Best historical strategy games pc

Viking-themed RTS Northgard 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 the skirmish mode.

Mechanically, Homeworld is a phenomenal three-dimensional strategy game, among the first to successfully detach the RTS from a single plane. If you liked the Battlestar Galactica reboot, or just fancy a good yarn in your RTS, you should play this. Thanks to the Homeworld Remastered Collection , it's aged very well. The remasters maintain Homeworld and its sequel's incredible atmosphere, along with all the other great bits, but with updated art, textures, audio, UI—the lot.

Everything is in keeping with the spirit of the original, but it just looks and sounds better. The different factions are so distinct, and have more personality than they did in the original game—hence Soviet squids and Allied dolphins. They found the right tonal balance between self-awareness and sincerity in the cutscenes, as well—they're played for laughs, but still entertain and engage.

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.

Only Total War can compete with the scale of Supreme Commander 's real-time battles. In addition to being the preeminent competitive strategy game of the last decade, StarCraft 2 deserves credit for rethinking how a traditional RTS campaign is structured. Heart of the Swarm is a good example of this, but the human-centric Wings of Liberty instalment is the place to start: an inventive adventure that mixes up the familiar formula at every stage.

In , Blizzard finally decided to wind down development on StarCraft 2 , announcing that no new additions would be coming, aside from things like balance fixes. The competitive scene is still very much alive, however, and you'll still find few singleplayer campaigns as good as these ones.

Most notable today for being the point of origin for the entire MOBA genre, Warcraft III is also an inventive, ambitious strategy game in its own right, which took the genre beyond anonymous little sprites and into the realm of cinematic fantasy. The pioneering inclusion of RPG elements in the form of heroes and neutral monsters adds a degree of unitspecific depth not present in its sci-fi stablemate, and the sprawling campaign delivers a fantasy story that—if not quite novel—is thorough and exciting in its execution.

Shame about Warcraft 3: Reforged , it's not-so-great remake. Some games would try to step away from the emotional aspect of a war that happened in living memory. Not Company of Heroes. Age of Empires gave us the chance to encompass centuries of military progress in half-hour battles, but Rise of Nations does it better, and smartly introduces elements from turn-based strategy games like Civ.

When borders collide civs race through the ages and try to out-tech each other in a hidden war for influence, all while trying to deliver a knockout military blow with javelins and jets. It was tempting to put the excellent first Dawn of War on the list, but the box-select, right-click to kill formula is well represented. In combat you micromanage these empowered special forces, timing the flying attack of your Assault Marines and the sniping power of your Scouts with efficient heavy machine gun cover to undo the Ork hordes.

The co-operative Last Stand mode is also immense. If you need a 40K fix, we've also ranked every Warhammer 40, game. Like an adaptation of the tabletop game crossed with the XCOM design template, BattleTech is a deep and complex turn-based game with an impressive campaign system. You control a group of mercenaries, trying to keep the books balanced and upgrading your suite of mechwarriors and battlemechs in the game's strategy layer.

In battle, you target specific parts of enemy mechs, taking into account armor, angle, speed and the surrounding environment, then make difficult choices when the fight isn't going your way. It can initially be overwhelming and it's undeniably a dense game, but if that's what you want from your strategy games or you love this universe, it's a great pick. 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. 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 probably only have one. In Sid Meier described games as "a series of interesting decisions.

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.

Sneaky tactics doesn't come in a slicker package than Invisible Inc. It's a sexy cyberpunk espionage romp blessed with so much tension that you'll be sweating buckets as you slink through corporate strongholds and try very hard to not get caught. It's tricky, sometimes dauntingly so, but there's a chance you can fix your terrible mistakes by rewinding time, adding some welcome accessibility to the proceedings.

First, you manage stockpiles, and position missile sites, nuclear submarines and countermeasures in preparation for armageddon. This organisation phase is an interesting strategic challenge in itself, but DEFCON is at its most effective when the missiles fly. Blooming blast sites are matched with casualty numbers as city after city experiences obliteration. Once the dust has settled, victory is a mere technicality. Unity of Command was already the perfect entry point into the complex world of wargames, but Unity of Command 2 manages to maintain this while throwing in a host of new features.

It's a tactical puzzle, but a reactive one where you have the freedom to try lots of different solutions to its military conundrums. Not just a great place to start, it's simply a brilliant wargame. Hearts of Iron 4 is a grand strategy wargame hybrid, as comfortable with logistics and precise battle plans as it is with diplomacy and sandboxy weirdness.

Ostensibly game about World War 2, it lets you throw out history as soon as you want. Want to conquer the world as a communist UK? Go for it. Maybe Germany will be knocked out of the war early, leaving Italy to run things. You can even keep things going for as long as you want, leading to a WW2 that continues into the '50s or '60s. Our list contains games from as recently as 12 months ago alongside classics from as far back as 28 years ago.

They're all strategy games we think you could play and love right now, so why not have a look and see what we recommend? We've gone pretty broad with our definition of strategy games for this list. Below you'll find real-time and turn-based strategy games in there, and everything from small scale robot skirmishes to epic historical warfare. We have however mainly focused on games about commanding troops of one kind or another, while splitting our picks of the best management games off into its own list.

A handful of the games you'll see here will involve a bit of building, but there's no football management or spaghetti junctions. With that in mind, let's jump straight into our list of the 50 best strategy games you can play today. Below, you'll find our 50 picks for the best strategy games on PC. Fair warning - they are our picks.

You might feel we've forgotten something, so write your own enthusiastic recommendations in the comments below. That way, everybody can learn about more, wonderful strategy games. As soon as Amplitude announced their big historical 4X game, it was inevitable that comparisons would be drawn to the Civilization series. But Humankind is so much more than just a riff on Sid Meier's classic strategy franchise.

Yes, there are several different technological ages to play through, but the most tantalising aspect of Humankind is how you can graft different cultures together to accumulate all manner of different perks and effects. Onscreen, that can mean having Japanese pagodas nestling right up to Mayan pyramids and Italian opera houses. In all, there are one million potential civilisation builds in Humankind, and it is absolutely thrilling. At times, it's almost more puzzle game than 4X, giving it a distinctly different flavour to Civilization.

With so many different combinations to sift through and take into account, it can be a little overwhelming in early playthroughs, but the way you can redefine your entire game plan on the fly, pivoting money-making dynamos into diplomatic powerhouses and research giants is also Humankind's greatest masterstroke.

If you're tired of Civ, this is a very worthy heavyweight alternative. Even as you send fresh troops into battle, replacing a squad who just died on a fool's errand of your own making, Company Of Heroes makes you believe that every soldier counts for something.

That's partly due to the detailed depictions that the Essence Engine make possible, but it's also down to the careful pacing of the missions. Even when combat begins, there's usually a peppering of shots toward cover before casualties occur, and Relic ensure that you have time to react as a situation develops. Even though those soldiers are just pixels on a screen, don't be surprised if you find yourself making tactical choices that ensure their survival rather than the quickest possible route to success.

That's where Dune 2 Legacy comes in, an open source project that reworks Dune 2 into a new framework, giving it a more modern interface and graphical sensibilities. The world has, of course, moved on since Houses Atreides, Harkonen and Ordos first went to war for control of the Spice of Arrakis, but a combination of straightforwardness, excellent vehicle, creature designs and devious treats such as the now-rare likes of stealing enemy buildings lends it a timelessly lurid charm.

Arguments over which of Creative Assembly's historical battlefield sims is the best are a time-honoured tradition among strategy game obsessives, and you'll probably find a lot of those discussions tend to conclude with 's Total War: Shogun 2.

In our own discussions, we concluded that 's Warhammer II and 's Three Kingdoms were the bestest best Total War games you can play today, but Shogun 2 is still one of Creative Assembly's all-time classics. Set during Japan's warring states period, you are put in the samurai war flip-flops of one of the many warlords struggling for control of the islands during the 16th Century, and it gets hectic. The AI is well-tuned on both the strategic map and on the tactical battlefields not always the case in Total War , and the campaign is paced with shrewd finesse: if you throw your weight around too much, the Shogun himself will paint a target on your head, and everyone will come at you like estate agents after a plate full of money.

Thanks to this built-in tipping point, progression is a matter of careful calculation and time-biding rather than a wild land grab, and political thinking is just as important as good generalship. It's an abstract simulation of thermo-nuclear war, in which the tension rises along with the DEFCON level, and frantic deals lead to bitter betrayal.

It's a game in which people are reduced to numbers and ashes. Scores are measured in megadeaths inflicted and, in the default setting, causing a megadeath on an opponent's territory is worth two points while losing a million citizens in your own territory only loses one point.

The value of life. The presentation is immaculately sinister and minimalist, and while DEFCON is unlikely to keep you playing through the night, you might lose sleep anyway. The closest strategy gaming comes to horror. Few games are as enjoyably apocalyptic as Sacrifice. You'll wage terrible war across many more, unleashing an even worse monster in the process, profaning altars, and ultimately murdering the gods themselves.

The five gods who make up its pantheon are memorable, highly charismatic, and consumed with petty rivalries. Each god will offer you a job fighting some enemy or other. Which one you pick determines which level you'll fight in this chapter of the story, and what unit and spell you'll add to your collection.

You could play the entire story two or three times and never fight the same battle or use any of the same units.

And what battles! You personally visit weird, floating lands full of blobby monsters summoned by pumping a soul into them, that they will crush your enemies so you can harvest their souls too.

Spells will bore irreparable holes in the earth, summon the arbitrarily-scything figure of Death itself, and crush someone under a massive cow. Its deployment of levity and charm is perfectly pitched to take the edge off its bitter, intense conflict. There's a whole food ecosystem, the regular arrival of winter turns it into a survival game of sorts, you can trade with monsters and your choice of which clan you control affects your play style on a level far beyond mere unit options.

It's very much a building game as well as a war game, but does a stand-up of job of keeping things lean despite how many plates it spins. The single-player campaign plays a somewhat distant second fiddle to a beautifully drawn-out multiplayer mode that makes a virtue of tension as well as conflict, but whichever way you play, Northgard is without doubt one of the best RTS games of the last few years. The perfect gateway game. Perhaps you've dabbled with a couple of 4X games and the occasional RTS, and now you want to step up to the plate and try your hand at a historical war game — Unity Of Command is precisely what you're looking for.

It models all the smart stuff, including supply lines, but doesn't drown players in the details. There's plenty for experienced war gamers to enjoy as well. Each map seems tailor-made to illustrate specific tactics that were utilised during the Stalingrad Campaign, and the expansions introduce fresh approaches that fit the historical realities of their new campaigns.

It's glorious. To EA's enormous credit, the Remastered Collection does those old games proud, rendering ridiculous FMV in modern resolutions, turning pixelated sprite art crisp, applying UI improvements from later games back to the original, as well as rebuilding the multiplayer, adding a map editor, and more. It's a great package - and heck, worth it for the remastered music alone.

Revisiting Julian Gollop's masterpiece now, particularly in light of the excellent Firaxis remake and its sequel, can be a sobering experience. Why is it possible to send soldiers into battle without a weapon? And, come to think of it, why does X-COM, the planet's last hope, have to buy basic equipment? Why is the interface so unfriendly to newcomers? Indeed, UFO is riddled with irritations. Fortunately, there's now OpenXcom , which takes the game apart and puts it back together again with a new code base designed to run on modern computers.

It also means it's free from all the irritating bugs and limitations that played the original, and you can mod it. You can still buy the original if you really want, but OpenXcom is definitely a more enjoyable experience in Of course, the Firaxis remake is even better in , but when you're in the thick of a terror mission, with chrysalids seemingly pouring out of the walls, or in those last hours when you finally seem capable of taking the fight to the aliens, there's still nothing else quite like X-COM.

Not even XCOM. It's the grimmest, darkest strategy game in existence, and while the game itself is more limited in scope than T'Warhammer, the 40K universe is a much stronger draw than the elves 'n' imperials fantasy world. Dawn of War is steeped in the blood and weird theological war cries of the 40K universe, and manages to add enough thematically suitable twists to the RTS template to make the setting more than a fresh lick of paint.

Better still, it's lived a long and rich life of both official and fan-made expansions, adding races, modes, units and even entire new rules aplenty - which is a big part of why this remains the ultimate Games Workshop RTS, even 14 years on. Endless Legend is unspeakably beautiful. Every part of it was made with care and thought, and a commitment to making an often formulaic sub-genre interesting and strange and enticing. Each world asks to be revealed, each faction stokes curiosity.

There are the bizarre cultists and their sole, massive city, who fanatically raze anything they conquer after they've learned what they can from it. There's the dour Broken Lords who are haunted suits of armour, unable to use food but able to reproduce with 'dust', the game's mysterious magical currency, which itself is key to why one of our favourite factions, the Roving Clans, are so interesting.

They're nomads obsessed with collecting dust to unlock its true power. They're totally unable to declare war, but they get a cut of every market trade and can hire the best mercenaries. In addition to the expansion and conquest, there are story arcs to follow by sending armies to the right places, which themselves can drive conflict or political wrangling.

From the faction-specific units on the turn-based tactical battles to the esoteric faction rules that even, god help us, invite roleplaying, everything about Endless Legend aims to take strategy games somewhere new and better. It's a rare thing to find a game that slots neatly into a genre but doesn't seem to follow many — if any — of the established rules of that genre.

Offworld Trading Company is one such game. It's about offworld colonies, except you're not worrying about keeping your population happy and healthy. It's about making big profits, but money is a fluid thing rather than the central resource. It doesn't contain direct combat, but it's one of the most ruthless and competitive games you're ever likely to play. Everything, even hesitation, creates change, and because the foundation of the entire game is in flux — the numbers that drive everything visible and entirely predictable — it creates a space where you become proactive and reactive simultaneously.

It's impossible to act without influencing the status and decision-making of your competitors, and by the time the impact of one change has been felt, another handful have already happened. The strategic portion of the game manages to instil resource gathering and experience grinding with the excitement of exploration and questing, while the tactical battles rarely become rote despite the limitations of an 11x15 hex map.

It's a wonderful example of several simple concepts executed well and locked together in a whole far greater than the sum of its parts. A huge part of the game's success lies in its approach to progression. As is often the case in strategy and RPG games alike, the goal in each scenario is to uncover a map and make all of the numbers go as high as possible.

Build lots of units, level up heroes and gather gold until there's no space left in your coffers. New World Computing ensure that there's always something interesting behind the fog of war, however, and that every step toward victory feels like a tiny fantastic subplot in its own right. Just look at the towns for proof — every building and upgrade feels like an achievement, and part of a beautiful, fantastic tapestry. In strategy games that cover broad swathes of human history, it's always a bit sad that the Stone Age is, at best, an early game sideshow - something to be breezed past in a couple of technological leaps on the way to better things.

Not so with Dawn Of Man, which concentrates on the various something-lithic periods to the exclusion of everything else. In this game, pointy bits of iron are end-game tech. With its frosty, beast-stuffed landscapes, Dawn Of Man does a grand job of making you feel like just another animal with a few tricks up its sleeve. Progress is slow, achieved through painstaking increments, and settlements never develop beyond meagre, hard-won hamlets.

It's also received several post-launch updates, too, which have added more content and a greater sense of challenge. From some of the team behind the dungeon crawling Legend of Grimrock games, this turn-based tactics game offers just the right balance between Into The Breach-style solution-finding, and improvisational disaster mitigation along the lines of XCOM.

Using a small party of three and later four characters, upgraded between battles in classic RPG style, players must navigate thirty-five extremely well-designed missions, completing core objectives to progress and nailing secondary objectives to gain extra upgrade resources. As the last original game designed by Civ II creator Brian Reynolds, it stands as a suitable book-end to his career so far, but hopefully not an endpoint.

One of the hurdles strategy games often face is finding the challenge and fun in tasks and themes that don't immediately seem attractive or entertaining. War games and theme park management have certain, obvious appeals, but when taxation and logistics seem to be the order of the day, a game can quickly look a lot like a job.

Imperialism 2 is one such game. Although its scope is impressive and the idea of ruling a country and building an empire is potentially exciting, SSI's game focuses on labour and resource management, and is mainly about solving problems of supply and economics.

That it succeeds in making these elements of rule both engaging and relatively accessible is down to the strength of the design. By concentrating on logistics, Imperialism and its sequel become games about the big picture that the smaller details are part of, rather than lists of numbers and complicated spreadsheets. Micromanagement is out and important nation-wide decisions are well and truly in. Galactic Civilizations 2 succeeds by sticking to the basics. That's not to say there's anything basic about the game itself, but there are no unexpected twists.

You take control of a space-faring race and you conquer the galaxy, just as the 4X gods intended. Stardock's game succeeds by implementing all of the expected features — diplomacy, economics, planetary management, warfare — in an enjoyably solid fashion. The AI is notable, both for the challenge it offers and the way that it operates. Although it does receive boosts at the highest difficulty levels, there's also a credible attempt to simulate counter-strategies tailored to the player's actions.

The Endless Universe release, or Ultimate Edition, is also bundled with the two expansions, one of which adds the ability to destroy solar systems. From archfiends to gods. Wannabe gods. Dominions IV, like Solium Infernum, can be off-putting at first. It has a complicated rule-set that takes a few playthroughs or a determined study of the monstrous manual to understand, and even when a session begins, following the flow of action can be difficult.

That's despite the game being separated into tidy turns, with distinct sets of instructions to put into action. You need to manage housing, mating, food, warmth, etc. Part survival game, part city simulator Banished sees you creating your own medieval village. A must for Grand Strategy fans wanting something medieval. A grandfather in the medieval rts subgenre, the original Stronghold had you build up not just a medieval castle from scratch, but the entire economy required to maintain it.

Stronghold offers more than just a simple skirmish mode but a variety of multiplayer and historical campaigns set in medieval England. And with an HD re-release on steam this classic is still enjoyable today. Stronghold has you managing both your kingdom internally and defending it from external threats.

Farmland is now limited and water is more important than ever so more attention needs to be paid to preserving your precious oasis territory. Follow the historical campaign mode as heroes from the Crusades such as Richard the Lionheart of Sala-al din or engage in a skirmish mode, or play with up to 7 others in a multiplayer match.

Build and command from your own customized castle and fight in epic battles with or against the Muslim forces or the Crusader states. The game has recently received a healthy facelift with an HD version released on Steam.

While technically set from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the grand strategy game Europa Universalis none the less involves a great deal of late medieval politics and war. Armies will start out still fighting with halberds, swords, and bows but I think being able to progress beyond this stage of technology will be satisfying for players who get sick of the same combat system over and over again.

Set out to forge your nation into a great power at the twilight of the Middle Ages and into Modernity. Europa Universalis IV offers one of the most comprehensive and complex and fun grand strategy experiences ever.

One of the most popular medieval strategy games, Medieval II: Total War gives players control over numerous 11th century factions, ranging from the Moors to the Rus. You don't just smash your army into the enemy's, but send volleys of arrows and harass them with cavalry. Medieval 2: Total War mixes both large scale strategic decision making with real-time tactical battles.

The second and arguably most popular of the Age of Empires trilogy. Age of Empires II is set from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance and includes a multitude of civilizations to choose from ranging from the Mayans to the Vikings to the Byzantines.

Start out with a small town centre and a few villagers and expand, cutting down forests, mining stone and gold, and hunting wildlife as you build up defenses and a rudimentary army and advance from age to age until you have a mighty force of well armored knights and siege engines sallying forth from a massive medieval city filled with houses, farms, castles, barracks, and blacksmith's shops. A title so loved by its fans, it got an HD re-release on Steam 10 years after it first came out and on top of that in came with new factions available such as the Spanish and Songhai.

Age of Empires 2 is so beloved by its fans, it has been resurrected more than 10 years later with new content and an HD facelift. So there you have our top 10 medieval strategy games for PC. While I am not the biggest fan of this genre-combination I prefer more modern settings for strategy games I still admire and respect the quality and variety of games within this niche market.

Being a history lover I have to really respect the developers when they pay attention to realism, such as Crusader Kings 2 with family politics, or Total War: Attila and its mini ice-age and migrations.

Its always the close attention to details and walking the line between accuracy and good gameplay that pays off in these games. Skip to main content. Level up. Earn rewards. Your XP: 0. Updated: 19 Apr am. The Middle Ages are an immensly popular setting for videogames including the strategy genre. BY: John Bartlett.