On 27 April 2018, the day we celebrate freedom, a free traditional real time strategy game was released on Steam. Developed by a group of volunteers and heavily inspired by RTS classics such as Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander, Zero-K has been a long time in the making. This means you can expect large swathes of robot armies, massive artillery guns, nuclear warheads and Strategic Zoom. There is even nod to Planetary Annihilation in that one of the special buildings you can construct is able to collect and call down a shower of meteors upon your enemy's base.
Both were commercial and critical successes and still have communities going to this day, they are great games and quite different from your standard RTS. If you had to pick one to play I’d go for the more recent Supreme Commander. Or just give Zero-K a try, it’s free after all.
I’ll never get over my love of Total Annihilation. It had the very unfortunate timing of releasing when StarCraft did and then got “lost” in StarCraft’s shadow.
TA for me was way ahead of its time though. Supreme Commander is also a fantastic game, although I prefer Forged Alliance. The only issue I have with Sup Com is that Tier 1 units become obsolete late game, where in TA you could still build swarms of basic units and overpower high tier units. That just doesn’t work in Sup Com.