Strategos Review – So Much Potential

Strategos has been a game that I have been keeping my eye on since it was first announced. In fact, I have interviewed the developer, and I even recommended players to try it during one of its demo runs at a Steam Wargames Fest. Now, Strategos has arrived in Early Access, and it’s time to take the real deal for a (chariot) ride and see how this real-time wargame set in antiquity performs.

• Genre: Real-Time Tactics | Wargame | Real-Time Strategy
• Developer: Strategos Games
• Publisher: MicroProse Software
• Price: $22.49 | 22,05€ | £18.89
• Buy At: Steam
• Release Date: 20 January , 2026
• Reviewer: Nuno Marques (PC)
• Target Audience: Wargamers, Total War players, strategy game players, RTS enjoyers, History buffs, and Antiquity fans
• Final Score: 8/10

What Is Strategos?

Strategos is a 3D real-time tactics wargame set in antiquity, featuring around 120 unique factions and 250 unique units. If that sounds impressive, it’s because it is. There’s a lot of content in Strategos, and more than enough to keep an invested player skirmishing for months on end and still not being able to fully experience everything the game has to offer.

Now, Strategos might look like Total War, and in some aspects, you could draw parallels to it, such as its real-time battles, but it lacks any kind of campaign layer. Strategos also leans a lot further into the simulation aspect of things, with battles being overall slower, and some underlying mechanics that provide a bit more authenticity and attempt to replicate the real-life aspects of cohesion and terrain, for example. In fact, I would argue that Strategos is a lot closer to something like Field of Glory 2, the amazing turn-based strategy game from Slitherine, than it is to Total War, but more on that later.

The game’s biggest focus is on allowing the player to set up their own battles, and play around, and experiment with the different armies available. There are some “campaigns”, but they’re campaigns in the sense that they’re just battles strung together. There are also some premade battles as well, and a competent tutorial that you can get over with in less than an hour.

Antiquity Combat In Strategos

With so much focus on the real-time battles of Strategos, one has to ask: how do these battles work?

Imagine Total War, and you’re nearly there, because that’s where all the comparisons and first impressions about the game came from. The 3D, real-time battles of Strategos play very similarly to what you would find on a Total War game, at a superficial level. What I mean by that is that they look, control, and play out very similarly, and at a distance, you would have a hard time distinguishing them (which is a good thing for Strategos, because the game looks good). However, when you start to drill down on the battle mechanics, this is where things start to differ, and I’m not yet sure if that’s a good thing or not. Let me explain.

You start a battle by laying out your troops on the battlefield, according to your military genius, which all of you, readers of Strategy and Wargaming, surely are. Press play, and the battle starts. Unit control is done in the exact same way as in other RTS titles, with clicks and drags of individual units and formations, but Strategos throws command & control into the mix. You see, your orders are not obeyed immediately unless the troops you’re ordering are within verbal range of a commanding unit. If they’re not, then a courier is dispatched to inform the unit of the order it should follow. This mechanical choice (which is a very authentic one to real-life) changes the way the game plays in comparison to something like Total War in a fundamental way.

You’re no longer an omnipresent leader giving instant orders to thousands of men. Instead, you have to keep your generals close enough to the battle so that they can be most effective, giving your forces the necessary orders almost instantly, making huge impacts on the battlefield. However, this also means that by keeping your general close to combat, you’re also risking him, and once he dies (and they will), things become difficult to control, and control can be lost, and entire formations routed. In a game like Total War, the general unit acts more like a passive buff or has some active abilities, but in Strategos, it’s instrumental to have your troops do what you need them to do, promptly. Have your general all the way in the back, and a courier might take 10 or 15 seconds to reach a single unit, and by then, whatever order that you issued is no longer optimal. Even worse, it can be dangerous to execute and place your troops at risk of being flanked and unable to react.

I enjoy this aspect of the game. It’s simple to use, because everything is automated. Couriers are dispatched automatically, and if there are none available (because you don’t have an endless number of them), they’ll be dispatched as soon as they come back from their current assignments. It also adds another layer to your planning and to what kind of commitments you’re willing to make in a battle, because if a poor order gets issued, reverting course might not happen as quickly as you need it to.

My biggest problem with Strategos at the moment is the combat resolution, because it just doesn’t feel smooth and as obvious as everything else. Which is a shame, because everything else in the game is very much on point, easy to understand and learn, and feedback is almost instantaneous. However, when two units meet to fight, what seems to happen is that they become locked in combat, and then there are several dice rolls happening in the background, determining cohesion checks and casualty results. This makes the game feel like it stopped being real-time, and now you’re playing a turn-based strategy game waiting for a dice roll to finish, while the fighting animation doesn’t represent what’s really going on behind the scenes.

I know this isn’t an easy thing to ask from a solo developer, but I would much rather have unit combat happening as they do in Total War, which has a more dinamic feel to it, is a lot more fun, and feels a lot better and, in my opinion, it has a massive impact on the satisfaction I get from seeing my plans come to life in real-time.

This doesn’t mean that units locked in combat can only fight one unit at a time; not at all. They can be flanked and attacked from 4 different directions. So what would one expect? A sort of hammer and anvil tactic happening? Infantry fighting infantry head-on, and a massive cavalry charge from the flanks to send units flying. Well, that’s what you would expect, and in theory that’s what happens, but given the system in place, what happens is that the cavalry arrives, engages the infantry (I’m almost sure the animations are pre-rendered), and a result of the cohesion check happens, and the unit routs. There’s no exciting charge, no horses trampling lines of troops, and certainly no one is being flung into the air by a direct impact from a horse, and that just ends up feeling so underwhelming and anticlimactic.

I want to reiterate that I do believe the combat system of Strategos is good, and it dishes out authentic results, but the hard-lock of its system and how the game goes from feeling a fluid RTS into a weird turn-based combat situation is something that I haven’t been able to get over just yet.

Graphics and Presentation

Overall, it’s undeniable that Strategos has an awesome presentation, and the game is quite the looker. As I mentioned at the start of this review, if you look at Strategos and Total War from a distance, you won’t be able to tell them apart (unless you’re comparing them to Warhammer, of course, and in one screen, there are hoplites, and on the other, there are minions of Nurgle). Units are colorful, the models have a high-quality look to them, the textures are detailed, and the art-style is good (even if I’m not the biggest fan of its table top look, but I don’t often zoom in to care that much about it). The maps also look good and are easy to read.

With that being said, Strategos isn’t exactly what I could call a game that’s optimized. This is the first game I am reviewing on my beefy new machine (Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 32GB RAM, RX 9070 XT) that can run games like Ghost of Tsushima, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, and Total War: Warhammer 3 at well over 100 frames-per-second, but struggles to keep Strategos above 60 with full anti-aliasing. The same thing happened with my previous machine while playing its demo, so I don’t think it has anything to do with the PC itself, and I’m more inclined to say that the game isn’t just that impeccably optimized. Even so, I don’t think most PCs will have a hard time running the game; it may just not be the smoothest experience.

As for the UI, I think it’s OK, and the music is actually decent and pretty epic. My only problem with sounds is that the game would benefit a whole lot if it had unit barks to inform the player that a unit has been selected, a movement order was given, as well as an attack order, and maybe even an alert to units routing. Besides its usefulness in informing the player, unit barks are a big part of a game’s character, so this was a missed opportunity. Again, I know this is a single developer, but I need to point that out.

AI, Dificulty and a Lack of Multiplayer

One thing that surprised me is how apt the AI on Strategos seems to be, and how it puts up a challenge in every battle. It knows how to skirmish and use ranged troops effectively and aggressively, and will punish players if they have any units out of position (say, and isolated infantry formation, for example). It will harass and retreat as necessary. So far, I enjoy what I’m seeing with the AI, and the game looks like it’s delivering on the premise of having a good enough AI that players won’t miss multiplayer.

While I’m the kind of guy that would be like “yeah, that makes sense”, because I often prefer playing single-player games, a game like Strategos would thrive in multiplayer (as do its closest competitors), so its absence comes off as strange. I hope it gets added later down the line, because Strategos battles and strong skirmish mode seems like a perfect fit for it.

Is Strategos The Game For You?

Going into Strategos, I had very few doubts that what was going to be on display was a game of quality and immense strategic depth. That, I’m glad to say, proved to be the case, and with its Early Access stay for the foreseeable future, one can assume that these characteristics will be improved going forward, too. But that’s not the point I wanted to discuss in this section of my review. I want to go over the kind of audience I think might enjoy Strategos, and how it squares off against the major players, like Total War and Field of Glory 2.

Despite being fundamentally different games, and I can see several justifications as to why players who enjoy duking it out in Antiquity could play all three. One thing is clear: if you want a game with a proper campaign, then go with Total War: Rome or Total War: Rome 2. If you’re looking for a game that has a competitive multiplayer scene and is still running tournaments, go with Field of Glory 2. As for the battles themselves, I think this is where Strategos might gain a foothold. Field of Glory 2, being turn-based, instantly removes the slice of the audience that’s exclusively interested in real-time strategy. Total War’s focus on spectacle rather than substance is what opens the door for a title like Strategos to shine with its more complex and semi-realistic mechanics. The fact that Strategos doesn’t lag behind at the graphical level is also a massive plus when trying to impress new players that might scoff at the idea of playing a pixelated wargame, no matter how amazing it is. Another thing that helps Strategos stand out is how easy it is to start the game, pick up two factions, and just play a game or two without too much investment. I personally enjoy games that allow me to do that, as they’re great for days whenever I just want to play something while listening to a video in the background, or at lunch, or just want something that doesn’t take too much effort to set up and enjoy.

Final Score: 8/10

With everything said and done, and despite my criticism, I come out of Strategos with a very positive view of it. Strategos is a game that tackles a subject very few games do (weirdly enough, because there are a lot – and I mean a lot – of people that go crazy for antiquity stuff, from memes to books, and games), and does it so with with a unique take on it, provides players with an authentic experience of what ancient battles would have been like, and also regales them with a sense of spectacle most wargames just don’t offer. Add to that the voluptuous amount of content for a very attractive price point, and it’s easy to make a case for having Strategos on your checkout page on Steam.

Remember that this is an Early Access project, and while I doubt that my major pain point (the battle resolution system) will be changed, Strategos is aiming for a very specific experience (a very unique one at that), for a very specific type of audience that I’m sure will love it, and that also matters when attributing a score.

In the end, it all comes down to what you enjoy and are looking for right now. If you’ve grown tired of Total War: Rome 2, and Field of Glory 2 just doesn’t cut it anymore, then Strategos might be a good game to rekindle your love for ancient history.

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