What are the best strategy games on PC? Turn-based or real-time, grand strategy or tactical RPGs, there are many sub-genres within the strategy game umbrella. For example, in one game, you can command an entire fleet in space, while in another, you bark orders to soldiers fighting on a battlefield as magic flies through the air.
There are so many different strategy games out there, and we’ve got separate lists for the best turn-based strategy games and the best 4x games specifically, so we’re keeping this list as broad as possible – similar to our roster of the best building games. Join us as we explore a curated collection of the genre’s greatest hits, from newcomers to classics, giving you autonomy over your actions – and their consequences.
The best strategy games on PC are:
Rise of Kingdoms
A classic colony sim, Rise of Kingdoms has a cute, cartoon-like aesthetic and tasks you with choosing from a range of real-life civilizations, including Rome, Britain, and Japan. You start with a modest village and build your way towards a booming kingdom by adding homes, workplaces, and farms.
There’s also a story in play, told through the many NPCs you’ll meet on your journey – Rise of Kingdoms doesn’t just leave you to oversee a growing civilization and nothing more. Quests push you forward in your goals and give you something specific to work towards while still leaving many decisions between your desires and your random NPC allocation, combining strategy with RNG.
Play Rise of Kingdoms for free.
Homeworld 3
A new entry in a classic PC strategy game series, Homeworld 3 sees you at the helm of huge fleets of ships, navigating through a seemingly unwinnable war. It may still bear some of the interface clunkiness of its predecessors, but if you’re looking for space strategy on a large scale, you can’t go far wrong with Homeworld 3.
The campaign tells a story of personal growth, huge skirmishes in 3D space, and throwing as many fighters at a problem as you can. If following a narrative isn’t for you, the War Games mode allows you to customize your experience as you see fit, creating whatever scenario you like. Check out our Homeworld 3 review if you want to know more.
Manor Lords
One for the early access lovers out there, Manor Lords is a strategy game that comes bundled with a cozy city-builder; you’ll attempt to build a medieval village from nothing, and eventually take over every region, demolishing your enemies in the process.
While the combat portion of Manor Lords hasn’t been fully fleshed out, the blueprint is there, and equipping your villagers with weapons you’ve painstakingly created is nearly as satisfying as out-witting your foes on the battlefield. Check out our Manor Lords early access review if you want to know more.
Supremacy 1914
Fancy taking control of the world’s nations as they engage in one of the largest wars in military history? If so, you should take Supremacy 1914 for a spin. This is an MMO strategy game that sees you and up to 499 other players taking control of the different countries of the world as you play through the First World War – and things don’t necessarily need to follow the path of history.
As you can imagine, each game takes a really long time to play out. With so many different playable countries (each with its own unique selection of resources available), you’ll encounter a lot of variety. History buffs will also enjoy the attention to detail present in all the cities and units that each nation produces.
Star Trek Fleet Commander
If you’ve ever wanted to try your hand at running a space station, Star Trek Fleet Command is the perfect game for you. Not only can you kit your home base out as you see fit, but you get to construct a fleet of spaceships from a host of fan-favorite Star Trek factions.
Not only can you command your own armada of ships, but you can staff them with famous officers from throughout Star Trek history; you could go old-school with Kirk and Spock, or if you’re more of a Next-Gen fan, you can have Picard and Riker at the helm.
Play Star Trek Fleet Commander for free.
Solium Infernum
This devilishly good strategy game puts you in Hell as you plot to take your place in the throne of the underworld. Stunning, unique, and incredibly fun, Solium Infernum is a dark and twisted political game based on deceit and lies. In fact, Solium Infernum is so good, we name it “the best new strategy game in many years” in our Solium Infernum review. At first glance, it looks like there’s a lot to learn in Solium Infernum, a glorious remake of the 2009 original, but it’s actually incredible accessible, and you can learn more terrible plots and schemes as you progress. We can help you, too, with our guides to Solium Infernum Rituals, SI Relics, and the best Solium Infernum Legions to bid for.
Against the Storm
For a strategy game with a city-building and roguelike twist, look no further than Against the Storm, which got its full 1.0 release just over a year after its early access debut. In this fantasy strategy game, you constantly have one eye on the progress bar that visualizes the temper of the queen – the same queen that has tasked you with created designing her kingdom. With such high stakes, it’s hard to know when to stop tweaking and building, especially when the queen’s patience is wavering.
This, alongside the fantasy elements, colorful graphics, and roguelike elements make this one addictive strategy game, so the score at the bottom of our Against the Storm review may come as no surprise. If our word isn’t enough, add the thousands of very positive reviews on Steam, or try out the free demo for yourself if you’d rather make your own mind up.
Total War: Pharaoh
A clash between three TW Pharaoh factions during one of the least-explored sections of history. Total War: Pharaoh gives us the thrill of commanding our armies on the battlefield, and the deeply satisfying act of maneuvering around the overworld, outwitting your opponents at every turn, all on a smaller, more personal scale.
Check out our Total War Pharaoh review to find out exactly why you should play this strategy game, and how the real enemy may turn out to be your environment and the passage of time.
Terra Nil
Instead of commanding armies of building a base fit for conflict, Terra Nil is a more peaceful strategy game that tasks you with bringing a barren wasteland back from the brink, transforming it into a flourishing habitat teeming with lush flora and thriving wildlife. The decisions you make and the machinery you build determines how successful your restoration is and affects the land around you.
Vita Nova, a recent, free content update, introduces new missions and landscapes to work on as well, each with their own new challenges to overcome. For example, the Scorched Caldera is a volcanic crater scorched and dried by lava which you must attempt to turn into a lake brimming with life. In contrast, another quest tasks you with cleaning a polluted lake and reintroducing to it and the land around it.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns
If you’ve ever wanted a little more deck building in your turn-based combat, Midnight Suns has you covered. Developed by strategy stalwarts, Firaxis, Midnight Suns puts you in the shoes of the Hunter, a mysterious hero who’s been dead for the past few centuries, pitting them against the ultimate foe: their mother.
The combat is thought-provoking and often spectacular, with the deck-building aspect turning encounters into puzzles rather than all-out brawls. The combat and deep friendship mechanics combine for something special, and the story isn’t bad, either. Check out our Midnight Suns review here to learn more about the sleeper hit of the year.
Crusader Kings 3
Talk about a murderous bastard of a grand strategy game. While only time will tell whether this dynasty-spanning, emergent-storytelling successor claims the throne of its now free-to-play predecessor Crusader Kings 2, it’s certainly kicked off its reign with royal excellency.
Crusader Kings 3 has massively overhauled the series’ formerly byzantine interface, making it a welcome proposition for new players while retaining much of the depth the series is known for. It may look like a traditional grand strategy map-painter, and while it certainly features in-depth systems for waging war, the heart of Crusader Kings 3 lies in its personal, often hilarious stories.
Will you seize power through military might, wealth, religious influence, diplomacy, or subterfuge? Each character you can play has its own personality and lifestyle focus, and each member of your dynasty will shape their empire, for better or worse, before bequeathing it to their next in line. It’s a game that makes personal plots hatched behind closed doors as important as battles between nations.
Don’t forget to check out our Crusader Kings 3 review if you’re still undecided. For tips, you can check out our Crusader Kings 3 starting characters guide, our Crusader Kings 3 beginners guide, and our Crusader Kings 3 mods guide while we wait for more Crusader Kings 3 DLC.
Offworld Trading Company
Offworld Trading Company is right at the other end of the strategy games spectrum from Civilization, though its designer, Soren Johnson, also worked on Civ 4. While Civ spans the history and some of the future of humanity, chronicling the progress of mankind, Offworld Trading Company is all about making a fortune by exploiting our red neighbor, Mars.
It’s an RTS crossed with the intricacies of the best management games, one in which victory is not achieved by throwing tanks at enemies or demolishing their bases.
Instead, your weapons are resources and cash, which you use to manipulate the marketplace not just to get rich but to screw over your competitors completely. You might not expect an economic strategy game to be very aggressive, but Offworld Trading Company encourages you to be just as hostile as a warmonger.
When you’re eyeing up menus, planning what to build next, what to sell, which company to launch a hostile takeover against next, it’s easily as thrilling as when you’re sending infantry across artillery-pummelled fields or launching sneak air attacks against an enemy stronghold in Company of Heroes or StarCraft 2.
XCOM 2
XCOM 2 is one of the best turn-based strategy games, and we gave it a really good score in our XCOM 2 review. It takes the best bits from the series so far – the savage struggle, the ragtag group of heroes, the devious aliens, the tight tactical battles – and throws improvement after improvement on top.
It’s a toss-up as to whether the War of the Chosen expansion is objectively better, but there are plenty of excellent XCOM 2 mods that can bring the vanilla game up to scratch. Both offer distinct yet equally rewarding experiences. There is plenty of other XCOM 2 DLC available as well.
The battles are challenging and varied, full of horrific adversaries with tricky, surprising abilities, but the biggest changes are found on the strategic layer. You will travel all over the world, setting up cells, infiltrating black sites, and hunting for more resources so you can field more powerful weapons and tools – it is compelling rather than an afterthought.
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak
Blackbird Interactive has done the seemingly impossible with Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. And that’s to transpose the original Homeworld games’ elegant, minimalist space wars to a single planet, making for one of the best strategy games in the process. Somehow it works really, really well.
It’s a journey across a vast desert directed by your mission to save a civilization. Each battle is connected to the last and the ones yet to be played. Every unit that survives will live to fight another day on another mission in a persistent war for survival.
Kharak itself, despite being a giant desert, is a fantastic planet-sized battlefield that does for the ground what the originals did for space games. The addition of terrain and elevation replicates the three-dimensional battles of the previous games, with the dunes providing cover, hiding spots, and high ground from where you can unleash devastating attacks.
Like its predecessors, the game is blessed with some of the best art design you could hope to find in an RTS, meaning you can take beautiful Homeworld screenshots. Add to its incredible sound design and genuinely interesting narrative, Deserts of Kharak is a classic.
Total War: Warhammer 3
If you thought that Total War: Warhammer 2 was big, it’s got nothing on Total War: Warhammer 3’s sheer sense of scale. It essentially has everything that made that game great, all while bringing all 15 of the tabletop game’s core races to life with jaw-dropping visuals. A new five-hour tutorial prologue helps get new players up to speed, so it’s also the best jumping-in point if you’ve never experienced a Total War game.
You can read our Total War: Warhammer 3 review if you want a more in-depth sense of just how packed it truly is, but the long and short of it is that once you begin to play, you’re likely to be playing the same campaign at least a calendar year down the line, and still have a smile on your face as you discover another new thing.
Civilization 6
You would find plenty of debate about which modern Civilization game was better, Civ 5 or Civ 6. However, with the release of Gathering Storm expansion, this sixth entry of the series can finally stand proud as a great strategy game worthy of note.
Still epitomizing the ideal of ‘one more turn’ that makes these kinds of games so addictive, Civilization 6 offers many more mechanics to bring the world to life around you. It’s not just about schmoozing this civ or declaring war on that civ – you’ve got to pay attention to how you’re impacting the world and working towards your goals – of which there is a wide variety.
Civ 6 just recently finished its year-long New Frontier season pass, which added a bunch more excellent Civs and their inspirational leaders, as well as a bunch of optional game modes and both free and premium content drops. It culminated in the April 2021 balance patch, which, while a bit by the numbers, has left the game in the best state it’s ever been.
There’s plenty to dive into with Civilization 6, whether it’s the healthy amount of Civ 6 DLC available or the vibrant and creative collection of Civ 6 mods. With the seventh Civ game on the horizon, the future is bright for the long-running strategy series.
Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault
Company of Heroes 2 was great, but it didn’t quite match the magic of its predecessor. Then Ardennes Assault came along; in our Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault review, we found that it’s one of the best RTS games you can play.
The US forces and German Oberkommando are fighting over control of the Ardennes in a campaign inspired by The Battle of the Bulge – in true war games style. That sets it apart from Company of Heroes and the sequel, alongside its non-linear single-player campaign that plays out across a strategic meta map. The Germans are dynamic, reinforced by retreating forces, changing the challenges posed by both story missions and the dynamic skirmishes.
While the campaign is only played from the American point of view, the US forces are split into three companies, all with unique specialties covering air, support, and mechanized roles. These companies all have special officer abilities and upgrade trees, and any can be used to tackle a mission. Even if you focus on one, the other two will still be on the map and can provide assistance by blocking the enemy retreat out of a captured province.
This is the first time the battles in Company of Heroes have had real weight to rival the best WW2 games, but the series won’t stop there. Company of Heroes 3 has been announced, and it’s bringing a brand new campaign layer that takes the lessons learned from Ardennes Assault and turns them up to 11.
Command & Conquer: Remastered Collection
There’s much to love about Command & Conquer Remastered, from the corny FMV cutscenes to the bonkers secret levels. You’ll struggle to find a strategy game with as much personality and charm as this RTS. It includes the original Command & Conquer, set in a near future where the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) and the Brotherhood of Nod fight to control an ultra-valuable energy resource called Tiberium. It also stars Joseph D. Kucan as Kane, a man we swear hasn’t aged a day since the 1990s, who we interviewed once.
The other game in this immaculately recreated collection is Command & Conquer Red Alert. Set in an alternative history where Hitler was assassinated before rising to power, we instead get the Allies warring over Europe against the invading Soviet Union. It may not be as wild as the sequels, one of which manages to cast J.K. Simmons, Tim Curry, and George Takei, but it’s still a fantastically silly romp.
All of the playable factions in both included games are asymmetrical, so while the Allies in Red Alert have access to aerial weapons and space lasers, the Soviets have Tesla Coils and powerful Mammoth Tanks. Moreover, the Remastered version fixes and modernizes both games with rebuilt multiplayer mode from the ground, allowing you to find skirmish matches easily. For those who may be new to RTS games or strategy games in general, we can think of no better place to start than here. Check out our Command & Conquer Remastered Collection review for more on why this is such a great collection.
Endless Legend
In our Endless Legend review, we lavished praise on a 4X game that seamlessly blends fantasy and science fiction, throwing stranded spacemen against magical dragon people in the most striking hex-based world. Diverse and gorgeous, it looks almost tangible, like you could reach out and pick up one of the elaborate cities and cradle it in your hands. “Don’t worry, citizens. We won’t let the horrible man-eating insects devour you and your families,” we whisper into our cupped palms.
Fascinating factions vie for dominance over the apocalyptic world. Each has unique and interesting mechanics that set them apart and inform how they’re played. You have got the horrible aforementioned flesh-eating insect race, the Necrophage, for instance, who are so foul they cannot make alliances with other factions, forcing them always to be the opposition. Endless Legend is also blessed with a strong narrative that lends it a strong sense of place. Every faction has a set of story quests that will inform many of your decisions without backing you into a corner.
Amplitude has recently released a new historical 4X game called Humankind, which seeks to rival Civilization VI. It’s not quite where it needs to be yet to earn a place on this list, but you can read our Humankind review for more details – it’s pretty good already.
Starcraft 2
StarCraft 2 is a classic base-building RTS featuring armored cowboys, xenomorphic aliens, and space elves. It tasks you with gathering resources, building armies, and killing your enemy before they kill you with quick decisions and even quicker mouse clicks.
StarCraft 2 is a strong multiplayer game. Your enemies are human; they’ll probably be able to click faster than you, issuing orders quicker than you. You’ll lose a lot, but you’ll get better the more you play, making this one a decent RTS for anyone with a competitive streak. The PvE campaign is also notable, as the story is hard to do in RTS games. Many developers resort to cutscenes or in-mission dialogue, but StarCraft 2 lets you interact with the world outside combat.
Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition
One of the greatest RTS games ever, Age of Empires 2 has retained a loyal following for over two decades. 2019 saw the release of the game’s Definitive Edition – a remastered version that introduced new content. Since then, AoE 2 DE has gone from strength to strength, as regular balance patches and even new content drops continue to drop.
Though the next game on our list – AoE 4 – may be the latest iteration of the beloved series, many will tell you AoE 2 reigns supreme. If you do decide to try your hand at this exceptional strategy game, then consult our Age of Empires 2 cheats guide for a full suite of game-changing codes that are a boatload of fun to use.
Age of Empires 4
For years, we thought a new Age of Empires game would never happen. However, 16 years after the last numbered entry, we now have Age of Empires 4, taking everything that made the remakes of the classic RTS series such a memorable experience for so many people and dialing it up a notch. It now includes more historically inspired scenarios, eight base game civilizations, and a bunch of unique mechanics and armies at your disposal.
Suppose you feel like learning something while extinguishing your rivals’ chances at victory. In that case, it has several unlockable documentaries that are well-produced, teaching you all about the facts for each level you play. As we mentioned in our Age of Empires 4 review, it isn’t a revolutionary RTS game, but it shows that the genre is still fun, all while having a modern coat of paint.
Dune Spice Wars
Those of you with fond memories of Westwood Studios’ Dune 2: The Building of a Dynasty will likely bring the game up in the conversation of best strategy games. However, Dune: Spice Wars is entirely different. It’s an early access title riding off the coattails of the recent film adaptation and aims to keep things more in line with the books (yes, House Ordos is a made-up faction for the Westwood Studios game).
This blend of 4X and RTS has you build bases to try and gather as much of the coveted spice as you can, all while maintaining some form of diplomacy with factions and avoiding the ever-hungry maw of a sandworm. It’s already quite a behemoth of a game if you’re not used to the 4X side of strategy games, and with it being in early access, chances are that it will introduce new and exciting mechanics over time. It’s certainly one to watch.
Ara History Untold
Ara History Untold is more than just another Civ-like, as Oxide Games has introduced some marvellous innovations to give the well-trodden grand strategy genre a real kick. The biggest thing to watch out for when playing Ara is that civs complete their turns simultaneously, meaning you’re going to have to try and anticipate your opponents’ every move.
Unlike Civilization, Ara doesn’t have multiple wincons as such, instead you earn Prestige points that cointribute to a global leaderboard. At the end of each epoch, the least inspiring civ is wiped from history – very battle royale-coded. Though Ara’s “mix-and-match approach to history” can be a bit perculiar – something we note in our Ara History Untold review – it’s a spirited strategy experience that won’t disappoint.
So, there you have it: the best strategy games on PC, as decided by us in a Totally Legit(TM) manner. While you’re here, feel free to check out the best PC MMOs for a similar set of mind-blowing proclamations. And if you’re after the cream of the crop, check out the best PC games of all time.