Best free rts games for pc 2013

Breezily amass an immense army to crush your foes with the weight of your military might, or rigorously strategise each combat scenario. From mad medieval romps, to cinematic sci-fi adventures, to historical simulators, their plethora of settings, themes, and playstyles ensures RTS games offer something for everyone.

Some are focused on tactics and the heat of combat, others lean into base-building, and some benefit from elements of traditional wargames. All, however, are absolutely ace. Once a thriving beacon of design ingenuity and thematic ambition, the RTS genre has taken a bit of a hit in recent years. MOBAs, grand-strategy, and management sims drew audiences to other horizons, leaving real-time strategising a little bare.

However, after years of refinement, this World War 2 squad-focused skirmisher has become something of a classic, and goes to great lengths to recreate frenzied battlefield assaults through consistently nail-biting moments. Recreate frenzied battlefield assaults through consistently nail-biting moments. Involving only limited base-building and concentrating on few, powerful units, Company of Heroes 2 plays as a tactical game of territory control.

Its simple but robust cover system has you manoeuvring infantry through hollowed-out buildings and cratered rural fields, tweaking unit positions to evade enemy machine gun nests and mortar fire, while pressing forwards in heroic assaults.

All of this makes for intense squad management on the smallest level. Balance your forces with heaps of unit variety, and pay heed to their crucial abilities and vulnerabilities — no fear is like the fear of seeing your vulnerable riflemen walk directly into the range of a heavy machine gun nest. It simply had to be given a place on this list. Construct a variety of units to rock-paper-scissors your way to victory, and make good use of civilisation-specific units — from samurai, to elephant archers, to mamelukes — to bring the pain.

Mixed with naval warfare, siege tactics, defensive fortifications, and continuous base-building, skirmishes quickly develop into an onslaught of furious micro-management. Cardboard conflict: These are the best war board games. The definitive edition of the game is exactly as it sounds. Impressive for a game that launched over 20 years ago.

Rather than commanding huge swathes of infantry and gradually building a force to overwhelm the enemy, you start with nought but a central squad of valiant Space Marines to gun, slash, and melt your way through hordes of alien adversaries. And those few Space Marines are all you need. Weapons, armour, abilities, and more can be discovered, upgraded and specialised across a non-linear campaign that explores the depths of slimy wastelands and the decaying core of industrial cities, and formidable squad customisation mechanics allows you to consistently switch up your methods of play.

The basic edition is free to play with purchasable upgrades depending on how deep the bug bites. The sequel to the arguably, unmatched original brings a fresh new campaign, units and banging new storyline. Choose you race; Terrain, Protoss or Zerg and reclaim your position at the top of the food chain, no matter the cost. The Big Bad Boss: A game with some massive ugly thing to defeat every so often is just so much more rewarding.

Until Fortnite came along causing kids to suddenly start doing idiotic dance moves on highway islands and at every single televised sporting event, Dota 2 was arguably the most popular online multiplayer for all ages. Choose your hero, discover new powers and outwit your opponents to destroy their tower or ancient, D. Skip to main content. Level up.

Earn rewards. Your XP: 0. Updated: 13 Oct pm. BY: Rueben Walter. Below is a list of ten awesome, free to play strategy games that will keep you wildly entertained until your wallet is thick again: The Great War More on this topic: rts free.

When not procrastinating on the playstation, I'm writing, or working off the chips. Gamer Since: And with all the tabletop factions present, you can experiment with countless fleet configurations and play with all sorts of weird weapons. Viking-themed RTS Northgard pays dues to Settlers and Age of Empires, but challenged us with its smart expansion systems that force you to plan your growth into new territories carefully.

Weather is important, too. You need to prepare for winter carefully, but if you tech up using 'lore' you might have better warm weather gear than your enemies, giving you a strategic advantage. Skip through the dull story, enjoy the well-designed campaign missions and then start the real fight in the skirmish mode. Mechanically, Homeworld is a phenomenal three-dimensional strategy game, among the first to successfully detach the RTS from a single plane.

If you liked the Battlestar Galactica reboot, or just fancy a good yarn in your RTS, you should play this.

Thanks to the Homeworld Remastered Collection , it's aged very well. The remasters maintain Homeworld and its sequel's incredible atmosphere, along with all the other great bits, but with updated art, textures, audio, UI—the lot. Everything is in keeping with the spirit of the original, but it just looks and sounds better.

The different factions are so distinct, and have more personality than they did in the original game—hence Soviet squids and Allied dolphins. They found the right tonal balance between self-awareness and sincerity in the cutscenes, as well—they're played for laughs, but still entertain and engage.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak sounded almost sacrilegious at first. Over a decade since the last Homeworld game, it was going to take a game remembered for its spaceships and 3D movement and turn it into a ground-based RTS with tanks? And it was a prequel?

Yet in spite of all the ways this could have gone horribly wrong, Deserts of Kharak succeeds on almost every count. It's not only a terrific RTS that sets itself apart from the rest of the genre's recent games, but it's also an excellent Homeworld game that reinvents the series while also recapturing its magic.

Only Total War can compete with the scale of Supreme Commander 's real-time battles. In addition to being the preeminent competitive strategy game of the last decade, StarCraft 2 deserves credit for rethinking how a traditional RTS campaign is structured.

Heart of the Swarm is a good example of this, but the human-centric Wings of Liberty instalment is the place to start: an inventive adventure that mixes up the familiar formula at every stage. In , Blizzard finally decided to wind down development on StarCraft 2 , announcing that no new additions would be coming, aside from things like balance fixes. The competitive scene is still very much alive, however, and you'll still find few singleplayer campaigns as good as these ones.

Most notable today for being the point of origin for the entire MOBA genre, Warcraft III is also an inventive, ambitious strategy game in its own right, which took the genre beyond anonymous little sprites and into the realm of cinematic fantasy.

The pioneering inclusion of RPG elements in the form of heroes and neutral monsters adds a degree of unitspecific depth not present in its sci-fi stablemate, and the sprawling campaign delivers a fantasy story that—if not quite novel—is thorough and exciting in its execution.

Shame about Warcraft 3: Reforged , it's not-so-great remake. Some games would try to step away from the emotional aspect of a war that happened in living memory. Not Company of Heroes. Age of Empires gave us the chance to encompass centuries of military progress in half-hour battles, but Rise of Nations does it better, and smartly introduces elements from turn-based strategy games like Civ. When borders collide civs race through the ages and try to out-tech each other in a hidden war for influence, all while trying to deliver a knockout military blow with javelins and jets.

It was tempting to put the excellent first Dawn of War on the list, but the box-select, right-click to kill formula is well represented. In combat you micromanage these empowered special forces, timing the flying attack of your Assault Marines and the sniping power of your Scouts with efficient heavy machine gun cover to undo the Ork hordes.

The co-operative Last Stand mode is also immense. If you need a 40K fix, we've also ranked every Warhammer 40, game. Like an adaptation of the tabletop game crossed with the XCOM design template, BattleTech 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.

A beautifully designed, near-perfect slice of tactical mech action from the creators of FTL. Into the Breach challenges you to fend off waves of Vek monsters on eight-by-eight grids populated by tower blocks and a variety of sub objectives.

Obviously you want to wipe out the Vek using mech-punches and artillery strikes, but much of the game is about using the impact of your blows to push enemies around the map and divert their attacks away from your precious buildings. Civilian buildings provide power, which serves as a health bar for your campaign. Every time a civilian building takes a hit, you're a step closer to losing the war. Once your power is depleted your team travels back through time to try and save the world again.

It's challenging, bite-sized, and dynamic. As you unlock new types of mechs and mech upgrades you gain inventive new ways to toy with your enemies. The game cleverly uses scarcity of opportunity to force you into difficult dilemmas. At any one time you might have only six possible scan sites, while combat encounters are largely meted out by the game, but what you choose to do with this narrow range of options matters enormously.

You need to recruit new rookies; you need an engineer to build a comms facility that will let you contact more territories; you need alien alloys to upgrade your weapons. You can probably only have one.

D ownload F ree G ames. No Adware, Spyware or Pirated software. Home » Real Time Strategy Games. Command and Conquer Gold. Savage - Battle for Newerth. Warzone Bos Wars. Kingdom of Camelot: Battle for the North. Age of Empires. Army Men RTS. Gather supplies, research new tools, and wage war!

Wage epic battles in the next chapter of human history! Command squads of green soldiers and vehicles! Overthrow the evil dictatorship in this intense RTS title. Build a defensive fortress and raid other players! Build a powerful army with a diverse range of soldiers. The RTS classic now a free download! A simple and fun strategy game with rapid gameplay. Experience all 3 epic titles in this exciting RTS series!