Top 20 Best Classic RTS Titles... You Should be PLAYING 

Agreed

We need a 4X game with real time tactical space & ground combat 🤗

yep ,and that involves 'workshop' mechanics like earth 2150-2160 ...or ever heard of 'thandor' ? a gem i only ever got to play the demo of for it came out when funds where low as they say and once i hade funds.. sighs ...days of hardware copies ,no one sold it for 'low sales'.. dream rts be something on the scale of supcom 1+faf ...with the addition of 'workshops' mechanics like earth 2150 and that logical aspect of landscaping like '' better put power plants & factory complexes underground means they survive at least one nuke hit before destroyed'' or ..''dam river/maountain in the way here adding 40 min for units to reach x spot.. BRIDGE/TUNNEL TIME!'' not to decide what your arsenal be.. both in global 'standard' designs and local 'niche' ones... and if that could be worked out for a full planet sphere style map ,or at least interconnected 'tactical' borders of maps to form such a thing with a dash of 'tell AI commanders what to do/factorio quality of life GRAND strategy style to keep building crap you 'plan out' in a zone or after their own ability at your 'priority list' ..while still shipping fresh war material to what ever areas is front lines or you dictate etc... that i honestly think might be impossible to top if it could be made.. suppose only involving 'drop in drop out first person assume direct control' in urban assault style be possible to add to improve on such a dream product

@@Amoth_oth_ras_shash OH GOD THANDOR!!! I only had the demo too! and sadly its pretty much impossible to get nowadays because it was never really got that much attention q.q I checked couple times if i could find it somewhere, but to no avail.

Dust Front RTS is coming soon. Looks really good

Ground Control was an abolute classic, I loved the story of it. GC2 was simply one of the best RTS games I've ever played, especially in multiplayer mode.

Emperor Battle for Dune was my JAM growing up, and is frankly the only Dune media ive been able to enjoy. None of the other games, none of the movies, and not even the book have been as enjoyable as that was.

I loved the Dune Rts's. Drove my ex-gf crazy.. UNIT READY UNIT READY UNIT READY...

I agree with Ground Control and I'm bummed out it isn't mentioned in the video.

cossacks

Love that game to death. I played it on ps1 the first time round on a demo. I was overjoyed when I found out it was available on pc. To this day I haven't finished the campaign yet.

@@8eewee last mission is a bitch , if you ever get there forget about castling up is all i will say . best game I`ve ever played from an artillery perspective

The new HD crispness and modern quality-of-life improvements are one of the best points, people who have played the old version should give it another go, it's worth.

wasn't that the one where you build your own vehicles with modules you research like in the Earth Moon Project? Atleast that's whats comes to mind when hearing that game name.

@@TheAzureGhost yup yup! You research all the different guns, treads, and bodies and then design units to build

Planetary Annihilation got me into the RTS genre.

I was wondering if it's in the list when I clicked the video!! Loved the games, especially Forged Alliance. If you like SupCom try checking out Beyond All Reason! It's like a unofficial successor to the series and it's FREE! Yes - free - because it's developed by the community.

You need to get the dlc and then download the faf client. My friends have been playing it for months now with new ai and mods it adds so much to this brilliant game.

I was born in 01 and my dad did the same with me and man that game still holds a special place in my heart. I still fire it up on steam from time to time

i honestly think its one of the best candidates for a new rework. You could totally do a 5v5 online or 3v3 version against other teams. would make a great game

So many memories, mainly of the one mission where you had to escape through a ravine but I was terrible and could never make it with my initial ship/tank so I eventually just ejected and walked the whole way on the upper rim and sniped a pilot from a tank at the end and used that to finish the objective. Just the tank portion of the game would be a lot of game back then but they allowed you to build and order others around, then when your tank gets destroyed you can either take a friendly one or snipe the pilot out of an enemy one and take theirs.

aye i misse dfthe first one (first time around) but i lost weeks to battlezone 2 even within it's jank it was on hell of an experience. Between it, hostile waters, BF1942/2142 and planetside my hopes and expectations for the future of gaming were established in greatness. alas 20 years later and the closest we have ton those dreams is angels fall first and guns of icarus, 2 games that are pop-dead with almost no hope of "mainstream" audience because the average gamer has no patience, no co-ordination and community servers are all but a relic of the past so playing with a regular community has likewise become a lost ritual. damn, now i'm sad again.

Omg, right! I was so surprised to see that on his list.

This game was awesome when I was a kid

On a technical level. third is even better! ;-)

spellforce sure was thing, never got over that road block map, where you early on unlock the orc´s and you have long map with demon gate and dragon on the end of map. could just not get that one to work.

@@jacovanderschaaf3044 watch a video online to get past it... the campaign only gets better from there. Its fantastic

​@igorthelight only in spell force 1 you could zoom in all the way into the 1st person perspective though. 2 and 3 didn't let you do that and the rpg aspect suffered a bit from it imo.

Yes! This game was my favorite overall RTS of its kind in the late 90s. Had a lot of little user friendly touches like just pressing R to have a unit automatically head to the nearest repair bay that were missing in its contemporaries like Red Alert or StarCraft. Also really enjoyed the game balance, the defensive buildings were MUCH stronger than in most games (railguns so fun) so turtling at least worked a little bit as a trade-off (still lost access to resources due to lack of map control, but wasn't also just pointless and weak like most base defenses seem to be).

Dark Reign was my favourite C&C style RTS game. It had so many quality of life features that were ahead of it's time. You could build units from the structures like in TA so it made sense to create multiple factories or barracks. The units were asynchronous and suited the kind of faction they were with the Freedom Guard's stuff being mobile, stealthy or hard to detect like the phase units or repurposed civilian vehicles like the Skirmish tank being a tractor with missile launchers strapped the top and the Imperium had proper, heavy armour like the Tachyon tanks being the incontestable kind of heavy armour. I remember the AI being ridiculously good too, using probing attacks before sending in a concentrated forces, responding to your units and what you were fielding. You had the unit behaviours as well, so they'd return if they were lightly or heavily damaged to repair or heal. How they'd react to being shot at by either fleeing, shooting while in range or going into search and destroy without a care for their survivability. The map editor was also really damned good and very easy to use.

This was my first ever that my father introduced me to Good times, good times!

Buy sins rebellion and jump on the Armada 3 mod :)

@@comradex1387 I love that mod and, best of all, it's complete.

Was thinking the same thing

I was so hyped for Warcraft back in the day when they announced........but it sucked.......sorry

@@dukkencuvva1 Which Warcraft are you on about?? Warcraft 3 Reforged or Warcraft 3 Classic?? Cause Reforged indeed sucked but Warcraft 3 Classic never sucked. What planet are you on?? XD

wc3 was goated

Yeaa, I loved tank defence v4 back in the day, along with all the other defence maps. I also made pac-man in the map editor just for fun. Starcraft is my #1 pick just for the atmosphere of the game playing through the campaign, as well as an amazing pro scene to watch. Afreeca Starleague Season 16 just concluded, can't wait to watch the finals but there were a lot of amazing matches this season.

Oh my GOD YES how did we miss Starcraft 1!

I still play it today and have a few maps I made, remastered is only 20 bucks and the non remaster is now free to play the full game

@@JuniperFinch538 its free now! :D

Then what about Warcraft 2? Later campaign missions are a lot of fun and quite hard, especially in the expansion. Maybe lack of balance is an issue for multiplayer (Ogre Mages being OP for someone with good micro), but gameplay is great! And this is probably last Blizzard RTS with marine combat in mind.

YES!! I loved that game back in the day!

I played a ton of army men toys in space. I can still hear the screaming of melting plastic men.

I don't remember ever actually ordering ships vertically. Though I do remember them flying "around" targets in a 3d space. To be fair while I did play Nexus on release back in the day it wasn't a title I ever went back to. I wonder how well it holds up these days.

@@CaptainShack Yeah, you can't order them around like you can in Homeworld. The game also looks a lot like Homeworld 1 graphically despite coming out in 2004, and it did 3d space combat far worse than the games that likely inspired it. Hell I'd venture to say that the next game to do 3d space combat as good as the original Homeworld games was 2014s Homeworld Remastered Collection. The game does have something of a modding community and it has steam workshop support, likely added by Nordic when they acquired the IP in 2015. There's a Battlestar mod for it, a Stargate mod for it, a Freespace mod for it, etc. Those 3 are on the most subscribed anyway.

Can`t believe i`ve had to scroll this far to find mention of this game , personally my favourite level of control in space combat in any spacefaring game which made it truly feel like space since there is no linear plane to shuffle around , no up or down . been trying to find a game of it`s caliber ever since

@@CaptainShack I definitely could be misremembering it! I haven't played it in a lonnnnnng time.

@@CaptainShack There were a few mods made for it with varying levels of polish that were interesting.

Also free on steam right now.

Absolutely... 2100 was a really generic name for a very old *"Classic"* that felt more like it had been sent back in time to us. Nothing flew under the radar harder than it did which is ironic because it was one of the only RTS's ever made that was very focused on Intel and _solving the map_ like it was a puzzle

@@OodldoodlNoodlesocksIt's Open Source, you can get it for free at any time.

As far as I remember the Steam version is not the latest version or not the planned version. At least someone went solo putting it there. Better use the official page of wz2100@@OodldoodlNoodlesocks

The moon project was so sick.

Finally someone mentioning Earth 2150!!! Moon Project was one of the pillars of my gamer youth

@@babylonastronaut I also remember some of the missions being insanely difficult. Well worth butting heads with that game though.

warzone 2100 offered that years befor ;) . love 2150/2160 though.

Yeah, Warzone 2100 was my game of choice, but Earth 2150 was good too. @@ApocGuy

Yes!.. im glad some one other than me mentioned this.

This game was amazing, surprised no one has tried to do what it did again.

@@z3r0f14m3 right

Go RimTech, blue teams all the way. :D

​@@CuldcepterI liked to mix and match by taking parts of other mechs

You don’t think he would put empire at war on the second video? Dude has played like 10k hours of it on this channel lik

@@CunnilingusVolcano must’ve missed the part where he said he was making a part 2

@@CunnilingusVolcano And where did you hear that? Because I never heard it and I watched thru the whole thing lol

@@Vandicoup he said he had more on his list, have you ever watched xpgamer channel before? He plays empire at war mods all the time

@@CunnilingusVolcano Imagine that people discover this channel trough a vid like this. I know it is like magic 🪄

I always preferred 2, still loved 1 though

It's called "Battlezone: Combat Commander" on Steam now. It's a Battlezone II but remastered!

I played Z, I always loved The Bitmap Brothers games, since playing the original Xenon and Speedball 1 on my Amiga.

Yes!

Dune 2000 was the first RTS I ever played and Emperor Battle For Dune was an amazing update to the game....10/10 for the time it came out

I love Battlezone. Redux is great.

Definitely need a lets play on at least GC1 and 2, though Chimera is pretty brutal.

aye GC1 was a game changer, one fo the few times it felt like you were in charge of soldiers and not just utterly mindless drones (which is weird because the player units were utterly lobotomised to obey your orders exactly.

Dungeon Keeper is now called "War For The Overworld", but it kinda lacks the charm of original

@@Bodwaizer no, that's a spiritual successor. Completely different developers, Dungeon Keeper is Dungeon Keeper, WFTOW is WFTOW. There's no renaming lol.

@@Qyngali why would you take that so bluntly, I never wrote about renaming, but it's a same game, just played it btw

@@Bodwaizer You literally said (well, wrote) that DK "is now called". That is like renaming. You could've said it in dozens of other ways which wouldn't introduce confusion. Like "A modern day DK like is WftO".

@@Winnetou17 true, that's not my language though and this is YT comments, buddy

Rise and fall is amazing!! Unfortunately it's also abandonware, on the upside makes it easy to get hold of😅

Just pirate it! It's abandonware now.

you can actually get it for free (because its abandonware) even now from the third age forum. and you can even play multiplayer with it. not to mention the modding scene which is gigantic for it

With the drunkest pathfinding! 😂

game is so so, but concept is cool as heck :D

Don't forget to tweak your game with DoW Mod Manager ;-)

@@igorthelight First thing I (almost) do daily 😅 ...if I'm not playing SoaSE 🤗

@@continuumsanctum869 Nice! Did you find ability to add Anti Aliasing and force high polygon models in Mod Manager? ;-)

@@igorthelight High Polygon ✅ Anti Aliasing 🤔 I'm getting rid of the fog when zooming out & extend the memory to >2GB ... Plus in the mods better pathing and 20+ new factions... Really like the Inquisition & Grey Knights 😅 Oh yeah, almost forgot... the extended campaign with a new planet & moons + playing that with new factions is awesome fun, too 🤩🥳😊

@@continuumsanctum869 About anti aliasing - click on SETTINGS and look what's there ;-)

Thank you for bringing up Conquest: Frontier Wars! I'd actually forgotten about it until seeing it here. I had hours and hours of fun comp stomp cooping with a friend on a ring map. Great game with an interesting mechanic in the multi-system wormhole thing and building in rings around planets.