What is a real-time strategy game?

An RTS game, as its name suggests, is a subgenre of strategy game where the player plays in “real time” without needing to wait a turn. This becomes especially challenging when the match starts to build up and the player needs to handle multiple situations, make quick decisions regarding what units to train, what orders to give to the trained units, how to gather and produce more resources, where to explore in the map, where to search for the objective and, of course, try to figure out where the enemy is and what their next move will be.

Classic examples

Released by Blizzard in 1998, StarCraft is one of the most popular RTS games to this day and has a long history of professional players competing against each other in worldwide championships (it was also one of the very first esports). The classic StarCraft gameplay in the remastered version was released in 2017 and is still one of the benchmarks of this strategy sub-genre, as well as Warcraft III, which was released in 2002.

Even though these games can be listed as the most popular of this genre, it is no doubt that other games were the pioneers in many forms of gameplay and mechanics that we define as RTS today. Developed by Westwood Studios and released by Virgin Games in 1993, Dune II was the very first RTS game to introduce resources gathering, base and unit buildings, construction dependencies, and different factions with unique weapons – all features that are now part of any RTS game. Dune II was not the first RTS game, but it was the game that helped define this genre.

Another RTS game that should be mentioned is the Age of Empires series, started in 1997, which was a combination of Warcraft and Civilization, the latter being a turn-based strategy (TBS) game.

Modern games

The RTS games that were released in the 1990s defined the base of the genre, but many other games expanded the features, gameplay, and mechanics, creating sub-genres such as real-time tactics (RTT) and Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate (4X).

Dune: Spice Wars is a great example of a modern 4X RTS game that was released in 2022 as early access on Steam. Following in the footsteps of Dune II, this game contains all the great features that are expected from this genre with modern graphics. Company of Heroes, a World War II-based game, also pushed RTS games further with real-time physics and destructible environments.

RTS games are also the foundation of the very popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) that was born as a Warcraft III mod in 2003 called Defense of the Ancients (DotA). Years later, DotA 2 (2013) and League of Legends (2009) were released and defined a new strategy sub-genre.

There are so many great classic and modern RTS games that we could cover an entire book on them, but I had the difficult task of selecting a few of them to illustrate their beginnings and evolution.

Now, we are going to look at the features that most of these games share.