The best strategy games you can play right now on PC. Here is our list of the best strategy games on PC or Mac. Whether you favour real-time bouts or brainy turn-based simulations, great strategy games throw you into uniquely massive scenarios that let you rule empires, control spacefaring races, and marshal cavalry charges against armies of hundreds. We love them.
PC/Mac/Linux Society; Best RTS on steam. Hi everyone I was wondering what your oppinions were for the best rts on steam. I've played WC3, and red alert 2 and liked those. Then there is CoH.
But we love some of them a little more than the others. Will you agree with our picks? Are there any you’d add or like to recommend to fellow readers? Have your say in the comments. We’ve focused on games that offer a strong variety of takes on the genre, and which still play brilliantly today.
This list will be updated when new games make the grade. Tom Senior: Viking-themed RTS Northguard 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 skirmish. Tom Senior: 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.
Samuel Roberts: 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. The second game 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. Tom Senior: 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’t have all of these. You can probably only have one.
In 1989 Sid Meier described games as “a series of interesting decisions.” XCOM 2 is the purest expression of that ethos that Firaxis has yet produced. 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. There are also new Advent troopers to contend with, tons more cosmetic options, zombie-like enemies who populate lost human cities, the ability to create propaganda posters and lots more. War of the Chosen does make each campaign a little bloated, but the changes are so meaningful and extensive that XCOM 2 players need to check it out regardless. Rob Zacny: 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. Samuel Roberts: The Civ game of choice right now for us, and it’s packed with enough features that it feels like it’s already been through a few expansions. Its Districts system lets you build sprawling cities, and challenge you to think several turns ahead more than ever.
The game is gorgeously presented—while the more cartoon-y style takes some time to get used to, it’s lovely to look at in its own right. We’re really curious to see how the inevitable expansions will build on what’s already here, but taken as it is, this is the best Civ to play right now. Samuel Roberts: “I hope upcoming patches and expansions can fill in the gaps,” is what Phil’s Stellaris review said at launch. There’s still room to improve for Paradox’s sci-fi game, but the updates have been coming fast. The Utopia expansion made major changes to the game’s internal politics system, and various other changes could plausibly see you put another hundred hours into the game.
Plus, it lets you build Dyson spheres around a sun, letting you drain all the energy from it and leave any nearby planets freezing, which is amazing in a cruel way. Tom Senior: Only Total War can compete with the scale of Supreme Commander’s real-time battles. It’s still exhilarating to flick the mousewheel and fly from an individual engineer to a map of the entire battlefield, then flick it again to dive down to give orders to another unit kilometres away. When armies do clash—in sprawling hundred-strong columns of robots—you’re rewarded with the most glorious firefights a CPU can render. It’s one of the few real-time strategy games to combine air, ground and naval combat into single encounters, but SupCom goes even further, with artillery, long-range nuclear ordnance and megalithic experimental bots. Samuel Roberts: A somewhat leftfield choice for this list, Tooth and Tail charmed us with its simpler take on the RTS, which has clearly been built around using a controller—but it still has most of the things that make a great strategy game. It’s more Pikmin than Halo Wars, with units rallying around your character and following simple orders, with unit creation automated according to your population limit and available resources.
Battles only last for ten minutes, and with a background of political conflict between anthropomorphised animal factions, each trying to survive, it’s thematically rich, too.