Our month-long RTS tournament is coming to an end. We started with a shortlist of 16 units, and now we're down to the final two—both of which were determined by your votes. This is what democracy is all about, folks! Determining what RTS unit has the right to call itself the greatest unit of all time.

It's been an emotional journey. Dreams shattered. Friendships ruined. Drug tests performed on a member of the clergy. But this is important, worthwhile work. But let's stop faffing around and get stuck in.

The final bracket

Well, it looks like my prediction from last week did not come to pass. A tragedy!

With the humble Peon failing to return from the dead, I was left with only one of my original picks in the running: the unstoppable Pride of Hiigara from Homeworld 2. As it turns out, it's actually quite stoppable. The indomitable Mammoth Tank from Red Alert gave it a beating, winning with 60% of the votes.

I will gracefully accept this defeat. I mean c'mon, the Mammoth Tank is a legend. Could it realistically destroy a mothership that can spit out a fleet of capital ships? Probably not! But this tournament is not determining which unit would win in a fight. "The best" can mean a lot of different things, and there's no denying the Mammoth Tank is awesome.

I do, however, take umbrage with the Priest defeating the Super Star Destroyer. 70% of the votes! This is madness. That wololo-ing thief has no honour. But even though this outcome is ridiculous, I must accept the will of the people. I just hope that was the horrible little man's last victory.

So we're down to two. Mammoth Tank vs Priest. I'm going to give you all until the end of Wednesday (BST) to vote. Can this icon of the Soviet war machine defeat God's pal? We'll find out next week.

Mammoth Tank vs Priest

Mammoth Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert)

God bless these great, trundling beasts—implacable Soviet strength wrought in steel and pig iron.

Mammoth Tanks are unfathomably costly and painfully slow, but whatever. I'm convinced just one of them could probably win the entire RA1 Soviet campaign by itself. Akh-knowledged. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Priest (Age of Empires)

"Wololo." I win. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor

An RTS is only as good as its campaign. Sure, it's the competitive multiplayer side of things that gives these games their long tail—StarCraft 2 has been the dominant RTS for 16 years for this very reason—but the bulk of initial players will first be seduced by the promise of a killer singleplayer romp. In this regard, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 4 has the juice.

I've had a couple of weeks to play around with two of the four campaigns—orks and Adeptus Mechanicus—along with the shorter, two-mission prologue featuring the Astra Militarum, and I've been able to set aside my fear that we'd be getting a repeat of Dawn of War 3's issues. Folks, I am loving these campaigns.

Lads, lads lads

Out of the prologue, I signed up with the orks. The greenskins are a good first pick, not just because this campaign comes first in the chronology, but because it's the most straightforward faction. Their units and buildings are the cheapest in the game, and it only takes a few minutes to recruit a basic army right out of the gate. If you just want to smash shit up, the orks are your guys.

This is not to say that you'll be steamrolling everything. You can lose that army even quicker than you recruited it if you just charge in blind. Orks might not be the brightest xenos in the universe, but their ruthlessness and rage is tempered by low cunning—something the campaign narrative leans into.

If you want to make the most out of your green tide of devastation, you'll want to do a bit of recon, figuring out what toys your opponents are playing with. This won't just determine the units you should recruit, but the wargear upgrades you give them as well. Like the tabletop game, you're given a lot of versatility, which includes being able to switch up the weapons on individual units, which in turn lets you handle specific threats more effectively.

The ork campaign is a fun one, full of large green idiots posturing, backstabbing and getting all charged up about the prospect of squashing humies. You'll start as the boss of a local band of angry lads, but then spacefaring orks fall from the sky, and their boss (a familiar face for Dawn of War vets) quickly decides the world of Kronos is his—the native orks aren't really OK with that.

So a lot of this campaign is focused on this competition between the two groups. A particularly great mission sees you competing in a race with this ork interloper. The first side to destroy the Adeptus Mechanicus base wins the race and gets to be the big boss (not that orks are sportsmanlike or tend to honour deals).

The armies are separated and must push up their respective paths, with the UI showing who's winning. It's a brilliantly designed map, with a slight MOBA vibe because of its lane setup, but also featuring some spacious areas for big fights and base building, lots of chokepoints, and some elevated positions that you'll need your Stormboyz to overcome. Across most of it, you're separated from the other orks, but you can still see them pushing their way up the map, which I found even more effective than the UI when it came to lighting a fire under my arse. At the top and bottom of the map, however, the two sides are linked, which inspires a bunch of sneaky backstabbing.

Your opponent starts sending small forces to harass your base, keeping you on your toes, and then your main armies clash at the top of the map, near the Adeptus Mechanicus base. I had a vast green horde and a respectable lead, but the tech priests were able to hold me off for a wee while, giving my opponent time to catch up. It was the best way to end the mission: a climactic battle where I was squished between humans and enemy orks. When the last building crumbled, most of my army was gone, but it didn't matter—I'd won the challenge.

After the race, you pick a side—the local boyz or the invaders—for the rest of the campaign. Some of the maps and objectives are shared between the two paths, but you'll also encounter unique missions, story moments and, of course, you'll have very different commander units to play around with. It's a smart way to solve the one-and-done nature of RTS campaigns—you'll need to play twice to experience everything. And even within the same path, you're occasionally forced to make certain decisions that will affect future missions.

As a tabletop boy, I feel pretty well taken care of in DoW4. Not being a methodical turn-based romp, it's naturally going to feel different, but it's undeniably authentic. There's the adaptation of the wargear system that I mentioned above, of course, but things like stratagems and command points also make their way over from the tabletop version.

Command points can be earned by fighting and taking over capture points, which can then be spent on activating powerful abilities, the aforementioned stratagems. They've helped me turn the tide of battle more than a few times. They're all great. Whether I'm summoning some explosive squigs, calling down a random unit—which naturally obliterates anything in the landing zone—or psychically buffing my entire army by calling a WAAAGH!, stratagems always promise a good time, and they live up to it.

The orks are also just a delight to watch, with their exaggerated animations and colourful model design, flawlessly evoking the tabletop game. Zooming in and watching a melee scrum play out is well worth the sacrifice of battlefield visibility, especially with the synced up animations. King Art has expanded this system, so it doesn't just sync up units when there's a kill.

Now, it doesn't always work as advertised. I often see units flailing around and not hitting anything, but I've also witnessed plenty of flashy duels playing out. Broadly, DoW4's scraps have a high level of physicality, with clashes between forces feeling tangible and tactile. And with a couple of months between now and launch, hopefully it will look even better in the finished build.

Heavy metal

After I finished up with my ork besties, the Adeptus Mechanicus campaign was a big change of pace. This is the first time these nerds have featured in Dawn of War, but good things come to those who wait—whether it's Guinness or tech priests. It's a fun tonal shift from the brutality of the green lads, with the Adeptus Mechanicus being the scalpel to the ork's blunt instrument.

The structure of the Adeptus Mechanicus campaign is similar to its ork counterpart, in that there's a big rivalry that allows you, after a certain point, to pick one of two paths with different commanders. The ork and Adeptus Mechanicus campaigns, and their respective paths, still feel suitably different, however, with bespoke missions and distinct characters giving each a powerful flavour all their own.

Technoarchaeology and immortal machines—that's what you're getting into with the Adeptus Mechanicus. The Imperium's dogmatic tinkerers make for a high-tech, precise army as they attempt to thwart the awakened necron forces on Kronos. Like the ork campaign, it's blessed with lots of variety, boasting plenty of novel missions and deftly avoiding too much repetition.

The tech priests are a ranged powerhouse, certainly compared to the orks, but right from the get-go you'll get access to stealthy melee units that do a great job of locking down ranged enemies or slaughtering foes who are hunkering down behind cover.

Oh yeah, cover is back! Thank the Emperor. Cover was a big part of the first two games, but it got sidelined in DoW3. Relic's third game did technically have a cover system, with small areas that you could capture, after which a temporary shield would offer units inside a bit of protection, but it was a poor system. These locations were few and far between, often placed in areas where they weren't really needed, and the nature of the missions—where you rarely stay in one place for long—rendered them largely useless.

DoW4's approach should keep everyone pretty happy. Every map features barricades, plonked down in sensible spots, and during the more scripted campaign missions they are almost always a sign that an enemy army is going to be charging towards you. They are vulnerable to melee units and flanking attacks, but will keep your ranged units alive for longer.

Orks can actually construct their own barricades, which can be erected anywhere.The Adeptus Mechanicus, meanwhile, aren't left out in the cold. They're able to construct a different kind of cover: Emanatus Field Generators. As you'd expect from a technologically advanced faction with a ranged focus, these are fancier than the basic cover. They absorb melee damage and protect units garrisoned inside them from ranged attacks, and the coverage is 360 degrees, too, rather than being directional.

I got so much use out of the various types of cover, and they can dramatically change the flow of battle and give important roles to specific units. But cover doesn't make units invincible, and it can be destroyed, so there are plenty of ways to deal with protected enemies.

Grenades are handy, of course, and so are fast melee units if you're dealing with barricades. The Adeptus Mechanicus Sicarian Ruststalker or the ork Squighog Boyz can quickly get behind cover and then lock the ranged unit into a fight, completely defanging them and making them vulnerable once more.

All this is to say: cover has a huge impact, both when you're facing it and using it. But it's not the only defensive measure. The Adeptus Mechanicus also has access to a rather impressive bit of tech known as the Void Shield. This bad boy can protect your base from anyone outside the shield, as it's not possible for enemies to shoot through it. They must walk into your base to do damage, at which point they can be surrounded and taken out.

While DoW4 is a pretty fast-paced game, the Adeptus Mechanicus are a touch slower and more deliberate than the orks. While the latter can rapidly plonk down some buildings anywhere on the map and spit out an army, the tech priests take a little longer to get going—but that's not a disadvantage.

See, the Adeptus Mechanicus warmachine is fuelled by the Noosphere Network, a system that links up the faction's buildings, turrets and field generators, and confers a multitude of benefits, improving the efficiency of both their bases and armies. Through relays you can spread the network across the entire map, so distant outposts or defended positions can benefit from the efficiency boost. But these relays are vulnerable, so the bigger the network, the more you need to invest time and resources defending it.

But expand it you must—because the larger the network, the more powerful it becomes, eventually netting you fancy end-game units, research and upgrade options. It's a lovely bit of friction: to become stronger, you must also make yourself a bit more vulnerable. If the enemy takes out a critical relay, you could be screwed.

There's more to consider in an Adeptus Mechanicus playthrough, then, but damn do they have some fun toys to play with—as you'd expect from 40k's most overzealous gearheads. The Knight is a highlight of course—a gargantuan behemoth that towers over the battlefield—and the faction boasts some powerful stratagems, including one that can wipe out an entire enemy force if you time it just right. It's beautiful stuff.

Room for everyone

As a fan of Iron Harvest, which took a lot of cues from original Dawn of War developer Relic, I expected to enjoy DoW4. But a good RTS campaign is not guaranteed, even when it's coming from a proven studio—just look at the last game, which almost killed off the whole series. From what I've played so far, however, I think King Art is onto a winner here.

OK, now it's time to address the elephant in the room: Total War 40k. It's been suggested that Creative Assembly's take on Warhammer 40k will steal DoW4's thunder. I don't see it. First of all, DoW4 is right around the corner, while Total War 40k doesn't even have a release date. They're also just completely different kinds of strategy games.

DoW4 is a classic, pure RTS with a series of mostly linear campaigns and an emphasis on storytelling. It's a smaller scale romp, and probably a bit tighter and tidier as a result. Total War 40k, like all Total Wars, is more like a grand strategy game with real-time tactical pitched battles. There's no base building, the maps are mostly open and the campaigns will be sandboxes.

They are completely different experiences, and there's room for everyone. Indeed, I feel pretty damn lucky to have a new Dawn of War and a new Total War to look forward to—it's a good thing. Take it from someone who's played both. So there's never been a better time to be a 40k fan—that said, between Dark Heresy, Dawn of War 4, Total War 40k and the new battleforce boxes Games Workshop just unveiled, I'm about to be a broke 40k fan.

We are now in the second half of the most brutal war to play out on the pages of this venerable website—a war that will determine, through democracy and science, which RTS unit is the greatest of them all.

Two weeks ago, the conflict started with 16 units. Last week, eight survivors duked it out in the quarterfinals. Blood was shed and four more units were tossed into the void. It was tight—with two battles ending with the victor claiming only 10% more of the votes. My two faves, the noble Dolphin and humble Peon were killed off. I weep for these fallen heroes.

But there's no more time for sentimentality. Another battle is about to begin. Clean off the blood and get ready for the semifinals. It's time to choose which two units will be going head-to-head in the glorious final battle.

The semifinals bracket

During the quarterfinals, I made a prediction. One I was pretty confident about. But was I right?

I was pretty close, actually! The only one I got wrong was Peon, which has honestly shocked the hell out of me. In the first round, my sweet green boy utterly dominated the Glass Dragon, and it's been getting plenty of love in the comments. I did not expect to see it get knocked out by a tank. Just a tank! OK, it's probably unfair to call the indomitable Mammoth Tank "just a tank", but the Peon was robbed.

Clearly we've got some tank fans, but even more Star Destroyer fans. The sneaky Mirage Tank, another of my favourites, was blown to smithereens by Darth Vader's Executor Super Star Destroyer. When you've got that many turbolasers blasting at you, pretending to be a tree ain't gonna do you any good.

Spaceships are clearly doing well. The Pride of Hiigara was up against a bunch of horseboys, and unsurprisingly one of the most iconic videogame ships around triumphed over a bunch of lads who love a gymkhana.

I knew it was coming, but it still hurts to see the brave, noble Dolphin getting taken out by the Priest—a thief and a trickster who can't fight his own battles. In the war between nature (because what is more natural than a weaponised aquatic mammal who can destroy ships with sonic blasts?) and organised religion, organised religion won. A tragedy.

Anyway! That's all in the past now. We're down to four combatants, and your votes will determine who goes into the final. You'll have until the end of Tuesday (BST) to make your picks, but otherwise there are no rules. This is not a case of "Who would win in a fight?" unless you want it to be. Maybe you just think the Priest looks sexy in those robes, or you're broadly pro-Sith and must show the Star Destroyer some love. Right, let's get fighting!

Mammoth Tank vs Pride of Hiigara

Mammoth Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert)

God bless these great, trundling beasts—implacable Soviet strength wrought in steel and pig iron.

Mammoth Tanks are unfathomably costly and painfully slow, but whatever. I'm convinced just one of them could probably win the entire RA1 Soviet campaign by itself. Akh-knowledged. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Pride of Hiigara (Homeworld 2)

While other ships are spitting out missiles and other little projectiles, the Homeworld Mothership is spitting out capital ships. It is both a unit and your base—an impossibly huge mobile factory that can carry your whole fleet inside of it. Its direct offensive capabilities are extremely limited, but like I said: It can spit out capital ships.

I've picked the Kushan/Hiigaran version specifically because of its iconic design, which for me is right up there with the Enterprise D and Star Destroyers. While it's largely stationary in the original Homeworld (at least in the campaign), it's fully mobile in Homeworld 2, giving it an extra dose of utility. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Super Star Destroyer vs Priest

Executor Super Star Destroyer (Star Wars: Empire at War)

My colleagues have, for some reason, chosen to prioritize things like "funny voice lines" and "subtext" while proposing their favorite RTS units. Sorry, gang: you're about to get crushed by 19 kilometers of steel and turbolasers.

This enormous Death Triangle is the ultimate wish fulfilment vessel in Empire at War, one of my favorite Star Wars games. It's not a top-tier RTS, but it is top-tier Star Wars fantasy in game form, letting you move around a bunch of little toy ships and play out the "what if" of throwing Rogue Squadron's ace pilots up against a Star Destroyer. They've got a real chance in that fight, but not against the Executor, Darth Vader's personal ride.

The damn thing is practically the size of Manhattan, and you can really feel that scale in the game. It makes regular Star Destroys look like Doritos by comparison. It's swimming with so many turbolaser batteries it can bully an entire Rebel fleet by itself. Don't even try that A-Wing trick against it—that sort of nonsense only works in the movies. —Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor

Priest (Age of Empires)

"Wololo." I win. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor

Frank Klepacki has composed a lot of great game music over the years—in fact, he's responsible for the soundtrack in Eye of the Beholder 2, one of the best dungeon crawlers of all time. At heart, though, Klepacki is a real-time strategy guy—and he takes real issue with claims that the genre is dead.

There's no question that RTS is diminished, at least compared to its glory days. Back in the 1990s, games like Command & Conquer, Warcraft, and Dune 2 (especially Dune 2, I'd say) dominated the scene. But all that remains of any of them these days is the seemingly unkillable World of Warcraft—and how many players even know that Blizzard's one true behemoth is an RTS spinoff?

Speaking in the latest issue of Edge, however, Klepacki said he thinks the genre still has lots of life in it. "There was all of this doom-and-gloom talk about ten years ago, saying, 'Oh, we think RTS is dead now—why are you still trying to work on games that are in a genre that’s going away?’" Klepacki said. "Obviously, if there are games coming out, [the genre is] not going away. It’s just that other types of games have taken the forefront of attention. Everything runs in cycles, you know? That’s how it always is."

That's true: RPGs have ebbed and flowed over the decades, and flight sims were huge until they weren't, and then they were again. But Klepacki also pointed the finger at a hollowing-out of the industry and growing aversion to risk, particularly among big-budget developers: "I would love to see more unique ideas that are allowed to be triple-A titles. A lot of indie titles are taking those creative chances, but a lot of the middle ground has gone."

Real-time strategy DNA has persisted in the MOBA genre, but traditional RTS games are enjoying a bit of a boom too. More than 20 years after Frozen Throne, Blizzard dropped a new campaign for Warcraft 3 in September, a Game of Thrones RTS is in the pipe, and Company of Heroes and Ruse are back; Age of Empires and Age of Mythology are still rumbling along, Tempest Rising delivers a very C&C-like experience, and while the new StarCraft game revealed at BlizzCon is a shooter, Blizzard is still dicking around with StarCraft 2, too.

The days of building them around ensemble Hollywood casts may be over (at least for now), but the RTS itself? Be happy, Frank: it's definitely alive and kicking.

There's a generation of millennial gamers who are haunted by an entity known as 'old Blizzard,' an allegedly more competent, creative, and virtuous version of the present-day Microsoft subsidiary based in Irvine, California.

For the nostalgia-afflicted, BlizzCon 2026 felt like a nod to those good ol' days of Blizzard—at least in terms of ambition and scale—as developers rolled out a slew of major announcements including World of Warcraft: Forever, Diablo 5, and an open world shooter in the StarCraft universe.

However, the most meaningful moment may have been the very first reveal that occurred on stage, when Blizzard president Johanna Faries received a tepid audience response after announcing that Heroes of the Storm—Blizzard's niche MOBA that had been relegated to bare bones maintenance mode in 2022—would be welcoming WoW big-bad Xal'atath as a new playable character.

Blizzard surely drafted dozens of versions of its stage presentation in the lead-up to BlizzCon, and would have been well-aware that announcing Heroes of the Storm's first new hero in six years would barely register on the audiences' radar compared to the rest of their slate. With that in mind, you have to wonder if leading with HOTS was not just a quirk of sequencing, but a conscious, conciliarity choice.

Sunsetting games that fail to reach certain commercial benchmarks is a widespread industry practice, and from a certain perspective, any backlash to HOTS being put on ice could have been seen as unrealistic and entitled—come on, at least the servers weren't shut down!

At the same time, you didn't have to be a hardcore HOTS player with hundreds of hours invested to understand the greater sense of betrayal. Blizzard may not have been an active participant in every aspect of the mythmaking surrounding itself during its glory days, but the company certainly enjoyed the perception that it had a uniquely honorable relationship with its fans. Even as it became more and more corporate, some still believed that Blizzard would uphold an implicit pact: 'We will never give up on a game before its community.'

In resuming active development for Heroes of the Storm, Blizzard seems to be expressing that this is a standard it still wants to live up to.

Well, not unconditionally. There are no roadmaps or grand promises regarding the future of HOTS, and the game's affectionately dubbed "Janitor" James Yen has carefully managed his tone in interviews to focus on "sustainability" and make sure the 'we're so back' mentality doesn't get out of hand. Yet, for the time being, this seems to be a more-than-acceptable state of affairs for the HOTS community. There's an air of optimism that hasn't existed in years, and HOTS players are even getting a WoW Classic-esque nostalgia rush out of complaining about how overtuned Xal'atath is at release.

Even in the corners of Blizzard fandom that are harder to placate, BlizzCon gave reason for cautious optimism. Warcraft 3: Reforged had a disastrous launch in 2020, with gamers criticizing the quality of the remastered graphics, lack of multiplayer features, and the general feeling that it needed to bake for a while longer. Reforged has received several updates since then, culminating in the release of Forsaken Kingdom—a brand-new, full-length DLC campaign—over BlizzCon weekend.

The reception hasn't been universally positive—there's been sticker shock around the $30 price point, and there are lingering complaints from the original Reforged launch that may be impossible to realistically address. However, at risk of generalizing about a community that contains both ultra-traditionalist PvP gamers and casual fans who are primarily in it for the story, most players seem to agree that Forsaken Kingdom is a damn cool thing to happen to a 24-year-old RTS classic.

On the other hand, game series like Diablo might reveal where this newfound care for legacy games can only go so far. Shortly ahead of Diablo 4's release in 2023, Diablo 3 was put into unofficial maintenance mode with no new content being actively developed. Huge updates for Diablo 1: Resurrected, Diablo: Immortal, and Diablo 4 have been rolling out this year in celebration of the series' 30th anniversary, but the absence of Diablo 3 content has been conspicuous—especially considering that Blizzard has lauded the game's staying power with millions of players.

Presumably, fears of user cannibalization are keeping all resources for the 'mainline' series committed to Diablo 4 (and later, to Diablo 5), which does make sense when you reluctantly put on your shareholder hat. However, with World of Warcraft announcing its third different fork, you have to wonder why Blizzard is so averse to Diablo fans sampling a wider variety of demon flesh.

The most cynical interpretation would be that nothing has truly changed at Blizzard, and that its specific decisions regarding new content for old games were a result of which projects passed the cost-benefit-analysis test.

Yet, even without access to internal figures, it's hard to imagine a world where a decision-maker looked at a new HOTS hero and said "yes, this is definitely the profit-maximizing investment at this time" or "yes, this is the big PR move that will get everyone back on our side."

Instead, it seems like limited opportunities for Blizzard to be the 'good guy' are emerging, and when all goes well, developers with great affinity for specific franchises have been in place to seize them.

So, no, the old Blizzard people are nostalgic for isn't back, and may never be. However, there's still a heart beating at Blizzard's core, and if you're lucky, some oxygen might find its way to the game you love.

Friends, we are doing important work—the work of determining, through democracy and science (maybe), what RTS unit deserves to be held aloft and named the greatest RTS unit of all time. It's a lot of responsibility.

Last week, the war began. 16 units entered, eight units survived. There were close battles. Dawn of War's unstable Psyker and Battle for Middle-earth's Rohirrim were neck and neck for most of the voting period, swapping positions with every blow traded. But in the end, those long-haired horse boys won. Then there were the ass-kickings. Right from the word go, Warcraft's Peon raked in the votes, leaving Rise of Legends' majestic Glass Dragon battered a bruised.

We salute the losers—they were good, but not good enough. And now the victors must return to the battlefield to duke it out again. It's time for the quarterfinals, baby!

The quarterfinals bracket

Things are getting tense. We're going to have to make some difficult decisions. Will our collective love for funny little green guys keep the Peon from being obliterated by the mighty Mammoth Tank? Will the Mirage Tank's ability to pretend to be a tree help it survive against Darth Vader's personal Star Destroyer? This is all up to you.

All four of my personal picks made it to the quarterfinals (thank you, thank you), but now I'm nervous. Now that we're down to eight competitors, I've got a pick in each fight. I could win it all! Or I could lose everything. Harrowing stuff. I'm particularly worried about the Dolphin vs Priest battle. Our sleek, squeaky pal utterly dominated the Sonic Tank in the last round, but the Priest was incredibly popular—only the Peon had a more clear-cut battle.

It would be inappropriate for me to try and influence your vote, but just let me ask you this: do you really want to see a heroic, noble creature of the sea getting crushed by organised religion? Let your conscience guide you.

As before, you'll be able to vote on each battle below until the end of Sunday (BST). Otherwise, there are no rules. Chaos reigns! Vote based on vibes, aesthetic, hyper-specific grudges or just who you think would win in a fight. Right, let's get back to the war!

Peon vs Mammoth Tank

Peon (Warcraft 3)

The real heroes of Warcraft, Peons are mistreated, disrespected and undervalued by orcish society, but they are the most critical cog in the Horde's war machine. They get called "dogs" and "cowards", and yeah, they might enjoy the occasional nap—but they work hard! They deserve a rest!

Orcs are classist dickheads. Without Peons, you'd have no great halls, no barracks, no trained warriors. Peons avoid conflict not because they are cowards, but because they know they are too important to die in battle—that the future of their people hinges on them building a new gold mine or chopping down some trees.

And if it comes down to it, they'll fight, either directly (which they are, frankly, terrible at) or by holing up in a burrow. They can do it all! Zug zug, my friends. Zug zug. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Mammoth Tank

God bless these great, trundling beasts—implacable Soviet strength wrought in steel and pig iron.

Mammoth Tanks are unfathomably costly and painfully slow, but whatever. I'm convinced just one of them could probably win the entire RA1 Soviet campaign by itself. Akh-knowledged. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Rohirrim vs Pride of Hiigara

Rohirrim (Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth)

The Ride of the Rohirrim is a very influential movie moment for a young lad. I, for example, decided that the only faction I could play in Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth was Rohan. And the only unit I would enjoy playing were the Rohirrim.

I'd get my long-haired horse boys fresh out of the stable, hand them forged blades (made the tips of their spears glow), as much heavy armour as I could afford, then arrange them into a neatly-formed flying V formation. My entire operation was focused on powering through as fast as possible until I could get my horde of superpowered spearmen on horseback. Every playthrough—every damn playthrough.

These Rohirrim were basically a cheat code. They could easily trample Sauron's armies under hoof. Just line them up, set them off, and watch carnage ensue. I'm rewatching the Ride of the Rohirrim as I write this and it makes me want to boot the game right back up again—goosebumps. —Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware

Pride of Hiigara (Homeworld 2)

While other ships are spitting out missiles and other little projectiles, the Homeworld Mothership is spitting out capital ships. It is both a unit and your base—an impossibly huge mobile factory that can carry your whole fleet inside of it. Its direct offensive capabilities are extremely limited, but like I said: It can spit out capital ships.

I've picked the Kushan/Hiigaran version specifically because of its iconic design, which for me is right up there with the Enterprise D and Star Destroyers. While it's largely stationary in the original Homeworld (at least in the campaign), it's fully mobile in Homeworld 2, giving it an extra dose of utility. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Mirage Tank vs Super Star Destroyer

Mirage Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3)

Most tanks are performative. They're like those folks who film themselves in the gym, flexing their muscles, grunting and getting in everyone's way. But not the Mirage Tank—it's sneaky. You wouldn't even notice it in the gym. You'd just be left to wonder, "Who put this tree in the gym?" And then it cuts right through you with its spectrum dispersion cannon.

It was already one of the coolest units ever created in Red Alert 2, but Red Alert 3's version introduces more disguises and enhances the unit's DPS capabilities. It can be a sneaky assassin on its own, but a group of them can make short work of an enemy base. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Executor Super Star Destroyer (Star Wars: Empire at War)

My colleagues have, for some reason, chosen to prioritize things like "funny voice lines" and "subtext" while proposing their favorite RTS units. Sorry, gang: you're about to get crushed by 19 kilometers of steel and turbolasers.

This enormous Death Triangle is the ultimate wish fulfilment vessel in Empire at War, one of my favorite Star Wars games. It's not a top-tier RTS, but it is top-tier Star Wars fantasy in game form, letting you move around a bunch of little toy ships and play out the "what if" of throwing Rogue Squadron's ace pilots up against a Star Destroyer. They've got a real chance in that fight, but not against the Executor, Darth Vader's personal ride.

The damn thing is practically the size of Manhattan, and you can really feel that scale in the game. It makes regular Star Destroys look like Doritos by comparison. It's swimming with so many turbolaser batteries it can bully an entire Rebel fleet by itself. Don't even try that A-Wing trick against it—that sort of nonsense only works in the movies. —Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor

Dolphin vs Priest

Dolphin (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2)

The Dolphin—what a superstar. You could be forgiven for treating these sleek, squeaky critters like nothing more than scouts, with their lack of armour and impressive speed. But you'd be wrong. They are killers.

In a group, Dolphins are unstoppable gods of war, able to deftly take out buildings and vessels with their sonic blasts. They should be feared and respected. Sure, the Soviets think they have naval superiority, but once the Allies start churning out Dolphins, it's game over, man. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Priest (Age of Empires)

"Wololo." I win. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor

Almost a decade ago, we published a list of our favourite RTS units. There are some good picks in there. But I want to revisit the topic, and not just by listing some cool tanks. Real-time strategy is competitive. I want to find out what the best unit is, and for that we need a tournament. No deliberating, no debating, just brackets and voting.

Last week, PC Gamer writers created a shortlist, and now I'm pitting them against each other in randomised face-offs. And you lot now have two days to vote for your fave, after which the victors will move to the next round and we'll do it all over again.

But what does "best" actually mean? That's up to you! Better in a 1v1 brawl? Better looking? Better at pretending to be a completely normal tree? The choice is yours.

The war begins

Welcome to the first round of our apocalyptic war to determine the greatest RTS unit of all time. We've got 16 competitors duking it out, from Peons to the Executor Super Star Destroyer. Hmmm. That doesn't seem fair. But war isn't fair. There will be tears. There will be surprises. There will be grudges that remain for centuries.

But for now, let's meet the competitors. This is also where you lot come in. Underneath each set of two units, we'd like you to vote for your favourite. Now, I can't make you vote for my picks—that would be incredibly corrupt—but I'd certainly appreciate it.

Since there a lot of units to get through in this round, I'm going to leave the polls running until Sunday evening, and then we'll kick off the quarter-finals early next week.

One last bit of housekeeping: In cases where these units crop up in multiple games in a series, we've just picked one version. So while the Peon features in all three Warcrafts, I've gone for the Warcraft 3 version (because it looks extra goofy).

Peon vs Glass Dragon

Peon (Warcraft 3)

The real heroes of Warcraft, Peons are mistreated, disrespected and undervalued by orcish society, but they are the most critical cog in the Horde's war machine. They get called "dogs" and "cowards", and yeah, they might enjoy the occasional nap—but they work hard! They deserve a rest!

Orcs are classist dickheads. Without Peons, you'd have no great halls, no barracks, no trained warriors. Peons avoid conflict not because they are cowards, but because they know they are too important to die in battle—that the future of their people hinges on them building a new gold mine or chopping down some trees.

And if it comes down to it, they'll fight, either directly (which they are, frankly, terrible at) or by holing up in a burrow. They can do it all! Zug zug, my friends. Zug zug. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Glass Dragon (Rise of Legends)

Rise of Legends is one of those RTS games that sometimes I feel like I hallucinated from whole cloth. Fraser assures me that he's played it and it's rad, so I'm including the Glass Dragon here under the assurances that I haven't made it up.

Rise of Legends is an incredible game that blends steampunk and Arabian mythology and aliens (!) in a beautiful, messy RTS stew. The Glass Dragon stands out in particular not only for its ability to slag tanks, but its beauty. Just look at those beautiful polygons! —Russell Adderson, Contributor

Mammoth Tank vs Petard

Mammoth Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert)

God bless these great, trundling beasts—implacable Soviet strength wrought in steel and pig iron.

Mammoth Tanks are unfathomably costly and painfully slow, but whatever. I'm convinced just one of them could probably win the entire RA1 Soviet campaign by itself. Akh-knowledged. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Petard (Age of Empires 2)

Greek infrastructure hates to see these guys coming. I love destroying buildings is what we're learning here. But can you blame me? The Petard is a unit with a noble and singular goal: to hurl himself at the nearest enemy structure and turn it to smoking rubble. Of course, the Petard dies in the act, but such is the price you pay for glory.

It might be grim, it might be heartless, but it's certainly effective. Also, it's fun—producing a horde of these guys and sending them rolling over to the enemy's nearest base like a horrible circus coming to town is, simply, a great lark. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Psyker vs Rohirrim

Psyker (Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War)

I love a unit that's so powerful it hurts itself. Not only is Dawn of War's Psyker the best voice-acted unit in a game filled to the brim with fantastic voicework, but he's the perfect mechanical summary of the setting's relationship to the Warp. Imagine if, to cast magic, you had to tap into hell, filled with soul-hungry predators and daemons who'd happily possess you given the chance. Hey, or maybe your head will just explode from the strain.

This is represented by the Psyker's 'Perils of the Warp' mechanic, which gives him a small chance of dying anytime he casts one of his powerful abilities. So, while it's fun to hear him shout WITNESS YOUR DOOOOOOM as many times as possible, abusing his powers will lead to an untimely end. —Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer

Rohirrim (Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth)

The Ride of the Rohirrim is a very influential movie moment for a young lad. I, for example, decided that the only faction I could play in Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth was Rohan. And the only unit I would enjoy playing were the Rohirrim.

I'd get my long-haired horse boys fresh out of the stable, hand them forged blades (made the tips of their spears glow), as much heavy armour as I could afford, then arrange them into a neatly-formed flying V formation. My entire operation was focused on powering through as fast as possible until I could get my horde of superpowered spearmen on horseback. Every playthrough—every damn playthrough.

These Rohirrim were basically a cheat code. They could easily trample Sauron's armies under hoof. Just line them up, set them off, and watch carnage ensue. I'm rewatching the Ride of the Rohirrim as I write this and it makes me want to boot the game right back up again—goosebumps. —Jacob Ridley, Managing Editor, Hardware

High Templar vs Pride of Hiigara

High Templar (StarCraft 2)

I'm not one for all this lore nonsense, though the High Templars have lore abound if that's your jam. What I'm into is seeing a mass of enemy Terrans melt under the AoE of Psionic Storm.

Back when I was a wee wannabe Grandmaster SC2 nerd, discovering Templar Storm was game-changing. Previously, I'd based my game around making the sweet and simple Protoss ball of death—an army of smaller units and couple of big Colossus (Colossi?)—then crossing my fingers, but before long I discovered I could tech into Templars for that AoE. Just one or two of these bad-boys pulled in and I could melt my opponent's entire army of Marines or Zerglings. I'd never experienced anything like it. —Jacob Fox, Hardware Writer

Pride of Hiigara (Homeworld 2)

While other ships are spitting out missiles and other little projectiles, the Homeworld Mothership is spitting out capital ships. It is both a unit and your base—an impossibly huge mobile factory that can carry your whole fleet inside of it. Its direct offensive capabilities are extremely limited, but like I said: It can spit out capital ships.

I've picked the Kushan/Hiigaran version specifically because of its iconic design, which for me is right up there with the Enterprise D and Star Destroyers. While it's largely stationary in the original Homeworld (at least in the campaign), it's fully mobile in Homeworld 2, giving it an extra dose of utility. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Mirage Tank vs Ballista

Mirage Tank (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3)

Most tanks are performative. They're like those folks who film themselves in the gym, flexing their muscles, grunting and getting in everyone's way. But not the Mirage Tank—it's sneaky. You wouldn't even notice it in the gym. You'd just be left to wonder, "Who put this tree in the gym?" And then it cuts right through you with its spectrum dispersion cannon.

It was already one of the coolest units ever created in Red Alert 2, but Red Alert 3's version introduces more disguises and enhances the unit's DPS capabilities. It can be a sneaky assassin on its own, but a group of them can make short work of an enemy base. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Ballista (Warcraft 2)

I edited C&C: Red Alert's rules.ini file so that attack dogs barked Tesla coil zaps, which was pretty cool. But lightning dogs were not an official unit, so I will instead call into battle the Ballista from Warcraft 2. Iconic, effective, and straightforward: this thing shoots a giant arrow. What are these other units gonna do against a really big arrow? Nothing. —Tyler Wilde, Editor-in-Chief (US)

Attack Cycle vs Super Star Destroyer

Attack Cycle (Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun)

The cheap and cheerful attack cycle is made out of recycled coke cans and implodes when it has a negative thought, but who cares? You can churn them out like paperclips, and a swarm of them will make short work of enemy walls, turrets, and foundries. They are the Nod philosophy crystallised: victory through numbers, speed, and lethal affordability. —Joshua Wolens, News Writer

Executor Super Star Destroyer (Star Wars: Empire at War)

My colleagues have, for some reason, chosen to prioritize things like "funny voice lines" and "subtext" while proposing their favorite RTS units. Sorry, gang: you're about to get crushed by 19 kilometers of steel and turbolasers.

This enormous Death Triangle is the ultimate wish fulfilment vessel in Empire at War, one of my favorite Star Wars games. It's not a top-tier RTS, but it is top-tier Star Wars fantasy in game form, letting you move around a bunch of little toy ships and play out the "what if" of throwing Rogue Squadron's ace pilots up against a Star Destroyer. They've got a real chance in that fight, but not against the Executor, Darth Vader's personal ride.

The damn thing is practically the size of Manhattan, and you can really feel that scale in the game. It makes regular Star Destroys look like Doritos by comparison. It's swimming with so many turbolaser batteries it can bully an entire Rebel fleet by itself. Don't even try that A-Wing trick against it—that sort of nonsense only works in the movies. —Wes Fenlon, Senior Editor

Atreides Sonic Tank vs Dolphin

Atreides Sonic Tank (Dune 2)

I couldn't let a list like this go by without a unit from the absolute goat, Dune 2. It was hard to pick just one, but the House Atreides Sonic Tank is not only an absolute beast of a unit that melts infantry like a pat of butter at the beach, but also represents all of the weirdness and imagination of the source material. —Russell Adderson, Contributor

Dolphin (Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2)

The Dolphin—what a superstar. You could be forgiven for treating these sleek, squeaky critters like nothing more than scouts, with their lack of armour and impressive speed. But you'd be wrong. They are killers.

In a group, Dolphins are unstoppable gods of war, able to deftly take out buildings and vessels with their sonic blasts. They should be feared and respected. Sure, the Soviets think they have naval superiority, but once the Allies start churning out Dolphins, it's game over, man. —Fraser Brown, Online Editor

Peewee vs Priest

Peewee (Total Annihilation)

In the dystopian future of Total Annihilation's all-out robotic war, the Peewee always seemed incongruously joyful to me. Though a basic Kbot, he happily marches around the battlefield swinging his arms like a proper soldier, and when the time comes to fight, he lets rip with his arm blasters, machine-gunning an endless torrent of energy balls. Frankly, it looks like fun.

Even the name "Peewee" gives me an image of a cute little blaster bot, which doesn't exactly fit its role as a warrior in a gruelling 4,000 year war between machine consciousnesses. —Sean Martin, Senior Guides Writer

Priest (Age of Empires)

"Wololo." I win. —Jody Macgregor, Weekend Editor

The recent trend of announcing new expansions for older games—most notably Songs of the Past for The Witcher 3—makes total sense when you look at the long tail on some of yesterday's classics. Beloved games now have a tendency to stick around for so long that new blockbusters are fighting for their lives against perennial Steam favourites that look like they could've been released yesterday.

The likes of Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3 aren't going anywhere, for example, and both would be great candidates for all-new DLC in 10 or so years because people will probably still be talking about them. Quake is a much older game, but its recently added episode is part of the same trend. So too is the newly-revealed Thief campaign in Nightdive's upcoming remaster.

Exciting as these expansions are, it's more thrilling to me when a real-time strategy game gets the same treatment. Is this because I love real-time strategy games? Yes. But it's also because the genre has a slightly different relationship with nostalgia.

The Warcraft 3 Reforged: Forsaken Kingdom expansion was by far the most exciting announcement to me at BlizzCon 2026. This is partly because I don't play WoW, and partly because the announcement of a 2030 StarCraft open world game might as well be a note that says 'IOU one bag of magic beans, dated 2030'. But it's also because I feel spiritually seen on some level when developers make new content for an RTS game from the early '00s. It's such an unexpected treat.

More old RTS games deserve belated expansions. There's already proof this is a good idea: Microsoft had been making hay for years with Age of Empires updates before this week's layoffs at series steward World's Edge—Age of Empires 2 is still vastly more popular than the far newer AoE4.

The arrival of a new Warcraft 3 expansion, even if it exists to salvage the legacy of a maligned remaster, potentially makes it a trend. God, I hope so! The RTS is a particularly good fit for this approach precisely because the genre has been stagnant for so many years.

Chronosphere ready

This is not a new observation. We've documented the ups and downs of the RTS on PCG numerous times—most recently in 2024, which saw a slew of disappointing games hit at once, like Company of Heroes 3, Stormgate and Homeworld 3. There are outliers like last year's Tempest Rising, which ticks a lot of the right boxes, but that too is a nostalgia play for its remixing of Command & Conquer elements. Like adventure games or immersive sims, the RTS is a genre where a lot of old favourites loom large.

That's exactly why reheating some of these games with new DLC is the right approach. Last month, Relic revealed that Dawn of War: Definitive Edition has sold 750,000 copies. The remaster is available at a budget price ($30/£24) and has a discount if you owned the original version, but that's a great result for a lightly spruced up two-decade-old RTS. You have to imagine that a new faction and a slew of new missions and maps for $10-15 would probably go down pretty well, given the persistent interest in faction mods for the game.

Along similar lines: in an ideal world, we would've had a Red Alert 2 remaster long before now. We didn't get one of those—but we did get a refresh of the original C&C and Red Alert back in 2020. May I controversially suggest that Yuri, the psychic commander from RA2, travel back in time to the events of Red Alert 1 to try and defeat that reality's Stalin? Or for a less egregious suggestion: a whole expansion themed around the giant ants missions from Counterstrike?

A cheapish mission pack and additional faction would reheat interest in a game that hundreds of thousands of us have kicking around our Steam libraries. Of course, this would require EA to actually do something with one of its old franchises, which is a big ask.

Taking the approach of a re-release combined with new content would be a great fit for the likes of Rise of Nations, Supreme Commander, Dune 2 (another Westwood classic) or Star Wars: Empire at War. If the concept of a 'remaster' seems vague in an age where all the RTS games we bought 20 years ago still look and play fine on a modern PC, creating new stuff for them is a decent enough reason for a repackaged version to exist.

Warcraft 3 Reforged is roughly following the same playbook as Age of Empires, even if the focus of the content is getting something of a mixed response on Reddit. I hope that's not the end of it.

Creating new RTS games that people can get excited about is a worthy cause, even though it doesn't seem to be a profitable one. I wish King Art Games the very best as they try to satisfy the fickle Dawn of War fanbase with December's fourth game. But if any genre has an excuse to ethically cash in on nostalgia, it's the deeply dadcore RTS. Most of the games that players are still excited about, after all, are at least 15 years old now. Looking to the past may not be the worst path forwards.

Since the dawn of time, mankind has reckoned with one overriding question: how do I get in that building and kill everyone in it?

For almost as long, the Stronghold series has grappled with both sides of this conundrum, placing you in the mailed shoes of both defender and attacker in medieval siege after medieval siege. Now, 15 years (would you believe it?) after Stronghold 3, Stronghold 4 is here to put things in trebuchets and launch them at you, and we just caught sight of it at the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

It all looks quite swish—that good old, down-home Stronghold fun with plenty of refinements to make it all sing. Firefly's promising battles both big and varied, with stuff like seven-CPU skirmishes and 14 (count 'em) battlefields serving as the big bullet points for the trailer.

Me, though? I'm most enamoured of the eight distinct sickos who will serve as your enemy lords. We've got an old guy, essentially doing a medieval and elderly version of the old 'You can't cut back on funding!' character from Sim City, you've got a man with a profoundly punchable face and a zoomer haircut, you've got a fellow who seems to not quite be all there, and, my favourite, a goth lady who promises to break you apart piece by piece.

We also see a whole buncha, well, strongholds, which range in design from simple to labyrinthine and range in material from wood to stone, and which it looks like you can really go to town on, design-wise. I must say, I'm looking forward to getting my hands on the game's stronghold-making tools and building me a castle that will last generations. Or at least until someone puts several flaming holes into it.

Stronghold 4 is coming later this year. You can wishlist it on Steam.

Check out our Steam page with all the games, updates, and DLC featured in the show. You can also read our roundup article which includes every announcement from the show in the order it aired.

Warcraft 3: Reforged got a hefty 3.0 patch alongside its new Forsaken Kingdom expansion, but not all of the changes are for the better. Amid bugfixes and new features, Reforged now requires an internet connection to play, even in singleplayer, and it also removed the game's local area network (LAN) functionality. Blizzard did not provide a reason for these changes in the patch notes.

Blizzard does mention that LAN support and offline play are still offered by the legacy Warcraft 3 client included with purchase of Reforged. The company has a Battle.net support page with instructions on how to install this legacy client.

But it's still a frustrating, confounding change: Reforged was an embattled remaster that had to claw back support from the fanbase. The Forsaken Kingdom expansion and 3.0 patch were the perfect opportunity to complete a redemption arc and lock in Reforged as the definitive version of the 2002 RTS. But as much as things have improved, it's taken a stumble in its victory lap.

Always-online requirements have been a sore spot in gaming since they first started cropping up in the 2010s, and depending on where you live, reliable high-speed internet isn't always a guarantee. Even in the big city, outages aren't unheard of, and always-online requirements for singleplayer games remain an odious imposition on players.

The LAN removal makes even less sense to me: LAN party and tournament play have always struck me as an essential part of Warcraft 3's legacy. Why concede this ground to the original game when the remaster's reputation has been so contested since its release? You can check out the full Warcraft 3: Reforged patch notes over on the Blizzard forums. More positive changes include a new graphics mode and a doubling of the unit selection cap from 12 to 24.

I still remember the PC Gamer cover from October 2006 featuring Company of Heroes as the vanguard of the "RTS Revolution." This was back in the day that I would walk down to the local grocery store to grab each new physical issue off of the news stand. I had just turned 17. I was already failing trigonometry. And in my free time, I was building a lightsaber hilt out of parts from the hardware store for Halloween… and trying to keep my airborne troops alive behind German lines on my first proper gaming PC.

At Relic Entertainment in Vancouver that same fall, as one designer recalled, Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' played over the PA system as part of a ritual when one of their games finally went gold. I didn't encounter anything quite that dramatic when I visited earlier this summer to talk with the team about the 20th anniversary of the franchise, but even through all the ups and downs, I did find myself surrounded by people very excited to be making a World War 2 RTS.

A lot of the earliest history of the franchise has been scattered to the wind, unfortunately. The genesis of the idea, I was told, was a story only recalled by a small number of people who have since moved on from Relic, if not the industry altogether. I did learn that the original prototype was created in the engine from Impossible Creatures, a very strange 2003 RTS about creating hybridized animals to fight for you. But Company of Heroes certainly wears its influences on its bloodstained sleeve in a way that remains apparent even today.

"We were highly influenced by Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers," principal programmer Ian Thomson recalled. "That was the era where big leaps in visual quality were arriving, with the Half-Life 2 presentations blowing our mind with characters and physics. We wanted to bring that to RTS in a World War 2 setting."

I was barely old enough to see an R-rated movie on my own, of course, and I hadn't, at the time, watched either Spielberg's epic or HBO's landmark series. I was very familiar with the visual language of them, though, having grown up on Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor, and the original Call of Duty. But even in shifting the perspective on those brutal D-Day landings from first-person to a bird's eye, I remember very little was lost in terms of drama and terror in the opening moments of the campaign.

The Human Element

Relic describes this phenomenon that got its hooks into me as "Humanizing the Battlefield," which they consider a core component to the franchise. In Company of Heroes, the audio and the animations, even outside of cutscenes, made me feel like these little soldiers I was ordering around were real people with lives back home they hoped to return to. They would take cover. They had morale, and could get pinned down or flee if they came under heavy fire.

Your average marine in Starcraft is basically an action figure. But when I zoomed in really close to an infantry squad in Company of Heroes, I found myself imagining: that one is Joe from Tennessee, and I could picture his cat, and the signed baseball on his dresser, and the kinds of pies his mom made for Thanksgiving. It sounds a little twee and overwrought, maybe, but they sold the illusion.

Relic was in the middle of a generational run, too, having almost completely reinvented the RTS formula a few years earlier with the original Dawn of War. After years of Warcrafts and Starcrafts and Commands and Conquers, Ages of Empires, they threw out a lot of the basic design of resource harvesting and base building and made a new breed of strategy game that was all about cover, momentum, and territory control. Another piece of why Company of Heroes felt so much more real is that its incentives led to the kinds of maneuvers and firefights a real battlefield commander might employ.

As for how they pulled this off, it may have simply been the boldness not to cut any corners.

"One of the defining characteristics of the CoH team was that nobody knew how to say no," principal programmer Remy Saville recalled. "Every time someone had a cool idea, we'd find a way to squeeze it in. Cover systems, destructible environments, squad tactics, all of it. The result was a game absolutely packed with features because the team was constantly pushing for more."

Apparently they really knew they had something when, Saville reminisced, people stopped taking lunch breaks just to stay at their desks and play more Company of Heroes. This same maximalist attitude, however, might have contributed to getting the team in trouble down the line. But for now, things were only looking up. Company of Heroes shipped as the highest rated RTS in PC Gamer's history with a 96—still one of the highest scores we've ever given to this day. It would receive two successful expansions, with Opposing Fronts in 2007 and Tales of Valor in 2009.

Into the Cold

Discussions of a sequel were already in motion not long after the first game shipped. And while the first had focused mainly on the British, French, and American experiences on the Western Front, it seemed natural to head East for the next chapter. It would be a long wait for 2013's Company of Heroes 2. Long enough that the kid from before who had been failing trigonometry had made her way out to San Francisco to be an intern at the very magazine she'd once walked to the store to snag every month.I still remember seeing the demo for CoH2 in the office for the first time, before it had even been revealed to the public. It is a very different game. And in keeping up with a bit of a pattern that started with Dawn of War 2, it became another Relic sequel that took some big, divisive swings, and I ended up enjoying even more than the original.

The Eastern Front as Relic depicted it was a warscape defined just as much by Mother Nature's contributions as our own manufactured lead and steel. Infantry left out in the cold too long could actually suffer frostbite. Frozen lakes and rivers could be blown up with grenades, sending tanks plunging into the icy depths. I absolutely loved it. It's still my favorite game in the series, and we might never get anything like it again. But it was not universally embraced, especially by the competitive multiplayer community.

This put Relic in a bit of an awkward spot that I've seen various studios have to navigate. When you release something as genuinely iconic and beloved as Company of Heroes, the follow-up can't just be more of the same. It has to bring something new to the conversation. And inevitably, not everyone will love those new things. Where once the spirit of throwing every cool idea into one game had produced a hit, now it had resulted in a wave of backlash.

Far from being panned, however, our own Rich McCormick wrote in his review, scoring an 80, "sometimes clumsy, a game that can't maintain all its systems, with too many disparate moving parts to feel consistently coherent. But the final result, despite the small losses along the way, is a winner."

Still, the narrative had started to crystalize in the ice that maybe Relic had lost a little bit of that magic from the 2000s. Company of Heroes 2 was good, but not as good as the original, so you'd hear around RTS enthusiasts. And with Dawn of War 3 turning out even more disappointing a few years later, that started to become something almost like common wisdom.I wasn't fully buying it, though. And the biggest reason was a little expansion pack released in 2014 called Ardennes Assault. Taking place on a dynamic map meant to simulate the Battle of the Bulge, it allowed you to move troops around from province to province between RTS skirmishes to cut off enemy retreats and reinforcements. I distinctly remember this as the peak of Company of Heroes as a franchise. Its voiced commanders with rich backstories, reactive campaign AI, and the way it really forced me to pick my battles wisely kept me coming back to it even years later.

Bella, Ciao

When it came time to start thinking about Company of Heroes 3, that spirit of wanting to go big hadn't left the team at all. Looking at the positive reception to Ardennes Assault, an idea started to form of an even larger dynamic campaign set during the lesser-known liberation of Italy. At the time, Relic was working with Sega, who was also in charge of the Total War series. And from my perspective, the influence of modern Total War campaigns seemed apparent.

The problem is that it just didn't work very well. I remember being asked what I thought of Company of Heroes 3 at launch by a colleague and saying the RTS battles were as good as they'd ever been in the series, but the Italian campaign… well, that was kind of rough. Our own Fraser Brown concluded, in what was otherwise a mostly positive review, "right now it's impossible to look at it as anything other than a failure."

"Yeah, we bit off more than we could chew," Relic CEO Justin Dowdeswell told me very frankly. "The idea was great. The spirit of it was good. The team was energized. It was just more than we could get done in time, and that's it."

The road only got rockier in the aftermath of what ended up being a rough launch for Company of Heroes 3. The studio faced two rounds of layoffs, representing a large percentage of their overall staff, in 2023 and 2024. Many of the people I remember talking to regularly when covering Company of Heroes 3 were no longer around when I visited to discuss the current state of things. After the announcement that Dawn of War 4 was being developed by German studio King Art Games—I was later told Relic passed on it as they simply didn't have the bandwidth to take it on alongside other ongoing projects, mostly related to Company of Heroes—I was wondering if there even would be a Relic anymore.But in the meantime, they have split from Sega and become independent again. And while a smaller team than they were at their height, what I saw in Vancouver this summer was a company of coders, artists, audio engineers, and programmers who seemed to be in high spirits. While the ordeals of the last few years would be enough to break the morale of even seasoned troops in the streets of Carentan, they all seemed to be excited about continuing to work on this franchise.And it's still chugging along, with the recent release of the wave-based Final Stand mode last month.

Battles to Come

The picture isn't exactly clear yet for what the next chapter of Company of Heroes might be called."The last chapter was called 'Chaos,' I know that," Dowdeswell quipped.

But there is a team with a drive to write it. The franchise, at the moment, might seem like it's knee-deep in seawater, under heavy German machine gun fire, just trying to make it to that shingle, especially without a large publisher like Sega providing air support.

"We will survive and thrive based on the success of the decisions that we make along the way," Dowdeswell said of their newfound independence. "And I think there's been, I don't know if it's a cultural shift, but a mood shift at the studio once everyone really started to see that it is up to us. The things we do can make a difference for the better, and when things go well, it was us. And I think that it removes any sort of question around, well, whose fault was that? Or whose win was that? Well, it's ours, either way, and I think that's more empowering than difficult."As a Company of Heroes fan, I hope to see this scrappier, independent Relic push forward to victory in spite of the setbacks they've faced since they first got off the landing craft 20 years ago. It won't be easy. But the commanding officers at the front seem to have no delusions that it will be."The industry's in turmoil, and this wasn't a guaranteed outcome for the studio," Dowdeswell concluded. "So I'm really pleased that we're here, able to support the games, and able to celebrate this 20th anniversary."

So am I. I'll crack a cold one to remember my boy Johnny Vastano from Ardennes Assault and send my best wishes to all the former Relic devs who I couldn't share one with on this trip, as tumult continues to follow after just about anyone involved in making games. We've lost a lot already, and I'd hate to lose Company of Heroes. So it's good to see that they're keeping up the fight.

Reactions to the StarCraft trailer shown at BlizzCon this year seem pretty universal. Initial excitement, immediately deflated when the words "STARCRAFT RETURNS 2030" appeared at the end. (The fact it's going to be an "open world shooter" didn't help.) The surprise announcement of Diablo 5 coming in 2029 seems odd too. There were 11 years between Diablo 3 and Diablo 4, but the gap between that and Diablo 5 will only be six.

Announcing videogames more than a couple of years ahead of release feels like a relic of the past. Everyone assumes games will get delayed anyway, and viewers are adding "at the earliest" as a footnote. Saying something is just around the corner earns goodwill, while saying it's three or four years away tells us to gear up for a hype cycle we'll be tired of before the actual game materializes—if it ever does.

Blizzard president Johanna Faries spoke to Bloomberg ahead of BlizzCon. "We want to convey confidence in some of our biggest bets coming forward," she said on this topic. "We're a Blizzard that's going to ship, and ship big, and ship on time, and all hands on deck to set those projects up for success."

Blizzard has so far managed to avoid being hit by Microsoft's recent layoffs, but more are coming next year. It's a good time to make sure everyone knows you've got loads of exciting projects in the works and you need as many staff as possible to make them a reality.

While Faries didn't discuss the possibility of job losses, she did say she wanted BlizzCon to be "a sort of oasis, a moment for real joy" for both Blizzard's staff and its fans, and that she was "completely focused on creating as healthy a Blizzard as possible".

"Preserving that has been my ultimate focus," Faries said. "The unique special sauce that is Blizzard both culturally and creatively. And to the extent that we can perform well for Microsoft, I think that should be seen as a mutual win."

The kids who grew up playing StarCraft on Nintendo 64 must have thumbs of steel. With the exception of a handful of games designed specifically for consoles like Herzog Zwei and Halo Wars, the RTS has not been a genre that's played well with controllers. It remains the heartland of the mouse and keyboard.

And yet, Total War developer Creative Assembly is committed to releasing Total War: Warhammer 40,000 on consoles. The studio's battle product owner Dave Petry told TechRadar at Gamescom he thinks it's a "myth" that controller support doesn't work for the RTS genre and that they've "landed something that really does work."

"Because yes, obviously, controllers are your primary method for using consoles, but it's just an input method. It's an accessibility tool, right? It's how you want to play or how you would like to play, and so we've always wanted to be able to bring that experience to people who want to use a gamepad."

Creative Assembly co-developed Halo Wars 2, which Petry cited as a specific example of a "really strong implementation of controller and RTS," though it benefits from its simplicity. When the more fiddly Age of Empires 2 came out on Xbox it had to have automated villagers who would gather resources and construct farms based on your preset preference, because that kind of micromanagement is a bit of a faff with twin sticks.

Of course, the Total War games leave building and tech trees for the turn-based side of the campaign, and it's only battles that happen in real-time. While the finer points of cycle-charging or drawing missile fire by marching your lord back and forth might not feel as nice with a controller, I'm sure it would be possible.

"I think we are learning that we can do this right, and yeah, it's definitely something that we're all keen to keep evolving as we ship and work on it," Petry said. "I think we've landed in a really solid spot. I think we're quite proud of where we are when it comes to the technical side of things as well."

For the first time since its Frozen Throne expansion in 2003, Warcraft 3 is getting a new campaign. Or got one, more accurately: Blizzard just announced at BlizzCon that it's dropping the expansion today.

In a pre-brief before BlizzCon's opening ceremony, we learned that Warcraft 3: Forsaken Kingdom is a two-part campaign for Warcraft 3: Reforged, the 2020 remaster of the 2002 RTS. It begins with a prologue covering the story of Arthas, the primary antagonist in World of Warcraft's Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

The main portion of the campaign following that prologue regards the Undercity, the capital of the undead Forsaken Kingdom, where we'll find the likes of Sylvanas, Putress, and the Scarlet Crusade.

Alongside the new expansion, Warcraft 3 Reforged is getting a free 3.0 update. Forsaken Kingdom is available now for $30 on Battle.net.

Reforged was not a popular remaster of Warcraft 3 when it first launched in 2020, but a new update and surprise expansion could go a long way toward rehabilitating the project. 2026 is now firmly the year of the surprise expansion to an old game: Forsaken Kingdom joins Thief Remastered: The Tarnished Mirror, Quake: Dawn of the Machine, and The Witcher 3: Songs of the Past in this strange new category.

Tim Curry has died at the age of 80, leaving behind a rich legacy in movies, television, and videogames. As well as playing Gabriel Knight, Premier Anatoly Cherdenko in Red Alert 3, and Arl Howe in Dragon Age: Origins, Curry voiced the villainous Doviculus in Double Fine's heavy metal epic Brütal Legend. To pay tribute to his passing, Brütal Legend is currently available for free on itch for a very metal 666 minutes. You can download it now, or claim it to download later.

Doviculus, Emperor of the Tainted Coil, is the extremely Cenobite-coded bad guy of Brütal Legend, who was originally going to be voiced by heavy metal singer Ronnie James Dio. "Tim Curry just has the perfect voice," Double Fine's Tim Schafer told USA Today of the casting decision. "When we told him this guy was not just big and tough, but also has this kinky side who, when hit with an ax, might scream in pain or squeal with delight, Tim laughed and said, 'Perfect for me.'"

This isn't the first time Double Fine has given their game away for free. Last time it was in honor of Ozzy Osbourne, who has a cameo as the Guardian of Metal shopkeeper in Brütal Legend, and likewise it was made available for 666 minutes. At the time of writing, that means you have a little over nine hours to claim it.

Game of Thrones: War for Westeros—the upcoming RTS from PlaySide emerging from the blasted wreckage of HBO's once-water-cooler-dominating fantasy TV series—would like you to know it still exists and is still coming out. Just, you know, a little later than it originally had planned.

War for Westeros originally broke cover at last year's Summer Game Fest, promising big RTS battles, tricksy alliance-forging between the many houses of Westeros, and "deeply asymmetric strategies, with signature heroes, armies, and mechanics forged from the brutal legacy of Westeros." It was very much a game based on the TV show, and not the more well-regarded but less recognisable book series—you could tell because Charles Dance did the narration and there were some uncanny CGI renditions of Kit Harington and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.

But it's been quiet since then. That is, until an update last week informed fans that "development has been progressing well" in that time, and provided a little more insight into what the game might actually feel like to play. You can check out the full post here, but to my eye it all looks like a perfectly cromulent RTS. You've got swarms of men in armour and hero units to rally 'em, plus some pretty and sweeping (though not yet distinctively 'Thrones-y') maps for them to fight on.

The most interesting part of the update pertains to combat itself. "We are placing a massive emphasis on responsiveness, unit behavior, and physical impact in War for Westeros," says PlaySide, accompanying which statement is a gif of some—I think Lannister—calvarymen absolutely knocking some archers aside like skittles.

It has a pleasing physicality to it, and PlaySide says it demonstrates that "Tactical counter-play can be crucial to winning an engagement. For example, if you see enemy cavalry charging your lines, amassing basic infantry will not save you. You will instead need to check your opponent’s composition and deploy a unit with the specific anti-cavalry role."

It's all a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down—by which I mean the news that the game is no longer due out this year. "We wanted to close with an update to our planned release window. War for Westeros will now launch in early 2027," say the devs. "We remain unwavering in our mission to deliver a real-time strategy game set in the world of Westeros that meets the expectations of both RTS players and Game of Thrones fans. This decision gives us the time needed to continue building towards that goal and ensure that the game reaches the high level of quality we are aiming for."

Getting people excited for Game of Thrones again is an uphill battle. Yes, yes, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was great and House of the Dragon is good, but do we still live in a world where people can get enthusiastic about the Night King again? I wonder, and I think the more time PlaySide has to get its take on the series right, the better.

Back in June at the PC Gamer Show, Relic Entertainment announced Company of Heroes: Definitive Edition, a remake to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of its WW2 RTS that got our Jake Tucker very excited. But that's not the only CoH game that Relic has cooking. Today the studio announced Company of Heroes 3: Final Stand, not an RTS but a "wave defense" game that pits players against escalating rounds of enemy attacks, with powerful bosses and "dynamic battlefield events."

Company of Heroes 3: Final Stand is "built on the beloved tactical foundation" of the RTS games, but expands upon it with a roguelite progression system "that encourages experimentation, adaptation, and replayability."

Four factions, each with unique strategies, abilities, and progression paths, are playable across five battlefields "designed for wave defense gameplay." Eight difficulty levels will provide a wide range of challenges, and it will support both singleplayer and two-player co-op action.

While Final Stand is obviously based on Company of Heroes 3—it's right there in the title—it's clearly intended to deliver a punchier, more immediate experience that throws players straight into the action. "Players can jump right in and experience the thrill of holding the line against overwhelming odds, whether they’re longtime fans or new to the franchise," Relic said, adding that the game "captures the classic Company of Heroes feeling of those pivotal moments where when faced with overwhelming odds, preparation, adaptability, and decisive command determine survival."

Final Stand sounds to me more like a mode in a fully-fledged Company of Heroes game, but it's a standalone release and doesn't require any knowledge of, or experience with, previous releases in the series. However, if you own Company of Heroes 3, you'll get a 20% discount on the $30 purchase price of Final Stand. It's set to launch on July 29 and is up for wishlisting now on Steam.

Have you ever played 'comp stomp?' When I want to arrange an RTS playdate with a mix of casual and hardcore friends with wide gaps in skill level, it's the only way to play without someone (or perhaps everyone except the guy who can time his build order) getting smoked. Load into a map against a bunch of AI opponents, form an alliance with your buds, and proceed to mercilessly gang up on the bots. There's just one problem with comp stomp: it usually sucks.

It can be fun to mow down crummy AI here and there, but it's the equivalent of getting a bunch of people together for a baseball game and then deciding, well, let's actually go to the batting cages instead and all practice our swing next to each other. RTS bots tend to either try and fail to mimic a decent human player or cheat out the wazoo, and if there's no real contest, no threat big or clever enough to push me into genuine improvisation and panic, I'm hardly playing an RTS at all.

Enter Dawn of War 2's The Last Stand, a decidedly Warhammer 40,000 answer to comp stomp. It might be an apocalyptic hell-future where everyone in the universe hates each other, but when you're down to a single measly commander unit and surrounded on all sides by waves of souped-up aliens, there's no time to be choosy about allies.

It's RTS by way of Killing Floor: take cover, work together, kill 'em all. If everyone on your team dies, it's over.

The Last Stand retains the chill vibes of comp stomp because of its cooperative setup, but it's hard enough that everyone in a lobby has to rely on one another. The first few waves are breezy, small packs of jobber orks and tyranids, but soon the game starts chucking much heftier units at you: artillery, infantry with grenades and rockets, and anti-everything monsters and bosses. The sort of stuff you can't kill with just one unit.

With enough kiting and clever use of whatever active abilities you've brought with you, getting through all 20 waves is a doable, lengthy challenge. But the game does not make it easy, and that's the best part—rather than ape strategies a real player might use, The Last Stand opts for the blunt force approach. The game tries to crush you in an avalanche of hopeless odds, with one wave going so far as to pit you against exact copies of your own characters, retaining the ability to revive each other and use whatever gear you've collected against you.

It's careful to extend a hand both to novices, who can get a feel for the game without having to worry about juggling several squads or managing the macro aspect that just becomes noise in a rushed PvP match, and to experts, for whom it becomes a de facto arcade mode. Score multipliers stack up based on how long you all go without dying, how many control points you're able to hold at once, and how quickly you best each wave. At first it’s a struggle just to see the end, and as you improve, it becomes a race to get there as efficiently as possible.

Where some casual RTS modes try to relieve the tension by making it certain you and your friends will win, Dawn of War 2 does it by making it likely you and your friends will lose, at least until you’ve taken your licks. That sort of punishment is exactly what I come to Warhammer adaptations to drink deep of; it’s the grim darkness of the far future! I don’t want the privilege of an even fight, I want to be beset on all sides, drowning in horrors, sustained by lonely rage at the futility of every spent magazine. It doesn't seem like I'm alone.

When I queue up for standard games in Dawn of War 2 these days, I tend to get bored of waiting before I find a single match. But with The Last Stand? I'm rarely left waiting for long, and you can still find people discussing the mode online these days, 15 years after Dawn of War 2's final expansion came out.

The same is true of other co-op modes in the genre, like Starcraft 2's excellent two-player missions. But I think The Last Stand has a unique quality that makes it worth going back to even if you don't play RTS at all: it mutates the genre’s DNA so much that it actually just cracks the code on a PvE MOBA, and because it's (almost) the only one, it takes the genre crown by default.

To MO-BE, or not to MO-BE

In this mode, nearly all the conventions of standard RTS play are stripped away. You only control a single hero unit, and you cycle between a few simple abilities restrained by resource costs and cooldowns. Sound familiar?

Dawn of War 2's standard PvP modes had already (controversially, at the time) done away with base-building and labyrinthine research trees to focus on lean, tactical scraps. Last Stand just takes that distillation to its natural conclusion.

You might think of this as cynical trend-chasing now that the traditional RTS is an aging carcass and MOBAs remain a big deal, but The Last Stand first debuted in October 2009—the same month League of Legends released. If anything, the mode was sort of forward-thinking for its time.

It's the perfect time for it to have come out, I reckon, because it has a lot of MOBA-esque ideas without feeling too similar to League or Dota. It feels like the result of alike influences rather than an impulse to ride the wave. As you play, you unlock wargear: weapons, accessories, and armor, each of which grants you new abilities and fundamentally alters your playstyle. Two space marine captains at the same level might play completely differently, with one toting a supportive healing aura and ranged bolter and the other tackling every witch in sight with lightning claws and heavy armor.

Even today, when there are so many great Warhammer-themed games all competing for your attention, it has a larger-than-average smorgasbord of playable xenos from the tabletop. Dawn of War 2: Retribution's base roster of factions each lend a single hero: the orkish mekboy can be anything from an oppressive rocket-wielding tankbuster to an explosive, randomly teleporting imp, while the chaos sorcerer can possess enemies (yes, even a clone of himself!) or simply melt them with hellfire. The playstyles range from gimmicky as all hell, like that teleporting mekboy, to straightforward and suitable for learning the game, like the imperial guard hero who can call in a retinue of AI-controlled soldiers.

After Retribution's release, The Last Stand was furnished with a faction selection even beyond that of the core game: the Necron overlord and (my favorite) the Tau battlesuit are a mite overpowered, but as a fanboy of the greater good who still wishes Fire Warrior was a decent game, I think I'm owed that. These factions are rarely playable in Warhammer videogames, most of which stick you in a familiar human body or its genetically super-enhanced astartes counterpart, and getting to draft your own uneasy alliance in this mode is a treat for fans of the tabletop game and its lore.

I think it says something about the hunger people have for a mode like this that it still attracts a chatty, if extremely small, group all these years later when so many alternatives exist. Darktide and Space Marine 2 might have bigger, more lavish horde-blasting modes for shooter fans, but there’s just something so very Warhammer about watching all the carnage unfurl from a bird’s eye view, anxiously wondering whether to dive behind cover or charge into melee.

It’s a smooth shot of what I dig about both MOBAs and Relic's more tactics-oriented strategy games, like standard Dawn of War 2 and Company of Heroes, while remaining accessible to newcomers as it straddles two genres notorious for their complexity. Because you're struggling against enemies you often can't solo and there's no economy to manage, no one can outscale their teammates so hard the challenge is trivialized. And there’s just enough build variety that every player gets to make their personalized mark shaving seconds off each wave.

Like plenty of dweebs addled by plastic glue fumes, I am looking forward to the release of Dawn of War 4 later this year, but it is more accurate to say I am specifically waiting to see its reprisal of Last Stand. While I'm glad DoW 4 looks to give diehard fans of the first game what they've been missing for the last two decades, the sequel more or less converted me to its RPG-inspired 'ding gratz lol' way of thinking, and I'm more keen to see an evolution of its best ideas than I am a base-building blast from the past. I got countless hours out of this mode in DoW 2 despite its spartan setup for progression and nearly no baked-in replayability aside from the score attack aspect—the waves are always the same, and there are only two maps.

I'm hoping DoW 4 can remix things just enough to keep it fresher for longer, without compromising the purity nor the brutality that make The Last Stand so special.

Back in 2006, Relic's World War 2 strategy game Company of Heroes picked up the entire RTS genre and shook it. At the PC Gaming Show just now, Relic announced Company of Heroes: Definitive Edition, and I couldn't be more excited about another opportunity to hop into the trenches.

I felt a giddy thrill come over me as I watched the trailer and saw the little GIs hopping out of the boat and storming up the beach for D-Day. For me, Company of Heroes is the best World War 2 strategy game, and this remake looks like it's going to be a diligent upgrade that preserves everything that made the original so special.

Company of Heroes helped redefine the RTS genre with a more tactical approach, popularising mechanics like cover and reinforcements in a genre that often felt like it was about drawing a box around all your dudes and right-clicking the enemy base. Or maybe that was just me.

Company of Heroes: Definitive Edition will include the original game alongside the Opposing Fronts and Tales of Valor expansions, plus a modernised UI, quality-of-life improvements and new enemy AI that Relic promises will provide a tougher challenge. Under the hood, the game is also making the jump to a 64-bit platform, helping it play more nicely with modern hardware while remaining compatible with the past two decades of community-made mods.

The announcement has me excited because it reminded me of all the hours I spent playing Company of Heroes at university, where I was an utter gremlin to almost everyone I played with. One friend stopped playing with me forever after I surrounded his entire base with barbed wire and tank traps before stationing snipers and anti-tank guns around the perimeter and declaring that I had demilitarised him. Reflecting on it years later, I probably would have quit in a huff too. Sorry, Nigel.

In a lot of ways, Company of Heroes practically encouraged this sort of behaviour. Who can forget the Fallschirmjäger Squad ability, which lets you spawn elite infantry from almost any building on the map at any time? The only real counter was to level every building before I could use it, which wasn't exactly practical when you were also trying to stop my forces from kicking your teeth in. Check it out on Steam.

Check out everything revealed at the PC Gaming Show.

Has your mini collection ever been too disparate to flesh out a fully-blooded army, and just thought: "What if all of these guys could get along?" That's the vibe that Tabletop Tavern, a roguelike RTS that has a demo out ahead of its release next week, aims to do.

Tabletop Tavern is a pretty straightforward game on the surface of it. Instead of defending cities on a worldmap, you advance through a linear branching path of battles towards a final boss—along the way, you flesh out your army into an appropriate deathball to take on the final skirmish of the act.

What really sets this thing apart is the roguelike goofiness that would misbalance a regular RTS substantially. While the hero you choose at the start is important, giving you specific bonuses (for example, Ser Edric Valeward likes having rare units and charge units) you can also recruit foes from the enemies you defeat.

This meant that my first playthrough wound up with my ghostly cavalry units rubbing shoulders with treants that I'd grabbed from the final town—and a good thing, too, I barely scraped past that battle, with my treants being the last green men standing.

You can also add items to your roster—giving powerful bonus effects to augment your armies. Despite Ser Valeward being into Charge units, I mostly ran ranged units thanks to some strong items I picked up during my marauding.

Speaking of, Tabletop Tavern's equivalent of rest sites are interesting. When you come across a settlement, you can either simply rest there, allowing you to regain some of your unit's health—or you can sack it, forcing you into a tough battle that might reap some better rewards.

The only critique I have for Tabletop Tavern is that it's a little informationally-dense, and it doesn't do too great a job of explaining how the game works—simply throwing several walls of tutorial text at you off the bat.

That might not matter, though, given the type of game this is clearly marketed towards—RTS battle fans who would rather muck around than deal with the stresses of a whole campaign. The lower stakes of a roguelike also had me messing around quite a bit more than I would otherwise—if I optimised poorly? I'd just go for the next run.

The theming is also deeply charming—you're essentially just wargaming in a mediaeval tavern, and at any time you can pan the camera up and see your low-poly opponent grumbling at your dastardly tactics (little did they know, I didn't have any). Tabletop Tavern charges into Steam come June 11.

Six years ago, in October 2020, Blizzard announced the end of new content updates for StarCraft 2, its storied real-time strategy game, although it promised to continue supporting the game with tweaks and balance patches "as needed." It's followed through on that commitment over the years since, and today (technically yesterday, but I didn't notice it then) brings as a new one, and it's kind of a banger.

The focus of this update is on "extending the early and mid-game experience, allowing players to remain competitive on one to three bases for longer periods," Blizzard said. "We’ve introduced changes to make non-warped Gateway play a more viable path, while also increasing overall strategic diversity across all three races."

The top-line change is a reduction in starting workers from 12 to eight, which fans in the StarCraft 2 subreddit seem generally supportive of, because it provides for more varied builds and, as redditor GoGoGoRL put it, because "shaking stuff up in this stage of the game in general is a breath of fresh air."

"The idea is to force harsher compromises in builds, in that you can't get counters for everything online as quickly," redditor Appletank added, explaining how the change fits with Blizzard's strategy of extending StarCraft 2's mid-game. "This increases [the] need to scout, increase time spent in the 80-150 supply range before everyone maxes out, makes supply slightly less free with expanding, makes it slightly less punishing to be a bit later on expanding as your main base minerals aren't half gone by eight minutes."

Redditor RedErin was a bit more succinct: "With 12 worker starts you have to get a third base ASAP or you're dead."

There are a handful of other economic tweaks, gameplay changes to zerg, protoss, and human forces, and a surprisingly beefy list of bug fixes and quality of life updates—all told, a more impactful update than you might expect given that StarCraft 2 is now 16 years old and, at least in terms of new content development, effectively abandoned. StarCraft 2 players are already kicking around ideas on how the patch will change strategies.

starcraft 2 changed warpgate after like 10 years whattt

— @hatmasteryt.bsky.social (@hatmasteryt.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2026-05-29T18:41:09.643Z

The StarCraft 2 5.0.16 patch is live now on the public test realm—depending on how that goes, it's possible some of these changes will be reworked. The full patch notes as they currently stand are below.

Economy

• Starting workers reduced from 12 to 8.
• Default Large Mineral patch resource count reduced from 1,800 to 1,600.
• Default Small Mineral patch resource count increased from 900 to 1,200.
• Total Default Minerals per base increased from 10,800 to 11,200.
• Default Vespene Geysers' resource count increased from 2,250 to 2,500.
• Total Default Gas per base increased from 4,500 to 5,000.
• Rich Vespene Gas Geyser harvest return value decreased from 8 to 6.

Zerg

• Hatchery, Lair and Hive
  • Supplies provided reduced from 6 to 4.
• Creep
  • Spread/Recede rate slowed from 0.45 to 0.55.
• Spore Crawler
  • Damage against Biological increased from 20 (+10 Biological) to 20 (+15 Biological).
• Carapace Upgrades
  • Level 1 cost decreased from 150/150 to 100/100.
  • Level 2 cost decreased from 200/200 to 150/150.
  • Level 3 cost decreased from 250/250 to 200/200.
• Infestor
  • Microbial Shroud range increased from 9 to 12.
  • Microbial Shroud can now be cast without requiring an upgrade from the Infestation Pit.
  • Neural Parasite on builder SCVs will only expire at structure completion.
  • Now has an auto-attack weapon.
• Viper
  • Abduct now considers Sieged Tanks a valid target.
• Overlord
  • Speed without Pneumatized Carapace decreased from 0.9 to 0.7.
  • Can now issue 'Load Nearby Units' commands.
• Overseer
  • Changelings automatically inherit the current order queue of the casting Overseer.
  • Changelings’ deaths are contagious to other nearby Changelings.
• Mutalisk
  • Mutalisk Glaives now prioritize targets.
  • Arc slop increased to 180.

Terran

• Command Center
  • Supplies provided reduced from 15 to 13.
• Ghost
  • Supply increased from 2 to 3.
  • Health reduced from 125 to 100.
  • Attack damage changed from 10 + 10 vs Light to 20.
  • Attack range increased from 6 to 7.
  • Steady Targeting:
    • Damage increased from 130 + 40 vs Psionic to 170.
    • Energy cost increased from 50 to 75.
    • No longer cancels upon taking damage.
• Medivac
  • Can now issue 'Load Nearby Units' commands.
  • Subgroup Priority:
    • Priority order updated from (Raven, Ghost, Battlecruiser, Marine, Marauder, SiegeTank) to (Ghost, Marine+Marauder, Raven, Battlecruiser, Siegetank).

Protoss

• Nexus
  • Supplies provided reduced from 15 to 13.
• Warpgate
  • Warpgate Research moved to the Gateway from the Cybernetics Core.
  • Warpgate Research speeds up Gateway unit production time by 35%.
  • 'Transform to Warpgate' cost increased from 0/(0) to 50/(50).
  • Warp-in Time is no longer determined by 'slow power fields'.
  • Warp-in Time decreased to 3s (from 3.6s and 11.4s).
  • Warpgate Cooldown Values:
    • Zealot: from 20 to 22.
    • Adept: from 20 to 22.
    • Stalker: from 23 to 22.
    • Sentry: from 23 to 22.
    • High Templar: from 32 to 35.
    • Dark Templar: from 32 to 35.
• Gateway
  • Pre-Warpgate Production Time Values:
    • Zealot: from 27 to 28.
    • Adept: from 30 to 28.
    • Stalker: from 27 to 28.
    • Sentry: from 23 to 24.
    • High Templar: from 32 to 40.
    • Dark Templar: from 32 to 40.
  • Post-Warpgate Production Time Values:
    • Zealot: 18.
    • Adept: 18.
    • Stalker: 18.
    • Sentry: 16.
    • High Templar: 26.
    • Dark Templar: 26.
• Sentry
  • Hallucinations automatically inherit the current order queue of the casting Sentry.
• High Templar
  • Psi Storm total damage reduced from 110 to 100.
• Disruptor
  • Now has a 'phantom attack' weapon.
• Warp Prism
  • Can now issue 'Load Nearby Units' commands.

Bug Fixes & Quality of Life Updates

• Fixed an issue where Carrier Interceptors owned due to a player casting Neural Parasite would not inherit the opponent's upgrades.
• Fixed an issue where EMP visuals did not provide clear visual indication of effect radius/affected units.
• Fixed an issue where Motherships would warp in adjacent to the Nexus rather than overtop.
• Fixed an issue where Guardian Shield visuals would persist even after loaded into a transport.
• Fixed an issue where melee units targeting builder SCVs would lose their attack order when the SCV moved through the structure.
• Fixed an issue where SCVs could not have build orders queued sequentially onto structures already being constructed by another SCV.
• Fixed an issue where Guardian Shield visuals would not update player color post-initialization.
• Fixed an issue where the KD8 Charge could knock back immobile targets during Recall.
• Fixed an issue where the KD8 Charge lacked a placement model and AOE effect radius cursor indicator.
• Fixed an issue where the KD8 Charge would be thrown in front of a target unit rather than at the targeted cast point.
• Fixed an issue where some units' spells would not trigger Protoss shield-damage graphics (Purification Nova, Corrosive Bile, KD8 Charge).
• Fixed an issue where units with burrow move would lose their current orders when told to burrow.
• Fixed an issue where 'Zerg Rocks' were lacking polish. (Now uses correct wireframe, has a Zerg building armour icon, and uses animation state to communicate health level).
• Fixed an issue where a variation of large diagonal rocks still did not receive an attack command if certain portions of the rock were within vision but not others.
• Fixed an issue where attack commands with Adept Shades in the selection behaved erratically (Example: finishing a shade caused the attack target to be lost if the command was not issued by smart command/right click, units could unexpectedly move command etc.)
• Fixed an issue where the Nexus had no indication Nexus Recall nor Energy Recharge abilities' cooldowns were global. Command card now displays charge counters and minimap displays all Nexus range radius.
• Fixed an issue where the Nexus Energy Recharge ability range radius actor would display permanently rather than when the ability was being targeted.
• Fixed an issue where Lurker Attack Spike sounds could be heard through the Fog of War.
• Fixed an issue where Lurker eggs lacked polish during creation/destruction. Eggs now take less time to appear due to faster birth animation and play a death cry to communicate when destroyed early.
• Fixed an issue where the Warp Prism would not display an unload visual model indicator.
• Fixed an issue where the Warp Prism would not display a load range radius actor when the ability was being targeted.
• Fixed an issue where the Warp Prism movement was highly variant/ sluggish if ordered to queue pickup orders or pick up units slightly out of immediate range.
• Fixed an issue where Banelings in splash range of enemy units but killed by enemy units would not spawn an audio cue indicating splash damage had been dealt.
• Fixed an issue where non-disguised Changelings would not play their full birth animation.
• Fixed an issue where commanding Oracles to build Stasis Wards in areas inside their range could result in slower execution than being commanded to build outside their range.
• Fixed an issue where Oracles would teleport short distances if told to build a Stasis Ward while overlapping with other air units (such as other friendly oracles).
• Fixed an issue where Stasis Wards lacked a distinct audio cue for their death.
• Fixed an issue where players attempting to attack a Stasis Ward could easily accidentally move command underneath it instead.
• Fixed an issue where Colossus could not be created/unloaded in space an air unit already was (this mostly affects the predictability of colossus drop positioning due to collision with the warp prism).
• Fixed an issue where Voidray Prismatic Alignment lacked a termination audio cue.
• Fixed an issue where Immortal Barrier lacked a termination audio cue.
• Fixed an issue where beam attack visuals would not terminate if targets were picked up by transports or teleported away (Sentry, Void Ray).
• Fixed an issue where the Sentry's beam attack visuals were misleading due to being significantly delayed during creation and termination. They should now feel much more responsive to control.
• Fixed an issue where the Cyclone basic weapon was unable to damage friendly cloaked/buried units.
• Fixed an issue where the High Templar's basic weapon's visuals and sounds were not proportionate in size/volume to its impact.
• Fixed an issue where Vespene Geysers did not update their model to tolerate shaders if players' shader graphics settings changed mid-match, allowing for re-enabling of the higher graphics option.
• Fixed an issue where Phoenix would not face their channeled Graviton target.
• Fixed an issue where killing a Viper prior to its Abduct tongue connecting with a target would not cancel the abduct.
• Fixed an issue where Nexus would still play Blinding Cloud visuals (despite no longer having Photon Overcharge).
• Fixed an issue where Planetaries lacked or had misleading visual and audio indicators (splash damage impact visuals, sound).
• Fixed an issue where Archons lacked several visual and audio indicators (birth sound, splash damage impact visuals, movement sound, attack physics).
• Fixed an issue where Disruptor Purification Nova cooldown/firing status was difficult to discern. Ability status should now be much more obvious due to increased colour states.
• Fixed an issue where friendly Disruptor Purification Nova range radius actors were displayed permanently, even if the unit was on cooldown, causing unnecessary clutter as unit count increased.
• Fixed an issue where Swarm Host range radius actors were displayed permanently, even if the unit was on cooldown, causing unnecessary clutter as unit count increased.
• Fixed an issue where Swarm Hosts lacked an equipment (weapon) display indicator for the Locust.
• Fixed an issue where Microbial Shroud's appearance happened gradually and unnoticeably due to lacking a sufficient impact model for the cloud.
• Fixed an issue where Hellbat walk animation speed was faster than expected.
• Fixed an issue where casting Generate Creep would only affect a subselection of Overlords or Transport Overlords rather than both variations.
• Fixed an issue where Creep Tumors lacked placement and placeholder models when spreading themselves.
• Fixed an issue where it could be difficult to distinguish if a research structure was active (Twilight Council, Fleet Beacon, Armory, Evolution Chamber).
• Improved an issue where injecting Queens 'shuffle'. Allowed re-issuing inject during ongoing cast so orders are not offloaded to others queen. Long-range orders are invalid if another queen is nearby the target hatchery.
• Improved an issue where units with their primary attack order on a changeling would lose their order if the Changeling subsequently disguised itself.
• Improved an issue where gather orders were clunky for workers. Workers adjacent and move commanding to a geyser now update their command to a gather order if a refinement structure gets built.
• Xel'naga towers can now be selected through the Fog of War. Xel'naga Towers now show their vision range radius when selected.
• Active Creep Tumors will now take selection precedence over Inactive Tumors.
• Active Creep Tumors in a control group at the time of exhausting their charge will now transfer control group membership to the spread tumor.
• Critters and destructible neutral objects have been standardized to share similar targeting/selection/collision values. They will no longer collide with/block player structures or units.
• Larva/Eggs will no longer collide with/block player structures or units.
• Locusts that were previously uncommandable during their swoop animation are now also unselectable (if already selected they will stay selected).
• Neural Parasite will now add the target unit to the current selection if the selection only contains one infestor.
• Protoss structures now generate additional 'damaged' graphical models.
• As larva increases, they will now spread further upwards around the sides of the hatchery. Larva will still start from the bottom of the hatchery.
• Music selection for spectator players has been adjusted to feature a greater pool of suitable tracks for spectating. Duplicate entries have also been removed.
• Slightly polished Oracles' Revelation and Build animation transitions.
• High Templar and Ravagers are now less likely to aggro towards faraway targets.
• Adjusted Warp Prism and Raven visual fly height to minimize clipping inside other models and reduced Warp Prism shadow size on low graphics to minimize shadow-casting on unloaded units.
• Commands to unsiege Warp Prisms will now be issued to all Warp Prisms in the selection.
• Healing Shrine visuals/sounds have received a minor polish pass.
• The Warp Prism will now attempt to immediately siege when instructed rather than prioritizing deceleration.
• Mapmaker support tools now include proper Worker-Only-Path indicators, No-Resource footprints, air unit height modifier doodads, and variable rock reduction units.
• Mule Repair is now set to auto-cast by default (Mules with a harvest order still do not attempt to repair units).

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 review - PC Gamer issue #197 (UK, February 2009)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation. By Tom Francis

Here's something I never thought I'd hear myself say playing a strategy game: "I think we brought the right classes, we just shouldn't have aggroed that second mob. Thaddeus makes a decent main tank now that Spiff is specced for range, we just need to find some better armour."

Dawn of War is now a roleplaying game. It's a strategy game too, but it feels as if RPG is the dominant—if beardy and dice-juggling—gene.

This is an extraordinary shift, bemusing in some ways, exciting in others. Real-time strategy has stuck so closely to the template laid out by Dune 2 and Warcraft—that endemic absurdities plague the entire genre. Who the hell builds a city on a battlefield? Why, how and from whom am I buying upgrades?

Dawn of War developers Relic like to say that Space Marines don't chop wood. They'd already subverted the conceit of harvesting on a battlefield in the first Dawn of War, and partially avoided the unlikelihood of base-building in the World War 2 strategy of Company of Heroes. Now they've found the courage to do away with both mechanics entirely. In Dawn of War 2, you have no resources, no base and at most 11 men.

The 'classes' I mention above are really squads—there are six in the game, but you can only take four on each mission. Those missions are no longer skirmish matches against equal forces, but mini quests to slay bosses, working your way through 'mobs' of enemies. Squads earn experience, and you choose what attributes to spend their points on when they level up—which is how commander Spiff was 'specced for range'. Loot—from 'better armour' for Thaddeus to new grenade types—is dropped by every boss and awarded for every mission.

This is heresy. This is madness. This is what happens when strategy game developers play too much World of Warcraft while they're working on the sequel. And this is, strangely, really good fun.

I don't miss building a base from scratch every half an hour, or managing my requisition and power economies. What I do miss from Dawn of War is the broader choice of units. You only get to play as the Space Marines in Dawn of War 2's campaign, and even then six squads is a slim slice of what that army had to offer in the first game. I'm happy to choose just four at once, but doing so from such a stingy menu feels like no choice at all.

Dawn of War 2 focuses instead on squeezing every crimson drop of murderous fun from those six squads. By limiting your remit to such a tiny band of men, it can ask you to direct their every move with thought and precision. And when you do, the game rewards you by giving their attacks spectacular force.

All your units are tougher than they have any right to be, but the one-man 'squad' that is your commander—you—is a human tank. Send him wading into oceans of hostiles and watch him cut his way out with a buzzing chainsword and a shower of blood. Thaddeus, meanwhile, leads a three-man squad of jumpjet assault troops—human artillery. They land with the force of a howitzer, and before the prone can even stand they're being ripped to ribbons.

Avitus is the tactical backbone of your strike force, and the personifcation of one of Company of Heroes' most satisfying mechanics: emplaced weapons. He leads a three-man heavy bolter team who need a second to set up their guns, and a specific direction to point them. That means drawing your enemies into their fire rather than advancing directly, but their damage output is obscene enough to justify that rigmarole every time.

Tarkus leads a four-man squad of standard marines, useful and durable but rather unexciting. Cyrus's Scout squad are the opposite: fascinating but incredibly weak. He's a stealth unit, but initially there isn't a lot he can do once he's snuck into position. Levelled up and handed a sniper rifle, though, he becomes a superb assassin and munitions-delivery device.

The sixth unit I won't spoil, since he's not unlocked until towards the end of the game and it's a great moment. Whichever you pick, you'll have ten or more special abilities between your four squads, and it's vital to direct them individually and manually. If you don't use hotkeys already, believe me: you will.

There's an urgent need for swift and accurate micromanagement, which means this certainly isn't the dumbing down some will inevitably call it.

It's more of an action game, sure, but one that's intensely tactical in a way DoW never was for the average player. Select all >Right Click is never viable, and that's DoW 2's biggest change and greatest strength.

Personally, my preferred tactic was to lead with my Scouts, stealthed, until they were behind the nearest enemy force. I set up Avitus in the best cover just out of range, and place my commander in front of him as a bodyguard. Then: action.

Thaddeus slams down into the biggest cluster of troops, knocking them flying, and falls back before they can get up. Soon they're blundering after him in a neat column, right into Avitus's line of fire. As the bolter fire pelts their ranks, my commander charges directly down their line, splitting them like a chisel.

Immediately, Cyrus de-cloaks to snipe their commander, so far back in the direction they've just run from that no one can reach him before he cloaks again. My commander, now deep in their lines, engages any ranged units to stop them firing, leaving Thaddeus's men free to advance unassailed once they've finished mopping up the forward troops—and Cyrus safe to grenade any occupied buildings.

The first time you orchestrate a perfect combined arms assault, the satisfaction is enormous. I don't think I ever pulled off an attack with this level of cohesion in the original Dawn of War. I'm sure you can, and pro players do, but Dawn of War 2 exaggerates these mechanics and relationships until they're clear to the average player, and gives you hundreds of manageably sized mobs to practice them on.

The 250th time you orchestrate a perfect combined arms assault, the satisfaction is starting to wear thin. That's not an exaggeration—I fought around five mobs per mission, and I finished the campaign on Day 48. You play one, sometimes two missions each day, so 250 is guessing low.

It's an enormous campaign, the opposite extreme of the original game's brief and jarringly anti-climactic one. But there aren't 50 missions. In fact, there are only about ten, of 15 minutes each. It's just that two of those—kill the boss and defend the shrine—are repeated to the point of insanity. To the point where you start to wonder if you did anything wrong in a previous life.

The idea is that you have a choice of missions spread across three planets. Some are plot critical and marked as such, others just get you a reward. But once you've done all the plot ones available, they just run out. You're left to do the seemingly random ones, often on the exact same map, until a new plot mission crops up.

Missiony positions

The depressingly similar quests come in three flavours

It'd be fine if the missions were varied, but Relic seem to think that 'Fight your way through a series of mobs and kill the Tyranid' is different enough from 'Fight your way through a series of mobs and kill the Tyranid who can burrow.'

Sometimes it's on a different map, but they're all pretty similar. Sometimes it's against a different foe, but once you've done fighting an Eldar mob, an Ork mob and a Tyranid mob, you've fought them all. The differences between the bosses aren't tactically interesting, because the boss fights themselves are oversimplified wars of attrition. And often, even the boss itself is the same.

What's presumably supposed to provide the real sense of progress is the roleplaying game element—choosing how to level up your squads and equipping newly found loot.

This works for a time—some of the abilities you can unlock are incredibly potent, and I excitedly worked my way towards them. Similarly, a few new items found in the field or offered as mission rewards spectacularly outclassed the equipment I had at the time, so there was a little buzz from earning those.

Soon, though, you're struck by how little impact these things are having on the way you play.

I'm not sure I ever noticed my commander's chainsword doing more damage, whether it was a few dozen points or hundreds. Almost every new weapon worth using is just a better version of the one you already have, so your tactics remain the same. The few exotic ones—plasma guns, flamers and missile launchers—do so little damage compared to their conventional counterparts that you'll switch them back out for the boring old bolter.

The same goes for attribute points: the only workable choice is the dull one. When Avitus levels up, you put his points in ranged damage. When Cyrus does, they go into Will to keep him in stealth juice. With Thaddeus and your commander, it's mêlée damage or health. I tried the alternatives for the sake of experimentation, but they just end up feeble.

There are exceptions to both these disappointments. Tarkus and the extra unit you get later in the game are better suited to customisation. Finding a teleporter or jump pack for your Commander is a big deal. And the perk that lets Cyrus use abilities while stealthed opens a lot of doors. But all these things come into play very late in the game, after the bulk of the repetition, so it's a little too little much too late.

The climax of the campaign—that's your cue to skip this paragraph if you want to avoid a mild, non-specific spoiler—comprises the game's best missions. They're the only moments where the scale and spectacle of Dawn of War 2 escalates. They lead towards what would have been an inspired, brutal and brilliantly dark ending, but the game inexplicably chickens out of that at the last minute. I don't have anything more to say about that—except, I hope the readers skipping this paragraph just glimpse the word 'chickens'—but for safety reasons this paragraph needed to end on a non-spoiler sentence.

There's one word in this review's opening paragraph I've skipped over: 'we'. I was playing Dawn of War 2's campaign co-operatively at the time, which is absolutely the best way. The missions are identical, but you and your friend pick just two squads each. Good always-on voice comms courtesy of Games for Windows Live facilitates co-ordination, but you will occasionally grenade each other or wander into an artillery strike. The advantage is that each squad is effectively getting twice the attention and brainpower it normally would, so your force as a whole is reacting faster and fighting more efficiently.

You do need to be able to keep playing with the same partner, though. You're both using the host player's squads, so it's no fun for the guest if he's never going to see his guys again once the mission's over. The host needs to let him level up those characters and play with them for a good chunk of time.

That's not the extent of multiplayer by a long shot. Because in skirmish mode—against other players or AI—Dawn of War 2 is a completely different game.

Taken Apart

Suddenly bases are back. Suddenly resources are back. Suddenly the four-unit limit is gone, the simplicity is gone, and all four races are playable. Weirdly, the only two modes of play are one-on-one, or three-on-three. About the only simple thing about it is that there are only five maps, and of those, only three work in three-v-three.

It is, for your first few games, utter chaos. There are three hero units to choose from for each faction, four resources, nine upgrades for your hero, a three-tiered tech tree of ten or so units, four global abilities, turrets to place, two other players to coordinate with and your much larger army still requires as much micromanagement as your four squads in singleplayer. And before you know what you're doing, it's over—matches only last about 15 minutes. Relic said they wanted to make multiplayer Dawn of War more accessible—I have no idea how this was supposed to relate to that.

It's wholly enjoyable madness, though. Here at last you get to amass proper armies, choose any units, and play as the ravenously-anticipated Tyranids. They're a truly horrible bunch—seas of bony mouths flooding your enemies, while delicate but deadly towers of spines pick the strongest targets to pounce on or eviscerate. Their mechanics are obtuse and fascinating, which only makes me more desperate for a Tyranid campaign, one where individual units mean something. Multiplayer is too fast-paced to get attached to your squads or care much about upgrading them.

There's definitely virtue to a multiplayer strategy game that's over in a coffee break, but it doesn't mix well with the enormous complexity here. Even once I'd learnt to play effectively, I never felt like I had a good overview of what was going on.

You've got too much to focus on to keep tabs on your allies, so the match can turn around in a minute without you knowing why. Neither victory nor defeat feels entirely yours, so you're just less invested throughout.

DoW 2 ends up feeling like a boxset of cool new ideas for strategy games. An action-RPG that's incredibly satisfying but sorely lacks variety; a great long-term co-op game about tightly coordinating two teams; and a hectic, spectacular lunchbreak skirmish game. But I'm left wishing they'd concentrated on one of them, because no single part of this is better than the original game.

Relic started with a classic game and have made a merely great one out of it. In that sense, their attempt to overhaul strategy has failed. But I like what they tried. I think they were right to scrap bases, to forget about resources, and right to focus the game on skirmish tactics rather than economies or larger-scale strategy.

They just stopped short of giving us real choice of units or weapons, meaningfully different missions and a campaign for the most exciting race.

We don't give marks for effort, so the game they've ended up with is all that matters. It's a great and truly new one, just not varied or exciting enough to live up to this particular name.

Special commentary on this classic PC Gamer review provided by:

Demigod review - PC Gamer issue #201 (UK, June 2009)

From the archives: The review below appears as originally written, with only minor changes in formatting and presentation. By Graham Smith

Demigod is gloriously bombastic, the introductory cutscene intoning the slight backstory in its best, booming Christopher Lee voice. One of the gods has been destroyed after leaking company secrets. As one of eight monstrous, magical demigods, you’re fighting for promotion to the suddenly vacant position of Totalgod.

The story needs no greater depth than this because there’s no campaign. You simply battle in individual skirmishes or larger tournaments against bots and other people, the various demigods separated inconsequentially into two teams for the event: the Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness.

Demi war

On their surface, these fights resemble traditional RTS, albeit focused upon one unit. Succinctly, you point and click to tell your demigod where to go and what to hit.

Battle takes place across eight maps, each small and symmetrical, covered with capturable flags and enormous Grecian statues. It’s an appropriately decadent stage for battles between hulking immortals and the AI minions at their feet. One map is surrounded by beautiful waterfalls, another takes place atop the coiled body of a two-headed snake, gripped in the hands of a screaming statue that floats in space.

These battles start small, but by the end levels are obscured by giants, demons and blubberous priests, all casting magic, throwing boulders and wreaking havoc. Beneath this lies a core of action roleplaying, where instead of building a base you’re growing your character by gaining experience, choosing skills and purchasing armour and magical items that provide buffs. In other words, your demigod is your base.

Except for your base, which I’ll come back to in a minute.

The demigod-as-base idea is best exemplified in the game’s most iconic character: the Rook. The largest of Demigod’s semi-deities, the Rook is an anthropomorphic castle imbued with all the wist and sorrow of one of the massive creatures from Shadow of the Colossus or something out of a Miyazaki film. He looks enormously cool, and he’s the first demigod I played. Either by design or by coincidence, this proved a good call, as he’s the easiest to grasp in a game that suffers from having no tutorial and no hint system. Despite this lack of knowledge, by the end of my first skirmish I’d levelled up my Rook to the point where his left shoulder was full of archers, his right shoulder was a kind of automatically firing Tesla coil, while a central tower balanced a trebuchet.

Now with wings

While the Rook is immediately appealing, the other demigod designs don’t make a similarly immediate connection. The game is all about the demigods, and it’s their distinct attributes that make the game a delight, rather than the game modes. But you may have to play each at length for those beautiful- on-the-inside attributes to become clear. In early matches I dismissed Regulus, an angelic sniper designed for ranged combat, as too weak to be useful. Then I realised that his skills, enhanced through levelling and judicious item purchases, make him great for protecting control points with mines and felling fleeing enemies with a single shot. Plus, tell him to walk somewhere and he’ll occasionally say, “This would be faster with wings,” and then you get a skill that lets him grow wings.

All of the demigods have at least one thing that falls into this category: an idea that is silly, or extreme, but ultimately cool in a 12-year-old high-five comic book kind of way. Both the Rook and Regulus are Assassins, one of Demigod’s two classes, and do most of their fighting themselves. Their two remaining classmates are Untamed Beast, a roaring, lizard-tailed creature with the ability to spread the plague, and Torch Bearer, who can use ice magic to slow and debuff enemies and with the click of a button “relive his fiery death.” That is, burst into flame and use fire magic to damage them directly. While burning, he repeatedly screams, and switching back to ice magic afterward is described as “ending his suffering.” Again, cool.

Yeti gain

The other class of demigods are the Generals, who while still possessing considerable personal strength rely on summoned minions to aid them, making the game slightly more like a traditional RTS. Oak is your best entry point, possessing enough strength to withstand melee fights while also able to reap the souls of his enemy’s fallen minions. Once you’re comfortable commanding troops, you can move on to trying the Queen of Thorns, a buxom lady floating above a plant held aloft on the backs of beetles; Sedna, who rides atop a giant cat and summons yetis to her cause; and the vampiric, pointy-eared Lord Erebus, who can reap souls, but also turn into a painful mist.

Using the Generals, there are moments when swarming enemies with minions is hugely satisfying, and times when it simply becomes confusing as to whether my guys are still alive amongst the ruckus of laser blasts and area of effect spells. It’s all colourful and beautiful, but it’s not always informative.

The distinctive demigods, and the different tactics required in the four game types (see ‘Four Holy Wars’), make it interesting to see which character combinations prove most useful. Conquest and Fortress require direct assaults on defensive turrets, for example. Sadly, this can cause matches to quickly become attritional, the inevitable winner clear long before the finish, and fights against turrets fixed in place by a level designer are a lot less fun than fighting giant monsters.

Those turrets, though fixed, can be upgraded via the Citadel at the centre of your other, more traditional base. Trekking back here from the frontlines is tedious, but there are big rewards to upgrading.

None more obvious than the changes you can make to your minion reinforcements, who spawn from portals bracketing each map.

These aren’t controllable by anyone, even Generals, but flow through the map on a fixed path to clash against the enemy’s minions. It’s by these creatures’ progress that you can tell the status of a battle. Upgrading at the citadel leads to new, larger creatures joining your side: first clerics, later the excellently named catapultasaurii, and lastly concrete- stick wielding giants bigger than some of the demigods.

Not like this

You accrue in-game money as you go, and if you’re not interested in spending it to benefit your team, you can instead benefit yourself by purchasing artefacts and items. This is why I refer to my Rook as my Rook.

On my second night of play I found myself online, reading forums and advice on character builds. I thought the roleplaying elements would be a nice way of getting RPG fans to play an RTS. It never occurred to me that the opposite was also true.

I’ve played and loved roleplaying games before, but not like this. Not where I actually paid attention to the numbers operating beneath it all.

Demigod is a Trojan horse filled with statistics. The Mage Slayer provides a 40% chance on hit to stun the target for 0.2 seconds? Man! I am all over that. That will totally benefit my Rook against faster opponents.

Demigod has about a dozen small but obvious flaws right now – most easily fixable, some bewildering.

These include some iffy pathfinding and the oddity of the game world being shrouded by grey sludge upon death. But the one that really matters is that its netcode is very patchy indeed. Joining a game via automatic matchmaking, the server browser, or even a friends list, is a perilous process where a single player with connection issues can prevent everyone else from playing the game. I expect this will be quickly fixed, which is why I didn’t mention it upfront, but at the time of writing, this multiplayer game, with its online matches and scoreboards, is frequently only playable against the computer. That’s a travesty.

Yet I’ve had nothing but fun while playing, both against the PC and when it’s worked online. Demigod’s blending of traditional strategy with RPG stats-based tactics leads to something that at least feels new, but it’s the unabashedly cartoony voices and over-the-top abilities that make the game fun.

Back in 2010, we gave the WW2 RTS Ruse an enviable 84% review score, applauding developer Eugen Systems for "doing something novel with one of strategy gaming's hoariest themes." Just five years later, it was gone—removed from Steam by publisher Ubisoft due to expiring license rights.

Now, in a surprise twist, it's back: More than 10 years after that takedown, Eugen Systems has relaunched Ruse on Steam with all previously released DLC attached, plus various technical updates and full Steam Deck support.

"While we developed and launched Ruse in 2010, the game didn’t officially belong to us," Eugen wrote in the re-launch announcement. "Sidelined due to distribution constraints, we could do nothing in the subsequent years to help the players who contacted us for assistance or tried to obtain the game. Recently, we received the opportunity to return Ruse to our catalog. This allowed us to re-release this pillar of the RTS genre, with some added extras!"

I don't see any specifics on those promised technical updates, aside from the verified Steam Deck support, and to be clear this isn't a remaster: The re-released Ruse is still a 2010 RTS. But, to repeat what we said earlier (that is, 16 years ago), it's a very good 2010 RTS.

The price—$30/£26.49/€30—has sparked a trickle of complaints from people who don't think a game of that vintage should cost so much, but more importantly, user reviews since the re-release are "overwhelmingly positive": 197 positive, compared to just two negative. It's not a huge number, but you have to like that ratio.

You don't see review charts like this every day:

Also note, speaking of price, that if you own Ruse already, the updates and DLC are yours for free—because again, this isn't a remaster or anything, it's just back on sale. Old saves and replays won't be accessible in the re-released version to prevent crashes, but they're still there too: If you want to use them, use the "Compatibility Branch" available in the Ruse Steam properties.

How this all came about is unclear at this point, although Eugen Systems is now listed as both the developer and publisher, meaning Ubisoft is completely out of the picture: Given Ubi's financial woes and restructuring, it doesn't feel like too much of a leap to assume that Eugen Systems was able to score the rights at a pretty good price. But hey, whatever: The important thing is, Ruse is back on Steam, and that's very cool indeed.

RTS games generally aren't my thing, mostly because I'm not very good at them. But I loved the original Homeworld: Enemy AI was too easily exploited (although for me, that's a feature, not a bug) but the setting and presentation were magnificent—more than enough to make it one of the most unforgettable games I've ever played.

I'm not the only one who thinks so: PC Gamer's Fraser Brown, who very much is a strategy guy, said a few years ago that even after decades, Homeworld is still his "dream RTS." That's a pretty powerful recommendation.

For those of you who haven't played it, this is your lucky day: The Homeworld Remastered Collection, with remastered and "classic" editions of that great sci-fi epic and its perfectly fine follow-up, is available for just $8 as part of the new 2K Tactics and Tycoons Humble Bundle. Astute online shoppers may point out that the Homeworld Remastered Collection can be had for just $3.49 on Steam right now—that's 90% off of the regular price—and that is true.

But wait! There's more! (You didn't think I'd point you toward a bad deal, did you?)

The 2K bundle also includes the outstanding prequel RTS Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, which Rob Zacny—another serious strategy guy—said is "a terrific RTS" in his 90% review, and "also an excellent Homeworld game that reinvents the series while also recapturing its magic." Deserts of Kharak is also 90% off on Steam right now, dropping it to just a fiver—so you're already saving money with the Humble Bundle.

But wait! There's more!

I'm really just here for the Homeworld, but there's a bunch of other good stuff on tap too, if you're into the RTS scene. You'll also get:

• Railroad Tycoon 2 Platinum
• Army Men
• Army Men 2
• Army Men: Toys in Space
• Army Men: RTS
• Shattered Union
• Freedom Force
• Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich

These games are quite dated but generally well regarded (with the possible exception, I am informed, of the Army Men games), particularly Railroad Tycoon and Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich, and one of the nice things about RTS games, and strategy games in general, is that they don't rely on cutting-edge visuals to succeed. In fact, I look at this screen from Railroad Tycoon 2, released in 1998, and aspect ratio aside I think it looks pretty sweet.

Of course, Homeworld is just flat-out sexy.

So anyway, if you want just Homeworld Remastered, or Deserts of Kharak, Steam is probably the way to go. But if you want both (and why wouldn't you?), then get the bundle—you'll get a bunch of other good games along with them, and you'll save 50 cents, too! (Hey, every little bit counts these days.) The 2K Tactics and Tycoons Humble Bundle is available until April 24.

Stormgate, the StarCraft-like RTS that launched into early access in 2024 and hit 1.0 a year later, is ending support for online play at the end of April because Hathora, which provides server functionality for the game, has been purchased by an AI company. There's a chance that online play could be restored at some point in the future, but for now developer Frost Giant Studios says it will patch Stormgate so it can be played offline.

Hathora announced in March that it had been acquired by Fireworks AI, and that its support for games like Stormgate would end on May 5. A partnership with GameFabric "to provide a clear migration path and hands-on support through the transition" was announced at the same time, but Stormgate apparently isn't going to make that move.

One possible reason is that Stormgate isn't seeing much action these days. We were quite taken by the game in its pre-release days, and there appeared to be a tremendous amount of support among long-suffering RTS fans too. A Kickstarter campaign drew nearly $2.8 million from backers—that's on top of the $35 million in private funding Frost Giant had already secured from investors—and a subsequent investment opportunity raised another $1.2 million.

But the early access release stumbled, and the 1.0 release in 2025 didn't turn things around, probably at least in part because some of the game's core features, including the terrain editor and co-op mode, were still in development. User reviews on Steam are mixed, with less than 50% of them positive, and concurrent player numbers haven't exceeded double digits since December 2025; the peak concurrent player count for the past 24 hours was just 28. For a free-to-play game, that's not sustainable.

So, the end of online support, as announced on the Stormgate Discord:

Frost Giant said it hopes to restore online play at some point in the future, but that will require "finding a partner to support ongoing operations." Given that Stormgate likely isn't making much money these days, I have to imagine its options on that front are pretty limited.

The one bright spot amidst all of this is that promised offline patch: Online modes will no longer be available, which isn't great for a game in which multiplayer figures so prominently, but Stormgate does offer a campaign and other solo modes, and those will remain. These days, that seems to be about the best you can ask for.

Earlier this year, Dawn of War 4 developer King Art Games showed off its combat director, which synchronizes melee animations to go a step beyond the already impressive sync-kills that were a trademark of the original Dawn of War. As senior game designer Elliott Verbiest explained on the latest episode of Deep Strike, an interview series on Warhammer TV, they're worth slowing down the game to watch.

"We had a few closed alpha playtests," Verbiest said, "and one of the key points of feedback that we got and that really showed that we have something special here was, 'Hey, could you maybe balance the combat to take a little bit longer? Because we really want to see all these sync-kills and all the sync-melee combat that you guys have got going on.' People found it so spectacular that they wanted to keep seeing more of it."

It's something you don't get in a tabletop game—no matter how much effort you put into painting your space marines you'll always have to imagine what it looks like when a unit of orks swarms your dreadnought.

On the subject of translating between the table and the screen, Verbiest pointed out that some things are better not given a one-to-one adaptation—like the necron faction's resurrection orb, a device that lets them bring dead troops back to life. Well, what passes for life when you're an unliving robot. "When you are playing in singleplayer for example resurrection orb feels amazing," Verbiest said. "Your units have been defeated, here's something that brings them all back. Doesn't sound super great in a multiplayer setting."

Rather than letting necrons have an artifact that functioned as a big undo button for death, they added a necron building called the resurrection gallery. Once you've built one you can select a particular unit type, and if one of those dies it gets to come back—though not immediately. It gets across the same idea, that necrons don't always stay dead, without being annoying to play against.

"We've conveyed it now in a way that also offers other players a form of counterplay," as Verbiest put it. "You can destroy the structures, it takes time for the necron units to come back, so there is a window in which you can do things in that meantime. Those are the kind of things we've considered in order to still bring across that core fantasy, and especially for the campaigns we go all out for that kind of stuff."

Another example of that comes in the Dark Angels campaign, which will let you play as their primarch, Lion El'Jonson. It's a big climactic moment for that storyline, giving you access to a figure right out of myth and legend, but one you won't be able to play in multiplayer. Because how would you balance that?

Dawn of War 4 is targeting a 2026 release, and you can follow its development on Steam.

There's something in the water in PC gaming right now. Specifically, ships. Lots of ships. Earlier this month, Facepunch Studios weighed anchor on Rust's massive naval update, adding player-made boats and a vast offshore region for survivors to explore. Now, Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is getting in on the seafaring action, with its latest update careening Microsoft's refurbished vessel to scrape the barnacles off the hull of its naval mechanics.

The elegantly named update 169123 is a typically hefty patch from developer Forgotten Empires, addressing a wide range of bugs and balance issues. But the most significant change is the addition of the Hulk-line, a new main ship type designed to counter fire ships.

There are three tiers of ship in this line, namely Hulk, War Hulk, and Carrack. All three are fast, durable vessels equipped with grappling hooks for close-range combat. Their high speed and armour means they can effectively withstand the heat belched out from fire ships, though they are vulnerable to long range attacks from ships like galleys.

These aren't the only ships added by the update either. Also new to the game is the Catapult Galleon, which replaces the cannon galleon for several civilisations. It functions in the same way, but has a shorter firing range and higher durability.

These additions arrive alongside an overhaul to naval systems that bring "significant changes across the board". This makes balance changes to all of the RTS' ships, such as reducing damage dealt by demolition ships, and adjusting fire ships so they only deal melee damage instead of both melee and piercing damage.

Even fishing vessels have been tweaked, making them more fragile and slower to gather fish, but adding the ability to gather gold from whales, a new aquatic resource. I'm guessing Forgotten Empires glosses over exactly how you extract gold from a whale, unless those aquatic mammals are just really into free-to-play games.

More broadly, the update adds cross platform voice chat, plus accessibility options like text-to-speech and speech-to-chat. There's a big flag update that adds regional garrison flags and waypoint/gather point flags that are specific to each civ, though I doubt this will stop players disingenuously asking "do you have a flag?"

Finally, there's a rework to the Inca civilisation, which adds a new unit called champi warriors, removes access to eagle warriors, and also removes several buildings like lumber camps, mining camps, and mills.

These changes tie into the launch of the Definitive Edition's latest DLC, The Last Chieftains, which bulks out the game's roster for medieval South America. It introduces three new factions, the Mapuche, the Muisca, and the Tupi, each of which comes with its own campaign. Each faction also has unique units like the Mapuche's bolas rider and the Muisca's guecha warrior, a specialist javelineer who heals other guecha warriors when they die.

Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition's consistent popularity has proved there's a big audience for classic RTS action, even as the broader genre struggles to break new ground. Hence, it's a little surprising to see other grizzled strategy veterans polishing their blades for one last stab at glory. One such example is last year's Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition, which further fortified ye-olde castle-building sim with a shiny visual overhaul and new campaigns.

It proved a successful makeover, with the Definitive Edition garnering itself a 'Very Positive' rating on Steam. Now, Firefly's stalwart RTS is getting additional reinforcements in its Winter Update, bringing a bunch of vital supplies to the game.

The headline feature is Steam Workshop support, which itself is supported by a new player tool—The Castle and CPU Lord editor. While not the most elegant name, it's an accurate description, the tool allowing players to create custom castles to besiege and CPU lords to pit their strategic wits against.

Joining this is another tool that lets players create custom trails—strings of skirmish missions that sit alongside the main campaigns. Alongside building whole new trails, the tool also lets players edit existing trails, tweaking the lord and castle configurations of any included missions to your liking.

If you're more interested in playing than creating, the Winter update adds ten new maps for you to build and fight on. These range from a map split into four sections by water channels, necessitating long range siege fighting before you risk a ground assault, and a coastal free-build map that lets you construct your fortifications on cracked flatlands or rugged cliffsides.

The winter update also introduces a 10-mission co-op trail, in which you and a buddy must square off against the Caravan of the Camels. Frankly, that seems like a bit of an unfair fight to me. Two crusader armies against a bunch of dromedaries? I can only assume those camels spit bullets.

Other new features include a spectator mode, an 'extreme' difficulty for trails, CPU castle editing in multiplayer and skirmish, and the usual array of bug-fixes, balance tweaks, and scenario adjustments. You can currently get Stronghold Crusader: Definitive Edition and all its wintry accoutrements for a 30% discount, bringing the price down to $14 (£11.89). That discount ends on Monday.

One of the reasons Dawn of War is still the best RTS is its sync-kill system. You'll be panning across the battlefield watching a disco storm of lasers go off, and in the middle of that inferno see two individual soldiers in a co-ordinated fight to the death right out of a movie. They'll finish with a dramatic impalement, or execution-style shots to the face. Big guys pick up little guys and crush them to death. Little guys climb big guys, plant grenades, then leap off. There's a huge variety of detailed animations for the many possible match-ups.

Dawn of War 4 will apparently expand on that with what developer King Art is calling its "combat director." As animation director Thomas Derksen recently told IGN, "Most people know the sync-kill system from all the way back from Dawn of War 1, but what we did is we tried to expand on that and instead have synced combat really. Every action that you see in the game really has a counterpart, so you see guys fighting it out between themselves. I don't think really any RTS has done anything like this in the past."

You can see an example of that at the 3.23 mark. A work-in-progress animation depicts orks swarming a dreadnought, which picks up one of them and throws it away, then stomps to clear some ground. Finally a couple of orks succeed in clambering up the dreadnought's arm and begin to hack away with axes.

Derksen goes on to explain that combatants are given power levels, and while some combat animations are unique to individuals, others can be shared between match-ups of the right power level. "There's a range of actions that only a terminator can use against other terminators for example," he says. "Some of them we will be able to combine with say a dreadnought or a deff dread or something, but gretchins then have their own unique action sets where they would match up against all the smaller ones."

It's clearly a lot of effort, but the pay-off is a sense of connection with the little dudes down there you don't get in games with more abstract combat. Watching from your godlike perspective as two units take turns to repeat attacks while health bars shrink by predictable amounts is nothing compared to seeing your Force Commander duel a bloodthirster.

Fostering a feeling of ownership with your troops is what Dawn of War is all about, and I'm glad it seems like King Art understands that. As Derksen says, talking about his experience with the original game, "The first thing that I saw and that they did different than most other RTS was, I had a squad of guys there and I could equip them with a range of weapons, I could upgrade them, I could add a sergeant and everything, right? It just felt like I cared so much more about these guys on the battlefield there fighting it out."

Dawn of War 4 had a couple of closed alpha tests last year, has a Steam page you can keep an eye on for updates, and is targeting a 2026 release. I'll be making the wait go faster by watching old sync-kill compilations on YouTube.

I've been utterly obsessed with Warhammer 40,000 lore videos recently. You may not think learning about the 19 extra organs Space Marines have would help lull me to sleep, but it does. I'm jumping on the Warhammer bandwagon at a great time, because the recently announced Total War: Warhammer 40,000 just hit an impressive milestone; it has over one million wishlists on Steam.

Creative Assembly announced its existence during The Game Awards in December. Getting over one million wishlists in barely a month is no small feat, and the Total War team shared a message on Steam stating it's "unbelievably excited" to share more with us all soon.

So far, we've only had one trailer for Total War: Warhammer 40k. It was introduced by David Harbour of Thunderbolts* fame (and West End Girl infamy), and it's an absolute delight to behold. We get a glimpse at gorgeous cinematics of elite Space Marine squads fighting against ork hordes, both with giant war machines onside to level the battlefield.

We also see some pre-alpha gameplay, showing the devastating weaponry that can be fired from orbit to help defeat the bigger enemies. The giant death beam reminds me of the WMDs in Tom Clancy's EndWar.

We'll get to fight both planetside and amongst the stars in a galaxy-spanning war that will hopefully live up to the vast scale of the 40k universe.

The game has excited the tabletop sickos among our ranks at PC Gamer, so much so that they even made their own wishlist for the Emperor that includes all the features they want. Hopefully he can take a break from psychically warring with the Chaos Gods and give it a once over.

What we do know is that the ancient alien race, the aeldari, will be a playable faction, as will the human legions of the Astra Militarum. I can't wait to take the former rulers of the stars for a spin—I'm sure they have some horrifying and devastatingly effective tricks up their sleeves. Do they even have sleeves? I haven't gotten that far in the lore videos yet.

I'm no RTS expert, but I'm nonetheless ride or die for Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. I've poured what must be hundreds of hours into campaign and skirmish modes across the game's four versions, gleefully gunning down gue'la for the greater good and deep striking dreadnoughts where they are least welcome. Granted, there's no record of my wartime victories, as the Steam versions of these games (and the CD-ROM versions of my youth) never had acheivements—until now.

That only holds for the recently released definitive edition, which as Sean Martin said in his impressions is a "sparing" but superlative version of the classic RTS series, but the GOG version has the achievements as well. You can find the full list on a Steam News Hub blog post from Thursday, and they're about what you'd expect.

There are achievements for winning a skirmish and multiplayer match as every faction, seeing each ending across the various story campaigns, and more flavorful ones like killing 666 space marines while playing as chaos marines. There's also an accolade for deploying each of the games' relic units—big monsters like the Greater Knarloc and the Bloodthirster—which was always a hype moment in-game, even if matches didn't always go on long enough to facilitate it.

None of them should prove particularly elusive, provided you can find enough opponents online to get all the multiplayer achievements. There's also "The Grim Darkness of the Far Future," where you're meant to kill 40,000 enemy units… hopefully you'll be fighting lots of imperial guardsmen.

The new achievements won't account for prior progress, as the blog post notes: "With a 20-year-old game as our starting point, we did not have much in the way of existing stat tracking to use, so we had to add that in this latest patch to support achievements." That being said, you only have to finish a campaign to get credit; if you have one beaten, you should be able to replay just the final mission and cross it off your list.

I'm not much of a completionist, but I will take any excuse to revisit some of the greatest strategy games ever made. If you see me in multiplayer, feel free to let me win! I'm just here for the achievement, after all.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 might be a hell of a lot sillier than even the original Red Alert, but it still holds up all these years later. If you never hopped off the classic RTS train, I have horrible news for your productivity at work: there's an impressive fanmade browser version of Red Alert 2, easily squeezed between Slack and Google Sheets tabs.

Called Chrono Divide, it released in pre-alpha in October 2020, and has continually received updates through this year. While you might expect it to be a solo novelty, it's actually got its own leaderboard, boasts cross-platform play with Android and iPhone users, and even has limited mod support. It's all being maintained by solo developer usestrict, who goes by El Presidente on the project Discord.

As the fan game's website notes, "the project initially started out as an experiment and was meant to prove that it was possible to have a fully working, cross-platform RTS game running in a web browser. Now, with a playable version already available, the end-goal is reaching feature parity with the original vanilla 'Red Alert 2' engine."

After importing my Red Alert 2 files and futzing around with it for a minute, it certainly seems like an impressive recreation. It's a little janky and the solo AI is a work-in-progress, but it's a way to play ranked Red Alert 2 on the toilet, which is better than anything I've built in the last five years. The leaderboard reveals quite an active community: player Milk is dominating the playing field with 105 wins and an 85.4% win rate.

I'm more of a campaign guy, so for me, this is ultimately a novelty until more singleplayer functionality is added—still, it's an utterly cool sight and decently popular, if the Discord server with over 17,000 members is any indication. It's free to try, but the developer accepts donations on the Chrono Divide website.

And now if you'll excuse me, I've got to rewatch that perfect opening.

Dinolords is one of those ideas that sells itself the second you hear about it, a colourful blend of RTS and ARPG that sees medieval knights and marauding Vikings take to battle on the backs of roaring, stomping, terrible lizards. I've been eager to try it ever since it was announced, and the first real opportunity to do so is rapidly approaching. At the end of this month developer Northplay is running a closed alpha playtest, and you can sign up to test its tyrannosaurs right now.

In a Steam post, Northplay explained the closed alpha will comprise a "small slice" of Dinolords, though to my eye it looks like a sizeable slab of stegosaur steak. The closed alpha will let players get hands-on with a three-part tutorial, after which they'll be able to explore four distinct maps, two different game modes, and a "'campaign' setup with cross-level progression." That's enough to give Fred Flintstone indigestion.

All of this will let players experiment with Dinolords' core systems, which includes typical RTS mechanics like basebuilding and unit control, as well as the more ARPG-inspired combat. The playtest will apparently focus on the game's Viking faction, though you'll naturally be able to control an array of dinosaurs too.

Lucky lizard wrangler Robin Valentine managed to grab half an hour with Dinolords at this year's Gamescom. He came away convinced it'll prove to be more than a one trick pachycephalosaur, describing it as "mechanically a much more creative and interesting game than you're likely expecting."

A crucial part of this is how your perspective on battles is locked to your titular dinolord, meaning you're always at the centre of the action, as Robin explained: "Jumping onto a velociraptor steed lets me speed between different settlements and battlefronts. Then I'm hunting for nests in the forest so I can steal the giant eggs and use them to recruit new dino species. As I set up my base, I'm enchanted to see that the lumber mill sends out a specially trained triceratops to uproot the trees and carry them back for sawing into logs." Sounds rad, honestly.

If you're interested in participating in the closed alpha, you can request access to the playtest via the Dinolords Steam page. Northplay stresses that not everyone who asks to join will necessarily be invited, and that when the playtest commences, the studio will be "letting in players in batches starting at the end of October."

Every Dawn of War game has been a bold stylistic departure from the last, so it's nice that Dawn of War 4 is looking like a buffet table stocked with all the best ideas from the series' history. A new interview dropped at today's PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, giving the inside scoop of how it all plays out on the battlefield.

"In the end we said, 'no, let's really go with Dawn of War 1, that's our guiding star,'" says creative director Jan Theysen; that's the game that influenced this sequel the most.

Everyone on the team said what they loved most about that first game was the "sync kills." Essentially, when enemy units faced off against each other, they'd actually fight and you'd see individual soldiers being defeated after being hit, rather than just randomly dropping dead.

"We wanted to double down and push forward on sync kills," explains Elliott Verbiest, senior game designer. "So not only just having synchronized animations between units killing each other, but also synchronized melee combat through our combat director system."

But, as with any sequel, the challenge is "you're not trying to recreate the old game, you try to recreate the feeling people had," says Theysen.

So, base-building and large-scale armies are back, as well as factions like the Blood Ravens and the Orcs.

If you wanted this kind of scale before, you needed the aid of mods or to play Dawn of War 3. But even without the towering mechs, there is a generous number of squads and buildings on screen in some of these firefights, which should put to bed any concerns the action will be stripped down.

With four campaigns playable in co-op, the return of Last Stand, and three varieties of skirmish, there should be plenty to tear into when Dawn of War 4 finally gets a release date one of these days. In the meantime, you can wishlist the game on Steam.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

If you lent a keen eye to the Mars Tactics trailer which dropped at today's PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, you might have spotted the ability to establish universal basic income right next to a button which wheels out a Martian Guillotine, or even the option to declare neoliberalism and "bend the knee to Earth's institutions." Come for the tactics, stay for the ethical and logistical burden of leading a revolution!

That's if you care to revolt at all, of course. Mars Tactics centers a conflict between striking workers and corporate enforcers on the Red Planet, and whether you want to brownnose the shareholders or blow them up with a rocket is up to you.

I'm interested in any game that offers an XCOM-like blend of turn-based tactics and squad management, but Mars Tactics' cheeky tone and larger metaprogression are what stand out to me most in the new trailer.

There are those governance policies I mentioned earlier, which seem to let you fine-tune an ideology reflected through your playstyle, as well as a research tree, and gun mods. I'm curious to see how deep the well goes; a scrappy resistance leveraging prison breaks and guerilla tactics against a heavily armed and entrenched corporate master presents a juicy sort of asymmetry. My heart tells me to side with the exploited underdog, but my lizard brain likes the look of those sleek business mechs.

We also get a peek at base building, which is one of the more unique aspects of the game I'm eager to know more about. Solo modes in tactics games can sometimes feel more like a series of puzzles than a player-driven campaign—not to say that's a bad thing, I hope I didn't hurt Into the Breach's feelings—but I'm hoping that in this case, I have the agency to hem and haw about which policies I can't afford to not be heartless about.

Mars Tactics is set to come out May 2026 and is available to wishlist on Steam.

Check out every game, trailer, and announcement in the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct.

Tempest Rising finally broke the RTS curse when it arrived earlier this year, delivering a thrilling remix of Command & Conquer's classic strategy action, while also remembering to add proper singleplayer campaigns alongside its competitive multiplayer.

If I had one complaint, though, it would be that keeping up with the pace of its singleplayer could be difficult sometimes. While I generally approved of Tempest Rising's balance between tension and fun, my reaction times aren't what they used to be during C&C's heyday, and having a little more time to think wouldn't have gone amiss in some of its scenarios.

Fortunately, this will no longer be a problem as of next week. Tempest Rising's next update will bring several of the community's most hotly requested features. Among these is an active pause feature and a game speed adjustment tool designed specifically for the singleplayer campaign, letting you tweak the pace of the action to your liking, or freeze the game entirely while issuing orders to your units.

Adjustable singleplayer speed isn't the community's most requested feature, however. That, apparently, is larger-scale multiplayer matches. Currently, Tempest Rising supports 1v1 and 2v2 scenarios. But the next update will introduce 3v3 matches too, supporting both multiplayer and single-player skirmish.

For these larger bouts, the update will add a new multiplayer map set in Kyoto with four and six player variants, while two existing multiplayer maps have been adjusted to accommodate 3v3 battles. Other improvements include a "full" spectator mode that expands upon the basic functionality added in June, a balance pass for the campaign missions (which should further help with pacing), and, curiously, a 'no bot' sandbox mode:

"We've heard from both new and experienced players that they'd like to load into a map without any opponents," developer Slipgate Ironworks says to explain this last feature. "In this next update, we're adding a 'No Bot' sandbox functionality to Skirmish mode so players can more easily experiment with units, buildings, and factions."

The update will roll off the assembly line on September 9. Sadly, there's still no word on when Tempest Rising's third faction will be made playable in the game, which is a shame as I think it's what the RTS needs to elevate itself from being a quality C&C successor to a classic in its own right.

I always enjoy it when someone with great power decides to use it for great mischief, rather than great responsibility. As is the case of the hacker that wreaked havoc in Nexon's online RTS, Blue Archive, late last week.

As spotted by Automaton, said hacker tapped into the game's systems to, and I am being fully serious, copy-paste the same anime girl over and over. Kurosaki Koyuki is a student players can obtain—a hacker prodigy with a mischievous streak. This event has been dubbed the "Koyuki apocalypse".

As shared by Jambo971 on X above, the hacker replaced recruitment banners with Koyuki, spawned a bunch of Koyukis in the game's cafes, and did this to the game's information page, replacing its title with "Nihahaha" (her laugh) and, you guessed it, more Koyukis.

This prompted Nexon to pull Blue Archive offline for six entire hours, per this official notice, which reads: "We sincerely apologize for the concern caused by the abnormal display of certain content on August 31 (Sun). The investigation into the situation has reached its final stage, and we would like to share the details of the incident along with the measures taken, prevention plans, and compensation."

The post goes on to explain that "The Blue Archive client checks environment settings from the CDN (Content Delivery Network) when launched. These settings are created and managed separately from the game, but records of external access were confirmed … Some settings were altered, redirecting to 45.94.31.77 (Netherlands), which caused the issue.

"Symptoms included abnormal banners, the appearance of Koyuki/Miku"—oh, yeah, Hatsune Miku also showed up later—"in Cafe content, and specific YouTube content being displayed. A thorough internal investigation confirmed no other irregularities beyond these."

In fact, Nexon's keen to emphasise that the hacker didn't do anything nefarious, and couldn't even if they wanted to: "We confirm that players’ accounts, game data, and payment information were not affected, as they are operated in a separate database and always revalidated by the game server."

Nexon will be compensating players for the six-hour maintenance with the following live-service doohickeys: A 10-Recruitment Ticket, 500 AP, 150 Tactical Challenge coins, 3,000 Expert Permits, 300,000 Credit Points, and seven Lesson, Bounty, and Scrimmage Tickets.

I mean, listen—in a professional capacity, I do not think you should hack (online) videogames. It's against the law. It can get you in trouble. However, a quiet little part of my mischievous soul finds this whole debacle, and ones like it, extremely funny; no serious data was lost, which helps. There is a tiny little Koyuki in all our hearts, and she is saying nihaha.

It's a little odd that Age of Empires is one of the liveliest RTS series of the 2020s. Perhaps that speaks to the sorry state of the genre in general. But a genuinely great fourth game from Relic and several well-judged remasters have undeniably helped the series defy the tide of history. In any case, if you haven't been paying attention to AoE's surprisingly strong twilight years, you've got a fleeting chance to catch up on the cheap, as the entire series is on sale until next week.

All four Age of Empires games are on varying discounts for the next few days, while the series' overhauled spinoff Age of Mythology: Retold has also had its price chopped down. Unsurprisingly, the remastered original comes in at the (joint) lowest price, down 75% to just $5 (£3.74). Frankly, I found Age of Empires: Definitive Edition a bit too timeworn when I played it on launch. It looks lovely, but I don't think its design has aged anywhere near as well as its slightly younger sequel.

On that subject, Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has the best deal pound-for-pound. Although not the cheapest game in the deal, at 65% off it's still very affordable, down to $12.24 (£7.24). For that, you get an enormous amount of game, with 42 civilizations to play as and 229 campaign missions to march through, as well as all the multiplayer gubbins on top.

Meanwhile, Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition is 75% off at $5 (£3.74). I must admit I've never played AoE 3, mainly because it arrived to a bit of a shrug on release. But its reputation seems to have improved over the years, so it may be worth a look at that price. I have played Age of Empires 4: Anniversary Edition, though, and thought Relic did a great job reviving the series. $16 (£12) is more than a fair price for it, though I still reckon AoE 2 is the game to shoot for if you're playing the series for the first time.

If you prefer your history with a bit of sugar on top (and by "sugar", I mean living gods smashing up the joint) then Age of Mythology: Retold is the RTS to pick up. As with all myths, Retold has changed with time, but Phil Iwaniuk found these differences to his liking in his Age of Mythology: Retold review.

"Retold is brave enough to play with the balance and the stat values of its source material, and that makes for some knotty, tactically fascinating skirmishes," he wrote earlier this year. Retold is half price at $15 (£11.24), which seems very reasonable for this heavily reworked affair.

You can get all four AoE games, plus Mythology Retold and couple of DLC packs, in the Age of Empires 25^th anniversary collection for $53 (£40), which apparently is 64% cheaper than usual. The sale runs until Monday.

We described Crossfire: Legion as "a promising, if somewhat sparse tactical RPG" when it appeared in the 2022 PC Gaming Show, shortly after its early access launch in May of that year. It went into full release in December 2022, but never managed to gain any real traction with players, and now, a year and a half after its last update, it's going away for good.

"It is with the deepest regret to inform you that we will be officially ending active development and support for Crossfire: Legion," the team said in an announcement on Steam.

"As part of this process, Crossfire: Legion will be delisted from the Steam Store on Aug 18th, at 18:00 PDT and will no longer be available for new purchases. However, players who already own the game will retain full access through their Steam Library."

It's not a surprising outcome—it's been a year since Crossfire: Legion surpassed a single-digit concurrent player count on Steam—but disappointing nonetheless. The Crossfire FPS the game is based on isn't well known in the West but it's a big deal in China and South Korea, which I imagine publisher Smilegate would give it a running start. Legion was also developed by Blackbird Interactive, the studio behind the outstanding RTS games Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak and Homeworld 3. The pieces all seemed to be there, but the players simply were not.

The good news is that the delisting doesn't mean the end of the game. If you own it, you'll be able to continue as always, although developers warned that the lack of updates and support means "multiplayer functionality may degrade over time or become unavailable in the future."

If you're curious what you've missed out on, a Crossfire: Legion demo remains available on Steam. If you're suitably impressed but don't feel like springing the full $20 for it, you can pick up a Steam key for $4.49 from Fanatical.

Throwback RTS Tempest Rising is one of my favourite games from this year, a spectacular and thrilling tribute to Westwood's tragically absent Command and Conquer series. I thought its twin campaigns were pretty much perfect when I reviewed it a couple of months back, which is possibly why its first major update focuses mainly on multiplayer.

Titled the "Rally and Recon" update, the patch substantially expands and refines player-on-player warfare. Its biggest additions are a ranked mode for 2v2 play complete with leaderboards, and the ability to queue for 2v2 matches either solo or with your friends. It also adds the "much requested" ability to adjust population cap for multiplayer matches, letting you play with anywhere between 100 and 500 li'l guys.

Among these are a couple of slightly smaller additions, such as a proper lobby chat system so you don't have to sit in textual silence while waiting for a match, and a "basic" spectator mode which developer Slipgate Ironworks defines as "V1", suggesting that it'll be improved over time.

Outside of these broader features, the update extends the online battlefield with six new maps. Four of these are designed for 2v2 play, with the remaining two are built around 1v1 warfare. All maps are repurposed affairs rather than being entirely new, but on the plus side, one of them is called "Emptied Hopes" which sounds like the name of a spaceship in Halo.

All of this arrives alongside an extensive rebalance for existing units. Slipgate provides a detailed breakdown of how each unit is affected in the patch notes, but the gist is to establish "a more formal Early/Mid/Late pacing for tech progression."

This affects each faction differently. For the GFD, it means a nerf to the intel-generating spy drones support power, but a buff for the hunter tank. The Tempest Dynasty, meanwhile, get slower resource harvesting, but more effective second-tier units, such as the missile-spewing Porcupine truck.

It's great that the multiplayer mode is getting such thorough attention. But I mainly want to know what's going on with the game's third playable faction. Slipgate stated it'd be coming sometime after launch, but haven't said much about it since. It is a much weirder faction than the other two, so it isn't surprising you could only fight against them in the campaign on launch. But I hope it gets folded into the main game soon, if only to give it something that isn't directly borrowed from the C&C games of yore.

HBO's first Game of Thrones series didn't feature nearly enough dragon scenes, if you ask me. My favorite mythical beasties mostly showed up for a passing greeting or to die within seconds, but it sounds like that's a problem PlaySide's upcoming RTS, Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, could remedy.

"The dragons have been a big focus for us," game director Ryan McMahon told me during a Summer Game Fest interview. "We've actually got a bit of an R&D team specifically for dragons. People that are dedicated to just making the dragons."

Even as someone who read and watched it all, I'm still impressed by how thorough and intense fans get in Game of Thrones lore debates. The PlaySide team finds themselves in many of those same debates, which are complicated by unreliable character sources and differences between the books and shows.

There's one question in particular they've spent ages debating: What happens when a dragon dies? While they don't speculate on what counts as definitive canon, the team does internally discuss whether or not some dragon details will be brought into the game.

McMahon didn't seem fully committed to implementing any one theory just yet, but clearly wants War for Westeros to investigate those details and how it affects the environment. A PlaySide spokesperson even chimed in, explaining the questions that came up as the team investigated the precedents set by the books and show.

"The implication is that when a dragon crashes into the ground, it explodes like a nuclear bomb," said PlaySide's spokesperson, referencing interpretations of some scenes in House of the Dragon. "The back and forth about what actually happens when a dragon isn't alive is absolutely fascinating."

"You know, in House of the Dragon, you see dragons die a lot and some sort of explosion. There are things about why they would explode in death," said McMahon, referencing their fire breath and different death scenes throughout the series. "That has been an interesting debate. Does it [the explosion] happen all the time? Or does it happen at all?"

I can see how that matters when we're talking strategy on the battlefield and whether or not some draconic traits should make it into the game. Should I strategically take my own dragon out over an enemy unit so the explosion catches them all? Or do they just sort of crash and roll into the ground? Does it depend on what they hit, like a barrel of explosives? If I get to determine how some iconic Game of Thrones battles play out, then the flying Targaryen beasts will star in them all.

The original HBO series had its fair share of impressive dragon talent, too, but CGI ain't free, so they were often relegated to offscreen adventures and distant roaring. Naturally, House of the Dragon has given them a little more airtime, but don't count on War for Westeros including anything from the prequel, at least not yet.

When I asked if we'd see more characters from the books or HBO's House of the Dragon, McMahon clarified War for Westeros "is just for the Game of Thrones IP" since the newer series is a separate license. Though he added, "That doesn't mean that's what we're going to do forever."

Correction: A partially misheard quote has been corrected. The developer has emphasized that its discussions about dragons in the game and show are not definitive; we've updated this article to better reflect that position.

I never watched the Game of Thrones series on HBO because, frankly, I get my fill of political awfulness from the real world in which I live. But even without being immersed in the scene, I was surprised how quickly everyone stopped talking about it: It was like the last season rolled and everyone immediately decided to pretend the whole thing had never happened.

There's something of a comeback happening on the videogame front, though. The action RPG Game of Thrones: Kingsroad launched on Steam in March, and tonight at the Summer Game Fest we got our first look at Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, a new RTS being developed by PlaySide Studios.

As you might expect from the title and the fact that it's an RTS, players will take command of the armies of House Stark, House Lannister, House Targaryen, or the Night King, and go to war for control of the Iron Throne in either a singleplayer campaign or "free-for-all multiplayer."

From the press blast:

Engaging in epic real-time strategy battles, forging strategic alliances, and weaving deceit against rival forces will be key. Each faction offers deeply asymmetric strategies, with signature heroes, armies, and mechanics forged from the brutal legacy of Westeros. Players can deploy infantry, cavalry, siege engines, giants, and dragons to break enemy lines as they work to outplay and outmaneuver rivals with inspiring hero abilities and the ruthless instincts of a true war commander.

And a handful of screens:

It'll be very interesting to see how War for Westeros fares when it arrives. It may be a very good RTS and you can never have too many of those, but I wonder how much the Game of Thrones license really brings to the table, and whether it will attract many gamers who wouldn't otherwise be interested in a "classic" fantasy RTS in the first place. Do we really still care that much about Jon Snow and the gang?

We'll find out next year: Game of Thrones: War for Westeros is currently slated to launch sometime in 2026 and available to wishlist now on Steam.

Larian is a certifiable CRPG rockstar right now, having taken the once-niche genre to chart-topping blockbuster status with home runs like Divinity: Original Sin 2 and the superlative Baldur's Gate 3. A lot of people, myself included, started gnawing the bars of their enclosure last year in anticipation of Baldur's Gate 4, an idea Larian mulled over before moving on from the series completely.

And so, tantalizing mystery takes the reins. What could possibly follow the first game to score the videogame equivalent of an EGOT? An easy prediction is Divinity: Original Sin 3, but here's my thought: Baldur's Gate 3 is Divinity: Original Sin 3 in all but name. Larian has taken the CRPG crown twice over and rocketed to space with it. I declare that the only suitable follow-up to a game like BG3 is a similarly seismic revelation—a niche genre must be reared up from the earth and reborn with new panache.

Yes, I'm talking about character action-RTS hybrids like Brutal Legend and the visionary Sacrifice. Yes, I'm talking about a sequel to Divinity: Dragon Commander.

No, you can't force me to shut up about Dragon Commander, and I have an allowance of around 800 words to wax poetic about this bizarre little treasure.

Where dragons dwell

Dragon Commander was always a stopgap for Larian—it released after Divinity: Original Sin's Kickstarter campaign had ended and the studio was about to enter its fourth year developing the RPG—and once the team realized Original Sin was going to take the extra resources, Dragon Commander was, as Swen Vincke put it, "murdered." Not canned, but rushed out the door.

Despite the early release, the game did well for itself critically and made up for its lack of polish with a premise so fresh it's still novel today. You play as a dragon strapped with a jetpack and charged with rebuilding a shattered empire. In play, this manifests in thirds. You need to seize territory on a shifting game board, quash enemy armies in action-RTS battles, and keep various fantasy civilizations happy with policy decisions.

The game is visibly stretched thin trying to do all this at once. The RTS battles are visceral when blasting apart foes in dragon form, but tactically toothless compared to full-on strategy games. Like a Silver League game of Starcraft, whoever makes the most stuff fastest usually wins, and your units can comfortably be clumped into a deathball for the majority of fights. Terrain presents no fuss and economy boils to one all-purpose resource. I'm a complete RTS luddite—I like MOBAs because I only have to micro one unit—and even I found Dragon Commander's battles too dumb to pass as dumb fun.

And yet despite all that, the game is still good! Dragon Commander's worthy of a revisit because the messy RTS action is bolstered and given context by the oldest metagame of them all: cutthroat politics.

Wag the trogg

The lynchpin holding Dragon Commander together is its RPG aspect, which manifests in a few ways. Between battles, a council of advisors try to sway you to their side on various hot topics. Should the free press remain free? Should public schools include religious studies in their curriculum? Are your imp advisors allowed to tear apart a sacred historical site so they can test a weapon of mass destruction?

The noble answers might seem obvious, but it's all about which advisors you're willing to piss off—and who's offering what in return.

For instance, the undead advisor represents a plainly corrupt theocratic power called the Church of the Seven. They want to institute indulgences, win your support for a state-sponsored inquisition, and grant complete political immunity to their priests. They suck! But playing into their hand gives a bonus to luck, making auto-resolved battles a cinch. If you vote against the undead too much, you won't have much support among them, and you'll have to defend their lands with far fewer units.

It's easy to get lost in an RTS or grand strategy game as a parade of stat blocks and spreadsheets, but Dragon Commander is eager to remind you that every soldier on the front lines has a life back home; it's your job to make it a life they'll fight for.

You've also got your betrothed to think about. Early on in the game you'll choose a first lady from one of the game's fantasy societies; feel free to marry for love, but it won't keep you safe from the politics for long.

If you marry the elven Lohannah, you'll win a huge base of elf supporters; but elves traditionally don't eat meat, which might be buzzkill at dwarven banquets. The undead princess Ophelia is terminally ill, and you'll have to find her a solution amid experiment-eager imps and snake oil salesmen eyeing on the royal treasury. Your decisions carry mechanical weight, but it's all tied up in characters you grow to care about. It never reaches for the devastating emotional hits of something like Papers, Please, but it manages to press some of those same buttons in a lighter, sillier setting.

The game's handle on politics is admittedly shallow and its battles are rudimentary, but in those gripping moments where the different elements play off each other—uphill battles spent defending villas that despise your rule, conversations spent wondering how many citizens you're willing to sacrifice to a demon in exchange for power—it feels like the best parts of a bunch of unrelated fantasy epics all ladled into a Michelin star stew.

Larian's later games might be tighter, cleaner, and sure, better. But Dragon Commander has an enterprising, irresponsibly ambitious spirit that's just begging for a second look.

Base-building RTS Tempest Rising released on Steam yesterday, a full week before it was supposed to, and the publisher doesn't see a good way out of it, so the game just has a new release date now: April 17 instead of April 24.

"While the team worked quickly to address the issue, the most seamless solution ended up being to release the game to everyone," reads an update on Steam.

The mistake had something to do with a seven-day early unlock period that was meant to start yesterday. Only those who pre-purchased the Deluxe Edition were supposed to be granted access, while others would have to wait for the full launch. Instead, Tempest Rising just fully released.

The error put developer Slipgate Ironworks and publishers 3D Realms and Knights Peak in a bit of a pickle. Anyone who pre-ordered the special edition specifically for advanced access has lost the bragging rights and theoretical extra hours of gameplay they paid for, but as the studio ultimately decided, rescinding access for owners of the regular edition would not be a good move.

After all, they seem to be liking the game, which currently sits at a Very Positive user rating on Steam. We liked it a lot, too, awarding Tempest Rising an 85% in our review.

The developer is now "working on new exclusive in-game content" for Deluxe Edition owners to make up them losing their early unlock reward.

Well, technically losing it. Tempest Rising did unlock early, it's just that it unlocked early for everyone and not just Deluxe Edition owners.

It's a pretty minor game launch accident all things considered, but it does draw attention to the silliness of advanced access bonuses.

Players who pre-purchased the Deluxe Edition are now in the awkward position of having lost something that it would look awfully petty to complain about: the privilege not to have Standard Edition owners enjoying the game alongside them. But they did lose something they paid for, and they aren't the ones who invented early unlock bonuses, so hopefully they like whatever they end up getting instead.

Anyway, for the rest of us, Tempest Rising is out now on Steam, and it's good, so we certainly aren't complaining about the early launch.

A new report in Asia Today (spotted by IGN) says that four different Korean publishers are pitching StarCraft games to Blizzard, in the latest attempt to bring back the iconic RTS franchise.

Ah yes, the good old RTS. StarCraft rumours come around fairly regularly but rarely do they centre on anything as absurd as a Starcraft 3 following up two of the greatest RTS games ever made: nope, what seems to get Blizzard excited these days is anything but.

The four Korean companies competing to pitch for the StarCraft license are NCSoft, Nexon, Netmarble, and Krafton. NCSoft, known for Lineage and Guild Wars among other MMOs, is claimed to have been pitching a StarCraft RPG, which presumably would be an MMO.

Nexon has pitched a "unique" take on the universe. Krafton, which owns PUBG as well as more recently being in the headlines for Inzoi, is going for something "based on its own development capabilities," according to a machine translation of Asia Today's report. And Netmarble? It's going for a mobile game, so Blizzard's probably going to go with that pitch (I jest of course).

Pitches are pitches and, even if anything comes of these, it will be many years before we see any kind of actual game out of this. But I'd say there are two notable aspects to this development.

The first is that StarCraft originally became a phenomenon in South Korea, with the much-improved Brood War turbocharging one of the most exciting esports scenes in history, and Starcraft 2 keeping that legacy alive. The game is arguably better-known and more beloved in South Korea than anywhere else in the world, and I don't think it's a coincidence that this pitching process involves four giant Korean companies.

The second point is simply that Blizzard's listening, and may even have invited such pitches. The Asia Today report says it has confirmed that "some of these game companies have gone all the way to Blizzard’s headquarters in California to hold presentations in order to secure a competitive edge."

Well. Last year brought the news that, while Blizzard has at least one StarCraft project under development in-house, it's the studio's third attempt at making a shooter in that universe (following the cancelled projects Ghost and Ares). "If it's not cancelled," said author Jason Schreier at the time. "I mean, this is Blizzard after all. Yes, that is a project that, as far as I knew, was in development. At least, as of the time that I wrote this book [...] this felt like such an interesting and useful nugget to include because it really just shows you that Blizzard cannot quit StarCraft shooters."

If you sense that the wind might be changing for StarCraft, you're not alone, but let's not get our hopes up. Recent years have brought nice things like StarCraft: Remastered and a crossover with Hearthstone, as well as a new tabletop miniatures game announced last week, though nary a hint of the number three (feels familiar). All new StarCraft stuff is welcome, and perhaps one of Blizzard's suitors will make a great game. But make no mistake: I love StarCraft because it's an amazing real-time strategy game and, if that isn't in some way part of its future DNA, I'm not sure that love will last.

Age of Mythology has had a long, strong history as the weirdest and most cult-like of the Age RTS series. Last year we got the release of Age of Mythology: Retold, which updated and revamped it for modern audiences. The community who still love and support the game have received it pretty well, with thousands online every day to play the enriched version of their favorite RTS. It recently got a big expansion, Immortal Pillars, adding a pantheon of Chinese gods and a Chinese faction alongside the Greeks, Norse, Egyptians, and Atlanteans of the base game.

In making a fresh expansion, senior director of production Earnest Yuen and the team at World's Edge realized that they'd have to abandon some elements of the Chinese faction in Age of Mythology's first remaster, the 2014 Extended Edition.

"To be open, we deliberately chose not to closely adhere to the original. We have all played the original expansion of course, so we understand what was good about it and what can be improved," Yuen said. "Even folks who did work on the original felt that we should rework the expansion with the experiences the team have gained now."

It's a little surprising for an expansion on a decades-old game, but not too much so. When I spoke with Yuen and the World's Edge developers at the start of 2024 as Age of Mythology Retold was revealed, they showed themselves to be huge fans of the game. They told me at the time they wanted to go "way beyond what we normally do for definitive editions" in order to build an epic as older players remembered it, rather than as it was in 2002. "We want to build the game in your head," he said.

The same held true for Immortal Pillars: they wanted to make the expansion you imagined for Age of Mythology, not the expansion that actually existed a decade ago. They didn't explicitly say it, but to me it was clear that Immortal Pillars either had to be up to 2025 standards or it shouldn't exist at all.

Good gods

"One of our key goals early on was to unleash our creative team to be free to 100% completely reimagine and rebuild the pantheon from the ground up, showcasing what a modern take of a Chinese pantheon would look like in 2025," said Yuen. "We wanted to reimagine the Chinese pantheon based on authentic Chinese mythology, which includes collaborating with experts and partners in China to create this expansion. Chinese mythology stories run incredibly deep, and we had a hard time picking which gods would make the final cut."

Some of those choices were informed by how players engage with Age of Mythology Retold. The team at World's Edge does their best to monitor social metrics—how people are talking about the game—and the hard data they get from people playing matches. That's part of what told them that a lot of AoM players really enjoyed skirmish and singleplayer game types against the AI, which lead to the development of the PvE Arena of the Gods mode released last year. That meant that a priority of design for the Chinese pantheon had to fit with the flashy "look at these cool battles" draw of that mode.

"It has so many incredible-looking Myth units which really makes any big battles look epic. I mean, we now have even more flying dragons and new flying tigers," said Yuen, adding that Immortal Pillars also includes a singleplayer campaign.

Not all design was informed by the need to look good, though. I asked Yuen how the team approached adding new gameplay types—there are a lot of cool ideas from the last two decades of strategy games that just aren't present in the core of AoM.

"Of course you have the completely new and awesome ideas like Taotie that eats other units to grow larger and increase attack stats. I especially like that unit design because not only does it introduce a new way to play, but the idea also aligns perfectly with the original Chinese mythology of Taotie representing 'gluttony,'" said Yuen. "I also love the hero Nezha, who leaves behind a trail of fire everywhere he goes.

"The way the Chinese gain favor is entirely different from any other pantheons, as they have to constantly expand their empire to cover more 'favored land,' and the barracks allow you to add defensive tower expansions on the buildings. These and other new features offer us new strategic options to think about building placements in the battlefield."

Yuen and the team clearly just really love this game. They're thrilled watching players come up with new and innovative ways to use the factions and powers they've implemented.

"The players have often created new ways to play the game or use various units and god powers in ways we don’t initially expect. Yes, sometimes it does keep our game balance team busy, but most often it just makes the game fun to watch and play. When the game first came out, I learned a lot from the best players out there and used those tools against other people in our team, especially with the new Norse god Freyr. I’m looking forward to doing the same with the Chinese Patheon!"

So do keep the reviews, comments, and discourse going, Age fans. It's clear they're important to the World's Edge team. "Players may not know this but on top of looking for complaints, the positive comments have routinely been a huge source of encouragement for our team to keep making the game as good as we can," Yuen said.

"Thank you, Myth fans. We love you."

Earth vs Mars is a new RTS in development at Relic, but unlike the studio's big Company of Heroes and Dawn of War games, this one is a "smaller indie-style" game being made under its Relic Labs label, which aims to "explore new sub-genres, experiment, get our creative juices going, and release games more frequently."

The new game is a campy take on a familiar scenario: The Martians, having had enough of our nonsense, invade Earth with an overwhelming force of flying saucers, hover-tanks, and other such staples of classic sci-fi. Humanity's only hope is the "Splice-O-Tron," a technology that enables humanity's leaders to combine "volunteers" with terrestrial animals to create supersoldiers that will fight alongside conventional military forces. But it may not be just human-animal hybrids on the table: The Steam page cites intriguing units like the airborne "cheetah-fly" and the "deadly squirrel-cow infantry." I'm not really an RTS guy, but I definitely want to know more about that.

But Mars, not being slouches in the technology department, will deploy their own weirdo mutants as the campaign progresses, evolving their own army alongside yours. Earth vs Mars will feature a singleplayer campaign with more than 30 missions, along with online multiplayer, a versus mode, and a map editor enabling players to create their own custom maps and scenarios.

The Earth vs Mars reveal comes just a week after Relic announced a new "bold course for the future," built on three key pillars: Continued support and updates for its existing games; "re-imaging" its older games in the form of re-releases, remasters, or "brand-new franchise experiences that capture the spirit of the originals while appealing to a new generation of players"; and "smaller scope" games with an indie bent, which Relic said "will allow the studio to explore new genres and gameplay experiences and continue fostering a culture of experimentation and artistic expression."

That announcement came in the wake of a rough couple of years for Relic, which has laid off more than 150 employees since mid-2023 and in March 2024 was sold by previous owner Sega. Relic said in May of that year that it was "returning to its roots as an independent creative studio," but it also confirmed that its new majority owner was investment firm Emona Capital LLC, which struck me as a bit counter-intuitive to the concept of independence.

In any event, Earth vs Mars is clearly Relic's first big step forward as it looks to regain its footing, and while it's still an RTS—the genre the studio is known for—it does look to be a simpler, more scaled-back experience than Relic's previous games. A release date hasn't been announced but Earth vs Mars is expected to be out this summer, and it will only be available for PC at launch: Relic said it may come to other platforms in the future, "based on the game's reception."

In February 2024, World's Edge announced new DLC for Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition that was slated to be out at the end of 2024. In October of that year, however, the DLC was delayed to an unspecified "future date," and today the studio announced that "after serious consideration," it's been cancelled entirely.

"We apologize that we haven’t provided any updates to you since our announcement of the DLC," the studio wrote on Steam. "While considering the inclusions for last year’s [New Year, New Age] show, we wanted to ensure that Age 3: DE players felt part of the franchise celebration as we know you have huge passion and love for the game. However, pushing to ensure that the game was included meant we announced content before it had been built, and we now feel that announcement was premature.

"We know that this is a huge disappointment, and many of you were excited for more content. We were able to put out a patch for the game towards the end of last year but understand that it was not the size and scope you were hoping for."

Details of the DLC were never revealed, but production director Earnest Yuen said when the announcement was made that it would feature two new civilizations "that have been highly requested by the community." He wasn't cleared to name them, but he did offer a tiny hint:

(Those are the flags of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Denmark, by the way.)

The last expansion for Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition, Knights of the Mediterranean, was released in May 2022, and with this promised new DLC cancelled it sounds like the game will be effectively settling into maintenance mode: World's Edge didn't say there will be no more DLC ever, but it did say it "will continue to maintain servers, rotate civs through the free trial version, and provide Customer Support for any issues you may encounter whilst playing." Given that Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition is now five years old, I'd say it's a good bet that this is where the studio puts a pin in it.

There are a surprising number of RTS romps knocking about these days, but few of them have managed to leave a mark. Pessimism has overtaken me, but there are some exceptions. Tempest Rising—Slipgate Ironwork's sci-fi throwback—is one of them. If you've ever dreamed of a reality where EA didn't completely wreck Westwood's Tiberium saga, this one's for you.

Last summer's demo convinced me that it's on the right track. There really hasn't been a Command & Conquer successor so primed to carry on Westwood's legacy before. A couple of missions, though, don't tell the whole story.

Multiplayer might not be at the heart of real-time strategy (despite the number of developers who have been mistakenly convinced that it is), but it's still a vital component. Certainly it's one of the reasons why StarCraft 2 managed to sit at the top of the pile for so many years. The good news, then, is that Tempest Rising's latest demo is showcasing its multiplayer chops.

Between now and February 3, you'll be able to duke it out with human players across a trio of maps: The Alps (2v2), Oasis (1v1) and Altitude (1v1). If you're more into comp stomps, though, you'll also be able to take the skirmish mode for a spin, too, flinging troops, drones and tanks at AI foes. All to the beat of a heavy, industrial, tinnitus-inducing soundtrack that features bangers from none other than Frank Klepacki himself.

The full game, meanwhile, will also include custom matches and ranked matchmaking, alongside the skirmishes and twin campaigns. It's not too far off, either. Tempest Rising is launching on Steam on April 24, or a week earlier if you shell out a few quid more for the deluxe version.