We've selected the best strategy games from the history of PC gaming in this list. 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.
We have over 510 of the best RTS games for you! Popper King Manual. Play online for free at Kongregate, including Stick War, Creeper World 3: Abraxis, and Obliterate Everything 3.
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. As with our list of the, 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.
Total War: Warhammer 2 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.
XCOM 2/War of the Chosen 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.