Best strategy games for pc free. The 50 best strategy games to play on PC in 2022
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The best strategy games on PC | PC Gamer.Best Free Strategy Games On Steam
The main difference is the world design and visuals, which focuses more on fantastical themes and lush green forests that'll remind you of Middle-earth. What makes Elvenar so unique is the range of armies and military forces you can build up. Instead of harnessing ancient powers, you recruit different troop types like Treants, which are tree men, and Elves. It's more laidback than its contemporaries due to the charming greenery of its visuals and the more cartoony aesthetic, but the strategic gameplay is still at the heart of Elvenar.
Game of Thrones may have finished broadcasting several years ago, but this free-to-play military RTS based on the hit show is still going strong. Available on PC and mobile, you play as the leader of one of the seven houses in Westeros. The focus is more on military training and combat rather than expanding your region of George R. Martin's world, due to it taking place within the predetermined geography of the show. There's still plenty to do, however, as keeping your citizens happy is very important.
You'll spend upgrade points to boost the food yield of your region, as well as developing new barracks and other buildings to ensure you stand toe to toe with the likes of the Starks and Lannisters. While it may be very similar to other games on this list in terms of gameplay, there's nothing else that lets you take control of Westeros. When it comes to free-to-play card video games, there are none more popular than Hearthstone.
Initially designed as a TCG spin-off of World of Warcraft, it quickly became a phenomenon of its own, and now it's one of the most popular games on PC. With your deck of 30 cards, you'll take on players worldwide, destroying their hero character and managing your mana resources to land the best attacks possible.
Similar to MTG, it's a game that has a very engrained meta and may not be the easiest for new players to learn. However, Hearthstone is slightly more accessible due to its casual playlists, which walk you through the mechanics without leaving you to learn the hard way. It also has a timer to ensure matches zip by quickly, and the range of different packs you can open and cards to collect mean you'll never run out of things to do.
Island Tribe 2. Sudden Strike Normandy. Be a King 2. Fort Defense. Call of War: Medieval Defenders. Ancient Rome. Island Tribe. War Legends. Defense of Greece. Dungeon Raider. Travian Kingdoms. Moai 3: Trade Mission. Arkheim - Realms at War. When in Rome. Dating back from the late s, it gained much popularity in the following decade with games like Warcraft, Starcraft, and Red Alert. Back then, games were made like intricate and asymmetrical chess matches with extra steps — after all, that's what the tech permitted at the time.
Today, the strategy genre is way past its apogee, with more casual games and genres entering the market. That doesn't mean they're outdated and dull, however. One only needs to take a good look at some of Steam's offerings for free strategy games to get an idea of how the genre evolved.
These free titles have kept the flame going and also brought some much-needed innovations. Updated February 5, , by Sid Natividad : Sometimes a more elaborate and asymmetrical chess match is what some gamers need to break the monotony of action and adventure games. Strategy games provide that opportunity. Like every good strategist would say: why spend resources for something more expensive when something free offers the same experience? Thankfully, there are plenty of free strategy games on Steam.
Since that's the most PC-friendly platform and strategy games are usually best played on PC, it's a match made in heaven. Genre fans will certainly find some of the best free strategy games on Steam, so even more have been added to the list.
Conflict of Nations: World War 3 is a grand strategy title set in a modern world where all-out war is as easy as bombing the colored territory. It plays out similarly to games like Civilization, or the campaign mode in Total War. It also helps players familiarize themselves with geography, since the game takes place on a fictional modern version of Earth. That means that players who want to take control of a certain country to wage a war over something could fulfill their war nerd fantasies.
If you like turn-based strategy games, you've likely played the board game Settlers of Catan. Colonist is a free web alternative to that built in HTML5, so it will work on your desktop, smartphone, and tablet. You could even play this board game over Zoom! In the game, you control a colonist and your aim is to build a civilization and expand your territory. Build settlements, gain points, and avoid attacks from enemies. You can either play solo against the computer, or battle it out against others online.
Geopolitics is your classic real-time strategy game that's all about conquering the world. You begin with control of a capital which generates gold. You then need to use this gold to buy an army and occupy nearby provinces to expand your power. Geopolitics isn't groundbreaking, but it's simple, fun, and has a nice charm thanks to its pixel art.
As an added bonus, it runs entirely in your browser and requires no download. For those who weren't happy with Imperator at launch, it's already undergone several transformative and free patches to address player criticism, and the reaction from fans seems to be encouraging.
If you've not dipped into it so far, now's a good time. It's incredible to think that nobody has taken Jagged Alliance 2 on face to face and come out on top. There are other games with a strategic layer and turn-based tactical combat, sure, and there are plenty of games that treat mercenaries, guns and ammo in an almost fetishistic fashion - but is Jagged Alliance 2 still the best of its kind?
Doubts creep in every once in a while and, inevitably, that leads to a swift re-installation and several days lost in the war for Arulco. Jagged Alliance 2 is still in a class of its own and despite the years spent in its company, it's hard to articulate the reasons why it has endured. The satisfaction of gaining territory in the slow creep across the map is one reason, and the tension of the tactical combat is another. Even the inventory management feels just right, making every squad the equivalent of an RPG's party of adventurers.
But it's the character of the squad members that seals the deal. Each has enough personality to hang a hundred stories on - remember the time Fox bandaged Grunty's wounds in the thick of a firefight a turn before he bled out, or the time Sparky made an uncharacteristically good shot and saved an entire squad's bacon?
If you don't, go play Jagged Alliance 2 and make some memories. 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. Gears Tactics is, as its name might suggest, a turn-based tactics game set in the beefy, growly world of Gears Of War.
An odd combination, you might think, but this is a game whose veins run deep with the same kind of deep, tactical prowess as your X-COMs and, err Against all the odds, it really does turn out that, even in the preposterously hench world of Gears, the mind really is the strongest muscle.
Its campaign is a smoothly designed, relentlessly paced squad 'em up that eschews everything in its genre territory except for the actual tactical battling, and it does that exceedingly well indeed. Its mechanics are built to emulate the aggressive, horde-mowing-down playstyle of its brick-chinned FPS dad, and you'd be amazed how well that translates to a completely different genre.
The only notable omission is the lack of any strategic or management meta-game once each battle is over. Instead, it's back to the battlefield with your newly looted gear and skills you've gained from levelling up. That may not be everyone's cup of protein tea, but if you've always tended to enjoy the fights of XCOM rather than spending time hanging around your base, this is the tactics game for you. The latest in Ubisoft's series of semi-historical colony managers, Anno covers the transition from the age of sail and small-scale farming to the era of thundering engines, electricity and hellish abattoirs we all know and love.
As well as offering competitive real-time city-building against both AI and human opponents, Anno also has an extra layer of built-in maritime RTS where you direct a small fleet of ships to trade, explore, carry out reward-based missions, fight pirates, or assault your competitors.
It can get hectic at times, with at least two separate maps new and old world in play at any one time, but it means you're never, ever short of something to do. Anno is also thoroughly gorgeous, with coastlines and jungles that thrum with exploitable beauty, and complex, varied building animations that make it genuinely worth it to zoom in on your streets and see what's going on.
The Banner Saga is an epic turn-based strategy series whose story spans across three separate games. While The Banner Saga 2 is arguably the best one in the trilogy, introducing more enemy types and classes to keep things interesting, this is very much the second act of the game's wider narrative, so it's definitely worth playing right from the start. The pseudo-rotoscope, Norse-themed art is glorious, but what gives The Banner Saga as a whole its staying power is that it's a sort of rolling mood more than anything else.
A disaster-strewn trek across a dying land, multiple, oft-changing perspectives, awful decisions with terrible consequences made at every turn, more a tale of a place than of the individual characters within it. The feel of Banner Saga is what's most memorable, elevating choose-your-own-adventure tropes into real atmosphere.
There's a reasonably robust turn-based combat system in there too, in which you regularly get to field armies of horned giants. A few punches are pulled, perhaps, but The Banner Saga has far more substance than might have been expected from a game which seems so very art-led.
They Are Billions takes real-time strategy, tower defence and zombie survival, and combines it all into a single punishing, rewarding, delicious experience.
It's one of the rare games that succeeds in its Frankenstein-esque genre splicing, and Numantian Games have only made it bigger and more beautiful since coming out of early access. The year is , and after one of those classic zombie apocalypses that ravage the earth, the remnants of this steampunk-infused world now live inside a huge walled city to keep out the undead nasties. But no more! In They Are Billions' sprawling campaign, you must colonise new outposts in the world around you, building new communities from scratch while protecting them from the hungry hordes.
The special thing about They Are Billions, though, is the way it keeps you scared and on your toes even during moments of relative peace. The way it leaves you to slowly explore outwards from the centre of the map and see just how many thousands of zombies are waiting for you, just beyond the borders of your city.
The way it generates such fantastic, characterful anecdotes of Achillean heroism and Sisyphean despair. It all adds up to a delectable experience that keeps you coming back even after it defeats you time and time again and, more importantly, even after you finally complete it, too. Six Ages works as a strategy game because it's about influencing people, not just accumulating resources. Cattle and horses and food are vital, sure, but they're not everything, and you need to gauge many things that can't be counted.
How the Grey Wings feel about you isn't presented as a number or bar, but what your traders and diplomats have to say. You're leading a village in a dangerous land of magic, religious conflict, and looming environmental crisis. Yes, it has bags of personality as your advisors snark and ramble and complain, and you explore the alien values of this colourful, yet malleable culture, but there are hard strategic decisions to make every year, even if the decision is to stay the course.
Success is about making good decisions in its many events, but also directing your clan's long term efforts behind the scenes. Where do you explore and when?
Will your precious magic supplement your crafter this year, or is it time to risk a ride to the gods' realm to secure a special blessing? And those decisions can never be fully divorced from the wider situation. The ideal solution might be obvious but unaffordable, or contradict another plan you have going. Measuring all these political, economic, military, religious, and sometimes personal factors up against your long-term plans is a storytelling delight and a cerebral challenge all at once.
Creative Assembly's historical Total War games have been going from strength to strength in recent years, and 's Three Kingdoms is arguably the best one yet. Set during China's titular Three Kingdoms period in the second and third century and based on the fourteenth century novel Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, this is the most dramatic and personal Total War game yet, making for some thrilling, real-time combat and some truly incredible stories.
For the most part, it's classic Total War. A large part of your time will be spent building towns, recruiting soldiers and moving your armies across a map of China as you try and unite your shattered land, but what sets Three Kingdoms apart is its intense focus on your individual clanspeople, giving each campaign a very human and emotional core from which to build your strategy from.
Never before have we felt so invested in our Total War soldiers, and victory has never tasted sweeter or defeat more gut-wrenching as a result.
Sure, it ends up leaning more toward the 'romance' side of history than the cold, hard factual take we're used to seeing from a Total War game, but for us, it's all the better for it. If you're new to the series, Three Kingdoms is also the best place to start by a country mile, as both the campaign and its combat are easier to understand than ever before. 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. By allowing the player to hand over the reigns of responsibility, Distant Worlds makes everything possible.
It's space strategy on a grand scale that mimics the realities of rule better than almost any other game in existence. And it does that through the simple act of delegation. Rather than insisting that you handle the build queues, ship designs and military actions throughout your potentially vast domain, Distant Worlds allows you to automate any part of the process.
If you'd like to sit back and watch, you can automate everything, from individual scout ships to colonisation and tourism. If you're military-minded, let the computer handle the economy and pop on your admiral's stripes. As well as allowing the game to operate on an absurd scale without demanding too much from the player in the way of micromanagement, Distant Worlds' automation also peels back the layers to reveal the working of the machine.
It's a space game with an enormous amount of possibilities and by allowing you to play with the cogs, it manages to convince that all of those possibilities work out just as they should. The Europa series feels like the tent-pole at the centre of Paradox's grand strategy catalogue. Covering the period from to , it allows players to control almost any nation in the world, and then leaves them to create history.
A huge amount of the appeal stems from the freedom - EU IV is a strategic sandbox, in which experimenting with alternate histories is just as if not more entertaining than attempting to pursue any kind of victory. Not that there is such a thing as a hardcoded victory. Providing the player with freedom is just one part of the Paradox philosophy though.
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