Perhaps unsurprisingly, Total War: Warhammer III has risen to the occasion and proven itself not only the best Total Warhammer game, but possibly the best Total War game of all time. Drawing on six years of fantasy and historical Total War design, Warhammer III pulls out all the stops in terms of offering the ultimate fantasy strategy game.
Warhammer Historical Great War P
There are two methods of constructing different parts of timelines in the game; the first is constructing the historical timeline, which unlock events from the past. Players will be able to collect Black-Boxes, which can generally be found scattered around in different places on each map of the campaigns to build up the historical events in the timeline. The second is the contemporary timeline, which unlock current events ongoing in the galaxy. These are unlocked every time a mission is completed.
A great thing about the classic Halo Wars was the large variety of playable units within the game, but what it lacked was the ability to command units of all sentients species (and their ranks), vehicles, aircraft, space ships and factions seen in the Halo media. In The Great War players can do just that.
The Great Wars uses the same rock, paper, scissors and traffic lights systems from the classic Halo Wars games. Players need to be tactical and use their units appropriately to be effective against their enemies. Generally, infantry will have the upper hand over aircraft, with aircraft over vehicles (this includes watercraft) and with vehicles over infantry. This is not always the case as there are special counter-units such as the Wolverine and Anti-Air Wraith, which are ground vehicles that can do a great deal of damage to air units, though such units tend to be considerably less effective against all other unit types.
Population is a major feature that controls the amount of units the player, enemy and allied teams are able to deploy in a game. Every time a faction acquires new units the amount of population room is filled up. Different units will take up smaller or larger amounts of population, depending on it's size and strength. The population limit has raised greatly since the originally Halo Wars and the player can further raise the Population limit by getting specific upgrades from a Research Producer.
The first expansion for The Great War, released four months after the official game's release. It adds various stand alone missions to The Great War for UNSC, Covenant, Colonial, Insurrection, Kig-Yar Pirate and the new Covenant Heretics factions. The expansion takes players to locations all over the galaxy, where they can engage in all kinds of conflicts. There is also a greater number of space battles and special operations in this expansion.
The Great War reuses a lot of the audio, models and animations from previous Halo games. Not only does this reduce the price for these features, but also enables more resources to be used to improve and expand other aspects of the game. This also creates a great sense of familiarity for fans of Halo games past.
Crusader Kings 3, the best strategy game of 2020, has usurped its predecessor's spot on the list, unsurprisingly. It's a huge grand strategy RPG, more polished and cohesive than the venerable CK2, and quite a bit easier on the eyes, too. At first glance it might seem a bit too familiar, but an even greater focus on roleplaying and simulating the lifestyles of medieval nobles, along with a big bag of new and reconsidered features, makes it well worth jumping ship to the latest iteration.
It's only going to get larger and more ambitious as the inevitable DLC piles up, but even in its vanilla form CK3 is a ceaseless storyteller supported by countless complex systems that demand to be mucked around with and tweaked. Getting to grips with it is thankfully considerably easier this time around, thanks to a helpful nested tooltip system and plenty of guidance. And all this soapy dynastic drama just has a brilliant flow to it, carrying you along with it. You can meander through life without any great plan and still find yourself embroiled in countless intrigues, wars and trysts.
Total War: Three Kingdoms (opens in new tab), the latest historical entry in the series, takes a few nods from Warhammer, which you'll find elsewhere in this list, giving us a sprawling Chinese civil war that's fuelled by its distinct characters, both off and on the battlefield. Each is part of a complicated web of relationships that affects everything from diplomacy to performance in battle, and like their Warhammer counterparts they're all superhuman warriors.
It feels like a leap for the series in the same way the first Rome did, bringing with it some fundemental changes to how diplomacy, trade and combat works. The fight over China also makes for a compelling campaign, blessed with a kind of dynamism that we've not seen in a Total War before. Since launch, it's also benefited from some great DLC, including a new format that introduces historical bookmarks that expand on different events from the era.
Stellaris (opens in new tab) takes an 'everything and the kicthen sink' approach to the space 4X. It's got a dose of EU4, Paradox's grand strategy game, but applied to a sci-fi game that contains everything from robotic uprisings to aliens living in black holes. It arguably tries to do to much and lacks the focus of some of the other genre greats, but as a celebration of interstellar sci-fi there are none that come close. It's a liberating sandbox designed to generate a cavalcade of stories as you guide your species and empire through the stars, meddling with their genetic code, enslaving aliens, or consuming the galaxy as a ravenous hive of cunning insects.
Midnight Suns was not how I expected Firaxis to follow up XCOM. From the card-based tactical combat to the emphasis on the social lives of superheroes, this tactical RPG eschews the legacy of XCOM in favour of experimentation. But Firaxis's skill at crafting tense battles and dense systems is still very much on display. It's a busy game, but all of it just feels great.
Like an adaptation of the tabletop game crossed with the XCOM design template, BattleTech (opens in new tab) 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.
Unity of Command was already the perfect entry point into the complex world of wargames, but Unity of Command 2 (opens in new tab) 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.
The sequel, Steel Division 2 (opens in new tab), brings with it some improvements, but unfortunately the singleplayer experience isn't really up to snuff. In multiplayer, though, it's pretty great. And if the World War 2 setting isn't your cup of tea, the older Wargame series still represents some of the best of both RTS and wargaming, so they're absolutely worth taking for a spin.
XCOM: Long War (opens in new tab) could have been an expansion. It throws in so much and tweaks pretty much everything, but it never compromises the game it's built on. XCOM was great, but it was quite a bit more streamlined than original X-COM designer Julian Gollop's vision of the series. Long War merged them, giving fans of the older games something trickier and meatier to play with, but it still felt modern and polished. Firaxis developers even got involved, and for XCOM 2 the team created some official add-ons, before following up the mod with Long War 2.
Together with historical events, such as remilitarizing the Rhineland, opening of airports, building of museums, Historical wars, historical ultimatums and more, we also have completely new and different alternate unhistorical paths you can take your nation through. Want to ditch germany as fascist Italy and pursue an alliance with the Allies? You can! Want to focus on the economy as Germany? You can! Want to enter the Axis as a military government in Turkey? You can! Want to create the Intermarium as an alliance of sovereign states ? You can! Want to re-establish the Monarchy in Brazil after a violent year long civil war? Hell yes you can!
This mod adds over 200 different events all over the world, with bigger Event Trees for important nations in the second great war , like Italy, Germany, Japan, the USSR and America , but also adding massive event trees to less popular nations, like Romania, Bulgaria, Brazil and more! 2ff7e9595c
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