list of the best strategy games on the PC contains only three RTS titles. And none of them are from the past decade. There’s a very good reason for this: the genre was perfected by Company of Heroes all the way back in 2006.
This piece originally appeared 2/9/17.
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The Best Strategy Games On PC
The PC is home to just about every type of video game under the sun, but few are as…
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The popularity of certain types of games can wax and wane depending on all kinds of things. With flight sims, it was the decline of the joystick. Adventure games died on CD-ROM and were reborn on digital shopfronts. Other genres have come and gone thanks to shifting market tastes, or advances in technology.
For me, though, the RTS is different. It’s never gone away—you only have to look at StarCraft II or Deserts of Kharak to see good, recent examples—but for a long time it’s felt to me like a dead man walking, with developers seemingly unable (or unwilling) to make the kind of major, serious advances you see in other genres like first-person shooters (compare Call of Duty to Call of Duty 4) or even turn-based strategy (compare Civilization III to Civilization VI).
Which is fine! I appreciate that millions of people love RTS games for that consistency, that entrenched set of expectations, and the studios making good ones have made a lot of money doing so.
Me, though, I’d always wanted something more. RTS games have always presented themselves as these destructive little dioramas, miniature studies in simulation warfare. Whether it was Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Dune 2, WarCraft or Age of Empires, screenshots and trailers made it look like these games were about the art of commanding armies in the field like an officer, a sensation the actual gameplay—where you end up being more of a shepherd—rarely provided.
One of the things I liked about 2016's Offworld Trading Company was that, whether intentional or not, its existence as a real-time strategy game without combat was a sort of commentary on how tanks and spaceships and soldiers in most RTS games were just window dressing. The real warfare was going on in the crunching of numbers between two colliding forces. Whoever could build up the most optimal bunch of digits and throw it against the other would usually win, and it didn’t matter if they were battleships or, in Offworld Trading Company’s case, resource price.
A successful strategy for a game like StarCraft or Command & Conquer is most important at the broadest possible level: how you gather resources, what units you build and in what order, how best to assemble them, when to commit to an assault. True to the genre’s name, these are indeed strategies.
But when it comes to simulating warfare, having a strategy is only half the battle. The other half—often the most defining—is in the employment of tactics (especially once your strategy goes pear-shaped), something which most RTS games absolutely fail to account for, or at least smudge over.
Except for Company of Heroes.
Video via We Play Games.
Relic’s 2006 classic didn’t care about how many crystals you dug out of the ground (it didn’t feature any resource gathering at all), or how many weapons you could build with them, because success in Company of Heroes wasn’t down to the size of your army, it was down to what you could do with it.
