Critical Moves - Strategy Gaming

Most gamers over 40 get five hours a week to play games. That's 300 hours for the entire year. We picked strategy titles that work when you can only play in short bursts between work, family, and everything else competing for your time. Al recommends Empire: Total War for its blend of grand strategy and tactical battles, plus it runs on iPad. Jack argues for Cities: Skylines because you can jump b...

Jack, Al, and Sid go through strategy games shipping in 2026. Sanctuary Shattered Sun from the Supreme Commander lineage. Dawn of War 4 returning to classic RTS after Relic lost the license. Total War 40K launching with four factions, no confirmed fleet battles. Three space strategy indies trying different approaches: Falling Frontier's physics-based combat, Fragile Existence's solo dev survival a...

The Critical Moves team reviews our first full year covering strategy gaming and explains why "the gaming industry is dying" headlines miss the point completely. We interviewed developers from Luke Hughes (Burden of Command) to Brandon Castile (Tempest Rising) to Thomas Vandenberg (Kingdom series). Covered games from solo developers and Xbox Game Studios teams. Went from zero listeners to half a m...

Our best games of 2025 are a DLC for a 2023 game, a DLC for a 2022 game, and a remaster of a 2004 game. That tells you everything about the state of strategy gaming this year. Adam picked Spell Force Conquest of Eo's Children of Norn expansion because the developers keep supporting a game that deserves more players. The complexity puts it somewhere between Heroes of Might and Magic and Age of Wond...

Creative Assembly announced Medieval 3 and Total War Warhammer 40K within two weeks. We break down what we know, what's missing, and whether the new Warcore engine can handle what these games need to deliver. Medieval 3 won't arrive until 2027 at the earliest, possibly 2028. The game promises more than just map painting with systems borrowed from Crusader Kings territory, but the challenge is find...

City builders split into subgenres that barely resemble each other. Cities Skylines focuses on traffic optimization and aesthetic building. Anno centres on island logistics and production chains. Banished and Frostpunk push survival mechanics. Tropico simulates dictatorships. Soviet Republic recreates command economy management. Each game builds around different core systems despite sharing the ci...

In this episode of Critical Moves, we sit down with Ben Angel, narrative lead and designer on the Age of Empires 2: Chronicles DLC campaigns. Ben shares fascinating insights into creating compelling narratives within the constraints of RTS gameplay, where players experience stories from a distant, zoomed-out perspective. We discuss how Chronicles tackles the inherent challenges of storytelling in...

Does Anno 117: Pax Romana live up to the hype? Err... No. In this episode, Al (the Anno noob) got a chance to quiz Anno veteran Timothy on what the latest instalment of the franchise does right and what it does terribly wrong. Join us as we pull apart Ubisoft Mainz' latest city builder title and discuss if the Roman setting fits the Anno brand, if it adds anything to the series and why diagonal ro...

Join hosts Jack and Adam as they sit down with Thomas Vandenberg, the visionary creator behind Kingdom Classic and Kingdom New Lands, for a deep dive into the evolution of minimal strategy design. Thomas shares the fascinating journey of turning a Flash game prototype into a beloved franchise that pioneered the "aesthetic strategy" genre, where atmosphere and accessibility take precedence over com...

Joe and Big Sid talk Football Manager from Championship Manager 01/02 to the FM26 disaster. Big Sid has been playing for 25 years. Joe started with FM12 and the San Marino Challenge, spending a year building a lower Italian league team into Champions League contenders. Both have lost relationships and jobs to this game. FM26 launched in early access and immediately got review bombed on Steam. The...

Welcome back to Critical Moves! In this episode, hosts Jack and Adam welcome newest team member Sid to break down the Sudden Strike series - the World War II real-time tactics franchise that's been quietly serving a dedicated fanbase for over two decades. With Sudden Strike 5 recently announced at Gamescom and promising ambitious features like 300+ units, co-op PvE gameplay, and massive 25-hour ca...

To celebrate the new year of Critical Moves Podcast, Al, Tim and Adam sat down to recommend a new game for the others to try. These were games that the others had never played before but that each hoped their co-hosts would enjoy. Games recommended were: Tim: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1207650/Suzerain (for Al) https://store.steampowered.com/app/1434950/HighFleet (for Adam) Al: https://sto...

Jack and Adam compare two modern revivals of strategy design: Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era and Endless Legend 2. We cover how HOMM OE modernises the classic loop, the daily and weekly map rhythm, city growth, unit upgrade forks, and where it stumbles with a cluttered spell UI and questions about handcrafted maps. We dig into Endless Legend 2’s Civ-style shell with heroes anchoring armies,...

Adam, Jack, and Tim dig into the October 2025 Steam Next Fest lineup. They highlight the most promising strategy titles, the ones to skip, and talk about how Steam’s visibility system shapes the fortunes of indie developers. The discussion covers what works, what doesn’t, and why the algorithm can make or break smaller strategy games. https://criticalmovespodcast.com

Nuno, Al, and Jack talk about how modern real-time strategy has changed — and improved. Dawn of War: Definitive Edition shows the strength of classic design, while new projects like Tempest Rising and Broken Arrow push toward a leaner, more deliberate form of RTS. The conversation covers what recent games are getting right, where design has shifted, and why the future looks more promising than it...

Al, Tim and Joe come together to discuss the future of the Total War franchise ahead of Creative Assembly's December announcement on what to anticipate next from the studio. With a look at what games the hosts expect to see and which ones they would love to see, the conversation covers settings such as Star Wars, Warhammer 40K and Lord of the Rings, along side what Medieval III might look like, or...

Asymmetry is one of the defining features of strategy games, but it’s also the source of endless arguments. Giving players different factions, units, or victory conditions creates tension and variety, but it also creates balancing headaches. Designers fight with trade-offs: too much asymmetry and one side can dominate, too little and the game turns bland. In historical wargames, asymmetry is unavo...

In this episode we brought in Ricky and Drexy from eXplorminate to correct the mistakes we made in episode 41 on the state of 4X. The discussion pulls apart what separates 4X from grand strategy, where games like Stellaris, Total War and Victoria 3 sit, and why the labels aren’t always useful. We cover direct control versus large-scale influence, why Total War is neither 4X nor grand strategy, the...

Beyond All Reason (BAR) is a free open-source real-time strategy game based on Total Annihilation. In this episode we interview community manager PtaQ and our very own Timothy. Learn about RTS game development, community-driven gaming projects, epic-scale strategy battles with thousands of units, upcoming campaign mode, new faction releases, and Steam launch plans. This strategy gaming podcast epi...

Community supported games are the reason classics like Age of Empires 2, Company of Heroes, and Heroes of Might and Magic 3 are still played decades after release. In this episode of the Critical Moves Podcast, we look at abandoned strategy games, how modding scenes keep them alive, and why some titles survive long after developers stop updating them. We cover Dawn of War and its Definitive Editio...

Dawn of War 4 exists! We talk about what we know and what we expect. The franchise has one good game, one mediocre sequel, and one disaster. Dawn of War 3 killed the series for eight years. Now KING Art Games and Deep Silver are taking another shot at Warhammer 40K real-time strategy. We cover the confirmed details, the studio behind it, and the current state of RTS games. Dawn of War 4 needs to s...

What does long-term survival look like for an indie strategy studio? In Part 2 of our interview, Chris McElligott-Park talks about: – Sustaining Arcen Games through shifting trends – Crowdfunding and community involvement – Designing sequels without repeating yourself – The challenges of predicting success in a saturated market This is Part 2 of a two-part interview.

What does it take to make a critically acclaimed strategy game? Chris McElligott-Park, designer of Heart of the Machine, joins the Critical Moves team to talk through: – How Arcen Games started – The design thinking behind AI War – Making strategy games without traditional narrative – Engineering AI opponents that can out-think players This is Part 1 of a two-part interview.

We try to avoid Stellaris. We really do. But if you're talking about the state of 4X games in 2025, it keeps dragging you back. Al, Joe, and Tim take stock of a genre that’s running out of excuses. Innovation is rare. Pacing is broken. AI can’t keep up. And the line between 4X and grand strategy has nearly vanished. Is anyone pushing things forward? Are we just reskinning old ideas? And why do mos...

We talk to Matt, the solo developer behind Fungal Front — a hard sci-fi real-time strategy game set on a hostile alien planet. In this interview, we cover what makes the game unique, the challenges of building complex systems solo, and what players can expect from the factions, mechanics, and world design. If you're into asymmetric gameplay, grounded sci-fi, and RTS games that don’t hold your hand...