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.

1. 1
   Dune 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
2. 2
   Rise of Nations

   Big Huge Games' 2003 hybrid that grafted Civilization's borders and eras onto real-time play.
   642pts
3. 3
   StarCraft

   Blizzard's 1998 sci-fi RTS whose three asymmetric races made it a national sport in South Korea.
   551pts
4. 4
   Total Annihilation

   Cavedog's 1997 game that introduced true 3D units, physics-driven projectiles and streaming resources.
   551pts
5. 5
   Herzog Zwei

   Technosoft's 1989 Mega Drive game, widely credited as the first real-time strategy game.
   551pts
6. 6
   Company of Heroes

   Relic's 2006 World War II game that replaced base-spam with cover, suppression and territory control.
   494pts
7. 7
   Dawn of War

   Relic's 2004 Warhammer 40,000 adaptation, which put squad combat and melee at the centre of an RTS.
   350pts
8. 8
   Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos

   Blizzard's 2002 game whose hero units and custom maps produced the entire MOBA genre.
   350pts
9. 9
   Age of Empires II

   Ensemble's 1999 historical RTS, still played competitively more than twenty-five years after release.
   257pts
10. 10
    Supreme Commander

    Chris Taylor's 2007 game of army-scale battles, strategic zoom and experimental units.
    257pts
11. 11
    Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri

    Firaxis's 1999 strategy game of ideological factions colonising an alien world.
    257pts
12. 12
    Command & Conquer

    Westwood's 1995 follow-up, which turned the Dune II template into a franchise and added full-motion-video briefings.
    0pts
13. 13
    Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness

    Blizzard's 1995 fantasy RTS that brought naval and air units, fog of war and mass multiplayer to the genre.
    0pts
14. 14
    Homeworld

    Relic's 1999 space RTS, the first to make the whole battlefield fully three-dimensional.
    0pts
15. 15
    Age of Empires

    Ensemble's 1997 debut, which proved a history-based RTS could sell as well as a science-fiction one.
    0pts
16. 16
    Populous

    Bullfrog's 1989 god game, an ancestor of the real-time strategy form and Peter Molyneux's breakthrough.
    0pts

Comments 1