From what I remember, Dark Reign had an excellent story. It wasn't told through cutscenes though, you had to read it via the manual or maybe it was the help file.

It's also a really good RTS game, but it can get pretty difficult at later levels.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2025-07-10, 19:35:

From what I remember, Dark Reign had an excellent story. It wasn't told through cutscenes though, you had to read it via the manual or maybe it was the help file.

It's also a really good RTS game, but it can get pretty difficult at later levels.

Dark Reign is one of the good examples that did not work out for me. One of the first games I tried when I started looking. The story, if you have not read the manual, is confusing, complex and not presented very well. There is too much alien stuff going on which makes it a tad too abstract for my taste. The game itself is nice and has good music and you are fully correct about the difficulty. I paused my playtrough at level 8 some time ago because the levels became very mean and if you would not follow that one strategy, its very hard not to loose the mission.

What I never understood in this game is the often praised AI. I dont understand how to use it. For scouting it makes perfect sense, that is a cool feature. But the whole "your units do it automatically and you just watch" does not work with the AI you are facing. Assuming I build 50 tanks and tell them to return when the are 75% damaged and continue to attach the enemy, it does not work. Because the enemy has extreme defense lines, you lose all of your units because they attack driving behind each other becoming single targets. I would really like to know how to use this AI efficient except for scouting 🙁

I like a lot of the fluff in "Urban Assault"s mission briefings, especially in the "Taerkasten" campaign in the unreleased (yet a developer leaked it) expansion pack "Metropolis Dawn".

That was definitely a game that flew under every radar because of how obtuse it played. Microsoft's marketing campaign was also kinda ridiculous and slightly cringey.

World War 3 Black Gold, I really liked the Russian campaign.
It had this really cool and unique feature where you could load units into a transport plane and send to a kind of "second home map"
This "home map" was like a storage yard that carried over different levels. meaning any units you sent "home" would then be available in future missions.

I remember fondly 1 mission that had a timer so was quickly trying to send all my units home but some had to be left behind. Much like real life.
The fact the units are based on real world vehicles was also a bonus, I'm also not really a fan of sci-fi based future units.

chinny22 wrote on 2025-07-10, 23:39:

World War 3 Black Gold, I really liked the Russian campaign. It had this really cool and unique feature where you could load uni […]
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World War 3 Black Gold, I really liked the Russian campaign.
It had this really cool and unique feature where you could load units into a transport plane and send to a kind of "second home map"
This "home map" was like a storage yard that carried over different levels. meaning any units you sent "home" would then be available in future missions.

I remember fondly 1 mission that had a timer so was quickly trying to send all my units home but some had to be left behind. Much like real life.
The fact the units are based on real world vehicles was also a bonus, I'm also not really a fan of sci-fi based future units.

Never seen it before but I checked Wikipedia and it confirmed that it was the same developer as Earth 2150 and you can really see how they just reused the same engine. Its fun when you can see the engine at first glance. Some have very distinctive visual patterns like the older Unreal engine had with bodys.

Dune 2 blew my mind when I tried it. Funny how much fun you can have with a game that came on a few floppy disks.

I like age of Empires I, and II plus add-ons but when it went 3D I gave up. I still play AOE II Conquerors online every week.

I liked Command and Conquer when it came out for DOS.

Dark Colony (SSI) was an interesting RTS few people played.

Dark reign had a pretty good story

Dune 2 blew my mind when I tried it.

If you have not yet played this one, give it a try. It may feel a bit rough at first but it is absolute RTS heaven.

...and this hounting, grating soundtrack ...

mombarak wrote on 2025-07-10, 19:21:

I liked Z and KKND a lot.

I have a special place in my heart for Z, by the Bitmap Brothers. (For those who don't know it, it was a game released back in the 90s, decades before Putin appropriated and tainted the latin letter 'Z' as a symbol of evil, but I digress.)

I'm pretty sure Z counts as an RTS, even though (as far as I remember), you cannot build new structures, only capture or destroy existing ones.

The charm of the game lies in its humor, which immediately becomes apparent in the intro. The units under your command express their emotions, often talk back to you, sometimes refuse to carry out orders when you send them on a suicide mission ("no way!"), and really pile their insults on top of you when you fail the mission ("We HATE you!", "Asshole!").

Even the (supposedly neutral) female computer voice (with a noticeably southern drawl in her accent) eventually turns on you when you mess things up. "You're crap!"

Having an RTS that does not give you units with complete and unquestionable obedience is refreshing, and also hilarious. 😂

Aui wrote on 2025-07-11, 09:30:

Dune 2 blew my mind when I tried it.

If you have not yet played this one, give it a try. It may feel a bit rough at first but it is absolute RTS heaven.

...and this hounting, grating soundtrack ...

Dont forget Dune 2000 with the John Rys Davis as Atreides Mentat and ingame engine graphics from C&C. That was great too.

I see it was already suggested, but I second Dark Colony (the story is ok and it doesn’t take itself seriously much like KKND). Another suggestion is Knights and Merchants, not sure if that counts as an RTS.

Total Annihilation was great at many levels, and the story/lore was one of them.

Though well beyond the 90s, Supreme Commander had a great story. I admire a game with 4 factions and you can't really tell who the villain is.

Total annihilations story was neat too, the overarching story is rather flat, but mission by mission, the story of commanders hunting each other. And then there's Krogoth Encounter.

Dune 2000 is a nice one

mombarak wrote on 2025-07-11, 10:23:

Aui wrote on 2025-07-11, 09:30:

Dune 2 blew my mind when I tried it.

If you have not yet played this one, give it a try. It may feel a bit rough at first but it is absolute RTS heaven.

...and this hounting, grating soundtrack ...

Dont forget Dune 2000 with the John Rys Davis as Atreides Mentat and ingame engine graphics from C&C. That was great too.

In that same vein, Emperor: Battle for Dune deserves a mention as well. It starred Michael Dorn as the Duke. And the cutscenes made it pretty clear that it was a sequel to Dune 2000, with even some Dune 2000 footage being shown in flashbacks.

As the previous Dune RTSes, Emperor had an excellent soundtrack. Frank Klepacki did some of the music, but in this game he was joined by two other prominent game composers, with each of the three playable houses having a dedicated composer for their sound tracks. As a result, each house would have music with distinct styles and atmospheres that fit the character of the house.

If I remember correctly, one of the additional composers was David Arkenstone, the same guy who composed the epic theme for the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 trailer. I think he mainly worked on the Harkonnen music, while Frank Klepacki focused mostly on the Atreides music.

But even with the additional composers and the new music, some recognizable tunes from Dune II and Dune 2000 were interwoven with the new music, delivering a mix of cool new music and some nostalgic familiarity mixed in here and there.

Example: Ride the Worm, by Frank Klepacki. Epic in and of itself, but at 1:19, it suddenly gets a familiar riff. 😉

Man, I'm listening to it myself now, and I'm getting goosebumps again. 😅 I'm such a fan of Frank's work. It would seriously meet the quality to be used in Denis Villeneuve's new Dune movies. (And I'm a big Hans Zimmer fan too, so no offense to him!)