New to PC Strategy

grizzly

Can you recommend a game?

(The poll is multiple choice)

Sephiroth_dude

I cannot recommend company of heros/of enough,best stratergy game out there at the moment in my opinion,also id recommend supreme commander and supreme commander fa,both great games too.

Sabre0001

Black & White is a great novelty but I think it loses it's appeal after a while...you start noticing flaws (I would avoid B&W2 personally)

Supreme Commander is supposed to be excellent alright! By the same creator as Total Annihilation (well worth checking out; think it could be free at this stage but don't quote me on that!) so you can see a lot of similarities but bound to be good...

Medieval: Total War is good - as is Rome:TW and Shogun:TW - Played the Shogun one myself - hours of entertainment and not an easy game! But all of those packages are supposed to be excellent...

Civilisation series is a classic - loved II especially when there are extra modes/maps/missions available...Will take your life though! Worth a look if you find you don't like Real Time Strategy (some of them can be very fast paced, especially Multi-player). After a while though, turns can take a long time - Motivated me to go to war just to cut down on the number of units on the map to move


I realise now that I have done little to aid your choices - The only reason that this isn't longer is because I haven't played the others!

jonski

I am a big Company of Heroes fan and also a big fan of the total war series . Rome TW can be bought cheaply now and I am back playing the same campaign since christmas .

Sabre0001

Age of Empires series is also quite fun - Can get 1&2 and the expansions as a pack as far as I know...Great fun on LAN!

Mad Mike

There are some cracking games on that list but I recommend another one for starting off as a complete RTS beginner:
Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth (BFME). This is a terrific strategy game that is very noob friendly but still engrossing and challenging.

After that you can try Company of Heroes. This is a superb game that is the very best of the more recent RTS (imho). In fact it is so good that anything you play afterwards may seem like a disappointment. Like BFME this game has simplified resource management and a fairly gentle learning curve. The tutorial is not as good though in my opinion and if you have never played an RTS before you may need to do some guessing about how to build units and such.

I would skip Medieval Total War and play Rome Total war instead. The games are almost identical but I found the romance of the whole Roman empire thing to be more engrossing. These games are very different to BFME / CoH with much richer more complex world management as well as huge battles. You can easily lose yourself for years in the Total War universe. Sadly every single Total War game I have tried has had a terrible buggy tutorial so I really cannot recommend one of these as your first RTS. Once you abandon the tutorial though the games themselves are terrific.

I am delighted to see you mentioned Homeworld but disappointed that no-one else voted for it. I re-installed Homeworld last Summer and was delighted to find that the game was just as atmospheric and captivating as ever. Well worth playing and a true classic. It needs a bit of patching to get it to work on XP and I am not sure whether or not it works on Vista. By the way Homeworld was one of the first RTS games I ever played so you could do worse than pick this as your toe in the water. Homeworld 2 is best avoided. The original is much better.

Black and White is not an RTS. In fact I am not sure what it is. I abandoned the game after a few days in a state of utter confusion.

grizzly

Thanks for the replies

nesf

I'd try everything up there personally.

What is driving you into the genre? Does the idea of grand strategy or cunning tactics interest you the most?

grizzly

I've played C&C:Red alert to death years ago. But since then I've never really had a computer that could play any of the newer titles (was using a mac with a poor graphics card). I did get to play Starcraft and Age of Mythology – which I enjoyed but mostly they just involve surviving until you've built up an overwhelming force to flatten the enemy.

I've since got a 360 and bought BFME and C&C, but felt that the experience was missing something with a control pad.

I'm looking for something that is in-depth but doesn't get lost in pages of sub menus.

nesf

Then you'll really enjoy Company of Heroes.

Cato

total war, if you want unlimited single player replay value pretty poor online, its not your traditional rts though but a very unique and refreshing concept that has yet to be imitated succesfully by rivals, i recomend this, can be pretty buggy at times but nothing majour unless your really anal.

Homeworld: i can only talk about the first one and its expansions very good game as well but its quite old gameplay is still ace, the graphics bug me though!

Comapany of heroes: excelent multiplayer, fairly standerd single player, play single player as a tutorial for online and you will be flying it, i would say one of the best traditional rts's around if not the best.

Civilisation games are good, mainly single player, its a turnbased game has alot of depth and unlimited replay value, only thing is its a bit to spartan and unrewarding at times, unlike total war were you see thousands of troops fighting here you see two animated icons unitl one disapears, a bit disapointing imo, when you finish a campaign on it you feel like you wasted your time...

Black and white: cool concept, quite fun, but very repetitive, and kind of boring once youve figured it out...

Branoic

I'm a fan of turn based strategy over RTS myself. Civ IV is an absolute class game, the best Civ since Civ 1. That said, I actually have more fun playing Galactic Civilisations 2 and its expansions. Its extremely immersive, and the developers interaction with and dedication to the fan community is unique in the gaming industry.