I agree with AFnord on his recommendation of Majesty. Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns is also a good game.

Original war, duh. Best RTS ever. (to back it up with arguments, it's got fantastic personnel management system, great story, slight RPG elements and it's incredibly underrated by reviews, with generally very high user ratings. Basically, it's fantastic.)

I've never heard of this game, sounds pretty cool.

Gamespot's review states "While real-time strategy games have generally advanced far beyond 1995, Original War has actually regressed." That actually sounds quite promising to me.

Reviewers weren't kind to this game, well at least those from abroad. It's a Czech game and it's certainly not an AAA title, but the fact that everyone I know of that played it also loved the game a LOT says something. And from most reviews, I get the feeling that they simply didn't really 'get' it: It looks like they were expecting another C'n'C with 3D graphics, and what they got was a game based heavily around resource management, logistics, and tactics. (Really, since you only get limited number of soldiers into every mission, when you want to strengten speed of vehicle production, you have to sacrifice in another field by refitting one person for the task. And that's just an example.)

edit: Heh, there's not even a single negative review here on gog! And it was released around the time Warcraft III was, well now I get it. They were expecting warcraft :D

edit2: Oh it's also got branching story with multiple endings and choices and consequences. Just saying

I'm actually (trying to) playing War Wind 1 now, mostly because somewhere it was said it has quite different player races, a bit like Starcraft. The main reason I loved SC so much.

Anyway, the gameplay feels so crude that I have hard time convincing myself to continue playing it, or the sequel (which I've yet to install and play). It certainly isn't Starcraft. :)

I'd drop Warcraft 1 and Dune from that list, due to their crude controls. Plus, Dune, even with the latest patches, had the "maximum number of objects" bug which made some of the final levels almost impossible to play, unless you made sure you kept killing excessive enemy units all the time so that the limit would not be reached.

It was kinda funny when the limit was reached, you'd have lots of friendly and enemy units on the screen, including turrets, but they were unable to shoot a single bullet. A massive staring contest.

If you want Dune, Dune 2000 is much more pleasant to play. Dune 2000 resolution (640x400) has some display issues with widescreen monitors (e.g. it isn't displayed full-screen, or some odd artifacts), but since the OP has a very old PC, probably it has 4:3 display anyway.

For Wacraft 2, BattleNet edition is the best, improved, version. Runs fine in 64bit Win7, albeit it needs the "funky 256 colours" fix.


I just wonder how slow or bad the OP's PC really is, if he feels it will not be handle almost any 3D RTS games. I've played e.g. Age of Mythology, and I think also Emperor: Battle for Dune 3D RTS games on something like an ancient IBM ThinkPad T40 laptop (which entered the PC market something like 10 years ago?), and at least AoM ran just fine on it, as far as I can remember. Probably Emperor too. I'm pretty sure something like Warcraft 3 would run passably on it as well.

Ah, you save the day again!

+1

C&C Tiberian Sun.. my favorite RTS ever..

Tiberian Sun had too many interesting, fun and unorthodox ideas to be successfull C'n'C game!

Lords of the Realm? I've only played it a bit so I can't personally recommend it but it seems good.

Age of empires 1 and 2 , and Cossacks 2. Nothing better was made in 2d rts genre for me.

There's SunAge which is pretty new i think 2010... its 2d and indie and it has a demo, its kinda fun.