if you miss the classics

Games like Command & Conquer

The specific thing people miss is quite narrow: build a refinery, get two harvesters running, mass twelve tanks and go and see what happens, in about thirty-five minutes. Here is what still does that.

There is a specific hole a lot of people have been trying to fill since about 1999, and it is worth naming precisely, because “I want an RTS” gets you recommended a lot of things that will not scratch it.

The thing that is missing is not real-time strategy in general. It is the Westwood loop: a single resource you drive out and collect, a power grid that punishes you for over-building, a sidebar you queue from rather than a building you click into, a tech tree with about eight rungs, and a match that starts and finishes inside forty minutes. It was a game about logistics that looked like a game about tanks.

Nearly every recommendation below fails at least one part of that. The list is ordered by how much of it survives.

The originals, legitimately

Command & Conquer Remastered Collection

The 2020 remaster of Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert with all their expansions, the original cutscenes rescanned, the soundtrack re-recorded by Frank Klepacki, and — crucially — a toggle that flips between the new art and the original pixels in real time. EA also released the source. If you want the actual thing you remember rather than something like it, this is the shortest path, and it is cheap.

What it does not fix: they are 1995 games. Unit pathfinding is 1995 pathfinding. That is either the charm or the problem, and you will know which within ten minutes.

OpenRA

Free, open source, cross-platform, and the single best answer on this page for most people. It reimplements the engines behind Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert and Dune 2000 with the quality-of-life the originals never had — proper unit control, attack-move, build queues that behave, rebindable everything, and multiplayer that works. It is still actively developed and has been for well over a decade.

The trade: it modernises the balance as well as the interface, so it is recognisably not the 1995 game. Purists find it too changed and everyone else finds it a relief.

The deliberate successors

Tempest Rising

The most direct attempt anyone has made at picking up where Tiberian Sun left off. Two asymmetric factions fighting over a resource you harvest off the map, a sidebar, live-action-flavoured briefings, and a campaign that takes itself about as seriously as C&C did — which is to say, not entirely. If you want a 2020s game that is unashamedly trying to be this thing, it is the one.

The Petroglyph games — 8-Bit Armies, Grey Goo, Forged Battalion

Petroglyph is substantially made of ex-Westwood staff, and it shows in the muscle memory more than the graphics. 8-Bit Armies is the closest and the friendliest: a bright, blocky, deliberately simple C&C loop with a co-op campaign, and it is frequently very cheap. Grey Goo is the more serious one, with three genuinely asymmetric factions.

Act of War / Act of Aggression

Eugen Systems doing modern-military C&C, with a harder economy — you capture and hold resource points, and prisoners are income. Denser than Westwood ever was, but the shape is right.

Adjacent, and worth knowing about

• Beyond All Reason and Zero-K — free, open source, and descended from Total Annihilation rather than Westwood. Enormous unit counts, streaming resources instead of harvesters, and a much longer match. Different tradition, extremely good.
• Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition and IV — base-building RTS with a colossal player base and superb campaigns, but villagers, four resources and an age system rather than the Westwood loop.
• Warcraft III: Reforged — heroes and creeping changed the genre’s direction permanently. Great game, not the same game.
• Dune: Spice Wars — set in the right universe, but it is a 4X-RTS hybrid, not a base-builder. See games like Dune II for what actually inherits from the 1992 original.
• They Are Billions, Northgard, Diplomacy is Not an Option — excellent real-time games that are mostly about surviving a wave, not about beating an opponent doing the same thing you are.

The honest summary

Longer version of why this hole exists at all: nothing ever replaced Command & Conquer.

Questions people actually ask

Read next