. With the help of your monsters, you must expand your dungeon by digging through the earth, uncovering treasure and mining for gold, and making it a desirable place to live for your evil minions.
Having a successful dungeon also makes it an enticing target for the goodly terrestrial heroes who want nothing more than to claim a slice of your treasure and extinguish the beating heart of your dungeon.
To that end, you have to construct elaborate traps and hire minions capable of falling even the mightiest knights—or better yet, turning them to your cause. One of the most epic stories ever told in the history of games, Homeworld is also the first of its kind—a space RTS which takes place in three dimensions, as opposed to a two dimensional plane. The game tells the story about a race of humans in the far-flung future who discover a buried alien spaceship in the desert of their planet—a relic of their distant, spacefaring past.
In their wisdom, they decide to get off their rock and find their way back home by following interstellar markers left by their ancestors. As their home planet is destroyed by a race of other hostile aliens, they have little choice but to proceed on their voyage. They must elude hostiles, make contact with benevolent alien races, and uncover the secrets of their heritage on the way home. Myth: The Fallen Lords is a little known game by Bungie yes, the same Bungie that made Halo that puts players in control of a commander of a unit not unlike the Black Company in the eponymous series of books by Glen Cook.
The game features highly detailed 2D sprites within a three dimensional environment, which allows you to deform the terrain with explosives, bounce or roll grenades off hills, or even blow up your own units by accident if they stand in the way of the throw.
Much of the focus in Dawn of War, like Company of Heroes, is on the command of small groups of units instead of build orders and rock-paper-scissors style gameplay. Each unit can be lead by a sergeant or a commander who attaches himself to the unit, earning experience points and even items to bolster his strengths.
In the single player campaign, the player takes charge of a set group of heroes who must drive back the alien forces and undertake missions in a persistent campaign that takes both wins and losses into account as you play through the game. Multiplayer is an entirely different beast, allowing players to play as one of the many alien races in addition to the Space Marines. Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm take place after the events of the first Starcraft.
Getting to grips with it is thankfully considerably easier this time around, thanks to a helpful nested tooltip system and plenty of guidance.
And all this soapy dynastic drama just has a brilliant flow to it, carrying you along with it. You can meander through life without any great plan and still find yourself embroiled in countless intrigues, wars and trysts. Total War: Three Kingdoms , the latest historical entry in the series, takes a few nods from Warhammer, which you'll find elsewhere in this list, giving us a sprawling Chinese civil war that's fuelled by its distinct characters, both off and on the battlefield.
Each is part of a complicated web of relationships that affects everything from diplomacy to performance in battle, and like their Warhammer counterparts they're all superhuman warriors.
It feels like a leap for the series in the same way the first Rome did, bringing with it some fundemental changes to how diplomacy, trade and combat works. The fight over China also makes for a compelling campaign, blessed with a kind of dynamism that we've not seen in a Total War before. Since launch, it's also benefited from some great DLC, including a new format that introduces historical bookmarks that expand on different events from the era.
The first Total War: Warhammer showed that Games Workshop's fantasy universe was a perfect match for Creative Assembly's massive battles and impressively detailed units. Total War: Warhammer 2 makes a whole host of improvements, in interface, tweaks to heroes, rogue armies that mix factions together and more. The game's four factions, Skaven, High Elves, Dark Elves and Lizardmen are all meaningfully different from one another, delving deeper into the odd corners of old Warhammer fantasy lore.
If you're looking for a starting point with CA's Warhammer games, this is now the game to get—and if you already own the excellent original, too, the mortal empires campaign will unite both games into one giant map. Paradox's long-running, flagship strategy romp is the ultimate grand strategy game, putting you in charge of a nation from the end of the Middle Ages all the way up to the s. As head honcho, you determine its political strategy, meddle with its economy, command its armies and craft an empire.
Right from the get-go, Europa Universalis 4 lets you start changing history. Maybe England crushes France in the Years War and builds a massive continental empire. Maybe the Iroquois defeat European colonists, build ships and invade the Old World. It's huge, complex, and through years of expansions has just kept growing. The simulation can sometimes be tough to wrap one's head around, but it's worth diving in and just seeing where alt-history takes you. Few 4X games try to challenge Civ, but Old World already had a leg up thanks designer Soren Johnson's previous relationship with the series.
He was the lead designer on Civ 4, and that legacy is very apparent. But Old World is more than another take on Civ. For one, it's set exclusively in antiquity rather than charting the course of human history, but that change in scope also allows it to focus on people as well as empires. Instead of playing an immortal ruler, you play one who really lives, getting married, having kids and eventually dying.
Then you play their heir. You have courtiers, spouses, children and rivals to worry about, and with this exploration of the human side of empire-building also comes a bounty of events, plots and surprises. You might even find yourself assassinated by a family member.
There's more than a hint of Crusader Kings here. You can't have a best strategy games list without a bit of Civ. Civilization 6 is our game of choice in the series right now, especially now that it's seen a couple of expansions.
The biggest change this time around is the district system, which unstacks cities in the way that its predecessor unstacked armies. Cities are now these sprawling things full of specialised areas that force you to really think about the future when you developing tiles. The expansions added some more novel wrinkles that are very welcome but do stop short of revolutionising the venerable series.
They introduce the concept of Golden Ages and Dark Ages, giving you bonuses and debuffs depending on your civilisation's development across the years, as well as climate change and environmental disasters. It's a forward-thinking, modern Civ. This is a game about star-spanning empires that rise, stabilise and fall in the space of an afternoon: and, particularly, about the moment when the vast capital ships of those empires emerge from hyperspace above half-burning worlds.
Diplomacy is an option too, of course, but also: giant spaceships. Play the Rebellion expansion to enlarge said spaceships to ridiculous proportions.
Stellaris takes an 'everything and the kicthen sink' approach to the space 4X. It's got a dose of EU4, Paradox's grand strategy game, but applied to a sci-fi game that contains everything from robotic uprisings to aliens living in black holes. It arguably tries to do to much and lacks the focus of some of the other genre greats, but as a celebration of interstellar sci-fi there are none that come close.
It's a liberating sandbox designed to generate a cavalcade of stories as you guide your species and empire through the stars, meddling with their genetic code, enslaving aliens, or consuming the galaxy as a ravenous hive of cunning insects.
Fantasy 4X Endless Legend is proof that you don't need to sacrifice story to make a compelling 4X game. Each of its asymmetrical factions sports all sorts of unique and unusual traits, elevated by story quests featuring some of the best writing in any strategy game. The Broken Lords, for instance, are vampiric ghosts living in suits of armour, wrestling with their dangerous nature; while the necrophage is a relentless force of nature that just wants to consume, ignoring diplomacy in favour of complete conquest.
Including the expansions, there are 13 factions, each blessed or cursed with their own strange quirks. Faction design doesn't get better than this. 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. 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.
The scientist was called Microsoft. Oh, and they made it look utterly beautiful too, and added dozens of little UI and control improvements to circumvent annoyances such as having to manually reseed farms. With 35 civilisations to play as, single-player missions over 24 campaigns, more multiplayer maps than we can be arsed to count, and even a built-in training mode to get people up to speed for multiplayer, it's more than double the size of the original game, and hundreds of hours' worth of fun even before you start fighting other people.
If there had never been an AoE2, and this had been released out of nowhere in , it would have blown people's minds. Long live the age of king s. A few years ago, claiming that Mark of the Ninja was anything other than Klei's masterpiece would have been considered rude at best. That the studio have created an even more inventive, intelligent and enjoyable game already seems preposterous, but Invisible, Inc. And, splendidly, Invisible, Inc. It's the kind of game where you throw your hands in the air at the start of a turn, convinced that all is lost, and map out a perfect plan ten minutes later.
The reinvention of the familiar sneaking and stealing genre as a game of turn-based tactics deserves a medal for outstanding bravery, and Invisible, Inc. Everything from the brief campaign structure to the heavily customizable play styles has been designed to encourage experimentation as well as creating the aforementioned tension. This is a game which believes that information is power, and the screen will tell you everything you need to know to survive. The genius of Invisible, Inc.
In the beginning, there was Total Annihilation. The beginning, in this instance, is , the year that Duke Nukem Forever went into production.
Cavedog's RTS went large, weaving enormous sci-fi battles and base-building around a central Commander unit that is the mechanical heart of the player's army. Supreme Commander followed ten years later. Total Annihilation designer Chris Taylor was at the helm for the spiritual successor and decided there was only one way to go. Initially, it's the scale that impresses. Starting units are soon literally lost in the shadow of enormous spiderbots as orbital lasers chew the battlefield to pieces.
Spectacle alone wouldn't make Supreme Commander the greatest RTS ever released, however, and there's plenty of strategic depth behind the blockbuster bot battles. It's a game in which the best players form their own flexible end-goals rather than simply rushing to the top of the ladder. Yes, there's a drive toward bigger and better units, but the routes to victory are many - some involve amphibious tanks, others involve enormous experimental assault bots and their ghostly residual energy signatures.
Indeed, we recommend playing Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance these days, which is a standalone expansion to the base game. This adds loads of extra units, an entirely new faction, new maps and a new single-player campaign, and it's a better sequel than the actual sequel. It's easy to dismiss the value of incremental improvements.
We're drawn to the flashy and the new, to innovations that light the touchpaper of change. Civilisation VI isn't a huge leap forward for the series, but a step or two still make it the best one yet.
The old draw is still there. You get to take a nation from conception to robot-aided world domination. Win the space race, infect the world with your culture. Pressgang the UN. Get nuked by Gandhi. It's a marriage of scope and personality that surpasses most game's attempts at either. Civ VI funnels that grand strategy through smaller milestones. You might reach a new continent to boost research speed for a key technology, or focus on winning round a city-state with a few well placed envoys.
City-planning matters more, thanks to specialised districts with adjacency bonuses. It's pleasingly grounding - a way of chipping away at that layer of abstraction while adding another welcome layer of strategy.
It refines ideas the series has been playing around with for decades. No one change is revolutionary, and nor is their cumulative impact. They still make it the best Civ by far, and Civ games are fantastic. Paradox's first foray into galactic-scale 4X had a bit of a rocky start in life, but a slew of big updates and even bigger DLC expansions has seen Stellaris continue to evolve into something far more impressive, and most importantly more varied, than it once was.
Paradox often sticks with its games for the long-haul, as we've also seen with the likes of Crusader Kings II and Cities: Skylines, but so far it's Stellaris that has benefited most from this approach. Whole systems have been ripped out and replaced in the name of slicker and smarter galactic empire-building.
Its tussle of space civilizations is now vast and strange, all gene wars and synth rebellions alongside the more expected likes of imperialistic aliens, and it's a whole lot better set up for pacifistic play than it once was too. This empire has very much struck back. After Earth, the stars. The release of the disappointing Civilization: Beyond Earth has only served to improved Alpha Centauri's stock.
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