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The 50 best strategy games on PC in | Rock Paper Shotgun - 50. Warhammer 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters

 

The techs, the conflicts, the characters— it was unlike any of its contemporaries and, with only a few exceptions, nobody has really attempted to replicate it. Not even when Firaxis literally made a Civ in space, which wasn't very good.

Alpha Centauri is as fascinating and weird now as it was back in '99, when we were first getting our taste of nerve stapling naughty drones and getting into yet another war with Sister Miriam. More than 20 years later, some of us are still holding out hope for Alpha Centauri 2 opens in new tab. Pick an Age of Wonders and you really can't go wrong. If sci-fi isn't your thing, absolutely give Age of Wonders 3 a try, but it's Age of Wonders: Planetfall opens in new tab that's got us all hot and bothered at the moment.

Set in a galaxy that's waking up after a long period of decline, you've got to squabble over a lively world with a bunch of other ambitious factions that run the gamut from dinosaur-riding Amazons to psychic bugs. The methodical empire building is a big improvement over its fantastical predecessors, benefiting from big changes to its structure and pace, but just as engaging are the turn-based tactical battles between highly customisable units.

Stick lasers on giant lizards, give everyone jetpacks, and nurture your heroes like they're RPG protagonists—there's so much fiddling to do, and it's all great. Set in an alternate 's Europe, factions duke it out with squishy soldiers, tanks and, the headline attraction, clunky steampunk mechs. There are plenty of them, from little exosuits to massive, smoke-spewing behemoths, and they're all a lot of fun to play with and, crucially, blow up.

Iron Harvest does love its explosions. When the dust settles after a big fight, you'll hardly recognise the area. Thanks to mortars, tank shells and mechs that can walk right through buildings, expect little to remain standing.

The level of destruction is as impressive as it is grim. To cheer yourself up, you can watch a bear fight a mech. Each faction has a heroic unit, each accompanied by their very own pet. All of them have some handy unique abilities, and yes, they can go toe-to-toe with massive war machines. Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 opens in new tab 's cosmic battles are spectacular.

There's a trio of vaguely 4X-y campaigns following the three of the Warhammer 40K factions: The Imperium, Necron Empire and the nasty Tyranid Hives, but you can ignore them if you want and just dive into some messy skirmishes full of spiky space cathedrals colliding with giant, tentacle-covered leviathans.

The real-time tactical combat manages to be thrilling even when you're commanding the most sluggish of armadas. You need to manage a whole fleet while broadside attacks pound your hulls, enemies start boarding and your own crews turn mutinous.

And with all the tabletop factions present, you can experiment with countless fleet configurations and play with all sorts of weird weapons. Viking-themed RTS Northgard opens in new tab 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 opens in new tab 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 opens in new tab , 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 opens in new tab 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. 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. Some might call Slipways a 4X-lite. We prefer the term 'grand-strategy-themed puzzle game'. For starters, it's a lot more immediate and moreish than other go forth and conquer space operas, as here you're tasked with creating a prosperous network of interlinking planets, keeping resources flowing to make sure everyone's got the thing they need to thrive.

The catch? The titular slipways can't overlap, so you'll need to be thinking a few steps ahead with every expansion. Trust us, keeping everyone happy - Slipways' version of civic and public order - is no small task.

If planets start getting antsy, then you run the risk of getting booted out of office, presumably into the cold coffin of space, ending your run. But here's the thing, most runs last a couple of hours tops - 45 minutes if you're good - making it much easier to dip your toe into if you're too time-starved for yet another pop at Stellaris or Crusader Kings 3.

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. There are cities to build, victory points to secure and armies to move around the randomly generated maps.

That tricksy rule-set, along with a combination of graphics that are functional at best and a demanding interface, can make the basics hard to grasp.

Or perhaps it's that there are no basics. Break through the hard crust, however, and there are rich veins to tap into. The clash of deities isn't a re-skin of monarchs or emperors at war - there are disciples to nurture, totems to worship and all manner of nations that can be subject to the whims of the possibly-tentacled pretenders.

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. 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.

With no enforced single sequence to mission order, and with replaying missions to complete secondary objectives being encouraged, it's very rare to feel stuck, despite some pretty challenging situations.

The whole package is wrapped in a lush and surprisingly cheery fantasy dressing, with dialogue that's more endearing than it needs to be, and a merry sense of adventure. It's not the longest game by any means, but the handcrafted nature of each mission, as well as the impressive variety of enemies, puzzles and objectives encountered, mean that things never start to feel stale.

Although it's not often regarded as part of the pantheon of strategy games, Rise Of Nations is the closest thing to a real-time take on Civilization that we've seen. Spanning the history of warfare from catapults and caravels to submarines and stealth bombers, it's a game of territorial control and long-term decision-making that could be mistaken for a simplified war game.

Incorporating resource management, attrition, formations and tactical use of terrain, it's a complex and rewarding game that sold exceptionally well at release but doesn't seem to have fuelled discussion in the way that many of its contemporaries do. 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. Following on from the adaption of the Total War formula to the Warhammer fantasy setting, 's Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 proved yet again that not all Games Workshop licences gravitate towards dangerous mediocrity.

It pushes a lot of the same buttons as Total War. You build up persistent multi-unit forces on a campaign layer, then position them on a tactical map and shove them into the enemy in a long, grinding bout of micromanaged carnage. The difference is that you're battling with baroque, city-sized starships crewed by millions of lunatics.

Of course, it's nothing like what actual space combat would resemble, being played on a 2D field - it's more like WWI-era battleship combat, embiggened to fit the maximalist aesthetic of Warhammer 40K. Even so, it's got that level of internal consistency that suspends all disbelief.

If anything, the strategic game is a little light, but not so much that it feels stripped down, and there's an impressive level of narrative customisation for each of its three playable factions - the obvious humans, the Very Very Hungry Caterpillars a. However and whatever you choose to play, you're guaranteed one hell of a light show. 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. 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. If you had to describe Neptune's Pride in a few words, it'd sound like almost any other game of galactic conquest. Planets and ships can be upgraded, and, as ever, you'll be trying to gather as much science, industry and money as possible. The twist in this particular tale is the speed of the game - or, perhaps, the distances involved.

Sending a fleet to explore, invade or intercept takes hours. There's no way to speed up the passage of time so what to do while waiting? Neptune's Pride is not one of those freemium games that allow you to buy gems why is it always gems?

Instead, most of the game takes place in the gaps between orders, as alliances are forged, promises are made and backs are stabbed. Due to the long-form nature of a campaign, Neptune's Pride will live with you, needling at the back of your mind, and you'll find yourself switching strategies in the anxious early hours of the morning, betraying friends and playing into the hands of your enemies. Most XCOM-alikes end up disappointing, but Warhammer 40, Mechanicus managed to achieve a decent enough treatment of XCOM's turn-based combat sub-genre, while adding enough creative idiosyncrasies to make it thoroughly charming in its own right.

You play as a faction of deranged cyborg techno-monks, plundering the depths of an alien tomb in search of ancient technologies, enlightenment, or sometimes just additional fuel for your knackered starship. Needless to say, the tomb is the resting place of countless miserable metal skeletons yep, it's those necrons again , who want to chase you out with a rolled-up newspaper made from searing green radiation.

This is an adventure that captures that 'one more mission' addictiveness, and it's superbly written, too.

The various bickering cyber-clerics behind your expedition are genuinely memorable characters, and you find yourself gripped - and occasionally even laughing - as their story unfolds in between missions. The game's also dripping with atmosphere, with moody battlefields, light choose-your-own-adventure elements in between fights, and a grimy industrial soundtrack that sounds like what a bunch of Gregorian monks might create if given access to an abandoned factory, a synth setup, and more than a little ketamin.

On the face of things, BattleTech might look like XCOM with giant robots, but those big metal suits aren't just there for show - they're what makes BattleTech so distinctive.

A big ol' mech doesn't much care when it loses an arm, for instance - it just keeps on fighting. Working out how to down these walking tanks both a permanently and b in a way that preserves enough of it to take home and use as parts to build a new one yourself is the key strategy here.

With a physics-based building mechanic at the heart of Tinytopia, you'll stack and join toy building blocks atop an array of tiny terrain, transforming each into charming towns and bustling metropolises. The only limit is your imagination! Tinytopia is a playful blend of city-building, physics-based challenges, and oh-so-satisfying destruction. Use a collection of toy structures, tools, and services to create your own digital desktop destination a mix of 23 real-world and fantasy locales.

Protect your tiny citizens from catastrophes like tornadoes, fires, monster attacks, UFOs, and more. Or flip a switch and watch it all come crumbling down! Build quaint island towns with curvy streets. Build small hamlets, soaring cathedrals, canal networks, or sky cities on stilts. Block by block. No goal. No real gameplay. Just plenty of building and plenty of beauty. That's it. Townscaper is an experimental passion project. More of a toy than a game.

Pick colors from the palette, plop down colored blocks of house on the irregular grid, and watch Townscaper's underlying algorithm automatically turn those blocks into cute little houses, arches, stairways, bridges and lush backyards, depending on their configuration. Experience a rich world that blends realism and fantasy, filled with compelling stories, memorable characters and moral choices aplenty. Taking on the mantle of one of three heroes — each with their own unique story — players embark on a non-linear, open-world adventure across a detailed and densely-packed fantasy landscape.

Split into two distinct phases, players traverse the realm from a third-person perspective, picking up quests, exploring the wilderness, and getting to know the people they meet. When conflict arises, however, the perspective shifts to tactical, turn-based combat. Players must then make smart use of their units as they fight to win. Set in the vast realms of Antara, a great danger has arisen. A mysterious blight has descended upon its furthest reaches, corrupting the land and all who live there.

Refugees from the affected regions have begun arriving in the kingdom of Nostria, putting food and resources in short supply.

Once living souls, blight-distorted creatures now roam the countryside leaving chaos and destruction in their wake. The land itself fights for survival, giving your decisions greater weight than ever before.

Hell Architect is a hell colony sim. Build and manage your hell. Take care of the sinners with funny cartoon-style tortures, fill their needs, develop buildings, gather resources, grow your population.

Prologue is a free standalone version of the game 'Hell Architect'. Patron is a survival city builder with a unique social dynamics system. Gather and produce resources, build your fledgling village into a prosperous city and navigate the intricate social tensions before they reach boiling point.

The year is , the start of Prohibition in the USA. With congressional action, a huge segment of the national economy becomes illegal overnight: bars and saloons are ordered to close, distilleries and breweries go quiet, distributors shut down. But a new era is dawning: a gilded age for smugglers, black markets, illegal manufacture, and organized crime.

This is where you come in. You're a new arrival in the city at the dawn of Prohibition, with ambitions of striking it big. Behind many of the city's facades, people are building makeshift distilleries, secret loading docks, nighttime speakeasies. Work your way into this network, and the world will be yours. But think beyond making a quick buck or two. You gotta be thinking ahead. You gotta be thinking bigger. Much bigger. Jupiter Hell is a turn-based shooter from the depths of cosmic hell, built on a classic roguelike framework updated with modern 3d graphics.

Rip and tear zombies, demons, and heavy metal monstrosities with chainguns and chainsaws. Like chess Assemble your party. Answer the call. Win the war. Build a deck and fight a series of turn-based combats with up to 6 party characters through the city of Dawn's Point. Each character can unlock a set of unique cards and abilities that can augment your deck in powerful, exciting ways. In a world with no memory of its past. The House of Sayadi sends its thousand-ton military ships to the skies.

Stirring the peace of nations inhabiting the earth they strive to bring back what they have lost. As a commander of the Sayadi Task Force you've been sent to regain control of the rebellious Kingdom of Gerat by whatever means necessary.

To succeed will require careful exploration, clever resource management, cautious diplomacy and building a fleet capable of ruling the skies unchallenged. Battle for survival in the skies of a mysterious future Earth in this unique action-strategy game mixing arcade combat, exploration, management and diplomacy.

As giant flying ships wage spectacular aerial warfare, a prophecy tells of one who will save the world - could it be you? You take on the role of manager at a small but growing! As you cultivate and train the newest generation of young pop stars, you'll have to decide who to hire and who to fire, who gets promoted when things go well and who gets reprimanded when things get sour. The personal lives of these young celebrities are a part of your business, and the life of a pop star isn't always a happy one.

Their crowning personal achievements can be your greatest commercial successes, but their emotional meltdowns and PR nightmares can spell financial disaster for your company.

It's not just the idols you have to worry about. The world is full of gossip magazines, super fans, and rival groups, all thirsty for a scoop on the latest scandal. There's a lot of people who want to tear you down and are willing to play dirty, but try not to let it get to you.

It's not personal, it's business. Orcs Must Die! All new War Scenarios pit players and their friends against the largest orc armies ever assembled.

Mountable War Machines give players the essential firepower to heave, stab, carbonize, and disarticulate the abominable intruders. Have you ever been stuck in traffic and wished you could do something to fix it?

In Mini Motorways, the city's traffic problems are in your hands. From the makers of Mini Metro, Mini Motorways is a game about drawing the roads that drive a growing city. Build a road network, one road at a time, to create a bustling metropolis.

Redesign your city to keep the traffic flowing, and carefully manage upgrades to meet the changing demands. How long can you keep the cities of the world moving? In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. Experience every bone-rattling explosion and soul-crushing charge in Warhammer 40, Battlesector, the definitive battle-scale game of turn-based strategy and fast-paced combat that takes you to the battlefields of the 41st Millenium.

Experience an epic twenty mission single-player campaign that explores the aftermath of the Devastation of Baal. Help Sergeant Carleon and his allies purge the Tyranid infestation on Baal Secundus, and preserve the honour of the noble Blood Angels. Each leads their own faction and features new characters, units, unique gameplay mechanics and narrative objectives. Formed of living bronze, the rage-filled Doombull Taurox is nigh-on invincible — save for one area on his gargantuan neck.

The Chaos gods whisper to him of a ritual that can eliminate this weakness, but the promises of the ruinous powers are seldom what they seem… Meanwhile, Oxyotl, the revered Chameleon Skink and master of stealth, scents the machinations of Chaos and rallies his cohorts. Taurox must be stopped at all costs, lest a new tide of Chaos sweeps the world. When the Silence meets the Fury in a final confrontation, who will prevail?

Every year is a turn, and each leader is a mere mortal, so your lasting legacy will be the dynasty you leave behind. The ancients speak of a Book written since time immemorial containing all the world's legends. After many fabulous adventures, recounted in Faeria Chronicles of Gagana, this relic was lost in a well of Faeria. Through contact with this source of magic, the Book developed a wicked free will of its own and became the Roguebook!

You are trapped in the Book of Lore of Faeria, and each page represents a new challenge. Lead your two heroes to victory in this roguelike deckbuilder developed in partnership with Richard Garfield, creator of Magic: The Gathering. Put together the best synergies between cards, relics and abilities, and take on the Roguebook. We call Wildermyth a myth-making tactical RPG. It empowers you to craft iconic characters who grow through deep, rewarding battles and interactive storytelling.

Manage one of 80 teams in over races and stages. From strategy to recruitment, it's up to you alone to make the best decisions. Experience more realism and authenticity with the new features added for Pick your contracts.

Hunt your targets. Collect the bounty. Navigate an ocean of crime and corruption to balance the bloody ecosystem of Necromunda as a merciless hired gun. The money's good, the dog's loyal, and the gun's reliable but can you survive the hunt?

Necromunda: Hired Gun is a fast paced, violent, and thrilling FPS set in the darkest reaches of Warhammer 40,'s most infamous hive city. For the right price, eliminate the most notorious gangers and mutants.

Your armory is a sprawling arsenal. Your body is enhanced with a dozen customizable augments to run on walls and leap over chasms. Your cyber mastiff will sniff out and eliminate enemies for you, while your grappling hook allows quick, agile traversal of the massive environments.

Griftlands is a deck-building rogue-like where you fight and negotiate your way through a broken-down sci-fi world. In Solasta, you make the choices, dice decide your destiny.

War never ends… In the aftermath of The Great War, the world is in chaos and borders are being redrawn. New Campaign Experience a full new Iron Harvest campaign in single player or side-by-side in co-op in 7 challenging missions with over 25 minutes of new cinematics and dozens of new allies and enemies. Usonia could become a beacon of hope for the oppressed, bringing freedom and justice to everyone, or it could succumb to the temptations of power and become a new empire, ruling with an iron first.

More than 30 new infantry units, mechs and buildings for these factions. Replacing frantic mouse-clicking and boring build orders with a constant need for actual tactics, its slower pace and more realistic battlefield conditions mean that even ten years on this is still an absolute classic.

And none of them are from the past decade. The Total War series remains a pillar of PC strategy gaming, and while Empire is my personal favourite, and Warhammer the more popular recent entries, I tend to recommend Shogun 2 first. Bonus: its big expansion, Fall of the Samurai , is probably the best thing in the entire Total War series. They say you can never go home again. Well, with Shogun 2 Creative Assembly has done just that. The art. You also need to try and rescue fallen comrades and research and upgrade your weapons and armor.

This is one sci-fi strategy number that will push your tactical mind to the limit. There are games that just turn out to be pillars of the genre, oft-copied but never quite reached. StarCraft was one such game for the RTS genre, so it makes sense that its successor really just offers more of the same in a shinier package. The campaign makes good use of each of its races, by now beloved by StarCraft fans.

Highly replayable thanks to its varying procedurally generated challenges, it pushes you to think carefully about your strategic approach each turn. Alien nasties known as the Vek are breeding underneath the earth and pose a serious threat to humankind.

If you fail, you essentially reverse the timeline to try and conquer the challenge again. By controlling different mechs and weapons, you encounter unique mech pilots and find more weapons throughout your battles to give yourself the upper-hand the next time around.

With an appealing pixelated style, it also has a pretty interesting story-line, and its procedurally generated challenges puts your tactical skills to the test and keeps it feeling fresh. And with the release of the Advanced Edition , there's never been a better time to get stuck in.

Looking for more great recommendations? Check out our pick of the best RTS games you can play right now. I started out writing for the games section of a student-run website as an undergrad, and continued to write about games in my free time during retail and temp jobs for a number of years.

Eventually, I earned an MA in magazine journalism at Cardiff University, and soon after got my first official role in the industry as a content editor for Stuff magazine. Now I get to write features, previews, and reviews, and when I'm not doing that, you can usually find me lost in any one of the Dragon Age or Mass Effect games, tucking into another delightful indie, or drinking far too much tea for my own good.