The strategic portion of the game manages to instil resource gathering and experience grinding with the excitement of exploration and questing, while the tactical battles rarely become rote despite the limitations of an 11x15 hex map. It's a wonderful example of several simple concepts executed well and locked together in a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. A huge part of the game's success lies in its approach to progression.
As is often the case in strategy and RPG games alike, the goal in each scenario is to uncover a map and make all of the numbers go as high as possible. Build lots of units, level up heroes and gather gold until there's no space left in your coffers. New World Computing ensure that there's always something interesting behind the fog of war, however, and that every step toward victory feels like a tiny fantastic subplot in its own right. Just look at the towns for proof — every building and upgrade feels like an achievement, and part of a beautiful, fantastic tapestry.
In strategy games that cover broad swathes of human history, it's always a bit sad that the Stone Age is, at best, an early game sideshow - something to be breezed past in a couple of technological leaps on the way to better things. Not so with Dawn Of Man, which concentrates on the various something-lithic periods to the exclusion of everything else. In this game, pointy bits of iron are end-game tech. With its frosty, beast-stuffed landscapes, Dawn Of Man does a grand job of making you feel like just another animal with a few tricks up its sleeve.
Progress is slow, achieved through painstaking increments, and settlements never develop beyond meagre, hard-won hamlets. It's also received several post-launch updates, too, which have added more content and a greater sense of challenge.
From some of the team behind the dungeon crawling Legend of Grimrock games, this turn-based tactics game offers just the right balance between Into The Breach-style solution-finding, and improvisational disaster mitigation along the lines of XCOM.
Using a small party of three and later four characters, upgraded between battles in classic RPG style, players must navigate thirty-five extremely well-designed missions, completing core objectives to progress and nailing secondary objectives to gain extra upgrade resources. As the last original game designed by Civ II creator Brian Reynolds, it stands as a suitable book-end to his career so far, but hopefully not an endpoint.
One of the hurdles strategy games often face is finding the challenge and fun in tasks and themes that don't immediately seem attractive or entertaining. War games and theme park management have certain, obvious appeals, but when taxation and logistics seem to be the order of the day, a game can quickly look a lot like a job. Imperialism 2 is one such game. Although its scope is impressive and the idea of ruling a country and building an empire is potentially exciting, SSI's game focuses on labour and resource management, and is mainly about solving problems of supply and economics.
That it succeeds in making these elements of rule both engaging and relatively accessible is down to the strength of the design. By concentrating on logistics, Imperialism and its sequel become games about the big picture that the smaller details are part of, rather than lists of numbers and complicated spreadsheets. Micromanagement is out and important nation-wide decisions are well and truly in. Galactic Civilizations 2 succeeds by sticking to the basics. That's not to say there's anything basic about the game itself, but there are no unexpected twists.
You take control of a space-faring race and you conquer the galaxy, just as the 4X gods intended. Stardock's game succeeds by implementing all of the expected features — diplomacy, economics, planetary management, warfare — in an enjoyably solid fashion. The AI is notable, both for the challenge it offers and the way that it operates.
Although it does receive boosts at the highest difficulty levels, there's also a credible attempt to simulate counter-strategies tailored to the player's actions. The Endless Universe release, or Ultimate Edition, is also bundled with the two expansions, one of which adds the ability to destroy solar systems.
From archfiends to gods. Wannabe gods. Dominions IV, like Solium Infernum, can be off-putting at first. It has a complicated rule-set that takes a few playthroughs or a determined study of the monstrous manual to understand, and even when a session begins, following the flow of action can be difficult. That's despite the game being separated into tidy turns, with distinct sets of instructions to put into action. There are cities to build, victory points to secure and armies to move around the randomly generated maps.
That tricksy rule-set, along with a combination of graphics that are functional at best and a demanding interface, can make the basics hard to grasp. Or perhaps it's that there are no basics. Break through the hard crust, however, and there are rich veins to tap into.
The clash of deities isn't a re-skin of monarchs or emperors at war — there are disciples to nurture, totems to worship and all manner of nations that can be subject to the whims of the possibly-tentacled pretenders. Gears Tactics is, as its name might suggest, a turn-based tactics game set in the beefy, growly world of Gears Of War. An odd combination, you might think, but this is a game whose veins run deep with the same kind of deep, tactical prowess as your X-COMs and, err Against all the odds, it really does turn out that, even in the preposterously hench world of Gears, the mind really is the strongest muscle.
The only notable omission is the lack of any strategic or management meta-game once each battle is over. Instead, it's back to the battlefield with your newly looted gear and skills you've gained from levelling up. That may not be everyone's cup of protein tea, but if you've always tended to enjoy the fights of XCOM rather than spending time hanging around your base, this is the tactics game for you. You play as a faction of deranged cyborg techno-monks, plundering the depths of an alien tomb in search of ancient technologies, enlightenment, or sometimes just additional fuel for your knackered starship.
The various bickering cyber-clerics behind your expedition are genuinely memorable characters, and you find yourself gripped - and occasionally even laughing - as their story unfolds in between missions.
On the face of things, BattleTech might look like XCOM with giant robots, but those big metal suits aren't just there for show - they're what makes BattleTech so distinctive. A big ol' mech doesn't much care when it loses an arm, for instance - it just keeps on fighting. Working out how to down these walking tanks both a permanently and b in a way that preserves enough of it to take home and use as parts to build a new one yourself is the key strategy here.
BattleTech is sometimes too slow for its own good though mods and a patch address this , but stick with it and it becomes an incredibly satisfying game of interplanetary iron warfare and robo-collection. Men of War is a real-time tactics game that simulates every aspect of the battlefield, from the components of each vehicle to the individual hats on your soldiers' heads.
The hats are not a gimmick. Best Way have built a full scale real-time tactical game that simulates its world down to the smallest details. If you've ever played an RPG and scowled when a giant rat's inventory reveals that it had a pair of leather trousers and a two-handed sword secured beneath its tail, Men Of War will be enormously pleasing. Ammunition, weaponry and clothing are all persistent objects in the world — if you need an extra clip for your gun, you'll have to find it in the world rather than waiting for a random loot drop.
If you need backup, or replacements for fallen men of war , you'll be able to find them in friendly squads who exist as actual entities on the map rather than as abstract numbers in a sidebar.
The credibility of the world isn't window-dressing. All of that simulation serves a greater purpose, allowing for desperate vehicle captures, as a seemingly doomed squad realises that they might be able to commandeer the Panzer they took out moments ago, patch it up and continue to fight the good fight. They Are Billions takes real-time strategy, tower defence and zombie survival, and combines it all into a single punishing, rewarding, delicious experience.
It's one of the rare games that succeeds in its Frankenstein-esque genre splicing, and Numantian Games have only made it bigger and more beautiful since coming out of Early Access. The year is , and after one of those classic zombie apocalypses that ravage the earth, the remnants of this steampunk-infused world now live inside a huge walled city to keep out the undead nasties.
But no more! In They Are Billions' sprawling campaign, you must colonise new outposts in the world around you, building new communities from scratch while protecting them from the hungry hordes. The special thing about They Are Billions, though, is the way it keeps you scared and on your toes even during moments of relative peace. The way it leaves you to slowly explore outwards from the centre of the map and see just how many thousands of zombies are waiting for you, just beyond the borders of your city.
The way it generates such fantastic, characterful anecdotes of Achillean heroism and Sisyphean despair. It all adds up to a delectable experience that keeps you coming back even after it defeats you time and time again and, more importantly, even after you finally complete it, too. It's incredible to think that nobody has taken Jagged Alliance 2 on face to face and come out on top. 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.
Franchise Hockey Manager 8. Darkest Dungeon II. Disciples: Liberation. War Mongrels. Good Company. Against the Storm.
Ruin Raiders. The Riftbreaker. Expeditions: Viking. Expeditions: Conquistador. Animation Throwdown: The Quest for Cards. The Last Friend. Europa Universalis IV. Guardians of Hyelore. Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Storm Ground. Beast Breaker. Guild Of Ascension. Niche - a genetics survival game. Dice Legacy. 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. As you unlock new types of mechs and mech upgrades you gain inventive new ways to toy with your enemies.
The game cleverly uses scarcity of opportunity to force you into difficult dilemmas. At any one time you might have only six possible scan sites, while combat encounters are largely meted out by the game, but what you choose to do with this narrow range of options matters enormously. You need to recruit new rookies; you need an engineer to build a comms facility that will let you contact more territories; you need alien alloys to upgrade your weapons.
You can probably only have one. In Sid Meier described games as "a series of interesting decisions. The War of the Chosen expansion brings even more welcome if frantic changes, like the endlessly chatty titular enemies, memorable nemeses who pop up at different intervals during the campaign with random strengths and weaknesses.
Sneaky tactics doesn't come in a slicker package than Invisible Inc. It's a sexy cyberpunk espionage romp blessed with so much tension that you'll be sweating buckets as you slink through corporate strongholds and try very hard to not get caught. It's tricky, sometimes dauntingly so, but there's a chance you can fix your terrible mistakes by rewinding time, adding some welcome accessibility to the proceedings.
First, you manage stockpiles, and position missile sites, nuclear submarines and countermeasures in preparation for armageddon. This organisation phase is an interesting strategic challenge in itself, but DEFCON is at its most effective when the missiles fly. Blooming blast sites are matched with casualty numbers as city after city experiences obliteration. Once the dust has settled, victory is a mere technicality. Unity of Command was already the perfect entry point into the complex world of wargames, but Unity of Command 2 manages to maintain this while throwing in a host of new features.
It's a tactical puzzle, but a reactive one where you have the freedom to try lots of different solutions to its military conundrums. Not just a great place to start, it's simply a brilliant wargame. Hearts of Iron 4 is a grand strategy wargame hybrid, as comfortable with logistics and precise battle plans as it is with diplomacy and sandboxy weirdness.
Ostensibly game about World War 2, it lets you throw out history as soon as you want. Want to conquer the world as a communist UK?
Go for it. Maybe Germany will be knocked out of the war early, leaving Italy to run things.
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