Battle Realms + Winter of the Wolf

Battle realms is perhaps the best compromise between light-base building and interesting combats you'll see. Sure the combat is quite messy to manage, far from the control you could have in a blizzard game but it's unique and quite varied. The game itself hasn't aged well but it looks decent enough and the atmosphere is great.

legendary. I prefer Battle Realms more than WarCraft/Age of Empire during its time. especially its unique training concept. this is a must for RTS lovers.

but the expansion was cancelled sad developers are quitters

This game is the best game ever <3

A base builder RTS, like the old classics. The game is entertaining, the mechanics original but the story is really silly and generic, the graphics are ugly and the gameplay frustrating as the game advances. The good thing is that, in the campaign, you can make decissions that will affect your army. The game works like this: - You start building your base surviving enemy raids. Buildings are huge and ugly, you need a tremendous space to complete your base - To build an army you get peasants that spawn from your main building: the hut. One peasant spawns at a time, the spawn rate decreases as you get more population. Then you have to send them to gather resources, building or training. - Each building gives a different training. Shooting range turns the peasant into archers, the dojo into spearmen, etc. You can also combine trainings to get different units. Since only one peasant spawns at a time and you can only train peasants one by one this gets tedious really fast. If you lose half of your army in a skirmish replentishing it back takes you forever as new peasants need to spawn, you have to keep training them, upgrading them in the skills buildings and so on and so forth. - Due to all of the forementioned, building outposts is a nay-nay. You need all 3 basic buildings to train plus the hut to spawn new peasants, plus the skill buildings... - Finally, the AI is stupid. Your armies will often disobey, they'll suicide if you let them be or you'll have to micromanage them one by one and tell them to hold position which sometimes leads them into not even defending. Moving your units will cause these orders to expire and therefore you'll have to order them to stand their ground one by one again. - AS a side note, it's ridiculous how easy it is to missclick, how often units refuse to move to certain spots due to collision range being huge and there's also no unit data or stats.