An Exploration of the RTT Game Genre

Read the article on my blog if you want: https://waywardstrategy.com/2026/06/08/an-exploration-of-the-rtt-game-genre/

Over a decade ago at this point, I set out to define for myself what a Real-Time Strategy game actually was. While the thought occurs to me that it might be very interesting to return to that topic a second time and see how my views have evolved since then, I’m sitting down today to tackle a slightly different genre definition: that of Real-Time Tactics (or RTT).

On my personal Discord server, I had someone ask me what I think of Real-Time Tactics games (or RTTs), and if I think that the RTS genre has any lessons it can learn from them. Examples given along with the question included such titles as Wargame, Men of War: Assault Squad, and Regiments (I might also choose to throw in World in Conflict as a archetypal example). That question felt big enough that more than just a sentence or two was needed to properly reply, so: here I am. An excuse to dust off the old keyboard, as it were.

As a player as well as a game designer, I’ve long had a fondness for RTT games (in addition to RTS, TBS, and TBT – I guess as a gamer and creator, I have a bit of a type). There’s something very… immediate about an RTT that doesn’t exist in many RTS games. And in many RTT you also get a degree of personalization that is likewise difficult to achieve in RTS. In something like World in Conflict or Wargame, for example, there’s something really satisfying about building your own “deck” of units. It scratches an itch in my brain that most RTS don’t really allow for, or haven’t solved gracefully at any rate.

Of course, RTS also tend to scratch their own set of itches that are in turn missing in RTT. But, that gets into the differences between these two genres of game, which the whole point of this article in the first place.

So, I'm likely getting a bit ahead of myself.

In this piece, I'm going to endeavor to do the following:

First, I'll define RTT as a genre separate from RTS and other existing game genres

Second, I'll describe a couple of RTT games and what I see as their strengths and weaknesses. We'll also test our definition to see how it holds up against some representative example games.

Lastly, I'll tackle the meat of the question: do these games have anything they can teach RTS? And if so, what might that be?

I am setting out to try to write a modest little definition and exploration of a genre. But sometimes my words do get away from me a bit, and this is one I've had kicking around in my head for literally years: I had begun toying with the idea of trying to define and describe RTT shortly after writing that RTS definition piece. We'll have to see where this takes us...

What is a Real-Time Tactics Game? A Definition

Ultimately, a tactics game concerns itself primarily with troops and positioning as its primary consideration, while a strategy game concerns itself with economics, growth, resources, and longer-term planning.

In my RTS article, I broke the genre down into pieces and described each one before tying it all together into a definition. That worked really well for the topic, I think, but I don't feel I can approach RTT in the same manner.

The way I'm going to look at tactics games is... a little different. I, personally, consider the RTT to be a sub-genre of RTS (as we'll explore through the course of this post). RTS itself could potentially be described as a sub-genre of wider "strategy" games... and you see some people disputing what constitutes a "true" RTS as differentiate from "tactical RTS" or many other possible permutations.

But the key thing here is that (for me anyway), RTS are able to be defined more holistically by way of their components, functions, systems, and what have you. An RTS has economic systems, it has tension (almost always in the form of combat), there are multiple parties that can be compared and balanced against one another, et cetera. An RTS can be measured and evaluated against its constituent parts and how those parts interact, in other words. You can define it in terms of the larger strategy genre: I like to use the analogy that RTS are something like a city builder tied to a wargame, for instance.

But for me as a systems-oriented kind of guy, Real-Time Tactics is most easily defined by its relationship to the RTS genre. I mean, let's face it: a lot of the building blocks of each genre are pretty similar (and I make the case below that they have something in common with TTRPG-style games like Baldur's Gate as well) I'm going to strive to provide a couple of lenses through which we can examine this style of game, and we'll see if we can combine them into a single, cohesive definition at the end of this section.

Tactics as a Subset of Strategy?

World in Conflict – one of the archetypal RTTs in my opinion

I'm going somewhere with this, so please bear with me for a second. I'm going to pull out a quote here regarding "strategy" and "tactics" in the context of military operations, as it's very pertinent to our topic:

Theoreticians distinguish three types of military activity: (1) tactics, or techniques for employing forces in an engagement (e.g., seizing a hill, sinking a ship, or attacking a target from the air), (2) operations, or the use of engagements in parallel or in sequence for larger purposes, which is sometimes called campaign planning, and (3) strategy, or the broad comprehensive harmonizing of operations with political purposes. Sometimes a fourth type is cited, known as grand strategy, which encompasses the coordination of all state policy, including economic and diplomatic tools of statecraft, to pursue some national or coalitional ends.

This actually gives us a decent starting point for our discussion, which is refreshing since gaming terms often diverge quite widely from real-world usage. So, using the above quote as a starting point: tactics as a concept is focused on troops in an engagement and how they are arrayed and the immediate goals of that engagement.

Operations and Strategy (grouping them together since I think “Real Time Operational” games are very rare) are focused on broader objectives, such as coordinating forces in multiple engagements, and most importantly: these higher level terms focus coordinating your resources across time to achieve a larger goal. Putting that in bold for emphasis, as it’s one of my main points here. We even get a definition for 4X... I mean, Grand Strategy, which is of course a map game that includes diplomacy and/or larger theaters of war (looking at you Hearts of Iron 4).

Evaluating many of our examples from the beginning of the article, we see that many games that we would bill as "tactics" games tend to be smaller scale: World in Conflict and Men of War, for example. We might even include the Close Combat series in this, as well. Blitzkrieg, or Sudden Strike are also relevant to mention in this context. Now, of course, you'll notice that I have so far left out larger scale games such as Wargame, Steel Division, or Broken Arrow. And that's because, when looking at these titles, the idea of a tactics game being smaller scale than a strategy game starts to break down.

And that’s ok, because I’m explicitly seeking to make the point that in Real Time Tactics, scale often features into the gameplay but isn’t the core element under consideration. Because while Wargame isn’t necessarily the same scale as something like Beyond All Reason or Supreme Commander or the upcoming (as of this writing) Ashes of the Singularity 2, the number of units you field easily rivals or even exceeds those in undisputed prime RTS games like Age of Empires, StarCraft, or Command & Conquer.

I know that there are people who call StarCraft and Age of Empires etc “tactics” games because they focus on direct unit control. I do not agree with this assessment and will not be featuring it in this article, but if you know of or want to write a counterpoint to this piece, I’d love to read it! Link it below or send it to me on social media.

Back on topic:

It’s the Economy, Stupid.

Growing your economy is a key consideration in Age of Empires titles, to the point where each Age requires a massive increase in economic investment.

xcuse the heading of this section. It’s a good one, and I’m having fun writing.

In the last section, we explored the idea that scale may be one of the differentiators between RTS and RTT: Tactics is focused on winning an engagement, while strategy is about a bigger picture of managing your resources across time to achieve a larger goal.

I’m focused, of course, on the term “resources.” Now, in a real war or military operation “resources” don’t mean “minerals and gas” or “gold and lumber.” People, fuel, ammunition, the logistical equipment like planes and boats and trucks that move around the people, and fuel, and ammunition, these things are all what we’d more properly refer to as resources in something that’s not a video game.

Company of Heroes does (in my humble opinion) a really good job of simulating this, with the game’s resources being Manpower, Fuel, and Munitions and generally corresponding to the player’s ability to field troops, and tanks, and special abilities. Good one, Relic. Well played.

Company of Heroes designed their game to more directly simulate the “strategy” elements of military resources: Manpower, Munitions, and Fuel. This draws a more direct comparison to actual military strategy than resources like Minerals and Vespene, which imply that the player is directly purchasing these units to deliver them into combat.

But in many RTS games, we’re talking about layers of abstraction pressed down into the gameplay, giving us shortcuts for the things they’re supposed to represent. Relic’s layers of abstraction, as I said in my previous paragraph, are pretty direct. Most RTS have much higher levels of abstraction. Minerals and Vespene becoming Marines and Battlecruisers, for instance. Or converting Tiberium into money, which is in turn spent on Riflemen or Obelisks of Light. This muddies the metaphor for a traditional-style RTS, pushing it well away from the idea of a military operation and in many cases (like in Age of Empires) feel more like building up a town or city-state that is engaged in conflict with its neighbor(s). The metaphor is under a great deal of strain when you look at Command & Conquer or StarCraft.

The key difference in all these scenarios though, is that in both “pure” RTS like Age of Empires or Command & Conquer and “tactical RTS” like Dawn of War or Company of Heroes, is that resources and building up and maintaining an economy are key to success in the game. Whether you’re building 1 Barracks or 20, or whether you have to capture control points and build Listening Posts or you’re creating Refineries or Command Centers and Hatcheries, RTS of all stripes are driven to a high degree by the game’s economy layer.

RTS of all stripes are driven to a high degree by the game’s economy layer

For all Company of Heroes has a different economic model than C&C, you still really need to hold those critical Fuel points to be able to produce tanks and other vehicles. And having a key territory taken, disrupting your income, still materially hurts your ability to field units and unlock upgrades.

The extent to which map control is tied to your ability to continue to prosecute a battle is very different in RTT games. In World in Conflict, for example: you have a stock of points that you can use to build up your army, and as units die those points are refunded over time. So the main ‘resource’ in World in Conflict is simply your units and where you can call them into the battle.

This is similar in Wargame. Now, in Wargame, each territory you control has a marginal effect on the rate at which your points accumulate, but it’s less than even what is seen in Company of Heroes and a whole other ballgame to resourcing in Tempest Rising or Dark Reign. Mostly, you’re trying to hold territories and kill enemy units as victory conditions, and the marginal resource gain rate differences exist as a gentle finger on the scale to help push games towards a conclusion for the player who’s completing their objectives more effectively.

This, to me, is the single clearest differentiator between RTS and RTT. Or, more precisely, it’s the actual method to describe or define which genre a game belongs to: Does external income matter in terms of game outcome? If the answer is yes, the game is Real Time Strategy. If no? Then it can be defined as a tactics game.

Squaring the Circle for Economy Being the Big Differentiator

This is where a lot of hay is made in any conversation relevant to RTT or RTS, and a lot of this depends on your specific definition or criteria for the genre, or even how you weight or define the terms.

There’s a segment of “core” RTS players count Relic’s games (or those in a similar space such as Ancestor’s Legacy) as tactics games because of the lack of harvesting as a specific economic activity, and/or the absence or scaling back of the idea of building up a base or bases. There’s no SCV or harvester scooping up minerals or gold or Tiberium out on the map somewhere? There’s no Dozer building turrets or Barracks or factories? then it’s a tactics game.

And there’s a lot of value, I think, to classifying Relic’s titles separately from StarCraft or other “core” RTS experiences (sometimes called Harvest/Build/Destroy games). They play pretty differently, after all, and there’s a lot of assumptions and skills that are expressed pretty differently. Personally, I call these “tactical RTS” due to their decreased emphasis on minute-by-minute economic operations.

There’s ample room for interpretation and disagreement here: games like AL or COH really push economic management into a smaller number of decisions and put the player’s army more in the role of “income gatherer” as they destroy, contest, and capture strategic points that are responsible for delivering resources into your stockpiles. And, as we discussed in the last section regarding Wargame’s economic model (such as it is) there’s certainly a matter of degree present in discussion of economy or income as a way to determine what is an RTS vs what is an RTT.

It can get weird on the other end too when we have to place a line between what counts as a tactics game vs what counts as an RPG. Commandos, Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, Desperados and other similar games weighed against things like Temple of Elemental Evil or Icewind Dale for instance.

This is already pretty long, but there's a bit more to the article, if you want to read the rest at my blog: https://waywardstrategy.com/2026/06/08/an-exploration-of-the-rtt-game-genre/

An Exploration of the RTT Game Genre

Completed

Ongoing

Upcoming