I remember in high school I used to play the first Starcraft a lot and I had really good grades. I really feel it stimulated my brain a lot which resulted in good grades. Are there any games like this, besides SC2, that you guys would recommend? No slow strategy games please, like Civilization. I would prefer a real time one where I'm actively thinking what I'm going to do next. Thanks.
The Total War series is good, but it's a massive army type game and by comparison SC/WC looks more skirmishy. The benefit to total war is that there's lots of options as far as genres go: the most popular ones are the Shogun and Rome with a Warhammer edition being the most recent or soon to come out.
The RTS scene is pretty dead right now. No complex games on the scale of Starcraft. Might have to wait a bit for a genre resurgence.
Warhammer comes out soon, Rome 2 and Shogun are both a couple of years old, but still play well. Last year had Total War Attila which is barbarian focused. I haven't played it, but at this point I'm sure they haven't screwed up the formula.
The Age of Empires franchise has some good games out there. Total War is fantastic, but may be a bit slow for what you are looking for, as it is turnbase besides the battles. Anyway, Shogun is my favorite Total War and the new Warhammer one should be pretty awesome.
Why not stick to Starcraft? It is an amazingly deep RTS game. Always something to learn or improve on.
You might want to check out something like Ashes of the Singularity. It's probably not as good as Starcraft, but it's along the same lines. But it's a memory hog on huge maps. It's more like Total Annihilation or Supreme Commander in terms of gameplay.
I cant get into it. They added too much stuff. I used to be really good in the first but this second starcraft frustrates me.
Actually, now that I think about it, I think the memory hog game I was thinking about when I posted that is Galactic Civilizations III on "Insane"-sized maps. I think that game was using something like 6 or 9 GB of RAM on one of the games I was playing.
Meet girls. Talk to them. Figure out how to get from first base to home. That'll stimulate your head.
Warcraft III is my all-time favourite and by the same studio, if you haven't played it yet. Will give more recommendations later.
I liked it when I bought it, but the GOG version crashes to the desktop every time I try to run it on Windows 10. It was quite a fine game you made there though.
If you are okay with older games, teh Total Annihilation series is pretty good. the original and Kingdoms are pretty fun. I didn't ever play TA-2 though, so I can't speak for it.
In 2013, RELIC Entertainment put out Company of Heroes 2... A WWII themed RTS that is complex and requires both quick reflexes and a mastery of units/strategies. The meta game is very deep (with 5 factions and dozens of different commander choices) and is going strong now on 3 years. Here's a fan site devoted to it if you're interested. www.coh2.org
Go with Age of Empires II Virtually the same exact kind of game as the original Starcraft, and there are versions available now that work on Win 7/8/10 (it used to crash on anything higher than XP) Cheap and definitely what you are looking for - you can probably get it and the expansion Age of Kings for ten bucks or so. But I'm with you, the original Starcraft was awesome, I would love to fire that up and play right now.