Classic strategy games

Retro strategy games cover everything from hex-map wargames to the base-building that grew out of them, and the interesting part is how quickly the second form arrived. Westwood shipped Dune II - The Building of a Dynasty with harvesting, a build queue, a tech tree and mouse-driven unit selection, and within three years every real-time strategy game on the market was arguing with its template.

Real time against the turn

Turn-based design kept the deeper systems. UFO: Enemy Unknown is the clearest case: a geoscape layer of research, funding and interception sitting on top of squad-level tactical missions where time units, line of sight and permanent death do the storytelling. Real-time design traded that depth for pressure and legibility, and Blizzard sharpened it with WarCraft 2: Tides of Darkness — larger selection groups, fog of war worth scouting, naval and air layers, and a campaign that taught the mechanics one at a time. Both strands shared a habit the genre has since lost: manuals that explained the maths, so you could reason about combat odds rather than guess at them.

What is listed here are the catalogued originals with their original balance, including the bugs people learned to exploit. Titles marked as playable start in the browser through an emulator that runs inside the page: no installation, no plugin, no registration and nothing to download. Mouse and keyboard behave as they did on the machines these were written for, so plan on a proper session rather than five minutes.