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.
]]>Earlier this month, RPS turned 15 years old, so it only seemed right that this month's Time Capsule entry should be the year of our birth: 2007. Looking back, it was a good year for PC gaming, with the release of Valve's Orange Box alone giving us three new stone-cold classics to enjoy. But what other games from the year of our Horace deserve to be preserved and saved above everything else? Find out which games made the cut below.
]]>Strategy games is an enormous genre in PC gaming, with real-time, turn-based, 4X and tactics games all flying the same flag to stake their claim as the one true best strategy game. Our list of the best strategy games on PC covers the lot of them. We like to take a broad view here at RPS, and every game listed below is something we firmly believe that you could love and play today. You'll find 30-year-old classics nestled right up against recent favourites here, so whether you're to the genre or want to dig deep for some hidden gems, we've got you covered. Here are our 50 best strategy games for 2023.
]]>Expansion packs were once a core part of playing PC games, but they can often feel less essential in a world of constant updates and microtransactions. Original game Alec, expansions Adam and Graham, and brief DLC Alice gathered to discuss their favourite game expansions and why they still think the model works.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance initially amazed with its scale. It's a real-time strategy game in which hundreds of robots collide upon enormous maps, in which the units you build at the start of a match are the size of a metallic toenail on the Experimental units you'll be building at the end, and in which you'll spend your time zooming seamlessly up into the clouds just to fit all the destruction on screen.
Seven years later, the scale doesn't impress me as much. Instead it's the depth that continues to amaze.
]]>This is not the mod I intended to write about when the day began. I had great plans to write about "kitchen sink" mods, which abandon narrative coherency in favour of cramming borrowed ideas into a joyous, lunatic mess. Then I couldn't get my key example to work, and spent four hours stumbling over error after error until I was forced to give up. I'm telling you this now because it seems like a worthwhile lesson if you're going to attempt modding beyond the safe boundaries of the Steam Workshop; sometimes it requires patience, sometimes it creates nothing but frustration.
Quick pivot. What can I get running now which will be fun? Think, think, got it: the Supreme Commander 2 Revamp Expansion Mod. Wish Gas Powered's robotic RTS sequel had been more in-line with its predecessor? This is the mod for you.
]]>OK, Nordic Games, the jig's up. You can go ahead and change your name to THQ II: The Rise Of Mecha-Bilson already, because seriously, you just purchased the publisher's legacy. Sure, Gearbox snagged Homeworld, and the company's modern heavy hitters found new, loving homes, but Nordic now (pending court approval) owns nearly everything else. Red Faction? Yep. Darksiders? Oh, certainly. And oh man, Titan Quest? Sure, why not. Supreme Commander too. And hey, remember Full Spectrum Warrior? I must admit, I - along with my good friend, Basically The Entire World - had forgotten about it, but Nordic deemed the military tactics sorta-sim worth salvaging. Here's the kicker, though: all those? Only the tip of the iceberg.
]]>When Sega plucked Relic from the ashes of THQ last month, it appears they didn't get the Homeworld license along with it. So for now the sublime space RTS series remains without a home, in an odd case of life imitating art. The Homeworld IP is now up for sale in an auction of THQ's remaining stuff - as is the likes of Supreme Commander, Red Faction, Darksiders, Titan Quest, Full Spectrum Warrior and a whole host of names known and forgotten.
]]>Gas Powered Games wants $1.1 million of your dollars. I also want $1.1 million of your dollars, but - instead of spending them on a mansion made of trampolines and a pony that's also a rocketship - the Dungeon Siege and Supreme Commander dev is hoping to bring an RTS-RPG called Wildman to life. It's about prehistoric evolution, but with an amusingly silly twist. "What if men, when they evolved into the homo sapiens form, what if other creatures also evolved, and other creatures had sentient minds? You could fight, say, a giant fly creature, or a lizard creature, or wild animals. What if there were thinking cats and things like that? Insects that are just creepy, that grew and were vying to take over the planet," explained Taylor in an interview with RPS. So it's part exploration-based hack 'n' slash, part troop-commanding RTS, and part fly monster. Got it. Video after the break.
]]>That headline may seem obvious, but wow. So Total Annihilation (and, more recently, Supreme Commander) were big, but Planetary Annihilation is shooting for the stars. And potentially shooting at them, as well. It's all the absurdly large-scale mechanized warfare you've (probably) known and loved since the late '90s, but now you can zoom out into space, build a fort on an asteroid, and then crash it into an enemy planet. So basically, total insanity. After the break, you'll find a video from Super Monday Night Combat maestros Uber Entertainment explaining their ambitious RTS (ambitiouRTS, for short) and - yes - asking for money.
]]>Or at least against the odds skirmishes. This is an afternoon ode to that time when you set up a skirmish mode in an RTS and pitch yourself against extraordinary odds (perhaps with a chum to help you). It's one of those little pleasures that I think most RTS players understand, but is probably unknown by, well, the rest of humanity.
]]>Just before the release of Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, I sat down and had a chat with the ever-effusive Chris Taylor. It was a fun interview - it started casual enough, but amped up and up and up until Chris was saying things like...
]]>Possibly of use to one in a hundred of our readers, but we're all about supporting persecuted minorities.
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