Ok you called me out. Now I?m calling you out. Name me some RTS.

[SnakeF]

My 2 favourite RTSs are:

Company of Heroes, a decent WW2 rts with resource gathering being replaced by territory control, something which leads to players strategising more rather than depending on resources found at thier base, it leads to there being a more war-like feeling to the game.

Empire Earth, I played this before Company of Heroes came out because it also gave a good feeling of Wartime combat with the added bonus of having an ability to play in any time frame you want, you could fight as cavemen, hitting each other with clubs or rocks through to the middle ages and the modern times into the future. It does depend on Resource Gathering but not as much as games like Age of Empires did.

 

[Aethren]

An RTS thread and not one person has mentioned the Civilization series?

What is wrong with you people?!

Civ 4 and expansions can be played on pretty low-spec computers, with enough mods to make the game feel totally fresh and different (much like Warcraft III's maps), while still giving a pretty good history lesson if you care to look. It is one of the most complex RTS games in the genre to date (even beating Starcraft IMO) with enough tech trees to kill a small forest, and simply just too much content to list here. Oh, and religions are in the game too.

Overview:

You choose one of around 22 (with expansions) different civilizations, such as Americans, English, Aztecs, Japanese, etc. and start your first city in 1000 BC. You then train armies, spies, missionaries (with religion), siege weapons, and settlers, to essentially expand your country's borders across the world. How you do this is up to you, whether you spread your influence by religion, corporation (with expansion), military power, cultural power, or simple expansion via making more and more cities. Roughly 3000 years later, the strongest country in the world wins.

That is a very, very simple overview, not even touching on the economics nor the resource management (build a camp around some deer to get +1 happiness in all cities), which are far, far more complex than the simple mining for gold/crystals of *ahem* other games.

 

[LogicNProportion]

The first 3 Dawn of War games are good. Campaign mode more than anything, however.

 

[Same River New Water]

I said in another thread that I played Halo wars and found the RTS thing boring. Well I?ve been called out so much because of it.

Halo Wars isn't a great example of an RTS, but even so, you might just not like RTS games. They're not for everyone. Take all recommendations in this thread with a grain of salt.

That said, for a last-millenium computer, Total Annihilation is great fun and Dark Reign is an often-overlooked gem.

EDIT: Oops, double post.

 

[Same River New Water]

An RTS thread and not one person has mentioned the Civilization series?

What is wrong with you people?!

Real... time... strategy.

 

[veloper]

An RTS thread and not one person has mentioned the Civilization series?

What is wrong with you people?!

Well what's wrong with us, is that we call these games TBS, not RTS.

Why? Because TBS are turn-based and not real-time, because you go on turns.

 

[Aethren]

An RTS thread and not one person has mentioned the Civilization series?

What is wrong with you people?!

Well what's wrong with us, is that we call these games TBS, not RTS.

Why? Because TBS are turn-based and not real-time, because you go on turns.

Only if you make it go in turns. It can be played in real-time.

 

[Lexodus]

Rise of Nations. I adore that game.

 

[veloper]

An RTS thread and not one person has mentioned the Civilization series?

What is wrong with you people?!

Well what's wrong with us, is that we call these games TBS, not RTS.

Why? Because TBS are turn-based and not real-time, because you go on turns.

Only if you make it go in turns. It can be played in real-time.

Heh. I'll play along for a bit.

How do you make civilization 1 play realtime?
How do you make civilization 2 play realtime?
How do you make civilization 3 play realtime?
How do you make civilization 4 play realtime?

 

[minarri]

'Command and Conquer Red Alert'. With the 'Aftermath' Expansion Pack.
[snip]
'Command and Conquer Red Alert 2'. With the 'Yuris Revenge' Expansion Pack.
[snip]
'Command and Conquer Generals'. With the 'Zero Hour' Expansion Pack.
[snip]

I second this! Although I haven't played Generals, the Red Alert games were fantastic and I'd recommend them to anybody looking for good, enjoyable RTS games.

 

[jeroen77]

I'm a big RTS fan ever sins playen C&C (all of them)
But then came the Total War series.

Espesely Rome: Total War.
a 1000+ soldies on the battle field.

The real angiant tactic's did acualy work.
I liket the Greek tactic above all, 4 line's of spearmen 30 men wide and the first 4 row's pointing 9ft spears to the front. followt by 2 or 3 unit's of arcers
cover your flanks whith horses and your ready to defeat just about anything.

 

[RetiarySword]

Company of Heroes. IT is the best RTS out there. Youtube a few videos.

 

[Azhrarn-101]

Lets see...

Perimeter: crazy russian RTS with probably the scariest adaptive AI I've ever run into. Learns your tricks very quickly which means that you can rarely pull any given trick twice since it'll be waiting for you the next time. The gameplay is a bit unrefined, but quite fun and challenging. Building mechanic is very interesting, and being able to completely change your entire army at a moments notice is quite awesome.

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. Don't bother with the original although it's campaign is quite nice, FA is the patched version that the original should have been, but got marketed as a stand-alone game instead. You'll need a pretty beefy PC to play with 8 opponents on the larger maps though.

Act of War: Direct Action with High Treason (there should be a gold edition with both out). Great "near future" campaign (unfortunately you can't play as the Consortium in either) but in Skirmish all 3 sides are playable and a lot of fun. The Consortium is probably the coolest "terrorist" faction in any game I know, with a great "twist" in their tech-tree.
Starting off as the cliché "primitive" terrorist army only to later reveal themselves and start using Railguns, cloaking technology and satellites carrying biological weapons.

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.
Not so much an RTS as an RTT game (Real-time Tactical game) since you never command more than a handful of Starships, somewhat unusual controls, but very fun once you get the hang of it. Not sure how good the multiplayer is, but the campaign is top-notch and so are the visuals.

World in Conflict: no base building, just airdrops but lots of strategic fun to be had.

Rise of Legends: basically Rise of Nations in a Sci-Fi/Fantasy package with a great campaign and interesting factions. You play through all 3 in the campaign mode, and all 3 are rather diverse and different from eachother.

Dawn of War 2: another RTT game, since you command a handful of marines at most in the campaign. Although in multiplayer larger numbers are certainly possible. Somewhat of a mix of RPG and RTS gameplay styles, with a nice story to back it up. Very shiny graphics too.

I'll leave it at that, no need to mention the great games already listed.

 

[Leaper]

If you are looking for newer RTS games I would highly recommend Supreme Commander (and its expansion Forged Alliance) and Sins of solar empire. They are both great games.

Supreme commander has really huge battles with hundreds of land, air and sea units. Not to mention huge experimental units that take ages to build, but they are devastatig. It takes quite some time to adapt to it, cos its quite different from other genre defining games like Starcrat or Red Alert.

In Sins of solar empire you fight in space with, well, scapeships, take over planets and so on. It's kinda different from majority of RTS as well, because it takes a lot of different things from variuos games and combines them into one RTS game.

But these two games have high system requirements so they might not be for you. From older games I would recommend Homeworld 2, Warcraft 3 (and its expansion Frozen Throne) and Startcraft (if you can handle its dated graphics).

 

[kanester2k11]

red alert two
command and conquer tiberium sun

 

[The Madman]

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident.
Not so much an RTS as an RTT game (Real-time Tactical game) since you never command more than a handful of Starships, somewhat unusual controls, but very fun once you get the hang of it. Not sure how good the multiplayer is, but the campaign is top-notch and so are the visuals.

Holy Shi... I wasn't planning on commenting in this topic because frankly I'm lazy and mostly just enjoy blabbing in a semi-poetic and overly verbose manner towards topics where I can inflame peoples tempers (ie feed the flames... don't judge me!).

But I gotta say, you are the first person EVER that I have seen read or even 'thought' about that's ever heard of this game other than me. Hell, at one point I was considering the possibility I might have imagined the whole games existence and that the box on my shelf was little more than a manifestation of my own insanity... but you sir... you have proven me wrong.

Nexus: The Jupiter Incident is a *real* game. (It's even pretty fun!)

Shock and Awe!

 

[Bat Vader]

I said in another thread that I played Halo wars and found the RTS thing boring. Well I?ve been called out so much because of it. I'll give it another crack even gods can be wrong. All I ask is to be kind to my wallet and PC. It still runs on coal.

Tell me as much as you can. Why is it great? You know why do you love it? Feel free to leave as much detail as you please. I will read all of it.

If you don't like something than you don't have to like it. Just because people called you out on the subject does not mean you have to listen to them.

 

[Skeleon]

Dawn of War 1, including the addons.
Warcraft 3 and its addon.
Starcraft and its addon.
Supreme Commander and its addon, if your computer can handle it, mine can just barely; but it's one of the few games I'd really call RTS and not RTT as in real time tactics.
Battle For Middle Earth 2 and its addon. Surprisingly awesome for an EA game.
Sacrifice, although one might argue it's more of an action or RPG game.
That's all the great ones I can think of.