This article contains spoilers for Game of Thrones.

🦋Titled Game of Thrones: War for Westeros, the game is planned to launch on PC at some unspecified point in 2026.

This was 🌞a purely cinematic trailer, so unfortunately we've not seen any actual gameplay yet, but hey, the cinematics sure look neat so far.

Just in case there was any confusion, this isn't the same Game of Thrones game as the action-adventure RPG that was revealed at The Game Awards last year. That one, titled Game of Thrones: Kingsroad, seemed like a bit of an odd one right from the get-go, as a spin-off to a season that had aired a decade prior. It since launched on Steam to mixed reviews after a rather underwhelming Steam Next Fest demo in February.

War for Wester⭕os, on the other hand, is described as a "premium" strategy game in a press release, allowing players to "take command of one of the Great Houses – or the Night King himself – setting out to conquer the Seven Kingdoms solo, or in exciting and challenging free-for-all multiplayer."

It also mentions being able to "rewrite the fate of the realm," which certainly sounds intriguing, especially since it baits out Jon Snow dying instead of the Night King, and then rising to join his ranks. That "rewrite" bit also comes with a dragon being plucked from the sky by a massi🌳ve ballista, which certainly reads to me like a pr🌳etty punchy comment on Daenerys' full-fledged heel turn towards the end of the final series. I'll let you decide exactly what that comment is trying to say, however, for yourself.

Be sure to check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Summer Game Fest 2025 schedule to keep up with all the other 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new game announcements.

But that's just it. The new demo is a short and sweet taster of the creepy mayhem yet to come in Quest Craft's upcoming new game, providing just enough of an introduction to Ghost Keeper's RTS and management systems to get you hooked. It certainly worked for me, and I'll likely be replaying the demo over and over again just to see how many kooky ways I can kill off or scare off those 🐬foolish mortals.

Cunning plan

My first mission in Ghost Keeper is simple: free Phineas the Mad, a trapped poltergeist stuck in a broken elevator. This first level takes place in Phineas' mansion, though sadly, he is rather dead. That means🌞 there's plenty of humans simply walking about his former home, and it's my job as Ghost Keeper to help the phantꦯoms regain control of their haunt.

The demo is essentially a long tutorial. I'm quickly introduced to the basics: I have two out of three ghosts currently available to summon and recall as needed, and can place them in any room in the three-storey mansion. Each ghost has its own requisite powers, and it's through harnessing each one's s⛄killseไt that I'm able to manipulate the wandering mortals to do my bidding – including setting Phineas free.

Night Blade, the assassin, excels at flickering lights, stalking mortals in the shadows, and locking all doors in a room to trap his prey inside. Meanwhile, William has a 💙bit more offense utility. He can set mortals ablaze ༒with Wild Fire, cause household objects to malfunction, and draw unsuspecting mortals to his location using a Whisper skill.

Each of these actions costs some ghost energy, with each ghost starting with 100 energy points, and some of them increase their visibility. That makes it ♒a bit of a🐬 give and take situation, as if a ghost's visibility meter maxes out or they use all their energy points, they are rendered unusable – or worse, vacuumed up by a member of the ghost-hunting Brotherhood. See what I mean by reverse Ghostbusters? I'll get to those guys in just a moment.

Despite how the first part of the Ghost Keeper demo is largely about freeing Phineas, the real fun begins once I do so. Now, I have access to all 🦂three spirits, and can finally amp up the hauntings! However, freeing Phineas causes enough spooky occurrences that the mortal residents of his once-glorious mansion ♔have called upon the Brotherhood to help rid them of their paranormal predicament.

Mischief management

As mentioned earlier, the Brotherhood patrol the house as wandering spirit hunters. They are a lot harder to scare than regular mortals – their fear meter has 300 charges, whereas the household inha💜bitants have 120 apiece – but it can be done. I now have full rein of the house, the ghosts, and all their skills, meaning it's time to scare or slay the night away.

Scar﷽ing mortals using Night Blade's haunting skills causes their purple fear meter to fill up, shown beneath their portraits along the top right-hand corner of the screen. Fill it all the 🅷way, and the mortal runs screaming from the house to escape. Alternatively, I can chip away at their green health bars to kill them off instead – and this turns out to be my favorite way to handle things.

Call me sadistic, but there's a smug satisfaction in using a combination of ghosts to achieve creative death situations. Taking advantage of the pause button to do so, I manage to catch two of the three mortal residents in the dining room, trap them there with Night Blade💞, and immolate them with William.

I also throw out a few other spooky tricks and treats to increase the level of haunting (charted by the amount of green ectoplasm spattered across a given room) like making a table levitate or bursting a nearby pipe. Then, when everyone is nice and terrified (or on fire), I send Phineas in to perform an Ectoplaওsmic Explosion and deal some extra d🍒amage.

Sure, it's only May, but I'm glad Ghost Keeper brings Halloween early with this nifty little demo. I might have run into a couple of bugs, but if I did, I didn't notice them – except for the one time I was unable to summon Phineas, despite hi♊m 🐽having zero visibility and 87 ghost energy, forcing me to restart the whole level from scratch.

I wasn't mad about it, though. It just gave me another opportunity to think outside the pine box and come up with mischievous new ways to achieve the same goal. And 💦if that's not the whole point of an RTS game, I don't know what is.

Check out some of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best free Steam games for more credit card-free experiences just waiting to be downloaded

Last month, it was reported that four game companies – Nexon, Krafton, Netmarble, and NCSoft – were all competing in an attempt to secure global publishing rights and work on new games in the StarCraft series.

A machine-translated claimed that e🐻ach company 📖was putting forward different ideas for what they could do with the series, with some apparently even pitching these suggestions to Blizzard in person.

Now, it's been reported that this battle is seemingly over. A new (which we've machine translated, but it's also been partially translated by ) states t🍒hat Nexon (which developed The First Descendant and more recently published The First Berserker: Kꦐhazan) has been chosen as Blizzard's "preferred bidder," entering into "main negotiations" with the company.

It's not currently clear what kind of new game (or games) StarCraft could see under Nexon. It was previously very vaguely said that the company had suggested some kind of unique way to use the IP, which could mean a whole lot of things. If it's to be believe🍰d, and plans haven't changed, it does seem to suggest that it wouldn't simply tread the same ground as previous entries in the RTS series.

Curiously, the same new report claims that, alongside its StarCraft-shaped win, Nexon has 🦹also bagged distribution rights for an u🔯pcoming mobile Overwatch game in Japan and Korea.

Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier reported on the apparent development of an Overwatch mobile game in his book about Blizzard✱ which was published last year, so this isn't the fir💝st we've heard of a release like this, although MTN now says that it's thought to be a MOBA title.

Be sure to take all of this with a pinch of salt for the time being, anyway, as none of this has been publicly confirmed. StarCraft fans are long overdue a win, though, so here's hoping that on the back of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:whispers about a StarCraft shooter, the series might finally get the attentio🦩n it deserves.

In the meantime, be sure to check out the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games you can play now.

A machine-translated (which has also been shared and partially translated by South Korean news account ) claims that Nexon, Krafton, Netmarble, and NCSoft are all competing to try and secure g🍎lobal publishing rights for StarCraft, with some apparently having travelled to visit Blizzard in person with their pitches.

Furthermore, it's reporteღd that each company is suggesting different things for the series, with Netmarble apparently proposing the idea of bringing the franchise to mobile platforms in some way, Krafton reportedly wanting to develop a new game, and Nexon putting forward some sort of unique idea to use the IP. The report also appears to suggest that NCSoft could develop an RPG of some sort.

It should go without saying, but this should definitely be taken with a pinch of salt while it remains unconfirmed. Just last year, Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier claimed that at the time of him writing his book about Blizzard (titled Play Nice), a new . Hype levels grew when, not long after this comment, a job advert confirmed that Blizzard was working on an unannounced "upcoming open-world shooter game."

StarCraft fans have been burned before, however – just think of StarCraft: Ghost, which was announced all the way back in 2002 before it sadly lived up to its name, got 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:indefinitely postponed in 2006, and then later canceled altogether. Hopefully, whatever is reportedly going on behind the 𒆙scenes at Blizzard today ultimately leads to something new – evenꦯ the series' latest release, the remaster of the first game, will be eight years old this August.

StarCraft 2 veteran would want a sequel to go open world, or just "try something radically new."

From Milky Tea Studios (and published by Megabit Publishing), Grit and Valor – 1949 is set, believe it or not, in the year 1949. This alternate history World War 2 has seen the conflict continue and not go well for the Allies, with the British Isles now taken over by the Evil Axis forces. The advent of dieselpunk technology, specifically in the form of mechs and other superweapons, have altered the conflict. Operating from a Re꧙sistance HQ base off the coast of Scotland, it's 🧔your job to lead a Mech Squadron to deliver an EMP payload to the heart of the Axis' forces and put WW2 history back on track.

Mech your maker

Which means your squad needs to go from tile to tile on a war map, making it through various objectives on each map while upgrading themselves, all while trying to ensure your mechs aren't too damaged to continue and – vitally – that the EMP-housing command vehicle is protected. Each objective revolves around waves of enemies appearing gradually onto each bite-sized map. Able to come from all directions, you must quickly reposition your mechs to best tackle the next group. A weapon triangle determines strengths and weaknesses, and thing♋s like high ground and cover c🐠an help in a pinch as well.

Between each wave, a crate appears on the map which you can scoop up, though this may potentially put your command vehicle in the path of danger if you've not t🐷hought through the movement carefully. Popping it open reveals a choice between (often) three possible upgrade cards that power up your🤡 mechs, giving their attacks the chance to apply debuffs, faster movement, or even a bit more health. Some of these upgrades can even synergize together. One mech might be able to Mark targets with attacks, while another might then deal extra damage to enemies with that status.

But it's not just simple wave clearing. Extra objectives can also be completed – ranging from the likes of protecting civilian areas to capturi💯ng towers – which give extra currency for upgrades. Aiming to tackle tougher battle tiles, or going for choice-based events, will affect your ability to improve as well. On failure, you're booted back to the beginning to try again. Collected resources can be spent to upgrade mechs with specialist gear, and blueprints traded into unlock new mechs entirely. As well as opening up new facilities at the base, you can also spend to make the path ahead a little easier – paying to int🍒roduce cover into the British Isles map made a huge difference.

Real-time, the action is slick, and so far I've enjoyed getting to grips with the mechs 🐻on offer, trying to balance mobile fast-attacking units with some slower, heavier hitters. This is one of those roguelikes where you definitely need to get quite a few runs under your belt not just to get comfortable with the rhythm of play, but also to earn crucial unlocks for that pleasing loop of getting genuinely stronger with each attempt. Delightfully moreish, this is a fun and snappy RTS take on roguelikes that turns what can be an intimidating genre into a lovely little snack. With the British Isles the only map in the demo, I'm looking forwards to seeing how the likes of Scandinavia, Western Europe, and New Germany will evolve the loop.

, and to PS5, Xbox, and Nintendo Swi🦂tch consoles in the Summer, so there's not long to wait until setting out on another mech expedition.

Want more battles? Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games list!

"Over the past year I have been working alongside the amazing C&C stakeholders here at EA to restore the Perforce source code archives for the C&C games back to buildable states, which now provides us with the ability to patch these classic games in a deeper way going forward," community veteran Luke "CCHyper" Feenan, who also worked with EA on the release of the Remastered Collection, says in today's announcement. "As a long time modder, it was amaz🐷ing to finally get a chance to deep dive into the source code for these games and see how they work!"

The full source code for all four games is now available on the EA GitHub page. Feenan notes that "for those of you in the community who know me, you will be familiar with my strong advocacy for video game preservation and my support for the video game open-source community." Indeed, the r💖elease of code like this is perhaps the best gesture a major publisher like EA can make toward game preservation.

Remasters - like the Command & Conquer Remastered Collection itself - can help keep a game available to modern audiences, but technology is going to keep marching on, and someday theꦜ official versions C&C will almost certainly be left behind again. The release of source code like this gives the community incredible options to keep these games in working shape for years to come.

But game preservation i🅠s also about more than just making sure everyday gamers can keep playing old cla🌱ssics. It's also about saving the history of how these games came to be. One of the - not just code, but the art and other assets used in a game's creation. Source code often offers some of the greatest insights available on a game's development, and it's equally valuable to modders and historians.

For most publishers, the idea of "preservation" starts and ends with reselling old games back to you, which is why I'm so happy to see EA go the extra mile with Command & Conquer here. (If only it'd take that 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:same step with The Sims.) Here's hoping more publishers follo♎w that lead.

Of course, the most immediate benefit of having source available is for modders, and there's more news on the modding front, too. EA is also enabling Steam Workshop support for Renegade, Generals, Tiberium Wars, Red Alert 3, and Tiberian Twilight, allowing you to🌟 easily download custom maps. The Mission Editor and World Builder tools have also been updated to let modders directly upload their creations to the Workshop.

Command & Conquer remains a mainstay among the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RTS games.

Pottinger is working on a new game, Project Citadel, with Last Keep Games, and with the pedigree he has, it'll be interesting to see if he does make so🧔mething that keeps the genre fresh. Everyone at Last Keep Games plays something together once a week, and recently that's been Microsoft's Age of Mythology remake.

"It was a big nostalgia trip to go back… it was heartwarming to go back and see those [missions] again and see how universal෴ and popu♎lar that strategy gameplay is," he says in an interview with . "I think it reinforced our decisions to innovate with Project Citadel."

He goes on to say: "It hasn’t changed much. You know, you’re still playing the same game we’re playing 20 years ago and looking at some of these new games—Stormgate and others like that—and they’re still really largely based on that formula. It works, it’s an old, golden set of rules, because they were good back then and they’re still good now,💝 and it’s nice to see that stuff 💫still works but at the same time I want to do something new, we want to do something new."

It's not always easy to innovate, though. "There were some times ♐on the Age franchise where we flew a little too close to the sun," he explains. "We had to pull back and take some very innovative things out of the game. I'm talking particularly about formation-based combat in Age of Empires 3. Hell, we demoed that at E3, and took that out of thꦯe game because we were afraid it was going to alienate too many of the existing Age fans."

My favorite RTS of all-time is The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth 2, and I'd still play it to this day if my laptop had a disc drive. It feels like a timeless game, but maybe that is because the ✅formula of the genre hasn't changed▨ that much.

While you're here, check out our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games you can play right now.

"With Kingmakers, we're obsessed with making everything interactable," creativ𓆉e director Ian Fisch says on , sharing a clip of a car crashing headlong into a wooden building. "If you drive a car full speed into a medieval tavern, well...." To be honest, I think an actual car would be a little worse for wear after careening headlong into a bunch of oak longs, but damn if the way that building crumbles doesn't look incredibly satisfying.

That clip originates from a trailer released last week, confirming that Kingmakers is due to hit early access in the first quarter of 2025. The full trailer, which you can s🎀ee below, also shows off numerous other examples of the destruction tech. We see a grenade launcher fell a castle arch, cutting off a gaggle of enemy soldiers, an RPG blow a hole in a fortified wall, and a floor destroyed to offer a better vantage point on the enemies sitting below.

Once upon a time, fully d📖estructible environments felt like they'd be the final frontier of video game technology, but these days it's mostly indie games with wild concepts like Kingmakers that are keeping the dream of destruction alive. Here's hoping Kingmakers turns out well, because if it's half as fun as it looks we could be in for something special.

These are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games out there today.

I put "in 24 years" in quotes because I can't independently verify exactly when the last patch went live - PC game updates in the '90s were not nearly as well documented as they are today - but the word of Blizzard's Adam Fletcher on is probablꦐy enough to trust. At a minimum, this is certainly the first balance patch to hit the game since it was succeeded by Warcraft 3 in 2002.

So what's in this balance patch? Well, you can read the full for yourself if you want all the details, but basically it's a bunch of damage and power value tweaks for various units. Most notably, Bloodlust spell for the Horde's Ogre Mage unit has been nerfed, decreasing its duration, increasing its mana cost, and making sure that the double damage effect it bestows on allied units applies after armor reduction - not before.

Bloodlust has the best spell in Warcraft 2, and the power it gives the Ogre Mage means that Horde has always been seen as the better of the two factions, such that competitive players . This particular change has been a long, long time coming. "Bloodlust FINALLY NERFED aft🧸er 29 years," as one puts it. they've been waiting for thꦑis "since primary school!"

World of Warcraft devs used to joke about the MMO making $1 million per month - just months before it smashed through $15 million in monthly revenue.

Last month, digital game storefront GOG unveiled 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:its Game Preservation Program – a new effort to build a collection of  "classic games that GOG has improved, with a commitment of our own resources to ensure their compatibility with modern systems and make them as enjoyable to play aᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚs possible." With promises of the games in the program being "the best and most complete" versions possible, complete with extra ဣquality-of-life improvements and a commitment to making them work "on current and future popular PC configurations," it's a huge win for game preservation, but apparently it's not totally perfect. Warcraft 1 and 2 are both part of this program, but they won't be available for purchase from December 13.

In a , GOG describes this as "heartbreaking news," and says, "even with our best effor♍ts and dedication to game preservation, sometimes things don’t go as🔴 we'd hoped." 

However, while it wo💧n't be able to sell the RTS games for much longer, it's updated its Game Preservation Program policy to make an additional promise, both to Warcraft 1 and 2, and any other games included in the pr💎ogram. "Going forward, even if a game is no longer available for sale on GOG, as part of the GOG Preservation Program, it will continue to be maintained and updated by us, ensuring it remains compatible with modern and future systems," it says.

Because of the offline drivers that come with GOG games, delisting them won't make them inaccessible for anyone who's already bought them. The storefront is even making🦋 them mo🌌re affordable for anyone who's yet to grab them, with a $2/£1.50 discount code ('MakeWarcraftLiveForever'), which can be used once per user. 

As , the two RTS games are also available to buy from Battle.net, and it's not clear if they're al♏so going to be delisted from there. Either way, they differ from the GOG versions, which offer some improvements including "small DOSBox tweaks to improve performance and compatibility" of Warcraft 1, for example. Needless to say, now's the time to add them to your library if you haven't already.

The same US Copyright Office decision that struck down a major game preservation effort also quietly reversed a historic DMCA win for accessibility advocates.

The mission in question is In Utter Darkness, which tasks players with killing a set amount of enemies before their Protoss units are inevitably overrun and go out in a blaze of glory. Over the years, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:real-time strategy geniuses have tried again and again to challenge fate and be truly victorious, but they've ne༺ver found a way to survive the ceaseless onslaught of enemies, until now. As , YouTube content creator Davey Gunface has found a way for the Protoss to live forever. 

As you'd expect, achieving this isn't easy, and Davey Gunface has shared a 39-minute video explaining exactly how it's done if you want to try replicating it. The basics of it, howe꧂ver, involve clever manipulation of the enemy AI, including tricking them into going d✨own certain paths where they'll be in vulnerable positions.

The thing that really turns the tide of the battle, however, comes in the final wave of ally reinforcements, with Artanis arriving in the Shield of Aiur. Davey Gunface explains that this mothership started as a "meta-defining badass" and transitioned to "utter meme" status, and potentially "one of the worst units in the entire game," but it certainly proves its worth here. By combining two moves – Vortex, which draws nearby units into a black hole, and Mass Recall, which can recall units – Davey Gunface crams about 24 Templar into a small, but all-important crevice on the side of a cliff, where they can't be reached by ground units. These Templars can morph into Archons, and 12 of those can easily dispatch the waves of air enemies that'd usually be lethal, and spell the end of the battl🐓e. 

Davey Gunface continues to lure enemies to their deaths by enticing them to this spot, and while the player still loses units for a while, it eventually gets to a point where there are too many ground enemies on the field for anything else to spawn. This brings the enemies to a standstill – they can😼't get to the Protoss, who're tucked away safely in their hidey-hole. However, things⭕ can be taken even further – it's possible to kill everything that isn't an Overseer just by staying cloaked. The Overseers (which can't actually do any damage) then retreat to out-of-bounds edges of the map, which Davey Gunface calls "a very realistic win condition." 

Sure, you won't get a victory screen fro❀m doing this unlikꦫe if you just accept your fate, but this is the best possible outcome for the Protoss in this mission. They'll be stuck in the same spot on a map until the end of time, but at least they're still alive and kicking, right?

For more games like StarCraft 2, be sure to check out our roundups of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RTS games and 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best PC games.

As highlighted across Reddit and the Blizzard Forums, many players of the classic game reported that after the release of Reforged 2.0, they could no longer access the 2002 version. "Multiple people, including myself, being hit with a menu saying 'This account does not have a valid Warcraft 3 License. Click here to purchase one' and the link takes you to the page to buy Warcraft 𝓰3 Reforged," . 

Others shared similar tales, with that "the CD [keys] of WC3 [Reign of Cha♔os] and [The Frozen Throne] have been on my account sinc🐻e forever," and that they've "owned the original game for almost 20 years," and never needed to pay for Reforged to continue playing it with its classic visuals. "Surely this is a bug, and not Blizzard's way of telling me that I'm no longer able to do so, right?" they question.

💖Thankful🌞ly, they're exactly right, as Blizzard acknowledged the problem on Twitter before long: "Our Warcraft 3 European servers are running into some login issues. We're also aware of players who have original Warcraft and are unable to log in," it explains. "We're working on a fix for these issues."

Perhaps it's because launching the original Warcraft 3 requires the Reforged client, allowing a problem to seemingly spread from the new version to the old one, but regardless, it mercifully seems that the situation has since improved, with some 𓄧that it's been fixed and they can "play without any problems." Either way, even tꩲemporarily making an enemy of the classic fans isn't exactly a great start for Reforged 2.0 – here's hoping that that's the end of its problems.

RTS classics Warcraft and Warcraft 2 surprise drop remasters with "brand new, hand-drawn visuals" that you can swap in and out in real-time.

Blizzard has surprise-drop🃏ped remasters for Warcraft and W♈arcraft 2.

We had some inclination that 1995&apo𝄹s;s Warcraft 2 was getting a remaster when it leaked last week, but the reveal of🌊 Warcraft 1: Remastered is a total surprise. Blizzard revealed both titles in a new trailer, showing off stark visual improvements from the original games. "These remasters feature brand new, hand-drawn visuals that capture the original art style from each game," said Warcraft manager Brad Chan during .

It's hard to say how the visual improvements will hold up in actual gameplay, but judging from the footage shown in the trailer, they look solid. I'll always have a fondness for the original look, which has such endearing♏ grit, and for my money the new look is decidedly more cartoony, but I suspect n♓ewcomers may prefer the updated version.

Here's the good news. Chan also confirmed you'll be able to swap out the original graphics with the remastered versions, a✨nd vice-versa, at any point "in r🧸eal time."

Here are some quick side-by-sides of the old, pixel-y versions next to their 2024 counte💧rparts for comparison:

The remasters are up for sale individually today, with Warcraft 1 Remastered going for $9.99 and Warcraft 2 Remastered costing $14.99. They're also available as part of the $39.99 Warcraft Remastered Battle Chest, which includes both remasters as well as Warcraft 3: Reforged, which just got 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:its massive 2.0 update aimed at givinꦗg the m🔯aligned four-year-old remaster a new lease on life.

It's never a bad time to think your way through our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games.

When Warcraft 3: Reforged first came to our screens in 2020, it was quickly criticized for its technical issues and failure to live up to the old promotional material for the supposed upgrade. It was so bad, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Blizzard apologized for it and even 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:changed its refund policy. Now, it has a chance for redemption.

Available now, Warcraft 3: Reforged has progressed to version 2.0. This update comes with new features such as the ability to customize the visualꩲs. You can play with the remastered Reforged graphics or go back to the visual experience of the classic game. There's also a remastered classic game style which should hopefully keep the feel of the original while upgrading the resolution for more modern systems.

One of my favorite things to do when playing Halo: The Master Chief Collection was just swapping ꦏbetween graphical styles mid-mission, so hopefully you're able to just press one button press for R𝓰eforged, too.

Once you've tried out all three styles for Reforged, you can customize your experience even further by mixing and matching elements for your UI. For example, you could have Reforged game scenes, c🉐lassic portraits, and remastered classic icons.

Alongside a second chance for Reforged, Warcraft 2: Tides of War and Warcraft: Orcs & Humans are getting some TLC. 🌞澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Part of thi🧔s information was leaked last week, November 6, when files for Warcraft 2 Remastered were found, and now we have finaꦑl confirmation that it's real and also available right now. Hopefully, i⛎t doesn't make the same mistakes Warcraft 3: Reforged did.

If you'd rather play something new instead of returning to familiar ground, check out our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games available right now. 

Ex-StarCraft 2 multiplayer lead David Kim isn't at Blizzard anymore – he's instead senior game director for all-new RTS game Battle Aces, which is being developed by Uncapped Games. Battle Aces was first 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:unveiled during Summer Game Fest in June, whe🐭re it was sold as an "RTS game for everyone" and accessible to newcomers to the genre, as well as good fun for any hardened veter🧸ans. This is a point Kim has reiterated in a recent . He notes that around the time Blizzard began development on StarCraft 2's 2013 Heart of the Swarm expansion, he began considering why "we have to continue to put so much pressure on RTS players to have to master these basic, I guess, execution elements before they can experience the core fun?"

Ultimately, after prototyping an RTS at Blizzard that ended up being canceled, Kim ended up at Uncapped Games, where he's still working on the genre. As for why that's the case, it boils down to a lot of love for real-time strategy and the desire to prove the genre can keep improving. "For me it's very personal, because [real-time strategy] is my favorite genre of all time, and I just🐠 can't accept the fact that players, or I guess developers even, take the stance of 'the end-all peak of RTS is StarCraft 2 and not🃏hing can ever be better than StarCraft,'" he explains. 

At GamesRadar+, we recently got 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:hands on with Battle Aces, with Andrew Brown noting that "the siꦚmplicity of Battle Aces won me over," even if "the game in its current state is still very awkward to learn for anyone who's coming from outside an RTS background." The game's latest beta phase kicks off today, which should give more players the chance to෴ give it a go.

For more games like StarCraft and Battle Aces, be sure to check out our roundup of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RTS games.

Warcraft fansite has posted images of logos and key art for Warcraft 2: Remastered which appear to have originated on Blizzard's own Battle.net, tied to an "internal alpha" for the game. No other info has been uncovered, but given the timing, it's possible we'll see an official announcement ไduring the set to run on November 13.

Blizzard previously released Warcraft 3: Reforged back in 2020. The remaster launched to a universally negative response, with players noting a raft of technical issues and its failure to measure up to years-old promotional material for the upgrade. Blizzard directly apologized for the launch shortly🎉 afterward - a process we'd see repeated in other high-profile remasters like Rockstar&apo𒊎s;s GTA Trilogy.

But while the GTA Trilogy eventually redeemed itself - to an extent - with patches and updates, Warcraft 3: Reforged never managed the same, and it's still widely maligned by fans of the RTS series. Blizzard would eventualꦜly get a little taste of remaster redemption, however, with the launch of Diablo 2: Resurrected, which remains widely regarded as an excellent way to revisit the ARPG. Here's hoping that, if Warcraft 2: Remastered turns out to be real, it learns the right lessons from Blizzard's previous upgrades.

BlizzCon is canceled again, and Blizzard hasn't really explained why - but says it's coming back "in future years."

Battle Aces marks the debut of Uncapped Games, a studio founded by former Blizzard devs, but what sets it apart from past projects is the way it slims down traditionally elaborate economic and macro-level decision-making in favor of streamlined combat. Despite that step toward simplicity, the thrill of maneuvering giant armies into battle has not been diluted – and after playing for myself, I'm mostly sold on the studio's rapidfire a❀pproach toward shaking up the RTS genre.

Construct additional crabs

When it comes to playing even RTS g🔥ames, I've always struggled with head-to-head multiplayer. Being outclassed in a match – and I often am – is like being slowly strangled, and by the time you realize there are keyboard-clacking hands around your neck, it's too late to do anything about it. The mistakes you made leading up to that point are inscrutable in comparison to other genres, which often come down to "shoot faster" or "dodge better", as it can be hard to trace defeat back to subtler errors like building a new base too soon (or too late) 10 minutes ago.

Battle Aces sidesteps this by squashing the process into something that resembles the later throes of an RTS match, 🐼where combat takes precedence over bigger picture planning. You start with a single hub building where all of you🌃r recruiting takes place, and the workers gathering your resources are all automated. Expanding with a new base is done at the push of a button – automated resource-gathering hubs are constructed automatically at preset points on the map – and battle-ready units appear instantly when bought. Your job is to ensure you're spending those free-flowing resources correctly, building up an army whilst investing to make sure income can keep up with the demand for pricier fighters later on.

As a result, combat is quick to the point where matches can last just a few short minutes. I certainly found that to be the case in my first few games: growing your economy and military in-step has been massively simplified, but it remains a tightrope that is brutally unforgiving to fall from. In some matches I'd watch as my horde of chaff crab-robots were decimated by bigger crab-robots because I hadn't bought the hub's Foundry to unlock tougher units early enough. In another, trying to correct that mistake meant overstepping and failing to have a big enough army ♎to protect my sprawl of industry. Finding the sweet spot is tough, but the reward for doing so is getting to see your seething blob of robots, missile-spewing Ballista, and aerial support chew through your opponents' own mass before setting upon their undefended bases.

Balancing an army-wide unit composition is just as tough – flying units, for example, decimate a lot of ground units despite being easily wiped out by anti-air – but this creates room to reactively outplay your opponent. However, when it comes to what you're fielding, Battle Aces' biggest twist is that there♏ are no race-based factions to choose between. Instead, you pre-build your own deck of individual units to use, which means you get a little bit more control over "your" faction's strengths and weaknesses throughout the game. I found myself losing a lot of matches until I swapped my starting robots – which were individually weaker but far cheaper, meant for horde tactics – for beefier crab mechs, but I'd be interested in seeing how this approach shapes out. I think it'll result in chaos where creativity thrives, or a rigid meta caused by being able to pick-and-mix every unit, but only time will tell.

As someone who's always preferred the strategic thinking and combat in RTS games over high-intensity button-mashing, the simplicity of Battle Aces won me over. But as it stands, the game in its current state is still very awkward to learn for anyone who's coming from outside an RTS background. Its tutorials cover the absolute basics of moving and recruiting units, but I wrapped these up in a few minutes without getting into equally crucial areas like resource management. As a result, I had to go into my first games still essentially flying blind; which led to a series of lost matches that felt like one punch after another to my morale. Onboarding new players remains the genre's toughest nut to crack – and I'm not expecting Battle Aces to magically solve this – but I have come t💦o expect a little more from any game entering the scene nowadaysღ.

Considering Battle Aces is still in beta testing right now, I'm hoping better onboarding is something Uncap♓ped Games plans to tick off its to-do list in time. But I think, partly, even this speaks to what Battle Aces is offering: an adrenaline shot for the genre's existing diehards. And that's fine! Better than fine, even – it pulls that approach off in a way I've never seen before, and I can see myself diving back into Battle Aces' quickfire matches without the hesitation I experienced in similar games. But just as easily, with the right onboarding, I can see Battle Aces' measured straightforwardness being the gateway to finally bringing in friends who have long been allergic to games that use words like "economics" and "micromanagement".

On my end, I wrapped up my hands-on feeling very keen to see how Battle Aces pans out in the run-up to launch. Though, admittedly, any game with mecha-crustaceans is goꦅing to 🥂get my vote.

Whether you prefer RTS or turn-based titles, here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games to check out.

Speaking to , Empire of the Ants game director Renaud Charpentier takes a question o꧋ver how much of an improvement there is b🌱etween the PS5 and PS5 Pro versions of the game and how the latter fares against a maxed-out PC game.

"As said and as presented by Sony, it is expected that most games will double their frame rate on t🐼he Pro or improve scene quality if they were already running in 60 on a PS5," he says. "Still, maxed-out PCs are kind of "no limit," so they will, of course, be more powerful, but you can't compare them. A maxed-out PC is going to cost easily three to five times more and consume three to five times more electrical energy.

"But what is interesting and ꦜsays a lot about the flattening silicon evolution curve is that your game on your monster PC is not going to look or play 3 to 5 times better than on a PS5 Pro console. There is a huge diminishing return now on high-end silicon, and that might have an impact on the life cycle duration of console hardwa𝄹re."

As for the PS5 Pro's price tag, Charpentier isn't sure how expensive it truly is. Th🌄e developer praises the PS5 and Xbox Series X as "incredible pieces of hardware" and says it was "impossible" to build a PC as powerful on the same budget. But, the inflation we've seen since launch means "comparing the PS5 Pro price with benchmarks and prices of decades ago doesn't seem very relevant."

"The interesting question would be how much it costs in terms of average salary percentage in each region and how much previous top-end consoles cost relative to their time," he says. "I don&apos🎶;t know about that, but I remember that in my youth, many consoles were already considered pretty expensive by my parents and my friend's parents."

As for Empire of the Ants itself, the game is a remake of another obscure R𒊎TS we got 23 years ago, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 to deliver visuals photorealistic enough to make the original look further away♊ in age than it already does. Regardless, if you play this one on PS5 Pro, you can rest assured it won't look much worse off than it would on a maxed-out PC.

Here are the澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询: best strategy games you can play right now if you want something to pass the time.

Recent StarCraft rumors came by way of Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, who, while , claimed that while he was writing his new Blizzard-focused book, a StarCraft shooter was in development. Blizzard hasn't confirmed if this is true or not, but 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:speaking to GamesRadar+ in a recent inteཧrview, StarCraft 2 production director Tim Morten tells us he'd hope that the next game in the series could spice things up a bit.

"I would hope to see StarCraft 3 try something radically ne💦w to advance the genre, like being an open world or introducing game modes that are radically different for a🅷ccessibility with a greater ability to game with friends," Morten says.

Morten isn't at Blizzard now, it should be noted – he's now the CEO of Frost Giant Studios, which recently released the RTS game St🌸ormgate in early access. Even so, there's no doubt 🦋that many fans would want the same thing from a potential fresh sequel – just something that breaks new ground. 

Anyway, if the rumors of a new StarCraft game being in development are true, whether it could actually see the light of day is another matter. Just look at StarCraft: Ghost – it was announced all the way back in 2002, butꦯ eventually canceled, tragically living up to its name. For the sake of RTS fans everywhere, hopefully there's something exciting to look forward to here.

Dev behind StarCraft "spiritual successor" Stormgate says the strategy game's mixed reviews are fine, but players shouldn't expect StarCraft devs to make StarCraft quality straight off the bat.

I have fond (if painful memories) of trying to master all three of StarCraft 2's factions at once, throwing myself into the zerg's trial-by-fire horde playstyle and, once that felt too hard, dropping it to learn Protos' quality over quantity tactics. I never quite clicked wi🔜th either – it was the safe, reliable Terrans I did best with – but it was the first and only time I've been so driven to compete in a strategy game. 

Even 14 years later, I'm yet to find another RTS that has grabbed me in the same ways StarCraft did. So when it was recently reported that a StarCraft shooter was in the works, my immediate reaction was two-fold: as much as I crave a new story in Blizzard's sci-fi world, I'd much rather be looking at that world from a top-down perspective. But given how mu🐬ch has changed since StarCraft 2 launched, I have to wonder what something like StarCraft 3 ༒would even look like.  

Construct additional pylons

Let's take a look at the broader strategy genre. Since StarCraft 2 launched, we've seen XCOM receive a critically acclaimed reboot and sequel, while Civilization has released two (going on three with 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Civilization 7) new mainline games. In 2016 Total War moved into fantasy, breaking with its decade and a half of historical dominance to delve into Warhammer. Even Company of Heroes, which of these examples lies closest to StarCraft despite its World War Two setting, has experimented with live service trappings and a♏ more sandbox-style campaign across its last two entries. 

That's all to say that strategy, more so than most genres besides open-world adventures, changes more than most. The landscape that StarCraft 2 dominated is now alien – there's been a massive shift away from traditional RTS games, which I'd define as having a scripted campaign, competitive-minded multiplayer, and skirmish mode options. Now, we tend to see parts of this packaged into completely different games. A good example is Cataclismo, an Early Access game published by Hooded Horse – which, by my measure, keeps its thumb on the genre's pulse better than anyone else. Cataclismo takes traditional single-unit combat and defensive turtling and splices it into a brilliant block-by-block base-builder. You're still creating buildings to recruit units, managing your resource-based economy, and trying to field a well-balanced army. But you're also playing medie🎀val Lego and fighting immeasurable hordes of enemies, things that don't fit within Star✅Craft's formula so neatly. 

Meanwhile, I can count on one hand the amount of recent studios trying to capture that traditional formula. The big one is Stormgate developer Frost Giant Studios – while our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Stormgate review flagged room for improvement, the game is currently in Early Access, and its first major update in September has been well-received by fans. On one hand﷽, it shows there's an appetite for this style of RTS – but even Frost Giant Studios CEO Tim Morten, who was the production director for StarCraft 2, feels Blizzard would have to think big for StarCraft 3. 

"I would hope to see StarCraft 3 try somet🤡hing radically new to advance the genre, like being an open world or introducing game modes that are radically different for accessibility with a greater ability to game with friends," Morten tells GamesRadar+. Though I can't picture an open-world StarCraft game myself, I completely agree with Morten's point – it's hard to imagine a safe follow-up succeeding in today's landscape. 

For all of its strengths, StarCraft could never quite connect with a casual audience, as a lack of onboarding meant that players could only learn how to play through YouTube tutorials and one crushing defeat after another. This is something that developers have become much better at in recent years. Last year's Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Realms of Ruin, which sticks to that classic RTS formula, did this quite well, as streamlined unit production and less intensive micro-management meant that you ✨could focus more on tougher concepts and the broader strategy of each match. Even grand strategies Crusader Kings 3 and Stellaris have made it to console, which defies the assumption that the genre's toughest games are restricted to nicher PC audiences.

If by some miracle Blizzard decided to greenlight StarCraft 3 – and by all accounts, the studio is dying to get back to its strategic ways – opening the series up to more players feels crucial. Besides the innovation that Morten points to, there's certainly room for StarCraft's larger-than-life campaigns to make a comeback, as very little can match a level propped up by one of the studio's . Ultimately, maybe the easiest way to bring back StarCraft really is through a shooter, even if past attempts at🤡 doing so . Perhaps the times have indeed changed, and there really aren't as many wrist-cramped fans clamoring for a true follow-up. But as someone who's spent 💝far too long gleefully mismanaging legions of doomed Zerg, Protoss and Terrans, it would be a shame to see Blizzard call it quits on the strategy genre rather than adapt to what it's become. 

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Following its release into Early Access on July 30, I've had the opportunity to complete what exists of the single player campaign while also managi𒆙ng to put some time into the game's online multipla🍌yer. The short is that the game feels a little messy and a little too complicated, and it is attempting to please a lot of different demographics of players without making the game truly appealing to any of them. It's the details of these appeals that matter, though.

I know that most people are thinking about Stormgate in terms of online multiplayer, but I think the storytelling and scene setting provided by the single-player campaign does critical work. The games t𒊎hat it is riffing on have had extremely long lives because they have provided a platform for head-to-head competition. StarCraft II's elegant triangular system of Terrans vs. Zerg vs. Protoss has resonated with players for more than 20 years, and there&a💖pos;s an electricity in those legacy Blizzard properties that is obviously difficult to replicate. The place where that work can be done, and where we can learn about these factions and their modes of engagement, is in the campaign.

Familiar territory

Unfortunately, I think that the six missions of campaign that launched with the game's Early Access point to some of the key problems with Stormgate. Over the two and a half hours it took me to work through them, I was introduced to a member of the human Vanguard faction named Amara, whose father was involved in the event that summoned the Infernal Host into conflict with humanity. She's a militari🐬stic badass haunted by the past and willing to do anything to defeat her enemy. That is essentiall🅺y where her characterization begins and ends, and she's got a couple supporting characters for her to bounce off on in that journey.

The Infernal Host are essentially demons, and their continual invasion has decim✃ated humanity over the past two decades. In the campaign missions that I was able to play, Amara learns about and decides to pursue a powerful mystical artifact that can destroy her enemies…but at w🌌hat cost?

There is a tension in the campaign because it is fundamentally a story-driven set of missions meant to get us invested in this world. It is undeniable that it is well animated, that the voice acting is strong, and that the cinematics are directed and considered as much as any other top-tier gaming product today. At the same time, the story is so buried in the genre, and so clearly riffin🦂g on themes and ideas from StarCraft, Warcraft, and Diablo, that I began playing a subgame of "what game will the nex🌺t plot beat come from"? 

I have a huge amount of empathy for the team making this game because they are fundamentally selling a product that is marketed as a Blizzard product being made by a company that is not Blizzard but shares its DNA. They even named their company Frost Giant. So they are stuck trying to deliver something extremely fa🔴miliar while also being fresh, but🌞 I am afraid that a world co-created by Chris Metzen after the heyday of Blizzard just might straight-up not have the juice. I imagine for some people these elements might create some warm and fuzzy feelings of stories played before. For me, they felt like a rerun.

Newly nostalgic

Detailing the strengt𓄧hs and weaknesses of the campaign and the setting of Stormgate is important because many of these same ideas bleed over into the online multiplayer. The gam♌e plays as a combination of StarCraft II's unit and base management systems and Warcraft 3's map management demands. In traditional RTS mode, you build little bases, make armies using the resources those bases create, and then try to take beneficial fights as you slowly overwhelm your opponent. The game maps themselves are covered in nodes that might be beneficial to control, like flags that heal you or resource gathering points, and so players have to compete for access and control of those as well.

The demands of these systems are tricky and I do not envy the work that Frost Giant's game designers have had to do for the past several years. They have had to create a game that is legibl൩e to newcomers and provides an on-ramp for learning the game, but they also have to create something with enough depth that long-time players of these other franchises might be lured into this new game. 

Much like the campaign and its setting, where it feels like the past has overwhelmed whatever novelty this game might be bringing to these themes, the online multiplayer is a remix of previous Blizzard-adjacent games. The basic operations of the RTS – building bases, armies, upgrading them, getting into combat – are💜 prettyꦯ uncomplicated and easy to operate. However, their complexity level is very high, and the campaign currently only exists for the Vanguard faction, meaning that you can only get a narrative "tutorial" for one faction.

It is a fool's errand to try to run through what all three factions (Vanguard, Infernal Host, and Celestial Armada) do in detail. Very broadly, the Vanguard is a human faction that has effective direct damage units that can move around to control the map efficiently. The Infernal Host have either smaller swarm units or bigger, bulkier units, and all of them are powered up when they stay in their own territory – to win as the Host, you have to prioritize making that territory bigger. The Celestial Armada, my chosen faction, have a series of efficiencies and shortcuts that allow them to be mobile in taking new bases and quickly standing up defensive positions, but it comes at the cost of fast and efficient offense. Longtime players of StarCraft might 🍬recognize the broad strokes of the Terrans, 𓂃Zerg, and Protoss here.

To Stormgate's benefit, these factions are not just the factions from this other game, but they do r🐟esemble them in many ways, and it takes a bit of gameplay to figure out the key differences in how you are supposed to use the factions and how you are supposed to defend against each of them. A new RTS player might actually have an easier time than a veteran, given that they would not be stuck with these resonances, but I am not sure – the evocation of the other games is so strong that it feels impossible to tell what being totally uncoupled would even look like.

As an Early Access product, Stormgate is a relatively fun experience. I cannot say that the campaign sample I had access to would make me interested in learning more about this world or these characters, given that their stories are so familiar to me already, but others with a higher tolerance or less baggage might feel differently. I&a🃏pos;m also willing to see what happens, especially with the expectation that other factions will enter into the campaign in more substantive ways.

I do not think that the Early Access for Stormgate tells its future, especially given that RTS games undergo deep processes of rebalance on a regular basis. Right now, ღthe game is fairly slowly paced and has a very high information bar to play. At the same time, it's fun and genuinely interesting to learn, and it would take me many dozens of games, and probably a few months, to determine something so simple as whether or not it is good or bad. I think that with♏ my limited experience, I can say that it's a complex game, and it doesn't always feel or seem rewarding for all the complexity it demands. Luckily, I think the Early Access period will be a place for development and feedback, and I am looking forward to dipping into the online competitive mode every few weeks to see where the game goes from here.

Stormgate was reviewed in Early Access on PC, with a code provided by the publisher.

Developed by Frost Giant Studios, there was never any doubt that Stormgate had got strategy fans' attention, with many showing their support with their wallets. It 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:raised over $2 million on Kickstarter thanks to prospective players' donations, smashing through its initial $100,000 goal, and then the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:studio went on to seek equity funding – encouraging fans to invest in the studio itself to help support the game. At the time of writing, Frost Giant has been able to secure over $1 million this way from 419 investors. This came after the studio received $34.7 millio🤡n from other investors, including Riot Games, via Seed and Series A funding.

Needless to say, expectations are high, but Stormgate released 😼in early access on Steam yesterday for previous playtesters, as well as backers and those who bought early access packs, and its reviews aren't exactly fantastic. Right now, after 374 rev♐iews (from people who purchased the game via Steam), 56% are positive, and it's earned itself a 'Mixed' score. While its multiplayer has been praised, some are unhappy with how the game feels and have criticized the campaign. 

Of course, it's definitely worth keeping in mind that key ꦑphrase – 'early access.' It's not currently been announced when Stormgate's 1.0 version will be released – suggests it won't be for "at least a year, but that's subject to change." On August 13, it'll go free-to-play, allowing everyone to dive in at no extra cost, which will certainly bring with it more feedback. Here's hoping that Frost Giant will be able to act on the constructive criticism to create the RTS that fans want, even if it takes a little more time. 

CEO behind Warcraft and StarCraft vets' new strategy game defends asking players to invest in the studio, even after raising $35 million across fundraising efforts.

But Cataclismo, the latest title to launch under strategy publisher Hooded Horse's watchful eye, puts an end to that nonsense. An RTS game that feels equal parts Starcraft, Lego, and tower defense, Cataclismo hasn't ju😼st stolen my heart – it's built a 50-foot wall around it and dared me to take it back. 

 Castles under the hammer 

In Cataclismo, most of the world has been overrun by Horrors – mutated, shambling beasts that lurk in the ruins of a once-proud civilization. As the last bastion of humanity, it's your job to try and reclaim some of these lands from the Horrors, building up settlements capable of 🔥withstanding seemingly endless assaults. 

Each scenario – whether it's a campaign level or Cataclismo's moreish endless mode – revolves around a day-night cycle. By day, the game is more of a base management sim. You'll place drag-and-drop buildings that support your economy – houses for citizens, quarries and sawmills for construction materials, barracks to recruit soldiers – whilst your walls are placed brick by brick. There are occasional probing attacks to weather, but these defenses aren't truly tested until night – when waves of Horrors att⛦ack en masse.

When the sun goes down, Cataclismo shifts gears and becomes a full-on RTS tower defense. You're told exactly where Ho⛎rrors will attack from, but they'll usually pour in from several points at once, and actually stopping them is easier said than done. 

Cataclismo's brick-by-brick building system is more intricate than any other RTS I've played. Stone is used to build walls and towers, while wood is flimsy and best used for stairs and walkways – the equiva🐼lent of stacking dirt to reach something in Minecraft. Verticality plays a big part in everything: a 'toughness' meter gives structures more health the higher they're built, which is visually represented by walls changing from shabby cobblestone to gleaming white brick as they get taller. Additionally, certain units like archers gain damage boosts from having a sizable height advantage over their targets, while others – such as artillery units and grenade-chucking Lobbers – work best at just a few meters off the ground. 

As a rౠesult, I've had to put a lot of thought into base-building. My first plan, to build a towering single row of stone and whack everyone on top, fell apart when I realized that Horrors could tear through it like paper and it was too thin for soldiers to maneuver on. Since then, I've started doubling up on wall depth, whilst adding stone overhangs at the top so I can cram on Merlons – which give units behind them more range – and stations for archers to light their arrows on fire. Roofs have been built to shelter everyone from rain, improving their accuracy, while windows closer to the ground let my Lobbers and Cannoneers blast Horrors at their optimal range. It's ugly, but effective: imagine if Gondor's structural architecture was handled by a toddler, and you'll have a pretty good picture of my setup. Slowly iterating shabby fences into imposing ramparts has been wildly satisfying though, especially when I get to sit back and watch hundreds of Horrors crash and die against my medieval not-quite masterpiece. 

 On guard

I've always found playi🐻ng defensively to be far more fun than attacking. In my first foray into strategy, Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth 2, I'd spend hours in custom matches with AI, holding the walls of Minas Tirith from waves of orcs and goblins. Some of my fondest memories in the Total War series are winning impossible♏ siege battles – from a few veteran praetorians holding the gates of Rome in the historical side, or rows of Dwarf Thunderers shooting down thousands of zombies in Warhammer's, er, not-so-historical entries. 

Elsewhere, my favorite missions in turn-based games are the ones that give you an objective to defend against overwhelming odds – like that stupidly fun Avenger Defense mission in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:XCOM 2, or fighting a hopeless battle to hold Garreg Mach monastery in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Fire Emblem: Three Houses. 

Why? Perhaps it's more interesting because the stakes are higher: I'm fighting to save something, rather than tear it down. More tangibly, there's also something incredible about watching the attacker&apoℱs;s superior numbers dwindle as they're peppered by ranged fire and forced through chokepoints. From a design perspective, these sorts of scenarios certainly push players to be more creative, as you've got to turn to environmental features like terrain and traps to find advantages –  whereas as a besieging army, for example, these are annoying hindrances to overcome. 

Perhaps it's none of these reasons that make me a sucker for security. In another life I may have been a 10th century mason, spending my days stacking bricks and gleefully building the perfect balistraria before dying of plague at the ripe old age of 23. But as even the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games have broadly shifted from tightly-crafted single-player missions t🦩o open-ended sandbox campaigns, and nearly every multiplayer mode revolves around smashing your opponent to bits as quickly as possible, I find myself scratching that defensive itch less often. 

It's a relief, then, but Cataclismo has entered my life to tell me that it's right and good to stay in my base forever, to shirk 90% of the map in favor of home comforts. It꧅'s not about winning, it's about having fun? That still holds true, sure – but Cataclismo lets me have my base and ke🦄ep it too.  

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Cataclismo review to see what we think of the Early Access game

I'm playing with an army full of Recall units. Relatively weak, slow-moving ground units, their strength comes in the fact that they're both extremely cheap to build and surpr📖isingly mobile. That's because their name refers to their ability to teleport to a nearby base after a brief delay. I've been using them to harry my enemies for this entire match, rushing a group of them into a skirmish before porting back to safety, hopefully taking a couple of resource-gathering workers down and getting out before the cavalry shows up.

While I've b🌞een harassing those enemy workers, my own have been largely untouched, and I've now bought enough time to upgrade my base and build a large number of disposable Bomber units. While I continue to poke and prod with my Recalls on one side of the map, I position the fast-moving bombers at the opposite edge. As I finally draw my opponent into a straight-up fight, I run the bombers into their base, wiping out the workers, crippling their economy, and allowing me to roll over them with a reserve squadron of tanks.

All your base are belong to me 

All of this happens inside nine minutes. Kim is a 10-year veteran of StarCraft 2, but in our time together he emphasizes that the months-long learning curve of that iconic RTS is something he's keen to avoid in Battle Aces. Everything is simplified - each player can take just eight units i𓃲nto battle, deciding which of two upgrade trees they might like to rely on. Building and resource management are relegated to just a handful of buttons, a choice that Kim says was made to allow players to keep their eye on the fighting, and facilitate skilled players to have battles on multiple fronts, without having to jump back to micro-manage.

Between that simplicity and Battle Aces' smaller maps, it might seem that it couldn't match the complexity that the RTS community has looked to across the likes of StarCraft and Age of Empires. But Kim is adamant that while this game has been made to act as an alternative to those classics, genre veterans have been effusive in playtests, diving into a deep, interconnecti𒊎ng web of different units to unlock unit counters, new strategies, and the kind of nail-biting finishes that might once have required two players with years of experience in a single game.

Rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock

Peculiarly, Battle Aces has enabled that depth by streamlining its armies. Each player can only take eight units into battle, divided along two upgrade paths. As a general rule, Foundry units are slightly beefier ground units, while Starforge units are faster, aerial fighters. At the start of each game, you'll also have access to Core units, which form the basis of yꦛour early armies. The Foundry and Starforge can each be upgraded twice, each upgrade granting access to an increasingly powerful unit. A fourth and final unit type ad𒈔ds a further layer of complexity, as you have to pick whether you want to unlock them with your second or third upgrade; pick a second-level upgrade, and you'll have more tools with which to attempt to counter your opponent, but you might lack firepower in the late-game; pick a third-level, end-game option, and you could be swarmed before you get a chance to play your ace.

I say 'late-game', but in🌊 reality I'm talking about little more than five or six minutes. Battle Aces fights are extremely fast, but each one is a case of counters and counter-counters. Enemy units are hidden in fog of war, but you'll be able to see what upgrade paths they're looking fo♕r, which units they're planning to build, and even exactly where their economy-boosting bases can be found. With each decision they make, you'll be forced to make your own in an attempt to keep pace. Fights were rarely complex, but I still found myself struggling to keep pace, even amid all those simplified building tools and streamlined UI. 

With its science-fiction roster and potential for brutality, StarCraft's DNA can certainly be felt within Battle Aces. Deeper than it appears, its apparent simplicity belies a game that's prepared to punish you if you're not ready to answer your opponents' challenges. What it offerꦏs in return, however, is an experience that speaks to the ideals of Blizzard's strategy giant, 🅘all while making a concerted effort to open the genre's doors to all comers, regardless of experience.

Anno 117: Pax Romana was announced during today's Ubisoft Forward live stream, along with the confirmation that it'll be releasing ꦍon PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S at some point next year. We've not been shown any gameplay for it yet, but rather jusౠt a live-action teaser to get us all hyped. However, speaking on stage after it was shown, creative director Manuel Reinher promises that it will "deliver a Roman gaming experience unlike anything you have ever played."

As revealed via the , players wi🐼ll step into the role of a Roman Governor in, you guessed it, the year 117 AD. We'll be tasked with building cities while faced with alternate paths – whether you want to "follow the path laid before you, or boldly question the status quo of the empire," the choice is yours. On top of that, you can expect "4X features like diplomacy, military an𝔉d a solid narrative layer," too, according to .

In addition, it was confirmed that for the first time in the series' history, players will be able to select their starting province – the Celtic wetlands of Albion, or the "💫traditional" Roman heartlands, Latiu🎃m – giving real-time strategy fans even more choice over the way they play.

It sounds like the devs are very confident about Anno 117: Pax Romana, anyway, as Reinher also states in the aforementioned news post: "We will not only deliver the fantasy millions 🥃of strategy players are waiting for: to govern one of the most iconic ancient empires, we will push beyond that, and change how people see the Roman Empire in games." 

Details might be relatively light on the ground for now, but Ubi꧟soft has confirmed that a dev team live stream is set to take place on June 18, where we'll be able to find out more.

Keep up with all the latest from the Ubisoft Forward event with our coverage of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:all the news from the stream.

It's called Battle Aces, and it was shown off with an exceptionally cool animated trailer showcasing some of the characters and plenty of fast-paced flying and gunfighting. After that, we a𓄧lso saw a gameplay reveal and got some further details from David Kim, senior game director at Uncapped Games. 

Speaking on stage, Kim explains that Battle Aces aims to be a "RTS game for everyone," regardless of how experienced they are with the genre. "It's for players th𒊎at are brand new to RTS, as well as RTS veterans," Kim says. "We really want to bring the core fun of RTS to everybody, kind of like how games such as World of Warcraft did for MMOs, or Hearthstone did for card games."

Kim describes Battle Aces as an "action-packed,ܫ army vs army game that has a high emphasis on the strategy." It'll utilize 'unit decks' in order to allow players to define the way they want to play, and ꦰexperiment with "endless" different strategies.

"We want to eliminate the tedious clicks required to play an RTS as much as possible, so the players playing this game are experiencing only the fun parts of playing an RTS game," Kim adds🍸. 

There's currently no full release date for Battle Aces, but as outlined on its , it'll be free-to-plꦉay when it launches on Steam. If you're keen to give it a go, a closed beta is set to begin later this month, and you can .

Our handy 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Summer Game Fest 2024 schedule can help you keep track of all the packed gaming showcases taking place today and beyond.

Frost Giant, a team full of veteran devs from the Warcraft series and StarCraft 2, already saw Stormgate reach enormous success on Kickstarter, with prospective players collectively pitching in $2,380,701, despite the funding goal being a fraction of that at $100,000. However, it was announced in February that 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Frost Giant was also turning to equity fundin🔯g, allowing players to invest in the actual studio and support Stormgate's early access launch, which is set to arrive later this ꦉyear. This funding is additional to the $34.7 million in Seed and Series A funding received since the studio opened its doors, from investors such as Kakao Games and Riot Games.

In a new , Frost Giant CEO Tim Morten defends the move to seek out equity funding, stating that making a game that "♉really stands as the next-generation RTS" requires "a lot of investment." He adds that the funding that the studio has raised to date is still significantly less than the budget of many AAA games releasing today.

"The reality is🅠 that big games t🌟hat get made today are spending in excess of $100 million," Morten begins. "So, for us to go up against AAA games, for us to be a game that really stands as the next-generation RTS of the coming years, it does require a lot of investment.

"We’ve raised just under $35 million to date – that’s a big number, but it’s a much smaller number than most AAA games actually deploy against building their products," he continues. "And we are really fortunate to be in a position that we got the funding that we need to get to our early access launch, but we want to launch strongly, and we♔ want to launch in a way that puts us at the same level as AAA games from other publishers.

"So, if there’s a playerba𝔍se out there t🦩hat supports that, this is an opportunity for them to be a part of our success. And really, we’ve been very gratified by the support that we’ve seen from the community so far."

And that support for the equity funding has been pretty significant so far. According to , where shares in the studio are being sold, a total of 296 investors have pitched in at the time of writing, who have collectively r🌺aised almost one million dollars – $938,673.16, to be exact. Considering that the funding plan had a minimum goal of $15,000, Stormgate has once again managed to rack up some significant interest here. 

Whether the RTS will be able to me🅠et fans' lofty expectations when it launches into earlyღ access this year is another matter, but Morten believes that funding the game in this way will allow Frost Giant to "retain its own decision-making and bring Stormgate to market with our vision, instead of giving up some of that power to a publisher."

Be sure to check out our list of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games for some games to dive into right now. 

25 years on, Homeworld 3 can muster that same mixture of awe and anxiety, but it's a little less consistent in its execution. When all engines are firing, Blackbird Interactive's sequel is astonishing to behold, while its campaign can be every bit as imaginative and intense as Relic's original work. But the missions take a while to warm up, and they do so at the exact moment the story starts to go cold. Meanwhile, Homeworld 3's big idea, to make th𓄧at metaphorical wall you're up against a literal one, is only intermittently successful. 

Fleet on the ground

The core of Homeworld 3 is the same as it ever was, its balletic, elegiac space battles emanating from the mobile hub of your Mothership. This bladelike vessel is both the HQ you must protect and the factory floor of your war machine. From here, you build dozens of smaller spac🎉eships that range from single-person fighters to kilometer-long battlecruisers, and direct them to fight enemy fleets across tightꦇly crafted missions. 

In previous games, these battles took place in (mostly) empty space. But in Homeworld 3, space has terrain now. Every mission or match takes place around vast megastructures and lands𒁏capes, such as colossal space derelicts, destroyed hyperspace gateways, and free-floating ice 𝔉shelfs.

These, uh, space-scapes provide a dramatic backdrop to the action. But they play a direct role in the game too. At a basic level, the presence of terrain makes moving your fle𓆉et around slightly easier. Instead of having to precisely input the 3D coordinates of a move order using Homeworld's patented movement disc, you can now often just right click on a bit of terrain like you would in a standard RTS (though the movement disc remains for movements across empty space.

But terrain has more specific uses too. Free-floating chunks of debris, for example, can be used as cover by smaller crafts, helping shield them from the projectiles of more powerful ships, each of which has a physical presence in the game world. Many maps are a𒆙lso riven with tunnels and gullies you can use to bypass enemy defenses, and possibly get thဣe drop on them with an ambush. 

It's a great idea in theory. But it's more incidental in practice. Opportunities to use cover and tunnels are relatively scarce. In the campaign, you might take advantage of them occasionally during the early par🃏ts of a mission, but the larger your fleet becomes (both in number and ship-size) the less practical cover becomes. It doesn't help that, compared to other RTS' that feature cover – like Company of Heroes – the benefits it provides in Homeworld 3 are not immediately obvious. The game tells you that units in a neutral stance will "try to use cover as much as possible", but this doesn't help you interpret when cover is being effective and when it isn't. It lacks the clarityꩲ of CoH's "soldiers placed behind this big stone wall will be protected from gunfire unless flanked or blown to smithereens".

The biggest problem with these megastructures, however, is they make your units seem smaller than in previous Homeworld games. Representing scale has historically been an issue for the series – your interceptors have always looked a bit like flies swarming around🌸 a cow's backside during battle. 

But your Mothership at least seemed massive, helping you understand how "big" other ships were. Now, though, even your Mothership frequently appears tiny compared to the massive structures that constantly surround you. To properly sell the fantasy, Homeworld 3 needs levels which properly reflect t🐷he scale of the ships versus t🦩he vastness of the world. 

Ion the prize

Fortunately, the fundamentals of Homeworld are as robust as ever. Its rock, paper, scissors unit combat remains both intuitive and satisfying, further bolstered by the fact that units have deployable abilities that can give you an extra edge in combat. Ion Cannon frigates, for example, can "Overcharge" their lasers for a huge damage boost at the cost of a longer recharge, while battlecruisers can disable their own weaponry to give all nearby ships a boost to damage, making them useful hubs to build fleet around. The addition of stationary turrets, which stick themselves to a surface also helps to bring the new terrain into play, letting 🌳you set up fixed defenses to free up ships for aggressive maneuvers, or establish progressively higher backlines to gradually push your opponent back. 

Turrets can be extremely useful, although deploying them can be a little fiddly. Then again 'a little fiddly' could surmise Homeworld 3 in general. Again, Homeworld's controls have never been the most intuitive, and learning how and when to move ships around is a big part of its reward. Nonetheless, Homeworld 3 makes some unforced errors. It walks back Homeworld 2's innovation to have smaller units grouped into squadrons by default. Hence, if you want different squads of Fleet Bombers or recon 🐈fighters, you'll have to assign them to different unit groups every time you build them. 

Another annoying element is that selecting a manufacturing unit on the map, like a Carrier or your Mothership꧂, doesn't automatically switch to their build menu. You have to do that separately in the drop-down menu in the top right corner, meaning you can easily end up building all your reinforcements on the completely wrong side of the map.

When everything comes together, though, the rewards can be enormous. Even with the diminished scale, Homeworld 3 can pop off in tremendously satisfying fashion. Skirmishes between the smallest craft are impressive, as your interceptors' gatling guns spit glowing streams of projectiles at their foes. But this pales in comparison to a squad of Ion Cannon Frigates firing white hot beams of death across several kilometers of spacℱe, or a group of Destroyers launching a constellation of torpedoes into the side of a battlecruiser until it bursts in an ice-blue explosion. Homeworl♛d 3 sounds incredible too, from the naturalistic radio chatter that suddenly cuts off when the ship in question puffs out of existence, to Paul Ruskay's magnificently eerie score, which lives up every bit to his earlier work in the series.

Campaign supernova

Visually and audibly, Homeworld 3 is a space game with vision. The same can't quite be said for its narrative, despite showing some early promise. Set 20 years after the events of Homeworld 2, the campaign's story centers around Imogen S'jet, descendent and disciple of the original games' protagonist Karan S'jet. Karan and her ship – the Khar-Sajuuk has been missing for most of this time, having departed to investigate an anomaly at the edge of space. When that anoma🍃ly starts causing massive destruction across several remote worlds, Imogen is tasked with following in Karan's footsteps, and discovering the truth behind this bizarre interstellar enigma.

The first half of the story is enjoyable, mysterious, and convincingly written. It starts with the traditional mission of putting your new Mothership through its paces, with cool😼ly uttered technical jargon flowing between your subordinates as you boot up the ship's various systems. When all's ship-shape, you then inch your way toward Karan's last known location, contending with raiders, sabotage, and asteroid fields as you do so.  

Unfortunately, the story's latter half is spoiled by the introduction of a villain who doesn't so much chew the scenery as swallow it whole, and🌊 it really pulls you out of the somber, sincere atmosphere Homeworld 3 has slowly built up to this point. After this, the story becomes a very lackluster affair, and s𝓰everal enjoyable callbacks to the previous games in the series aren't enough to redeem it.

Yet while Homeworld 3's story may stumble, the individual mission scenarios are more consistently compelling. Highlights include a vertical assault on a mass👍ive fortified shipyard, a spectacular siege defense where you hold off an army of vessels spilling out of an interstellar gate, and a 'stealth' mission where you need to sneak the Mothership through an icy ravine while using smaller ships to take out overhead patrols. 

The campaign is generally adept at twisting Homeworld's mechanics in interesting ways, and stretching your capacity to use the resources at your disposal. It is a slightly shorter campaign than previous Homeworld games, with a difficulty level leaning a little too heavily toward the easy side. But the final two Homeworld 3 missions are both significantly longer and harder than those that come before th🃏em, with both seriously challenging your logistics as you take on scores of enemies on multiple fronts. 

Sadly, these missions were also the buggiest I played. 🌳I encountered a handful of issues in the broader campaign, mostly revolving around how the game continues to play out even during cutscenes. But Homeworld 3 saved its worst bugs for last. The penultimate mission randomly spawned two enemies in an inaccessible area of the map just after it gave me an objective to clear all remaining enemies, which I only completed because those enemies spent fifteen minutes scudding across the map to fight me. The final mission was beset by an array of problems, ranging from the blue radial splashes of the sensor screen obscuring the battlefield in standard visual mode, to units just not allowing me to select them. 

It's also worth noting that Homeworld 3 is pretty performance intensive, and w🐽hile my experience was mostly smooth, some larger battles in the game's latter half slowed my gam🧜e to a crawl.

Be my wingman

Outside of the campaign, Homeworld 3 features the usual offering of multiplayer and skirmish modes, which let you battle against one or several opponents on maps of varying size. But it also adds a brand new mode called 'War Games', which aims to turn Homeworld into a rogue-like. After picking a specific fleet type, War Games launches you into aꦆ succession of increasingly difficult maps, which push you to complete rapid-fire objectives while also collecting "artifacts", each of which lets you pick from three potential upgrades to your ships. Each War Game culminates in a battle against a capital ship, with rewards from your run letting you purchase more powerful fleet-types.

Essentially, it's a randomly generated mini-𒁏campaign that can be completed in around an hour. It's a fun complement to the main campaign, with its fasﷺt pace doubling down on the frantic plate-spinning of the main campaign. Yet while War Games can be played solo, it feels geared toward cooperative play, as with one player you lose much of the scale associated with Homeworld's space battles. It's still good for a quick blast of Homeworld action, but if you want a full-fat Homeworld 3 battle without the aid of friends, you're better off with the more traditional skirmish or multiplayer.

Homeworld 3 doesn't represent a major step forward for the series, but it does bring the series safely into the modern era. Its c꧃ampaign could be bigger, its story better, its controls a little more refined. But most of what it does it does well, and when its combat engine really cranks the handle it is utterly sublime. I'd loveܫ to see Blackbird do more with the series, take the fundamentals they've rebuilt here and truly push the boundaries of the series. But if this proves to be Homeworld's final foray into the final frontier, then it goes out with more of a bang than a whimper.

Homeworld 3 was reviewed on PC, with code provided by the publisher.

As highlighted by , Tencent-owned studio Uncapped Games has released a short documentary that delves into its ambitions to create a "new type of RTS." The studio is being headed up by David Kim - who previously worked on StarCraft 2 a🌠s multiplayer lead - and features developers who have worked on other notable strategy games including Warcraft, Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, and more. 

The studio's reveals Uncapped Games is on a mission to "redefine" the strategy genre by "creating a paradigm shift" that will allow for a more action-oriented, fast-paced,🉐 and fun-focused experience that can be enjoyed by everyone. To do this, the team is developing a "next-generation" RTS for PC that refines the genre's core principles and introduces groundbreaking innovations.

The studio's upcoming game will allow players to customize their army, expand tꦗheir economy, and advance their technology in a game with "infinite replayability." In the documentary, Kim said: "Players will define their own way to play, and focus on commanding fast-paced, large-scale battles. Players will enjoy more moment-to-moment strategic decision-making in each game, instead of waiting for that next fun action moment."

It's been a few years since Uncapped Games began working on its mysterious title, but we can expect a full reveal of it during this year's Summer Games Fest - which is set to take place on June 7, 2024. "Once we announce the game, and we go in🌜to closed beta, from that point onwards, we want to be as direct, as hon💝est, as transparent as possible with the community and work on the design iteration together," Kim also shared in the documentary. 

"I think when we eventually announce the game and, you know, show it to everyone, we really hope everyone resonates and likes what we made," Ted Park, the game's aℱrt director reveals. "At the same time, the effort of putting everything in there, it's a reward in itself in a lot of ways."

Find out what else we've got to look forward to this year with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2024 list. 

Some in the studi🔯o's leadership were keen to try their hand at an MMORPG, spurred by the wildly popular beta of World Of Warcraft; others suggested an action RPG in the vein of Diablo. Both were backed enthusiastically, but lead programmer Angelo Laudon floated a more conservative option, one that would help keep the suits upstairs happy: stick to the RTS format on which the studio had built its name, while expanding beyond the PC audience.

At the time, the most high-profile example of a console RTS was StarCraft 64, a clumsy 🍎port of Blizzard's PC classic that ran poorly and lacked essential features. When Ensemble's own Age Of Empires 2 had been brought to PlayStation 2 a few years before, the port did little more than tie cursor movement to the left analogue stick and the Select button to X. "Angelo and I always felt like there were ways to pull it off that nobody was doing," Halo Wars producer Chris Rippy says. The plan, then, was to build a truly console-first RTS from the ground up, something that could live comfortably on the soon-to-launch Xbox 360. 

The bulk of the studio was tasked with 🌄finishing Age Of Empires 3 before moving on to the Diablo concept, another team was put onto the MMO project, and a final group – composed only of Laudon, Rippy and four others – got to work prototyping a console RTS codenamed 'Phoenix'. One of those four was Graeme Devine, a well-travelled designer and programmer whose credits spanned Doom 3 and cult puzzler The 7th Guest. Studio leadership reckoned his talents were being wasted coding Age Of Empires 3, and suggested he take the reins of Phoenix's design. Relatively new to the studio, he hadn't yet burned out on th🎶e genre – and previous experience had taught him not to write off experimental console ideas. "I thought back to my time at Id, when we were just beginning Doom 3, and Halo came out for the first Xbox," he recalls. He and his colleagues dismissed the idea of a console FPS outright. "And then we played Halo and were like, 'Oh. Look at that. That's pretty darn playable'."

I can see your Halo

Achieving something similar with Phoenix wouldn't be easy. The RTS was perhaps even more bound to PC and mouse-and-keyboard cont♓rols than the FPS before it. Rippy lists some of the questions that faced the team: "What was it like to select units? What was it like to move units? What was it like to gather resources? It was really just the most basic things." In search of answers, the team dedicated the first year of development to making a fully functional console port of Age Of Mythology to demonstrate that intuitive console controller support was even possible. "We always felt, at least at the beginning, that we were a skunkworks team off to the side," Rippy says. "We needed to prove ourselves." Tinkering with narrative, meanwhile, Devine decided that the game would step away from the historical settings – fantastical or otherwise – to which the studio had previously been tied. Phoenix would instead be a sci-fi epic that drew on War Of The Worlds and 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Humans go to the Moon, we find structures on the Moon, and we set off a cosmic car alarm," Devine says. An alien race called the Sway would follow the noise, triggering an invasion of Earth. 

Asymmetry was key. As in StarCraft, the human and alien factions would sport distinct unit types, abilities, upgrade paths and playstyles. The Sway would be able to blanket sections of the map in a fog of war, while the humans relied on stealth tactics. Both would advance through technological stages – much like the eras in Age Of Empires – but the Sway would do so by sacrificing their own units, adding a new dimension to skirmishes. Designs changed often, and the team's small size meant it could nimbly prototype and implement new i🍨deas. "One of Ensemble's strengths was to playtest every day," Devine says, with the rest of the studio often joining in to give pointers. Eventually, they honed Phoenix to a state where they felt it was fun to play. "That was the point where we went to Microsoft." 

The publisher hadn't greenlit any of Ensemble's smaller prototypes in the past, but it liked Phoenix. Microsoft was keen to have one of its most lauded studios produ𓆏ce something for its new platform, and seemed impressed by what the team had produced. There was just one snag. RTS had no proven console audience, and executives worried that Phoenix would struggle to sell without attachment to a bigger brand. Ensemble could develop the prototype into a full game, Microsoft said, on the condition that it became a Halo spinoff. 

Devine took this hard. He had spent a year building out a world of alien races, languages and future history. Now, he was being told to chuck it away for a series about which he knew little. "I baulked," he says. "I baulked badly. I did not like the idea." He was given the weekend to think about it. Then the arrangement was placed in stronger terms: if the team didn't get on board with the Halo pivot, there would 🉐be layoffs. "Well, OK, then🎉," Devine reasoned at the time. "I guess I like Halo." 

Bar the control system, which the team felt they'd just about cracked, most of the existing design work couldn't neatly map onto the Halo universe, making it redundant. And while Devine found a richer world in Halo than expected, the transition was made more complicated by the fact Ensemble was now working with a🍰nother studio's IP. To start their relationship on the right foot, Devine and Rippy visited Bungie's headquarters in Seattle to demo an early build. The atmosphere was tense. Many Bungie staff seemed confused. After hesitations, Ensemble was given permission to add to the Halo canon – ideally in a far-off corner of the universe. 

Devine remembers Bungie's pitch: "Why don't you set this 100,000 years before the events of Halo, in the time of the Forerunners?" Ensemble was on board, but not Microsoft: "'No, we wan♈t Spartans'." Except Ensemble couldn't use the one Spartan everyone knew. Master Chief – and indeed all of Halo's other central characters – were off limits, as the team skirted carefully around the in-development Halo 3 and the (ill-fated) Halo film. W🅘ith Bungie's assistance, Devine created a new crew of UNSC soldiers that Ensemble could play with, avoiding the risk of stepping on any toes.

Give us space

While Halo Wars was progressing, Ensemble's other projects were struggling. The MMO team had pivoted that game into another Halo-themed spinoff without Microsoft's request or approval. The Diablo-style ARPG project was cancelled when Microsoft refused to greenlight it, and th﷽e prototype that replaced it – a Zeldainspired spy game called Agent – fared no better. The team was split up, and its staff distributed among the MMO and Halo Wars. The extra hands were sorely needed. Despite being the only active project at Ensemble that had received Microsoft's approval, Halo Wars had the smallest team. But, as senior staff rolled off other projects, the balance of what was once a lean, nimble unit shifted. Devine was left to focus on the narrative, while lead design duties were handed over to Dave Pottinger. 

A veteran of Ensemble who'd worked across all of the studio's releases, Pottinger immediately spotted problems: "The simulation was floundering, the pathfinding was pretty awful, and the computer-player AI was nonexistent." Many of the system improvements the studio had developed for Age Of Empires 3 hadn't been brought over to Halo Wars, while many of the design ideas borrowed from that series proved unworkable on console. "The complexity of the game was difficult for console players," Pottinger says. "When I took over as lead designer, we were sending builds out and people were playing them and they weren't having fun, because it was just too hard." Soldiers differentiated only by their weapons might work in a medieval setting but they looked confusingly similar in the world of Halo; selecting individual units from the hundreds on screen ✱was a pain using analogue sticks; and managing an economy and building a base bogged down the momentum of skirmishes. 

Under Pottinger, the game was streamlined. The economy was changed to a two-resource system that didn't involve individual gatherer units; freestyle base-building was pared down to a preset building system; and a Select All option was added so that players could instantly control their entire force. Difficulties remained, though. Halo Wars was now a console game, an RTS and the next entry in Microsoft's biggest game series. But which was it first? "We had a lot of internal debate🍎, really right up until the end, about the priority of those things," Pottinger remembers. "In my view, it was: Halo, console, RTS. Once you decide to make a Halo game, you have to deliver a Halo game." 

N♚o wonder, then, that the Spartans were put front and centre, given the ability to hijack Covenant vehicles, and made an essential part of the UNSC roster. In some ways, though, this was anathema to Ensemble's RTS principles, limiting players' strategic options by encouraging them to rely on a specific unit. But finding a balance between compelling and console-friendly design was always the challenge. "We had to pull back on some depth, and, honestly, we pulled back too much," Pottinger says. "Then we ran out of time to put the right amount of depth in. I think about Halo Wars as a lot of missed opportunities." 

Yet when the game finally launched, those missed opportunities weren't as clear to players as its makers. Halo Wars was popular enough to get a sequel – albeit not within the same studio. With the MMO project cancelled several months earlier, Microsoft announced ahead of Halo Wars' release that this would be the studio's final game. Ensemble, then, spent its last days working꧑ in the very genre its leadership had once been desperate to escape. It made sure, at least, to go out with a bang. "A lot of people thought about Halo Wars not necessarily just as a footnote to Microsoft," Devine says, "but as what Ensemble can do when we're at our best. And it was Ensemble at its best💝."

This feature originally appeared in 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Edge magazine. For more fantastic features, you can or . 

As reported 𝓡by , developer Frost Giant has turned to a new method of funding for its upcoming game Stormgate: equity funding. The developer is🐷 looking for fans to invest in the studio itself, and the funding is designed to "support marketing efforts for Stormgate's upcoming Early Access launch on Steam," according to the studio.

"Frost Giant Studios' crowd-equit𒀰y offering on will enable private investors and passionate players to actually be our business partners, to help launch Stormgate in the best way possible – together," Frost Giant CEO Tim Morten said in a press release. At the time of writing, Frost Giant has accrued $43,145.68 from 18 investors.

As noted above, these funds aren't being raised to fund Stormgate, because it's already secured all the funding it needs to be developed. That was before Frost Giant launched Stormgate's 🍎Kickstarter campaign, which was designed to add new elements to the game on top of the foundations already established, like a 3v3 mode and "advanced hero customization."

Despite being already funded, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:St🎐ormgate sailed past $2 million ra𝓰ised from fans via Kickstarter, which is a far cr💧y from $100,000, which is wꩲhat Frost Giant was originally aiming for when launching the Kickstarter campaign. The final figure came from precisely 28,143 backers on Kickstarter, if you're curious about whether Stormgate has an established fan base already, despite not even having launched.

𒁃Stormgate's early access period, which Morten highlights above, will kick off at some p🌟oint later this year, and Frost Giant plans for it to last right around one year in total. After this, Stormgate will fully launch, which is what Morten and company are now seeking more funding for. 

Keep an eye on our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2024 guide for a look at all the other titles launching across the year. 

Filling out the top 10 are the strategy space RTS 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Homeworld 3, the auto-battler strategy game 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Backpack Battles, the zombie survival sandbox 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Dread Dawn, the turn-based strategy game Millennia, the roguelike deckbuilder Balatro, the online co-op dungeon-crawler Rotwood, and the derivative, aptly named Metroidvania Deviator. 

You can check out the full list for yourself , but suffice it to say there's an eclectic mix of all sorts of different genres and themes in there. I'm a little bummed to see so little love for horror on the list, especially after playing demos for this gorgeous Dark Souls and Princess Monono൲ke-inspired ♏boss rush horror and this 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:unimaginably dark PS2-style iওndie horror game, but I'm both surprised and🌞 happy to see on the list which previously had escaped my radar.

In a press release, Valve said: "This event racked up more than 3 million wishlists across all available demos; the most of any Next Fest so far!" Last week, I reported on the indie developer community's response to the unprecedented amount of engagement in this year's Steam Next Fest and how helpful it is to smaller stu✨dios f🌳ighting for some precious exposure.

Looking to add even more games to your wishlist? Have a look through our list of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming indie games for 2024 and beyond.

Once slated for an early 2023 release after a previous delay, Homeworld 3 currenꦅtly has a March 8 release date on . That's now been moved to May 13, or really May 10ꦺ with advanced access via the game's fancy editions, following a delay announced smack in the middle of the game's ongoing Steam Next Fest demo offering.

"This was our first time seeing the game played at scale, which is always an equally thrilling and nerve-wra🐬cking moment," reads a statement from developer Blackbird Interactive and publisher Gearbox Publishing. "We also recently gathered a dedicated group of players from outside our organizations to play through the full game. This resulted in additional insights and perspective that will be incorporated to make Homeworld 3 the best experience possible.   

"After careful analysis of feedback, we made the decision to delay the global launch of Homeworld 3 until May 13, with advanced ac෴cess set for May 10, to ensure that we’re making the final tweaks needed to deliver at the level of qu💧ality that we strive for and you deserve.

"To say that you as a community of players have been waiting patiently for this next installment would be an understatement, and we are deeply appreciative ꦍof that. We will continue to keep you updated on💫 our progress."

On the bright side, Steam Next Fest runs until February 12, so you've got a few days left to quench your thirst for sci-fi RTS action. This delay should also give Blackbird more tim🔯e to act on feedback from this demo period, as well as the full playthroughs it apparently ran internally. But hey, at least we know it's mostly finished, and really, what's another few months at this point? (It's another few months is what it is, which may be especially painful to fans who tried the demo in the past few days and were getting hyped for the impending launch, but I digress.)

Blackbird founder Rob Cunningham previously said "Homeworld 3 was our original dream for 🌼Homeworld 2," adding that he's waited 20 years to make the dream RTS, which is apparently "way easier to play" than the first game. 

As our friends at Edge reported, Homeworld 3 recaptures the tone of the classic RTS while realigning it with a new generation. 

Throughout the event, Lords Mobile players will be able to take part in the Pagani Grand Prix. Using the stunning Zonda F Coupe, you'll use Fuel to take to the racetrack𒐪, completing Endurance Achievements to earn prizes. You can earn fuel from Daily Login Events, Monster Hunts, and Kingdom Labors, and the Grand Prix will offer an exclusive Castle Skin based on the Zonda F Coupe, as well as emotes, avatars, and more.

There's also the Pit Stop, where you can us♊e the Racetrack Tokens you earn from the Pagani Grand Prix in exchange for the Racetrack Star Leader skin, new Artifacts, and collab emotes and avatars.

As well as taking part via the game itself, players will be able to head to the . From February 5 to February 10, you can complete the Pagani Puzzle, o𝔉ffering bonus gifts. After the event ends, Lords Mobile and Pagani will pick one winner to claim a Speedster Bundle, featuring custom Lords Mobile x BOSE bluetooth earphones, an Oath Keeper Figure, a Lords Mobile x Logitech keyboard & mouse set, a Lords Mobile x Soocas electric toothbrush, and a Lords Mobile x Anker power bank. And from February 11 to February 20, daily login events will grant dice that you can use to complete the Pagani Power event and earn Power Token൩s that can be spent on limited-stock items in the gift shop.

Finally, Lords Mobile developer IGG is hoping to celebrate the game's 8th anniversary in style by bꩲreaking an official Guinness World Record. IGG is looking for more than 80,000 Lords and Ladies to submit anniversary artwork in an attempt to break the record for 'Most Participants to an online ASCII image'. Once the piece is complete, the top 20 players in the anniversary challenges will win a limited edition art book commemorating the eff🍃ort, as well as other amazing prizes.

To take part in the Lords Mobile 8th anniversary e𒅌vent, you c♋an download the game via the , , or on - and make sure to follow along with the community on and .

Stormgate is the brand new project from Frost Giant Stud🍸ios, and it's become quite the success story on . Initially seeking just $100,000 to get its new game fully funded, Stormgate has accrued $2,380,701 from a grand total of 28,143 backers, which means its funded nearly every single one of its stretch goals.

This means Stormgate backers have unlocked new elements like profile portraits, "advanced hero customizatioꦺn," expanded personalities for bots, new three-play weekly mutators to mix up gameplay, and many more stretch goals for new features on Kickstarter.

Stormgate's astounding Kickstarter campaign took place even after it was fully-funded for launch. "This Kickstarter is in part a response to fan requests for a way to purchase a physical Collector's Edition of Stormgate," the Kickstarter page reads🍬, so Frost Giant Studios' game really has gone above and beyond with this campaign.

Billed as a "hyper-responsive real-time strategy game," Stormgate will feature an ongoing campaign, a 1v1 mode, a 3v3 mode, three-player online co-op, a "powerful editor," and much more. It's even called a "Blizzard-style RTS" by Frost Giant Studios, which gives backers a great idea of what they're in for. In fact, the new 🍌game is even called a "spiritual successor" to the likes of Warcraft and Starcraft.

Stormgate's going to have an entire year of early access, while Frost Giant Studios is busy working away on elements like the editor, the 3v3 mode, the game's different factions, and more༒. There's no word on ღwhen this early access period will start, but after it's over, Stormgate will hopefully be in a position to fully launch.

Check out our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games 2024 guide for a look ahead at some great upcoming titles to play while we wait for the new RTS to drop.

Last month, we reported that Stormgate had smashed its $100,000 Kickstarter goal by more than 600% in less than 25 hours. Now, 41 days later, it seems real-time strategy fans just can't wait to play this, as they've raised a further $735,000+ for the game in aও little over a month. If you did want to join in, there's still another 16 days before ends on February 1, 2024. 

Unsurprisingly, fans of Stormgate have unlocked a lot of the campaign's stretch goals, including an additional tileset, HUD skin, a new player assist tool, and more. There are only two stretch goals left, and they're for a Webtoon Series based on the game ($2 million) and an Editor Early Preview for maps, mods, and custom games ($2.25 million). At the rate we've seen this project take off so far, this could ve💜ry well༒ be reached in just over two weeks.

If this is the first time you've heard of Stormgate, let us catch you up. Some of the developers that make up developer Frost Giant Studios have previously worked at Blizzard, hence the link to Warcraft and Starcraft. The upcoming game is ꧟a "hyper-responsive" real-time strategy game that will place players hundreds of years in the future as they build a base, harvest resources, and command armies. 

We don't have an exact release date for Stormgate just yet, but it&🥃apos;s expected to༒ launch via early access in the summer. A demo/beta will also be available to all players from February 5 - 12, 2024. 

Take a look at our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games list to see what we can play while we wait for Stormgate.

Speaking to PC Gamer, Cunningham shares his excitement at finally being able to implement ideas that he's had since the legendary RTS series first took flight. "It was ܫprofoundly satisfying to 🐷finally be making the game that you had in your mind, finished, for a long time before," he says. "In essence, Homeworld 3 was our original dream for Homeworld 2."

Homeworld 1 launched in 1999, while its sequel followed four years later, and according to Cunningham, t𓃲he vision for Homeworld 3 was "uttꦏerly impossible" then due to the technological constraints of the time. "We couldn't do massive environments with these megaliths," he explains, "so we had to wait 20 years."

Recalling theꦬ limitations of the first game, Cunningham says, "The problem was the space: there was just so much space. We had some asteroids, but that was it. We did our 🅰best to make it strategically interesting, but there was really no other decision-making happening in the game space. Immediately, we started thinking, 'What can we do about putting terrain in space?'"

The answer lay in those aforementioned megaliths, gian♔t space structures which add an extra tactical layer to proceedings by offering new ways to flank the enemy as well as defensive options to keep your spaceship 𒆙safe from incoming fire. 

Despite being heavier on features, according to its creators, players will have an easier time getting to grips with the latest entry in ๊the Homeworld🔥 series. "With Homeworld 3, the terrain actually helps the player move around because you can select your units and click on the terrain, and they immediately go to that spot," Cunningham explains. It's way easier to play Homeworld 3 than it was to play Homeworld 1."

To really drive the point that Homeworld 3 is less punishing than its predecessors, game director Lance Meuller adds, "Homeworld 1 and 2 were known for very hard counters for units. You'd need an assault frigate or flak frigate to take out fighter units. For Homew🙈orld 3, we're trying to soften that as much as possible, and terrain&♑apos;s a very big factor for softening counters."

You'll find the full interview in issue 380 of PC Gamer, grab a single issue or set up a subscription now via .

Stormgꦦate, a free-to-play real-time strategy game for PC, is being developed by Frost Giant Studio, which is made up of various former Blizzard employees. The project launched on on December 6, with a goal of $100,000, and a whole 15 minutes into its campaign, it managed to raise the entire amount. Now, less than 24 hours after it launched, the Kickstarter has r𒐪aised $744,388, obliterating that goal with weeks still remaining in the campaign. 

It's no surprise that there are so many people excited about this project but I still can't believe just how fast the studio managed to reach its goal. There are still 57 days l🏅eft before the Kickstarter ends, so I can only imagine how much more cash Frost Giant Studio will be able to collect in that time. Thanks to all of this support, fans have managed to unlock several of Stormgate's stretch goals with just two more left to go.

So what is Stormgate? According to the Kickstarter, it's a "hyper-responsive RTS game tꦦhat will feature an ongoing campaign, 3P co-op, 1v1, 3v3, and powerful editor, and more." More specifically, players will experience a world set hundreds of years in the future (created in Unreal Engine 5) where they'll have to build a base, harvest resources, and command armies. 

If you were already a fan of the Warcraft and StarCraft real-time strategy games "it should feel familiar, like a true spiritual successor to those games," the devs claim. That being said, it won't be an exact copy as the Stormgate devs are aiming for a “modern take” on traditional strategy games. 

The best news of all is that we shouldn't have to wait too long to play Stormgate ourselves. Not only is the game scheduled for release in 2024, but now that the Kickstarter campaign has been a complete success, the team has said Stormgate Founders (those who con🃏tributed to a certain tier of the campaign) will be able to take part in a playtest which is scheduled to begin in February 2024. 

While we wait to see how the Stormgate Kickstarter campaign ends, take a look at our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games list. 

Cataclismo is a real-time strategy game that has players building castles stone-by-stone and defending them against swarms of enemies. In the game, players have to use their Lego-building skills to construct castl🔯es piece by piece. They'll also need to gather materials to build walls, bridges, and anything else they think will help stop the 'Horrors' from getting through their defense. 

Developer Digital Sun (who you may also know as the developer of acclai💎med roguelite Moonlighter) launched Cataclismo's campaign on October 10, and within less than three hours the project had already been funded 30%. By the next day, it had easily collected 50% of its funding, and by October 17 the entire goal had been reached - with another 24𒊎 days still left to go on the campaign. 

We recently got a taste of Cataclismo by 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:playing its demo during Steam Next Fest. News Editor Ali Jones was the one 𓆏to try it out and said it had "the most promise of anything I've played so far in Steam Next Fest" - even after the stairs he had strategically placed got munched on by monsters. The event may be over but you can still try out Cataclismo's demo via as well as contribute to its stretch goals on Kickstarter which include a photo mode and blueprint creation tool. 

Find out what else is still worth checking out with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best Steam Next Fest games list. 

Described as a complete rework of the original game, Stronghold: Definitive Edition revives the original campaign, upgrading it with modern visuals and gameplay systems that most recent series entries have seen. Along with enhanced visuals and added voice-overwork, the Definitive Edition includes integrated multiplayer, a bonus story campaign called The Jewel Campaign, and a new Castle Trail mode that focuses on skirmishes.

The demo that's focuses on two gameplay modes, The Hidden Lookout and First Blood campaign sequences, both offering over an hour of gameplay. As a remaster of the first game in the franchise, which led to sequels Stronghold: Crusader, Stronghold 2 & 3, and most 🅺recently Stronghold: Warlords, the Definitive Edition for the original looks to be a revisit that many long-time fans have been hoping for.

For more on the most exciting games from Valve's event, check out our roundup of the best Steam Next Fest demos for October 2023.

Empire of the Ants, a relatively obscure real-time-strategy game based on the 1991 science fiction novel of the s♚ame name, is getting an Unreal Engine 5 r🍸emake.

Now why should you, dear reader who might not have read the book or played the 23-year-old video game, care about this Empire of the Ants remake? Well, because it ac🎃tually looks pretty promising - more-so than it has any right to, frankly.

A lot of games bill themselves as "photorealistic" even though their characters' faces look like porcelain dolls, but Empire of the Ants genuinelyౠ could pass for a nature documentary if you were sitting a few feet away from the screen. I mean:

Stunn🌸ing visuals aside, Empire of the Ants has the potential to be a really compelling RTS even if the original game isn't exactly beloved. Developer Tower Five says there are plenty of tutorials to ease newcomers into the RTS experience, but the game still sounds like it has plenty of meat for genre enthusiasts to chew on. "The gam﷽e will offer a scalable difficulty and adaptable experience for veteran players who will discover new game mechanics as well as advanced strategies and combat skills," reads the .

"Strategy planning, exploration, combat skills, but most of all, setting up local wildlife alliances will be necessa🥃ry to survive the many challenges awaitiಌng."

Curiously, the developer also says Empire of the Ants will "offer an experience close to the iconic book saga," which tells a story from two perspectives: a human who disappears in the basement of the house he inherited, and a young female ant from the russet ant nation of🍰 Bel-o-kan who's investigating a mysterious new weapon being used to wreak havoc on her colony.

I ha🔴ve absolutely no clue how closely the video game remake hews to the book, but you play as the "Ant Savior" whose mission it is to lead its colony to prosperity by defending its land, rebuilding its home, and defending against attac🐬ks using strategic combat strategies.

Look, I have no idea if this game 𒊎is going to be any good, but at the very least, I'm mesmerized by its trailer and want to🐈 see more. The idea of controlling units of ants and uniting to repel the threat of a mighty lady bug is just really speaking to my inner child, and if the RTS gameplay is any good, I could see myself having a lot of fun with this.

Empire of the Ants is due out in 🌜2024 for PS5, Xbox Seri༺es X, and PC.

Here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RTS games you can play today.

Developer Digital Sun is now working on an RTS game called Cataclismo, which has been ambitiously as They Are Billions, a base-bui♛lding banger, meets Lego. The Lego influence comes in the form of "brick-by-brick" construction for the bases you'll be using to defend fortresses from waves of aptly named Horrors. 

Cataclismo is still in early development – so early, in fact, that its planned isn't even live yet. It does have a page though, and it confirms a Q2 2024 target release date. There's also a newly update🎃d demo which has gotten good feꦛedback so far, and the Steam page outlines the bones of the game: 

"ꦺBuild and defend the towers and walls of a besieged humanity struggling to live in a world blighted by a dangerous mist," the page reads, immediately bringing the opening of Demon's Souls to my mind. This mist ain't gonna fight itself. 

"Piece together walls, bridges, and towers with straightforward, brick-by-br🥂ick construction. The tougher your structures, the better you'll endure the relentless assault of the Horrors. Should your walls be razed or your barriers breached, fold time itself to give your soldiers another chance to survive," Digital Sun adds. I don't know how one goes aboꦚut folding time – perhaps as you would fold a bedsheet, just start with the corners – but it sounds fun in an RTS context. 

Digital Sun's trademark minimalist art style is back, and I'm really digging the mix of intricate base-building, tense resource management, and siege warfare promised here. There's word of limitless medieval castles in creative mode, too, which could give the game a whole new dimension. The perspective looks to be a great fit for this kinꦆd of combat, and if it's as good as Moonlighter, it may well end up being one of my favorite games of 2024.

Speaking of indie strategy games, this new Godzilla game is straight-up Into the Breach. 

But I'll tell you who does mind, and that's the two other fleet commanders desperately requesting my assistance. Their Frigates and Fighters are under assault, their Capital Ships deteriorating under a heavy barrage of Ion Cannons – frak, I've really done it this time. But that's War Games for you, the new cooperative game mode in Homeworld 3 that asks three players to team up and take on an increasingly difficult series of objective-based missions across the galaxy. Work together, you might survive; if one goes rogue, it's back to the beginning with whatever X🧸P progression you've earned.

Launch the alert vipers

If I'm honest, I recognize that it's a little reductive to think of Homeworld 3 in this way, as some Battlestar Galactica simulator. This is the return of the king – the long-awaited sequel to two of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RTS games of all-time. It features rather elaborate cover-based space combat in a truly 3D☂ space, where oꦇffensive and defensive initiatives can be born out from any angle. Blackbird Interactive has done a wonderful job of refining a complex control and command system too, with the veteran development studio offering up a crisp user experience that doesn't wane under pressure. And then there's the visual and audio presentation, which is undoubtedly best in class for the genre. 

Homeworld 3 is on track to be a staggering accomplishღment, smartly advancing the rock-paper-scissors essence of the franchise's tactical combat and finally making good on the concept of terrain in spౠace – where asteroid fields and ship debris aren't just elements of the environment to be admired but active parts of every engagement. There's real joy in breaking line-of-sight by quickly pulling Recon ships behind shifting asteroid fields, or weaving a squadron of Bombers through a debris field trench run before broadsiding an assortment of Missile Frigates.

So, am I really getting the most out of Homeworld 3 by forgoing the strategic freedom it offers? "We don't want to specifically discourage any apᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚproach to contributing to objectives," says Andrew Oatway, senior designer at Blackbird Interactive. "If you get the right Artifacts, and pick the right places to ambush from, massed strikecraft are definitely solid answers to the tac꧂tical questions we've posed. At higher difficulties, you may need to be a little more flexible, not every problem will be a nail per se. That said, with good cooperation, tactics, and Artifact selections, I'm sure people will carve out victories with all kinds of compositions of fleets."

With the backing of Blackbird, I'm finding renewed joy in the micro-management of Interceptor combat. Oatway me♌ntions Artifacts, powerful ship augments that are rewarded for completing objectives. In one round of War Games, the space gods bestowed upon me the ability to double the population cap of my beloved Interceptors, and increase their damage output at the cost of firing range. Have you ever seen a sight as glorious as 50 Interceptors swarming into a massive-scale galactic battle, like angry bees protecting a hive? I know that you haven't. 

The folks I was paired with hadn't either, and once I was able to figure out better ways to group, arrange, and maneuver my fighters we did start to find some success. Using my fleet to provide support to corvette-class combat vessels as we pushed against boss encounters, or zipping towards an almost defeated Capital Ship to draw fire for long enough that an all𝄹ied commander could send in Support Frigates. That's the great thing about Homeworld 3's War Games, because no matter the challenge, with a little communication, each connected player can indulge in their own starfleet fantasies. 

Become a master tactician with the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games waging war right now 

As any medieval strategy game will teach you, as a leader, it's up to you to build your king꧅dom to prosperity, and then defend it from those who would like to take that prosperity away from you. Thronefall is no exception - you'll spend the first few minutes of each campaign setting up a combination of economy and defense; houses and mills provide valuable income, while guard towers take shots at any enemies that come too close.

As your civilization progresses - with city walls, rolling fields, and barracks to train soldiers - so too do the threats you face. But here's where Thronefall puts its two-pronged spin on things; first, enemies only come in waves, and only at night, so you'll be able to plan for their arrival. If it&𒈔apos;s a weak force, you might be free to focus on economy for a turn. If they're coming from the West, you can move your soldiers away from the East.

Second, Thronefall takes away much of your decision-making. That might sound like a downside, but it turns each fight into a puzzle-solving activity, rather than a contest decided by brute force. Every building you can use to strengthen your kingdom is assigned to a specific spot, and more sites become available to you as you upgꦺrade your central castle, which must be defended at all costs. As you build and upgrade houses and mills, you get more money to bolster your city walls, or turn guarဣd towers from simple wooden affairs into massive, ballista-firing monoliths.

It's a system that makes for surprising depth. On some maps, I&aposꦐ;ve found that economy is key, using a steadily increasing pot of money to build impenetrable blockades in front of my opponents. On others, I've been forced to use my King as bait, drawing enemy soldiers away from areas of value. Each decision has weight, and finding the right place to use every single piece oꦺf gold could mean the difference between success and failure. Fallen soldiers and destroyed buildings will be rebuilt at the end of every wave, making the cost of a close-fought victory feel slightly less pyrrhic, but you'll lose income and take a hit to progression for every building that falls. 

Real (good) time 

The ability to rebound from the jaws of defeat lends itself to Thronefall's other twist. The tightly-bound puzzle format means that there's only a handful of maps to playthrough; instead of conquering a sprawling empire, the aim is to perfect your protection of a more tigh♔tly-knit kingdom. Different weapons allow your King to wade into the front lines, or fire from afar to kite enemies more effectively. Different perks might allow you to take a more economical approach, or turtle behind walls and towers that deal bonus damage. Further mutations grant enemies more speed or damage, but grant way more XP if you can overcome them all.

Each run grants points that unlock new🦹 perks, offering Thronefall a level of replayability that its minimalist map provision belies. More points means more unlocks, offering entirely different ways to ꩲplay, and a leaderboard system will have you playing against yourself and your friends in an attempt to secure the highest score possible.

Not quite RTS, not quite tower defense, Thronefall has quickly become the most dynamic and entertaining example of either genre that I've played in a long time. That's not to put the complexity of games like Age of Empires 4 to shame, but more to highlight the success that has long been found at the boundaries of the strategy genre. I'm reminded of games like Bad North and They Are Billions - projects that spu꧃n out of a relative dearth of big-budget real-time strategy in the 2010s, but focused on particular ideas rather than an emulation of the entire genre. Speed and simplicity drew me to those games, just as with Thronefall, but with all of them, it's the impressive depth you find below the surface that keeps me coming back.

Thronefall is out now on PC via Steam in Early Access. Find out what other hidden gems are heading our way soon with our 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:upcoming indie games list.

ZeroSpace is the debut title from Starlance Studios and a collaborative effort with Ironward Team, described as a cinematic RTS with "an epic sci-fi story where your decisi♔ons determine the fate of the galaxy. No two matches play the same thanks to nearly limitless combinations of factions, mercenary units and heroes, introducing unparalleled strategic depth and player expression to the genre."

As a casual and occasionally curious observer of RTS games, the thing I'm ไmost interested in ZeroSpace is the way it mixes in elements from classic RPGs, a genre I'm much more familiar with. Specifically, it features an "expansive lore" ജwith deep stories as well as a story campaign with player choices that affect branching narratives.

Further drawing me into ZeroSpace is the developers' commitment to "making an RTS that any gamer can approach and enjoy thanks to clever and intuitive interface design." The studio also says h𓆏ardcore RTS competito💞rs will find plenty to dig into with "a limitless ladder of skill expression to master in PvP, a campaign mode, and a massively multiplayer co-op mode."

I'm not the only one keeping ZeroSpace firmly on my 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:new games radar. The game's had an initial goal of $100,000 when it went live less than a week ago, and in just seven hours it had already blown right past that൩. At the time of writing, it's managed to reach $324,000 in funds from eager backers - more than triple the original goal.

The♈re's no release date just yet, but you can right now.

Here are the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best RTS games you can play today.

As part of 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Future Games Show, indie publisher Freedom Games gave us a taster of their upcoming titles, among them one that's just launched on PC platforms. Dust Fleet sees us t🎃aking control of a host of spacecraft, guiding troops on a mission through the dust belt in this futuristic imagining of the 24th century. With space colonization having rendered Earth obsolete, fleets like these are needed to scour the galaxy for resources to sustain humanity's life among the stars – and to fight back against the enemies that threaten it.

According to the game's Steam page, Dust Fleet lets you "customize each individual ship using a detailed designer." If the sound of that is ringing those 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:Starfield bells in your head, too, you're not alone; we're already excited to 澳洲幸运5开奖号码ౠ历史查询:build our🍬 home from home in outer space, and in contrast๊, Dust Fleet seeks to⛦ turn those homes into all-out weapons.

In the montage reel screened during tonight's showcase, Freedom Games treated us to a sneak peek at what its ship customizཧation menus look like. From selecting hull types to turrets, support styles, and more, Dust Fleet's designer allows us to tailor each ship to our tactical combat needs. It seems we will be able to choose an archetype from a list bꦛefore adding our own tweaks, making for a unique space fleet that can be tailored to your own playstyle.

If real-time strategy and sci-fi shooters are your thing, c𒀰heck out Dཧust Fleet on Steam and Epic Games.

If you’re looking for more excellent games from today's Future Games Show, have a look at .

The trailer gets up close to the action൲, showing off fighting with and against all of the game's four main factions. With models designed in close collaboration with Games Workshop, Realms of Ruin offers an authentic recreation of units from the Stormcast Eternals, Orruk Kruleboyz, and more.

There's also a glimpse 🦹of Realms of Ruin's story, and the mysterious power that sits at its heart. Written in conjunction with Black Library author Gavin Thorpe, it promises a twisting narrative over a campaign that brings the focus to all of the game's factions. different missions and modes will task you with managing each faction's strengths and weaknesses, and securing Arcane Conduits to ensure that the flow of battle never runs against you. And if you manage to master the AI across the campaign, you'll be able to tak✅e your skills online thanks to cross platform multiplayer and even a ranked ladder to allow you to vie for the title of the true ruler of the Realm of Ghur.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar is set to release on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC via Steam on November 17, and .

Want to go deeper? You🌳 can offer their early impressions of Warhammer Age of Sigmar: R💃ealms of Ruin.

If you’re looking for more excellent games from today's Future Games Show, have a look at .

Half of the stealth-sandbox missions in Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew are spent hunting down 🍒Black Pearls, while others send you in search of Soul Energy-infused Relics. I'm sure there are plot reasons for this, but frankly, I don't care. I'm spurred on by the fact that both materials are needed to resurrect more crew members, adding to my ranks of living dead skeleton assassins. The real-time tactical combat flows seamlessly as you scuttle from cover to cover thꦓrough lush, detailed maps, but Shadow Gambit's standout feature is the crew itself – so much so that it's easy to lose sight of the wider shape of the story.

Walking the plank

She might be a ghost ship, but The Red Marley is as much a main character as the undead souls housed on board. Shadow Gambi🌸t: The Cursed Crew starts sᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚimple enough: after rescuing the vessel from the clutches of religious crusaders known as Inquisitors, main protagonist Afia Manicato pledges to join her ranks, raise hell on earth (literally), and defeat Head Inquisitor Ignacia with the help of the cursed crew of the Marley. 

From there, I have my choice of which crewmates to resurrect and pull into the battle. I opt for ship doctor Suleidy first, drawn to her characte♏r model of a vine-wrapped partial skeleton with the ability to grow emerge✅ncy shrubbery using cover seeds. It seems a good balancing act when paired with Afia's more attack-heavy abilities like Blink and Time Freeze. Discovering these kinds of powerful pairings is key to Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew's action, and being a real-time stealth strategy game, I know the crewmates I choose can make or break a mission.

During missions, you control crewmates individually or move them as a group. The party size is capped at three maximum per outing, and Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew does well at encouraging you to test each new recruit. Still, there are some that you'll quickly leave behind. Gaëlle the Cannoness didn't make the cut for me, for exampl✤e, as more often than not I found her skills of shooting dead bodies at enemies or launching other crew members into far-flung areas a bit too situational to be of reliable use. 

This is an issue all throughout Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew. As a stealth strategy experience, there is a constant push to keep experimenting with new crewmates and their unique skills, each giving ꧂a certain tactical edge to help breach enemy lines and retrieve your treasure. But it's undeniable that some abilities are weighted better than others, and taking a gamble on more elaborate schemes can often lead to frustration. It's because of this that I often find myself drawn to the same three usual suspects, although that does mean I sometimes end up getting the cards thrown back into my face at crucial moments.

It was an Uno-reverse plot twist from developer Mimimi Games that left me feeling punished for playing my way. Developing a favored playstyle and sticking to it is a tried-and-tested method for me, especially in any of the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games. In the case of Shadow Gambit, however, having a steadfast group of core crewmates meant I was in for a nasty surprise during my showdown with Ign♚acia. Luckily, trial and error are fiercely encouraged. The save function itself is woven cleverly through the story, so I happily hit that Capture Memory button every three to five minutes. The good news is that Shadow Gambit really wants you to explore the possibilities of each character, but if it's pure stealth subterfuge you're after, I hope you have more patience ꦺthan I do.

Plotting your approach in Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a whole thing in itself. The isometric camera allows you to see maps from above, with the option to cꦜheck the vision cones of each enemy no matter where they are. It's helpful to see which direction they're looking in as they go about their patrols, but you can only check one vision cone at a time. This means learning how to avoid detection, or how to use crew abilities to distract and isolate ❀enemies, takes lots of practice. 

Various missions share maps with others, but with enemy positions changed up slightly across the board, ♐you never know what you'll be in for until you make port. This makes it even harder to experiment with crew selection, and keeps leading me back to my core strategy: one crewmate to help with hiding and distraction,ཧ and the other two sent in as killing machines. Even after developing a flexible approach that can be applied to most situations, though, something about the recycled environs eventually feels stale. There's only so many times I can tread the same boards before the islands get overly familiar, some being given plenty of facetime while others are abandoned far too soon.

It's the pirate's strife for me

Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew features 🐼a non-linear narrative structure, giving you some scope of freedom to experiment with characters and get a feel for the maps. While it's certainly fun being able to choose from an assortment of available missions, main quest objectives can pop up at inopportune times, forcing me to embark on multiple missions on the same island in a row. While I enjoy finding new ways around familiar problems, I prefer the more exploratory, loosely-hewn structure of the early-game missions. 

An exampဣle of this takes place on the Twins of Nerechtemeresh, a pair of conjoined islands haunted by the ghosts of two children. If you want their Black Pearl, you need to join them in playin🍬g tricks on patrolling Inquisitors – namely, setting fire to their grog. I love working within more playful parameters whenever Shadow Gambit let me, with the atmospheric storytelling of certain missions being a huge contrast from the capture-the-flag shape of most others. Less time is given to compact experiences as the game progresses, dramatically raising the stakes out of nowhere once you unlock five of the six potential crewmates. This shift doesn't feel like a clever narrative twist, it feels like whiplash.

The development of the main plot comes at the expense of the game's supporting elements, most noticeably its characters. Mimimi Games has created such an intriguing cast that, rather than engaging with the core story, I found myself longing to hang out with my Cursed Crew instead. Investigating a strange parasitic illness with Suleidy was more entertaining than sitting captive to Ignacia's dastardly plotting, so much so that the murky plot felt inherently unnecessary compare♍d to sheer fun of unlocking characters and experimenting with their powers. Side quest-like Crew Tales offer a nice narrative-driven change of pace while outside of the strategic sandbox missions, but since you can only take one at a time before you need to head out to sea, I felt almost resentful of the storyline for getting in the way. 

As night settles aboard the Red Marley and I sit down at the navigator's desk, it's time to chart another mission. As much as I love the distinct characters involved and could get swept away by theirജ charm, this is a blistering real-time tactics yarn that requires a grueling amount of brain juice to pull off properly. Strategizing your way around the same handful of maps might get samey after the first 10 hours, and the plot often comes second fiddle to its brilliant cast of characters, but Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew is a gem of a game with a mischievous glint not to be ignored.

 Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew was reviewed on PC, with a code provided by the publisher. 

Age of Empires 3 launched way back in 2005, taking the historical RTS series to the Americas for the first time. As part of a broader revival for the series in recent years, we got Age of Empires🌳 3: Definitive Edition in 2020, and that remaster continues to get support in the form of regular updates and even brand-new DLC packs.

Now, AOE3 Definitive Edition offers a free-to-play version on that includes a lot - but not all - of the full game's feature set. It's a similar model to that of games like League 𒈔of Legends that offer a rotating selection of characters to free players - here you get access to a rotating selection of civilizations, starting with the French, Haudenosaunee, and Russians. You can take those into both single-player and multiplayeꦬr games.

You can only host games on one of eight maps, but you can join games hosted by other players on any map. The one notable restriction to💖 online play is that you can't join ranked games in the free version. If you want more crafted single-player content, though, your options in the free version are more limited. You'll only get access to one of the game's eight campaigns and one of the six historical battles.

You can get 🌠more details in the , orও check out Reddit, where one fan has made a .

Time to revisit the 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:best strategy games out there. 

The ability to hit rewind is just one of💧 the many new features introduced to make Pikmin 4 more streamlined and approachable. For a start, as you explore, you can move your base and the Onion containing all your collected Pikmin around to new positions. Suddenly your Pik'crew isn't having to haul collected treasures – which are still beautifully rendered home items like fruit, a Game Boy Advance, or a Joy-Con – and the corpses of your slain foes all the way across the map, but instead means you can make more of each day you play. 

Somewhat controversially, some of the normal time constraints you find in a Pikmin title have also been stripped away. You still have to ensure you've gathered up all your Pikmin before the sun goes down, but you're no longer on a ticking overall timer to get all your goals completed in a set number of days. It means I've really enjoyed completing each of the game's areas and gathering all the scattered castaways, all without feeling the🌳 pressure to take shortcuts. I know there's going to be an option to come back later and have enjoyed the exploration a lot more because of it. 

(Space)man's best friend

Exploration is also a lot easier thanks to another new addition – Oatchi. This unusual 'dog' is a two-legged Pikmin bus with some 🃏attack power of his own. The Pikmin cling to his butt as you travel around on his back, letting you get a quick peek at which of your Pikmin could do with a nectar boost, but also move around so much faster than you can on your spaceperson legs. Oatchi's got some moves too, initially offering up a jump that allows you to traverse the maps a lot easier, and a dash that headbutts enemies and catapults all Pikmin straight at an enemy for instant damage. He can also swim, and safely carry your water-averse Pikmin types across bodies of water. 

All of these abilities can be upgraded too, making Oatchi more powerful and unlocking new abilities as y𒆙ou progress. Oatchi's a valuable new tool, and works well with the new Ice Pikmin. They, as the name probably suggests, are capable of freezing bodies of water, but also enemies too, which gives you a fantastic window to unleash other damage while they can't hurt you. It's a marvel for the big chomping sorts that like to make a quick snack out of your Pikmin. It's a good combo, particularly as the game has evolved alongside your own arsenal. 

Not only are🅠 we going inside the house for the first time ever in a Pikmin game, but we're also being allowed to see what dangers the night hosts for tiny little leaf creatures and a space mutt. Night Expeditions take a different approach to the classic Pikmin formula with you instead having to defend termite mound-like Lumiknoll from frenzied enemy attacks in order to collect the sap witꦯhin. For these missions, you enlist the help of the new Glow Pikmin, which are handily impervious to all elemental attacks. Like Oatchi, they have a charge attack that collects them all up into a glowing ball that stuns enemies, which is super handy in the later maps that'll really test your Dandori – aka the game's fixation on being good at planning. 

Fine and dandy

Although it's purely a Pikmin invention, the theory or practice of Dandori really comes into its own in Pikmin 4 with the aptly named Dandori Battles. These both appear as part of the campaign and from the title screen where you can play vs the CPU, a pal, or cooperatively against the CPU. Each team works against the clock to collect as many points as possible, either through collectibles or enemies, with certain items worth double or even triple the points at certain points throughout the match. You can steal objects from other 💫players, use items to impact their play, or start attacking their version of Oatchi if you so wish. They're chaos in the best way, and easily replayable. They do specifically highlight that there are still some issues with aiming Pikmin though, particularly when it comes to trying to fling Pikmin at objects on platforms or in any way elevated. 

Through all this, I've not even mentioned that you don't actually play as Olimar in Pikmin 4. Instead, you're attempting to rescue the usual, slightly clumsy hero as a custom character of your own creation. The customization options aꦓren't extensive but play well to the whimsical puppet-esque character design that we've come to expect from the series. It does mean that you can choose your suit colors and accompanying ship theme, and this decision also opens Pikmin up to include upgrade options for your equipme෴nt and new tools to play with, from protection against fire or ice, to weapons like bombs or electric strikes to shock enemies. 

It all combines to create the most approachable Pikmin entry ever. It's not removing the challenge entirely though, as there are plenty of moments that force you to make quick decisions or make small Pikmin sacrifices in the name of the greater good – or greater Dandori. The later stages of Pikmin 4 are formidable if you're looking for 100% completion, and with my current play time now sitting at almost 50 hours, there's ple🧸nty here to see and do and so much fun to be had along the way.

Pikmin 4 was reviewed on the Switch OLED with a code provided by the publisher.