if you miss the classics
Games like Dune II
Almost everything you think of as “an RTS” was decided by one Westwood game in 1992 — and its central mechanic, driving a vehicle out to collect a resource and driving it back, is still the most interesting economy the genre ever had.
Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty shipped in 1992 and quietly decided the next thirty years. Not because it was the first real-time game with strategy in it — Herzog Zwei and others were earlier — but because it fixed the template, and nobody has meaningfully moved off it since.
Everything in this list was in that one game: select units with a mouse, build a base from a sidebar menu, harvest a single resource with a dedicated vehicle, climb a tech tree, deal with fog of war, three asymmetric factions with a shared core. If you have played any base-building RTS at all, you have played a descendant of it.
The most Dune II thing that still runs
Dune 2000 (1998), through OpenRA
Westwood’s own remake, with live-action briefings and a properly modernised version of the original’s three-house campaign. OpenRA maintains a Dune 2000 mod, which is the practical way to play it now — the same content with unit control that does not fight you.
Dune Legacy
A free, open-source reimplementation of the actual 1992 game. It reads the original data files and adds the things 1992 could not do: multi-unit selection, proper resolutions, rally points, multiplayer. If you want Dune II rather than a game like it, this is it.
Emperor: Battle for Dune
The 2001 3D sequel, and the last Westwood Dune game. Aged less gracefully than the 2D ones, but it is the only place the sub-houses and the sandworm-as-a-real- threat idea got fully developed.
What inherited the loop
- Command & Conquer — literally the same team building the same game again with tanks instead of Ornithopters, and better at it. See games like Command & Conquer.
- StarCraft / StarCraft II — took the template, replaced the single harvested resource with worker units gathering two, and made it an esport. The harvester-as-a-vehicle idea did not survive the transition.
- Age of Empires II — the other great inheritance, with villagers and four resources. Enormously alive; a different economic feel entirely.
- Tempest Rising — the current, deliberate attempt to build a new game on the Westwood bones, harvester and all.
- Grey Goo — Petroglyph, ex-Westwood staff, three genuinely asymmetric factions, and the most interesting modern take on the “each side plays a different game” idea Dune II started.
Why the harvester is worth defending
Modern RTS economies are mostly abstractions: a number that goes up, or workers that shuffle inside a small safe circle near your base. Dune II’s economy was a vehicle. It was slow, it was expensive, it was unarmed, it had to drive somewhere dangerous, and it had to drive back.
That single decision makes an RTS map into a place. There is somewhere your money is, somewhere your base is, and a road between them that both players can see. Almost every interesting aggressive decision in the genre — the raid, the expansion, the choice between defending your income and pushing theirs — is downstream of it.
TANKS keeps it exactly as it was: ore fields with finite value, harvesters that route to the nearest one on their own, six seconds of mining, 500 credits a load, and a round trip you can time. Killing one is worth 700 credits plus every trip it would have made — which is why two tanks parked at the refinery on guard is one of the better investments in the game.
And, since you are here: TANKS
This site belongs to one. TANKS is a free browser RTS with harvesters, a power grid, a sidebar build queue, a twelve-mission campaign and an AI that expands and raids — drawn as marker pen on graph paper. It is not the biggest game on this page. It is the one you can be playing in ten seconds, for nothing, without an account. Play it here.
More on this: Dune II invented the RTS, and then everyone forgot the interesting part.
Reading about it is slower than playing it.
TANKS runs in this browser tab. No download, no account, no launcher.
Questions people actually ask
Was Dune II the first real-time strategy game?
Not the first real-time game with strategy in it — Herzog Zwei and others came earlier — but it is the game that fixed the template: mouse-driven unit selection, base building from a sidebar, a harvested resource, a tech tree and a fog of war. Everything from Command & Conquer to StarCraft is downstream of it.
What is the modern version of Dune II?
Dune 2000 (1998) is the direct Westwood remake and is playable today through OpenRA, which has a Dune 2000 mod. Dune Legacy is a free open-source reimplementation of the 1992 original itself.
Is Dune: Spice Wars like Dune II?
Not really. It is a good game, but it is a 4X-RTS hybrid about controlling territory and political influence, not a base-builder where you place a refinery and send harvesters out to it.
Read next
Games like Command & Conquer
The remasters, the open-source engines and the modern successors — with what each one actually gets right.
Dune II invented the RTS, and then everyone forgot the interesting part
The 1992 game that fixed the template. Most of it survived; the best mechanic in it mostly did not.
Free browser RTS games
Real-time strategy in a tab: what genuinely exists, what is worth playing, and what "browser RTS" usually means.