Best war strategy games pc 2011

Arma 3 is a massive military sandbox game with over 20 vehicles and 40 weapons. Authentic, diverse, open world, Arma sends you to war.

Defeat your enemy on a richly detailed battlefield spanning over km2 of Mediterranean Island terrain. Altis and Stratis are two islands that host the war. With a massive arsenal at your disposal, Arma 3 moves you into the world of tactical opportunity. You are Ben Kerry who must Survive, adapt and win.

The game is also very moddable with an active modding community. This is another RTS game. Wargame returns on a grander scale than ever before.

In this you are engaged in a large-scale conflict where Western forces clash against the Communists bloc. You can command the military resources of all 17 countries involved.

Command tanks, planes, helicopters, new warships, and amphibious units. Enter ultra-realistic battlefields, dominate the new maritime areas and adjust the course of history.

This game is thrilling in its single-player mode and also has multiplayer where up to 20 players can play. You will struggle with lack of food, medicine and constant danger from snipers and scavengers. This is an experience of war seen from a completely different angle.

The pace of the game depends on day and night cycle, in the daylight snipers restrict you from abandoning your hideout and in the night you go outside to search for items that can help you survive. This game is inspired by real-life events. Craft beds and stoves, weapons or alcohol, anything that can help you survive. Make decisions that can be emotionally tough, but necessary for survival. This is a tactical war game. You will experience the bloodiest period in American history, the war between north and south from The campaign depends on player actions and battle results.

Historical battles can be engaged in separately. You are the general and have full control over army composition. This game is not focused on guns, as it takes us back to swords and spears and arrows. An empire is torn by civil war and behind its borders, other factions rise. Take your armor and sword and participate in battles to defend your kingdom. Establish your rule in Calradia and create a new world from the ashes of the old.

It expands the combat system and the world of Calradia. Get diplomatic and carry out decisions that have consequences in the world or just engage in battles. Continuing in the strategy genre, we have Total War: Napoleon campaigns. This game opens up a narrative layer to the franchise. Experience 3 new episodic campaigns: Egypt, Italy mastery of Europe. With innumerable bugs, Sword of the Stars II was basically unplayable at the time of our review.

Could it be better with more patches? Sure, but it released in a state that certainly didn't warrant anyone's money. Sword of the Stars II may be this year's low point, but several middle-of-the-road strategy titles came out this year that offer cool experiences for certain niches.

Men Of War: Vietnam , a brutally difficult RTS, may not be for everyone, but fans of micro-management and a lot of failure can get satisfaction from its challenging levels. YES NO. Was this article informative? In This Article. Comic Mischief, Cartoon Violence.

Release Date. There's a good chance you missed one of these. These are seven of the hardest to find or obtain upgrades that require the Speed Booster or Shinespark upgrades. Weather is important, too. You need to prepare for winter carefully, but if you tech up using 'lore' you might have better warm weather gear than your enemies, giving you a strategic advantage.

Skip through the dull story, enjoy the well-designed campaign missions and then start the real fight in the skirmish mode. Mechanically, Homeworld is a phenomenal three-dimensional strategy game, among the first to successfully detach the RTS from a single plane. If you liked the Battlestar Galactica reboot, or just fancy a good yarn in your RTS, you should play this. Thanks to the Homeworld Remastered Collection , it's aged very well.

The remasters maintain Homeworld and its sequel's incredible atmosphere, along with all the other great bits, but with updated art, textures, audio, UI—the lot. Everything is in keeping with the spirit of the original, but it just looks and sounds better. The different factions are so distinct, and have more personality than they did in the original game—hence Soviet squids and Allied dolphins.

They found the right tonal balance between self-awareness and sincerity in the cutscenes, as well—they're played for laughs, but still entertain and engage. Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak sounded almost sacrilegious at first. Over a decade since the last Homeworld game, it was going to take a game remembered for its spaceships and 3D movement and turn it into a ground-based RTS with tanks?

And it was a prequel? Yet in spite of all the ways this could have gone horribly wrong, Deserts of Kharak succeeds on almost every count. It's not only a terrific RTS that sets itself apart from the rest of the genre's recent games, but it's also an excellent Homeworld game that reinvents the series while also recapturing its magic.

Only Total War can compete with the scale of Supreme Commander 's real-time battles. In addition to being the preeminent competitive strategy game of the last decade, StarCraft 2 deserves credit for rethinking how a traditional RTS campaign is structured. Heart of the Swarm is a good example of this, but the human-centric Wings of Liberty instalment is the place to start: an inventive adventure that mixes up the familiar formula at every stage.

In , Blizzard finally decided to wind down development on StarCraft 2 , announcing that no new additions would be coming, aside from things like balance fixes.

The competitive scene is still very much alive, however, and you'll still find few singleplayer campaigns as good as these ones. Most notable today for being the point of origin for the entire MOBA genre, Warcraft III is also an inventive, ambitious strategy game in its own right, which took the genre beyond anonymous little sprites and into the realm of cinematic fantasy.

The pioneering inclusion of RPG elements in the form of heroes and neutral monsters adds a degree of unitspecific depth not present in its sci-fi stablemate, and the sprawling campaign delivers a fantasy story that—if not quite novel—is thorough and exciting in its execution.

Shame about Warcraft 3: Reforged , it's not-so-great remake. Some games would try to step away from the emotional aspect of a war that happened in living memory. Not Company of Heroes. Age of Empires gave us the chance to encompass centuries of military progress in half-hour battles, but Rise of Nations does it better, and smartly introduces elements from turn-based strategy games like Civ. When borders collide civs race through the ages and try to out-tech each other in a hidden war for influence, all while trying to deliver a knockout military blow with javelins and jets.

It was tempting to put the excellent first Dawn of War on the list, but the box-select, right-click to kill formula is well represented. In combat you micromanage these empowered special forces, timing the flying attack of your Assault Marines and the sniping power of your Scouts with efficient heavy machine gun cover to undo the Ork hordes.

The co-operative Last Stand mode is also immense. If you need a 40K fix, we've also ranked every Warhammer 40, game. Like an adaptation of the tabletop game crossed with the XCOM design template, BattleTech is a deep and complex turn-based game with an impressive campaign system.

You control a group of mercenaries, trying to keep the books balanced and upgrading your suite of mechwarriors and battlemechs in the game's strategy layer. In battle, you target specific parts of enemy mechs, taking into account armor, angle, speed and the surrounding environment, then make difficult choices when the fight isn't going your way. It can initially be overwhelming and it's undeniably a dense game, but if that's what you want from your strategy games or you love this universe, it's a great pick.

A beautifully designed, near-perfect slice of tactical mech action from the creators of FTL. Into the Breach challenges you to fend off waves of Vek monsters on eight-by-eight grids populated by tower blocks and a variety of sub objectives. Obviously you want to wipe out the Vek using mech-punches and artillery strikes, but much of the game is about using the impact of your blows to push enemies around the map and divert their attacks away from your precious buildings.

Civilian buildings provide power, which serves as a health bar for your campaign. Every time a civilian building takes a hit, you're a step closer to losing the war.

Once your power is depleted your team travels back through time to try and save the world again. It's challenging, bite-sized, and dynamic. As you unlock new types of mechs and mech upgrades you gain inventive new ways to toy with your enemies. The game cleverly uses scarcity of opportunity to force you into difficult dilemmas. At any one time you might have only six possible scan sites, while combat encounters are largely meted out by the game, but what you choose to do with this narrow range of options matters enormously.

You need to recruit new rookies; you need an engineer to build a comms facility that will let you contact more territories; you need alien alloys to upgrade your weapons. You can probably only have one. In Sid Meier described games as "a series of interesting decisions. The War of the Chosen expansion brings even more welcome if frantic changes, like the endlessly chatty titular enemies, memorable nemeses who pop up at different intervals during the campaign with random strengths and weaknesses.

Sneaky tactics doesn't come in a slicker package than Invisible Inc. It's a sexy cyberpunk espionage romp blessed with so much tension that you'll be sweating buckets as you slink through corporate strongholds and try very hard to not get caught. It's tricky, sometimes dauntingly so, but there's a chance you can fix your terrible mistakes by rewinding time, adding some welcome accessibility to the proceedings.

First, you manage stockpiles, and position missile sites, nuclear submarines and countermeasures in preparation for armageddon. This organisation phase is an interesting strategic challenge in itself, but DEFCON is at its most effective when the missiles fly. Blooming blast sites are matched with casualty numbers as city after city experiences obliteration.

Once the dust has settled, victory is a mere technicality. Unity of Command was already the perfect entry point into the complex world of wargames, but Unity of Command 2 manages to maintain this while throwing in a host of new features.

It's a tactical puzzle, but a reactive one where you have the freedom to try lots of different solutions to its military conundrums. Not just a great place to start, it's simply a brilliant wargame.

Hearts of Iron 4 is a grand strategy wargame hybrid, as comfortable with logistics and precise battle plans as it is with diplomacy and sandboxy weirdness. Ostensibly game about World War 2, it lets you throw out history as soon as you want. Want to conquer the world as a communist UK?

Go for it. Maybe Germany will be knocked out of the war early, leaving Italy to run things. You can even keep things going for as long as you want, leading to a WW2 that continues into the '50s or '60s. With expansions, it's fleshed out naval battles, espionage and other features so you have control over nearly every aspect of the war.