Easiest Real Time Strategy Game ever?

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so i have much trouble with RTS games. i tried rolecoaster tycoon 3, some lords of the rings games, age of empires 2, sim city 4, tropico, all of then are too hard for me, too much buttons, too much stuff going on at the same time. it always get me anxious.

my focus is too low, and besides autism, i have a little of ADHD and i have little creativity, cause i dont like to think too much, so thats the reason i play games where i just kill or destroy stuff. i played some mobile rts, and they are so simple in comparison to pc games.

you guys have a recomendation of very simple rts games? it can be bad games too, as long they are simple and slow.

Well how much do you try and play those, I find the more I play a game the more I get used to all the controls and such. Have you tried playing the games you mentioned on easy mode and such? I mean I have played video games off an on throughout my life so I have some idea of different games...but I a lot of times play on easy mode at least to start so I can get more used to it. Like I want to get through the story so I don't want it to be super difficult at least not the first time through. I mean IDK you could play skyrim, like its kind of complicated but there is a lot of freedom to kind of do what you want like you could build an orc character because they are pretty strong and so if you like to just smash a lot of stuff they are good for that. But you will get a lot of missions in skyrim, so you have to decide which ones you want to do and which ones you don't.

The only RTS game I could ever really get into was the very first WarCraft: Orcs & Humans, I don't know why, but I played it enough to see the end credits.

Everyone loved WC2 and StarCraft, but I would just goof off for a while, clubbing seals or whatever, and then get bored and quit.

Since when are RollerCoaster Tycoon and SimCity RTSs?

Warcraft 1 is very hard, don't get it. Warcraft 2 is probably the easiest traditional RTS I've played but it still has tough levels towards the end of the campaigns, and things get complicated too. And the expansion is much harder. You can slow the game speed down greatly if you want to though.

Now there is something that might be good for you, it's certainly the simplest I've played and it's probably the gentlest, though it's not a pushover. Eufloria. This also has adjustable speed, though not as slow as Warcraft 2.

If you're playing something like Simcity (which isnt an RTS) and still finding it to be too much.... honestly, there's one very simple solution to this:

Pause it. No, seriously. Games like that one allow you to freeze everything and yet continue to make decisions, place buildings, give orders.... there are alot of games that do this now. Whether they are city builders or RTS.

When it's time to make some difficult decisions in a game like that, or deal with a crisis.... just freeze the action while you think!

Yeah, this wont work in games like Command & Conquer, but.... there ARE traditional-style RTS games that allow for a "freeze and give orders" function. Typically they are single-player only. If an RTS is capable of multiplayer it absolutely will not have this function.

However, given that some of the games you listed actually arent RTS games either, but are more like city builders or management sims (Tropico, Roller Coaster Tycoon) I'm guessing those have the freeze function as well. It's pretty much an expected function in that type of game... players get angry if it isnt there.

Now, that being said: If you dont like to think too much when gaming, RTS games, or even city builders, are probably not for you. The entire POINT of them is to get you thinking, using logic and reasoning to deal with situations. That's literally the entire idea behind their design. Often while throwing in some creativity as well.

I like RTS but I dislike the emphasis on micromanagement that the most popular games have such as Starcraft or Command and Conquer. Games where you have to micromanage skills of varying units and have fast reaction times I'm not real fond of. For this reason the RTS games I have most played over the last decade have been Sins of a Solar Empire and Supreme Commander. Both fairly old games, with more of a focus on macro level gameplay.

Are they simple games? Not really, they're sort of a hybrid of RTS and 4X game. But the fact you can pause, change speed, change zoom, automate a lot of things that would need to be done manually in other games makes these games more simple to play in terms of maintaining situational awareness and staying at a manageable pace.

Ever heard of AI War?

The game has probably the most utterly cruel learning curve of the entire genre (despite the massive number of difficulty settings, you can have it be insanely hard or super freaking easy), but it might also be exactly the sort of thing you're looking for.

I look at the genre the same way: I dont want to micro the hell out of all my units. Honestly I dont even look at Starcraft as a "strategy" game; it's more like a fighting game to me, everything about speed and reaction and accuracy. Yeah, there are tactics involved, but it's all secondary to those things.

So I very rarely ever touched the genre, until I ran into the developer that made AI War. It took forever but I managed to learn the game, and it's easily the single deepest strategy game I've ever seen, and also has the largest amount of sheer content out of the genre. And reaction speed / reflexes arent involved whatsoever; all combat is on the "macro" scale (often involving thousands of units VS thousands of units) and microing is basically impossible, and on top of that the game is one of those where you can pause to freeze the action, and then give as many orders to things as you want, and they'll be executed when you unpause. The game can also be slowed down and sped up when you want to. And yes, there's lots of automation involved. No constant managing of individual factories or any of that crap. Even your destroyed structures can be set to automatically rebuild, and so can your entire fleet.


Again, learning curve from hell (seriously it's like trying to learn Dwarf Fortress, except without the godawful interface), but I"ve known players that have gotten *thousands* of hours out of this one game, without tiring of it. It's that good.

A warning though, if you're the type that likes competitive multiplayer, this doesnt have that. It's called "AI War" for a reason, in that you fight the AI (you can however play co-op). But it's enough. AI in most of these games tends to be all sorts of stupid, completely braindead, because the devs try to mimic actual player behaviors, and current AI technology is bloody horrible at that. This game throws all of that out the window, as it's an asymmetric design, allowing AI to flourish instead of falter because it doesnt NEED to pretend to be human. The AI will never stop surprising you, yet you can customize the hell out of it.

Also dont expect great graphics. Not that great graphics would even be possible with this one: the sheer amount of THINGS the game is doing at once in the background would make your PC burst into flames if it also had to do all sorts of advanced rendering crap. That, and like Supreme Commander, you're going to play with the view zoomed waaaayyyyy out *most* of the time (so that all things except the supremely gigantic ones are represented by icons).


Yeah, a bit ranty here, but it's honestly one of the best games I've ever run into. And certainly the most epic in sheer scope.


I also was a fan of Supreme Commander, since that was mentioned. In fact, loving that game was one of the reasons I decided to get into AI War to begin with.


I've found so very few other RTS games that I actually liked. MOST of them just want to be Starcraft, and that's... very disappointing.

I had never heard of AI War before, but having seen the game after your recommendation I'm surprised I haven't heard of it sooner. It looks like exactly the sort of game I'd enjoy, though it does look a lot like SoaSE. The asymmetrical design of the AI opponent intrigues me.

Yeah, the AI is honestly the part of the game that's the most amazing.

The developer, Arcen, is very good at creating AI overall (it's something the head developer specializes in), and that game is the best proof of it. Not only will it always manage to surprise you, but there are *MANY* different types of AI for you to choose from when starting a new campaign. Each has a different "personality" and style, and many of them also get a few unique units/structures of their own that other AIs dont have access to. You always have TWO AI opponents at once, not just one, so the combination of AIs can really make for very different experiences. You get to choose EXACTLY what type of experience you want out of the campaign.

The AI has some of it's own rules to follow, which is also a huge part of it. There is a thing called AI Progress, which is always displayed on the screen. Basically the idea is that the AI at first doesnt consider you to be a true threat... it's concerned more with other things outside of the galaxy. The more trouble you cause, the higher that number will go, and the more concerned and aggressive the AI will get, and the more defenses it will put up in it's systems. Different things raise it by different amounts. If you let it get too high, the AI *will* annihilate you. There are ways to lower it a bit but they're typically difficult, risky, and well-guarded. It basically exists to force you to make interesting decisions over the course of each campaign, but alot of RTS players are used to just taking/smashing everything every time, so can have trouble with the idea. Most campaigns will have 80 seperate systems for you to explore, (*all* of which are active at once, they dont "freeze" or something when you're in a different system, which is one of the things that makes the game very draining on your PC) and deciding which ones to try to capture (based on what they have in them, which you can see from the galaxy map as long as you've gotten even one ship in there before, and there are ALOT of different things for you to find) is a major part of the strategy, because you absolutely cannot capture everything.

It's not just that though: There are other, often neutral alien groups that wander the galaxy with their own agendas (and their own unique selection of ships). Sometimes they might help you, sometimes they might make things more annoying. Even something like the wandering vendor; you can buy all sorts of powerful things from it, when it wanders into one of your systems.... but the AI can buy from it too, when it's in one of theirs. There's also things like the Devourer Golem, an invincible moon-sized monstrosity that roams from system to system, literally eating every ship (but not structures) it encounters, yours or the AI (like many things in the game though, you can choose whether to have it as part of your campaign when you're in the campaign setup screen). There's lots of cool stuff like that which will add all sorts of interactions to the game. There's a good couple hundred different types of units/structures in the game.

I could honestly ramble about it for pages here.... there's just so much to it. The ONE problem: The tutorial isnt very good. Never was. It'll teach you the absolute basics, and then it basically says "Well there ya go, have fun, try not to die!" Fortunately the wide selection of difficulty levels makes up for that; at the lower ones the AI will barely even try, so they give you chances to experiment. Difficulty 7 though is the one the game is most balanced for. Difficulty 10 is nearly impossible. I found that 6 was the best starting point. But yeah, there's sooooooo much to learn. Even just the sheer number of customizable options when starting a new campaign will be daunting. And chances are, unless you're playing on the really low difficulties, the AI is going to beat you until you really "git gud" at the game, which takes awhile. It's never genuinely unfair though... just brutal.

But it's just so bloody good once it "clicks" for you, even moreso with the expansions, I've loved every one of them.


I will also say it doesnt actually play anything like SoaSE whatsoever. The graphics can make it look a bit similar at times in terms of style, but that's by sheer chance. MOST of the game's art is actually taken from an old shmup called Tyrian, where quite awhile ago the developer released all of the game's art for other developers to use for free. Arcen, at the time of AI War's original development, didnt have a dedicated artist on the team, so the Tyrian art got used.

But yeah, it doesnt play anything like it. Which makes sense: SoaSE is a 4X game; AI War, from screenshots, can LOOK like a 4X game, but it isnt in that genre. There's no diplomacy or anything like that, no different types of victories, and pretty much none of the same mechanics, and the AI starts the game with full control of 99% of the systems on the galaxy map (you start with exactly one)... one way or another it's all war, all the time, and your final goal is always to destroy the 2 AI cores located in their home systems (yeah good luck with that). SoaSE, like all 4X games, also has a MUCH slower pace than AI War (and much less to keep track of; with 80 fully active systems, all of which can have thousands of units in them doing who knows what, there can be alot to keep track of with AI War. Not that the AI is ever going bonkers and attacking all of them at once or anything, it has limits to it's resources like you do). So in the end it's all about what you want out of the strategy genre overall.

I personally never really get into 4X games all that much. I love the concept of them: I dont love how utterly braindead the AI always is in them. I've *never* seen one where the AI can actually provide anything resembling a real challenge, typically you need other actual players for that. But I have heard alot of good about SoaSE regardless, as not everyone needs a major challenge like I do. It has alot of competition though in the genre. The 4X genre is a huge one and there are tons of games in it that everyone seems to love.

Also, back on the original topic here: I mentioned 4X games, and it occurs to me that the OP maybe should try some of those. They're complicated, but they're so nice and easy to get into, and very approachable overall despite their depth. They dont have the murderous difficulty that some others in the genre have, and the nice slow pacing makes it nice and easy to keep track of your empire without feeling overwhelmed.

....Unless you're playing a game made by Paradox. Dont do that when starting out. They are another set of games that has a Dwarf Fortress sort of learning curve of doom, except that they have an even worse tutorial than.... pretty much anything else. I've found them basically impenetrable.

Warcraft 3 is pretty simple by design, with fairly minimal micromanagement and an emphasis on being effective with a smaller amount of units. It just received an update too, with indications of further updates incoming.

Ah yeah, I remember that one, I liked that game back in the day. That was before everything went all super-micro with Starcraft.

Man, that was a LONG time ago, wasnt it...

If you struggle with controls and speed management in RTS games I would move to turn based games like Civ 5 or even grand strategy games like Hearts Of Iron 4.

There both excellent games and I would happily have a game with you.