Earlier this month, we asked you to vote for your favourite strategy games of all time to celebrate the launch (and glorious return) of several strategy classics this month, including Relic's WW2 RTS Company Of Heroes 3, Blue Byte's The Settlers: New Allies and Cyanide's fantasy Warhamball Blood Bowl 3. And cor, I've never seen such love for individual expansions and total conversion mods among mainline RTS games and 4Xs. As with all strategy games, however, there can only be one victor - and you can find out what that single strategy game to rule them all is right here. Here are your 50 favourite strategy games of all time, as voted for by you, the RPS readership.
]]>Say what you want about modern games, but they've gotten pretty good at rendering fauna. If Red Dead Redemption 2 wants to show you a goose, it'll damn well show you a goose. Last month, a new Twitter account popped up to remind us that this is a fairly recent development, cataloguing the smart, strange, and downright cursed wildlife created in the name of saving a few dozen polygons.
]]>After 15 years, Age Of Empires 3 returns today with a shiny new expanded version. Like the AOE 2 Def Ed before it, Age Of Empires 3: Definitive Edition polishes up Ensemble's historical real-time strategy game to play nice with modern computers, rolls in all the old expansions, and adds a few new things too. Considering we've still not got Nate back from AOE2, I dread to imagine what this might to do him. We'll find asleep in the RPS treehouse in the morning with a mouse in each hand, two keyboards draped over himself like blankets, and two matches still going.
]]>Following up last year's Age Of Empires II: Definitive Edition release, Xbox Game Studios are planning a beta period for the Age Of Empires III: Definitive Edition for registered Insiders. If you took part in Age 2's beta sessions, the developers say they are structuring Age 3's beta a bit differently. Sessions will be shorter and more focused, with multiplayer beta times beginning in February.
]]>Empires Apart [official site] is an upcoming RTS that "wants to be Age of Empires at heart", say Slitherine, who have just announced that they'll be publishing DESTINYbit's game when it's ready for release in the second half of 2017. I hadn't heard of the title until today, so I've been digging through old development video blogs like a digital archaeologist. You can see the three videos produced to date below, as well as an announcement trailer.
]]>Hurry! The recently-rebooted Games For Windows Live has dropped a crazy-assed old deal today - the complete edition of the habitually over-expensive Age of Empires III for just ten of your British pence, or ten of your American cents. Not sure about Euro-prices just yet, I'm afraid. A saving of $40/£40-ish, which is quite remarkable. Obviously it's Microsoft's own game so they can get away with this sort of slasher-behaviour. It's only for the duration of today though, so get a wriggle on, eh?
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