What is the most influential real-time strategy game of all time?
Every entry here changed how the next one was built. Mouse-driven bases, fog of war, hero units — somebody did each of them first.
1Dune II
Westwood's 1992 adaptation of Frank Herbert's world, which set the mouse-driven base building, fog of war and resource harvesting that every RTS after it copied.
1000pts
2Rise of Nations
Big Huge Games' 2003 hybrid that grafted Civilization's borders and eras onto real-time play.
642pts
3StarCraft
Blizzard's 1998 sci-fi RTS whose three asymmetric races made it a national sport in South Korea.
551pts
4Total Annihilation
Cavedog's 1997 game that introduced true 3D units, physics-driven projectiles and streaming resources.
551pts
5Herzog Zwei
Technosoft's 1989 Mega Drive game, widely credited as the first real-time strategy game.
551pts
6Company of Heroes
Relic's 2006 World War II game that replaced base-spam with cover, suppression and territory control.
494pts
7Dawn of War
Relic's 2004 Warhammer 40,000 adaptation, which put squad combat and melee at the centre of an RTS.
350pts
8Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos
Blizzard's 2002 game whose hero units and custom maps produced the entire MOBA genre.
350pts
9Age of Empires II
Ensemble's 1999 historical RTS, still played competitively more than twenty-five years after release.
257pts
10Supreme Commander
Chris Taylor's 2007 game of army-scale battles, strategic zoom and experimental units.
257pts
11Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
Firaxis's 1999 strategy game of ideological factions colonising an alien world.
257pts
12Command & Conquer
Westwood's 1995 follow-up, which turned the Dune II template into a franchise and added full-motion-video briefings.
143pts
13Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness
Blizzard's 1995 fantasy RTS that brought naval and air units, fog of war and mass multiplayer to the genre.
143pts
14Homeworld
Relic's 1999 space RTS, the first to make the whole battlefield fully three-dimensional.
143pts
15Age of Empires
Ensemble's 1997 debut, which proved a history-based RTS could sell as well as a science-fiction one.
143pts
16Populous
Bullfrog's 1989 god game, an ancestor of the real-time strategy form and Peter Molyneux's breakthrough.
143pts
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