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Favorite Strategy games?

I think there are few different strategy sub-genres.

Classic RTS : C&C Zero Hour. It's not perfect, it's imbalance, but I love it the most. Every faction has some kind personality too. I like C&C TW3 Kane Wrath too for its similar feeling.
Micro RTS : Warcraft III. Very high quality game in my opinion and a lot of custom maps, a total value. Second place is Company of Heroes 1.
Macro RTS : SupCom 1. Honestly this genre isn't my cup of tea.
MOBA : Heroes of the Storm. Not my cup of tea either but HotS is pretty fun.
Real Time Tactics : Commandos 2. Pretty fun, but maybe a little bit too easy.
Tower Defense : Orcs Must Die! 2. Not classic tower defense but extremely fun. The game that teach me that macro could be important feature.
4X : Civilization V. I put a lot of hours into it, although to be honest because the wait time is very long at the later turns.
Turn Based Strategy : Heroes of Might and Magic V. I like the art style, the music, the units, the skillwheel, and even the story feels grand.


Civ V does get very slow at the end. Any way to speed it up? It seems like faster CPUs do not make that big of a difference.
 
Addicted to Sup Com 2 waiting for 3, William Gauge still lives.
Sup Com 1
Starcraft
C&C series

None of these mess up my folding :respect:
 
Civ V does get very slow at the end. Any way to speed it up? It seems like faster CPUs do not make that big of a difference.
Changing from a i7-920 at 4.0 to a i75820k at 4.3 gave a big boost in turn speed for me, could be ram speed if not CPU?
 
sorry, yeah thats cobra
and converting enemy's priests and enemy's elite soldiers

but in 7 it doesnt work well, sometimes OK sometimes it just run in 256 color
 
Starcraft hands down -> ruled before, rules now! At least for me :) It shares the first spot in my heart with Homeworld- I've never felt space so close when playing.

Honorable mentions: Heroes saga + Disciples II: Rise of the elves / Metal Fatigue

That's it for me. Any other titles I've encountered just evaporated.
 
total war: Shogun II totally awsome :)
 
Ground Control II: Operation Exodus was the spiritual successor to World in Conflict. Personally, I liked GC2 better.
Earth 2140/2150/2160
Command & Conquer: Generals
Empire Earth 1 & 2 (3 is garbage)
StarCraft 2
Company of Heroes
Valkyria Chronicles (this is almost like 3D chess--haven't had a game make me think that hard in a while)
Evil Genius
Startopia

We've hit a dry spell for RTSs it seems. :(

I would check out Ground Control II: Operation Exodus but 2004 is a little too far back for me to go. Don't get me wrong I have played games since the 90s and there are TONS of games from the 90s and early 0's I could list. But I will be honest, going back and playing those games now just doesn't work for me too well. They just look too dated. Like all the NovaLogic games I loved, or MAFIA (the original), etc, etc, etc.
 
Ground Control 2 is for sale on steam at $4.99, totally worth it. Or GoG for $5.99. With that and the mods, it should be a good experience. The scroll zoom is pretty clunky but it holds up pretty well for what it is. But definitely looks and plays dated...feels like a blend of WiC (which this is a precursor to) and DoW1 imho.

I've been playing some more C&C Tiberian Sun again....how much I would love to see that title remade with a modern graphics engine or even in the Spring engine. Still a great classic, with its sprite-based infantry and such lol. Good fun.
 
Fan favourites
  • Warcraft Series (3 being the best rts of all time imho)
  • C&C 1 & Red Alert 1 (Tiberian Sun was not as good)
  • Dune 2
  • Homeworld
  • Z
  • Total Annihilation
  • Dawn of War Series
Less known
  • Dark Reign
  • Earth 2140
  • Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends
  • Metal Fatigue
  • Sacrifice
 
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Dark Reign was nice...
 
Warcraft II is my favourite, plain and simple. ^^
 
If we are talking about old games I LOVED the city builder Impressions Series of Caesar II & III, Zeus, and Emperor - Rise of the Middle Kingdom. They don't make them like that anymore... proof of that is Caesar IV which was terrible.
 
In no particular order:
  • Civ V
  • Supreme Commander (1 & forged alliance)
  • Sins of a solar empire
  • Homeworld
  • Command and Conquer (red alert, generals and cnc 3 being my favourite)
  • Rome: total war
  • settlers
  • World in Conflict had one of the best single player campaign storylines in an RTS for me
  • Stronghold 1 & 2
 
In no particular order:
  • Civ V
  • Supreme Commander (1 & forged alliance)
  • Sins of a solar empire
  • Homeworld
  • Command and Conquer (red alert, generals and cnc 3 being my favourite)
  • Rome: total war
  • settlers
  • World in Conflict had one of the best single player campaign storylines in an RTS for me
  • Stronghold 1 & 2
Yeah man WiC had it all going on. Even had Alec Baldwin voice work... and the Christmas time, nuke level. Wow that game is still so good. I think I have played through the single player like 10 times.
 
Bizarrely, kinda good for a mish mash of chess and space warrior nazi monks.

2015-08-17_00011.jpg
 
Ahh. Strategy. Can lose whole nights on that :)

My favourites...

- Ascendancy (MS-DOS, this is where 4X started for me)
- Civilization V
- C&C Red Alert
- Starcraft I (SC2 not so much)
- Warcraft 3 + expacs
- Warcraft 3 custom map: Defense of the Ancients.... this is where 3000 hours of addiction started, and still counting...
- Age of Empires 2
- Stardrive 2 (it is pretty damn good, with some flaws in performance)
- Company of Heroes 1 over LAN
- Endless Legend
- Heroes of Might and Magic 2/3/6 (do they count?)

Fan favourites
  • Warcraft Series (3 being the best rts of all time imho)
  • C&C 1 & Red Alert 1 (Tiberian Sun was not as good)
  • Dune 2
  • Homeworld
  • Z
  • Total Annihilation
  • Dawn of War Series
Less known
  • Dark Reign
  • Earth 2140
  • Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends
  • Metal Fatigue
  • Sacrifice

Oh my god. YES. Dark Reign, and Z! how brilliant was that. Z, I would just keep playing to see the next cutscene, awesome :)
 
Earth 2140 and Rise of Legends were epic too! I still have my Rise of Legends CD's...maybe have to see how well it plays on W10.... :D

On a side-note, played a little Zero-K last night, pretty fun. Seems a little more polished than the last time I played it.
 
Anyone into the Anno series? I own Anno 2070 on Steam but have never been able to get into it. Maybe I should give it a better chance?
 
A year after release and UberEnt are still adding badass updates to Planetary Annihilation.

Titans are now a part of the game! :D

This is great because I've gotten back into this, and recently they fixed a bunch of stuff with the SP war mini game, added asteroids, and now titans. This is among a list of new RTS's I feel are worth playing...it's a little more esport style and is speed-related...but it doesn't take itself too seriously and can be good fun!


Edit: From here-on I'll be posting RTS stuff I find back in the TPU Strategy Gaming Thread (link in my sig...)
 
I remember the excitement I felt when I downloaded the demo for Age of Empires 2. 56kbit/s, at best, took an awful long time (it was very expensive at the time to be online), it was about 80MB, then I installed it and fell in love. We used to play AoE 1 on our LAN matches. My sister and her husband was at the end of the IT crash, they once were the fifth largest ISP in Sweden. After the crash, and after an escapade including an actual psychopath in Stockholm and a late night break in to steal back their monitors (excellent 17 inch CRT Samsungs), they got some contract to have computer night classes in my home village (< 50 families in the middle of northern Sweden). They hade shiny new Pentium II's and those magnificent 17 inch Samungs. My brother in law had a DEC Alpha computer, but I couldn't play games on it so I wasn't really interested. Some nights I actullay had friends, and they got out there however we they could to play AoE, Motocross Madness and the AMAZING Delta Force. So AoE 2 came out, and it was bliss.

I never finished the campaigns, I always did prefer Warcraft and after that Starcraft. Always Starcraft.

I could write a novel about the Heroes of Might and Magic 2 demo, but I won't because whiskey tells me not to (it's actually the other way round though but I'm not going to dignify alcohol with my best thoughts).

tl;dr Starcraft and Heroes of Might and Magic III. Especially Heroes III. It is ... magnificent. Still is. That I probably could write a novel about; how it when I was younger reminded me of the travels of Bastian of the Neverending Story fame, how it always felt like I was creating an actual new world with the Random button, how the Heroes Personality Test actually framed my personality, how I really, really disliked Roland (a redhaired knight named Roland cannot be tolerated under any circumstance), how the world fitted so much lore, how incredibly sad I sound now. Good grief what have I done with my life?

Oh, and C&C on the Playstation was excellent.

A special shoutout to Aurora. Try it out and pray that Steve gets fired or something so he can develop it further! (not really, but I really really really wish it could be made into some sort of "final" version)

Also, Dwarf Fortress. No linkage required.

EDIT: Good god I am going to derail this thread with nostalgia: at one of those LAN parties in my home village we had one Delta Force disc (taken from my brother in law's ample pirate collection; it was not illegal at the time to pirate anything) and had the brilliant idea to simply share the CD-ROM drive on the network, a hub. connected all the 16 computers. We installed the game on 16 computers simultaneusly, using a network hub. It was brilliant.

EDIT again. Balor of the Evil Eye should really get a remake.
 
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