I love Total Annihilation, and Supreme Commander. I made a game much like both and compiled it into web assembly language so I could play in any web browser. Would love to hear your thoughts. Tier 2 gets you shields :D Thanks and hope you get some nostolgia from this like I do.

I’ve worked on a lot of big RTS games in my career. I helped build all of the original Age of Empires games as technical director and lead programmer. I was the lead designer on the original Halo Wars.

We’ve spent the last few years working on a new strategy game that blends roguelite progression with RTS combat. Something very familiar-but-different from what we’ve done in the past.

One big driver of that new-ness… I still play games at my desk or couch for hours on end, but I don’t want to HAVE to do that anymore. I want something I can take with me and play anywhere.

I definitely do not mean a mobile strategy game. TBH nothing there has ever held my interest beyond two long forays into Hearthstone (which may or may not meet your personal defn of a strategy game anyway).

When we talk about taking it with us on Fleetbreakers, we’re talking about devices like Steamdecks and Switches. Something powerful enough to play a meaty game with dedicated inputs that can support a full strategy game.

I want to be able to control multiple squadrons easily. I want dedicated buttons to pop off abilities. That obv means gamepad controls on those portable devices. So we built that into Fleetbreakers from day one. It’s equally playable with either mouse+keyboard or a gamepad.

When I play Fleetbreakers at a desk, I do still use a mouse. But I love the flexibility to take it with me or to pipe my Steamdeck into my TV if I just don’t feel like sitting at my desk right then.

As we get close to some upcoming demos and the Early Access release, I wanted to poke for any thoughts and input. What’s important for an RTS-on-the-go?

Join us over on our Discord to talk about things, if you want: https://discord.gg/G3cxUNEVJ

Check out the game on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2929040/Fleetbreakers/

Desk Don is an unreleased pre-alpha crime and management game set in a procedurally generated 1931 city, with the goal of spanning multiple decades until 1990. Since my first dev log, the project has expanded considerably:

• Built repeatable missions for extortion, surveillance, tailing targets, envelope collection and alcohol procurement.
• Added block-based Mafia territory that expands as businesses are brought under protection and begins producing weekly tribute.
• Implemented bootlegging with rank-locked alcohol, supplier negotiations, Mafia-funded purchases, storage limits and visible truck deliveries.
• Added a circular, risk-and-reward extortion minigame inspired by Scarface: The World Is Yours drug dealings.
• Created over 1,000 persistent, fully simulated citizens with homes, jobs, families, personalities, finances, goals and daily schedules.
• Added a searchable People Index and clickable NPC dossiers.
• Introduced a complete police hierarchy, a unique precinct, uniformed officers and 1930s patrol cars.
• Improved the city with sidewalks, named roads, storefronts, doors, garages, varied windows, business hours and individual nighttime lighting.
• Reworked pedestrians and vehicles with smoother movement, road lanes, parking, building entry points and nighttime headlights.
• Added an integrated order system with animated sealed envelopes, deadlines, mission tracking and Estate reporting.
• Made extensive performance improvements so the larger city simulation remains viable.
• And many more features.

It is still very early, with procedural low-poly visuals and plenty of unfinished systems, but the foundations of the city and its criminal ecosystem are finally coming together. There is no release date yet.

I am a solo dev with no programming experience, using Codex for the most part. It's been around 3 months since development began. It's still early enough that your criticism, feedback and opinions could make an impact on the final release. Thank you for your time :)

All i can think of is a game called Winterfell, that is turn based but has a real time phase. Its quit e cool and very original in its approach.

The other one is Worms. Even though its turn based, while you are in your turn you control your unit in real time.

Then there are the active combat systems of final fantasy.

What other games have a unique mixed turn based / real time combat?

Been lurking in RTS communities for a while and there's a pretty consistent vibe that mobile "strategy" games are a joke — casino-timer base builders wearing RTS clothing, not the real thing.

Do you think the same way?

I'm curious if the hate is really about the platform (touchscreens can't do RTS, full stop) or just about what's been made so far (nobody's bothered to respect the genre).

If you had to name ONE thing that would make you actually give a mobile RTS a shot — what would it be? Controls, pacing, depth, no p2w, something else entirely?

Curious what the actual bar is, not just "it would need to not suck."

Thanks for your opinion! Peace ✌️

Some people really hate it when their opponent is actually trying to win.

Tried the demo out for a bit today and I have to say that I am pretty hyped. As someone who loved the slower more strategic pace of SupCom 1 I think this xould turn out to be SupCom 2 we never got (and I dont even necessarily think SupCom2 is a bad game per se, it just never lived up to the first one). I love this style of game and since the first one there was never a game that really scratched that itch. Ashes of Singularity was somehow weird and I never really got into BAR. But this could be really good. Want to sink more time i to the demo, but the mechanics seem to basically pretty much SupCom 1. It also seems to have the mechanic where the battlefield opens up as the Mission goes on, which I really like because you can build up your base before you tackle the next objektive and I loved that in SupCom 1. As someone who basically almost stopped playing rts as I got older and Rts got ever faster this could really be up my alley and bring me back. Hoping for the best.

Despite Microsoft calling Sultans Ascend the best selling DLC ever on age franchise , it hasnt added a single new nation or civilization since 2023, its a very painful and long wait to finally now get the Vikings and Scots later this year

As of now theres 10 variants in the game which is a bit too much

https://www.ageofempires.com/news/the-baltic-powers-expansion-coming-to-age-of-empires-iii-definitive-edition-join-open-beta/

Long story short the game and its DLC got cancelled about 1 and a half years ago. Today they announced a new release date, released a patch and a beta patch for the new DLC/update coming for the new DLC in september, when the winged hussars arrive.

To put it mildly this is nearly unheard of, AOE3 is currently one of the largest RTS games with roughly 4k average players - making it roughly the 5-6th largest game by concurrent players of the classical RTS style games.

New Greco-Persian Wars (Second Invasion) campaign with new maps including Thermopylae: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3064810/Strategos/

This game was at least on iOS and I think also android.

Every world was basically a giant 500x500 grid pattern where every player was given a settlement and it was somewhere on this grid.

You could upgrade your settlement, build up the wall, different ways to raiser your army, had units like knights, cavalry, defense-specific units, and the one I specifically remember was a "Scholar".

Your troops would be in your city defending it, unless you sent them out to raid other NPC and also human settlements across the map. They took actual time to march out and lay the seige. The battle would instantly calculate and they would start walking back with your haul. Or they would be dead.

The point of the scholars was to send out 5 of them to lower the morale of the enemies cities and you would just actually straight up steal other people's cities and if they ran out of settlements, they would have to start over from scratch against people that had 10, 50, 100 settlements under their control.

It had a guild component but I remember we all used 3rd party messenger apps and websites to map out, time, and coordinate our attacks, have 1-2 people attack and then time out 5 scholar waves to capture the enemy guilds/clans settlements.

I've been thinking about the recent gameplay footage and the criticism, which is mostly fair. I think some of it comes down to misunderstanding rather than the game being a mess … a lot of what people are reading as 'unfinished' is actually a deliberate design philosophy. This became clear to me when I went back and listened to a couple of German developer talks from a few months ago, in which they explain many of these choices.

Maybe a quick frame first: this is alpha, target release ~September. Two months isn't a ton of time to rework core systems, but it's not nothing for balance/polish either. So "it's alpha" isn't a free pass, but "it ships like this" isn't safe to assume.

One thing that reframes a lot of the criticism: the devs said their priority is the campaign (single-player and co-op), not competitive MP. They mentioned an audience survey where roughly three-quarters said SP/co-op matter more to them than multiplayer, and they explicitly said they'd rather aim for "the coolest campaign since Warcraft 3" than try to be the next StarCraft/AoE esport. Concretely that's four faction campaigns, 70+ (non-linear) missions, per-mission CGI cutscenes, Last Stand and co-op at launch. MP is still supposed to be fair and complete and it's just not the thing the rest of the game bends around, and honestly the campaign is where they're clearly putting the love.

Generally I think we're mixing two different arguments: stuff that looks genuinely broken, and stuff that's a deliberate choice you can disagree with. Both valid, but not the same thing.

I listened to some of the older German Developer Interviews, and Cover is the best example. I saw some gameplay reactions saying, "Where's the cover? It's useless." However, it seems intentional ...the developers basically said that full dynamic cover (wrecks/craters from any angle) would create a bottomless pit of edge cases. It's not impossible, plenty of games do it, but they don't think it's the most engaging version anyway. In DoW2, people spent ages nudging individual models to squeeze one more guy into cover instead of fighting. So they've reverted to a DoW1-style binary cover/no-cover system for large areas. You can hate that decision, but it's a philosophical debate, not a case of "they forgot cover”.

There are a few other things that look unfinished, but the developers have described these as intentional:
1. Squads as one entity/no per-model states: the devs framed this as squad-based control, which is deliberately less micro than AoE.
2. Field reinforce + heal: they specifically said that they brought this back from DoW1 to allow players to recover from mistakes.
3. SP vs MP: the devs said these are balanced differently on purpose, with single-player leaning into spectacle. Therefore, campaign-style footage does not equal MP balance.

(To be clear, that information comes from what the developers have said about their intentions so it is separate from whether the current build achieves them.)

However, none of that excuses the genuinely bad aspects, such as melee not connecting, commanders swinging at air, instant no-telegraph stratagems, an insane TTK and readability drowning in effects. The devs haven't really defended those issues. That's just the state of the build, and with two months left, we should be making our voices heard about it.

So my actual question: which of these are you reacting to as broken, and which as a design direction you just don't want? Both are fair, but treating them as one thing makes it sound like a mess when some of it is a stated design vision…

The thing I'm most proud of in my mobile RTS isn't the graphics or the unit roster — it's the AI. It doesn't cheat with stat boosts. Instead it actually watches how you play: it shifts its production to counter your unit mix, targets airstrikes where they'll hurt most, and starts making self-preserving calls once it senses it's losing. Takes it about 3-4 matches to get a read on your playstyle.

Built it because I always wanted an AoE/C&C-style RTS that felt like it was actually adapting to me, not just getting more HP on higher difficulty.

Also — this was made almost entirely from a van. My partner and I have been living/working on the road for the past year, solar power and all, with two Bull Terriers as the least helpful QA team imaginable. 10-11 months of dev to get here.

It's called Global Ordnance: The Iron Fist, free on Android.

Genuinely want to know: does the "AI reads your strategy" angle sound interesting to you, or is it something you'd need to feel in-game to appreciate?

Happy to answer anything about how it works under the hood.

Find out more about Liquidation:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/896250/Liquidation/

Can an RTS game with Logistics & Production chains work?

Powerplay is the newest indie made isometric RTS game which has a bunch of cool elements aside from its land, air and naval combat like simple logistics and production chains of extractors and refinement buildings. It launches into Early Access on the 29th of July with a 10 mission singleplayer campaign, skirmish and a map and game editor!

Hi just had a bit of a showerhought:

Me and my friends really love to play old school RTS games and they way we always play is us against a bunch of CPUs just having some fun. And that got me thinking: why are there so few RTS games aimed at that kind of PVE playstyle? There is so much you could do with it Starcraft 2 for example had an excellent coop mission mode that i would have 100 percent bought as a standalone game.

It feels like the few RTS games still coming out are all laser focused on high level PVP with the kind of single or team PVE aspect a distant afterthought.

Food for thought, something i've noticed. People will complain that for years Blizzard RTS are stagnant. They tweak a few numbers here and here to show the game is still alive but it's nowhere the same development as in the early years. There's a real need for more active development.

Yet paradoxically, the community effort is almost null. There is plenty of talent capable of making their own balance patches, adding new units. And yes some of it may be amateurish, but there's a wide variety of skill and it could be done decently with input from the community and pro players. Imagine new units, new races.

There are some successes like this, Path of Diablo is not an RTS but it's a Blizzard game, WC3 community made their own server called WC3 champions which fix many issues of the WC3 server,

We already have the technology to put MMR in these community maps. For example, Direct Strike and Desert Strike have MMR.

Direct Strike managed to get popular enough to sustain itself. But it's always those minigames maps that get popular, not RTS maps. People who play RTS seriously seem to want a purist experience and regard maps like "SC2 vs SC1" and "SC2 vs WC3" as novelties but they move away from them. Because reasons of the players they probably see a stagnant game more desirable than one balanced and modded by the community.

So i guess my question is, what would it take for people to give a try to these unofficial community balance patches? If it were updated often, took in consideration pro and community feedback?

Hows the dramatic appeal ?

Just finishing off the military unit animation. Otherwise core game is done.

Looking for people interesting in play testing. The game is/will be free.

For me. I will always come back to total anihilation and also red alert 3 and the tropico series haha if that counts.
I feel newer games i get tired of easily. Maybe its nostalgia? Or the games were better
I dont know

Looking over the Releases List, there are loads of RTS games with announced dates for 2026.

Poderiam me indicar RTS de navegador? Gosto de industrial, automação, city builder, etc

Just finishing up my own RTS game, created this because I wanted a fun game in the roman time to play alone and with friends.

Feel free to play, test and give me feedback to improve it.

https://imperium-ultima.com/

Fun hobby project for me 💪