Introduction
For the longest time, I’ve been wanting to write this article on one of my favorite topics and things to do in strategy games: Turtling. For those of you who might not be aware of what turtling is, it is the act of building up your base in a real-time strategy game, setting-up massive defensive complexes of intricate layers of walls, towers with overlapping fields of fire, all kinds of defensive units strategically placed to deal the most damage possible, several heavily defended and redudant 10 gates, in case the other 9 fail, and all other kinds of buildings that might be used as some sort of defensive structure. After that, players just sit back and watch the game’s AI trying to break their defenses.
For the longest time, I used to play games like this. In Red Alert 2, all my bases were intricate mazes, and my Age of Empires 2 islands were completely walled off just in case, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized that this habit wasn’t unique to me, and that a lot of other people enjoyed this as well, and it was called “turtling”. In honor of this good old tradition, I have decided to compile a list of the 10 best real-time strategy games for turtling. Let’s go!
If you want to check my other lists, you can do it here!
10 – Age of Darkness: Final Stand
Very few games will give as many “uh oh” moments and as consistent a game as Age of Darkness: Final Stand. Inspired by the likes of They Are Billions, Age of Darkness has players in control of a human settlement and tasked with expanding it, as well as to defend it against the unrelenting dark forces of the “nightmares”, ghouslist creatures that will attack your settlement from time to time, in massive waves that can reach upwards of 5 to 10, to 20 and even 70 thousand units. Because of that, players must carefully expand and consolidate before moving forward again. It’s super fun to see how you have expanded, and stopped to fortify, and expanded again, and so on, and by the late game, you’ll have organically created your own bastions of defense and fallback mechanism. The only reason the game isn’t higher on the list is that it could have had so many more options for defensive gadgets. At least the campaign of the game is pretty awesome!
9 – Red Alert 2
One of the reasons Red Alert 2 is one of my favorite strategy games of all time is the fact that I spent hundreds of hours with it as a kid, just playing around with the base-building and creating all kinds of defensive apparatuses. While not as complex as other games in this list, Red Alert 2’s defenses were cheap, and its inventory was very eclectic, varying from walls, pillboxes, Patriot missiles, flak cannons, and Tesla coils.
8 – Diplomacy is Not An Option
Diplomacy is Not an Option is another game created exclusively to allow players to build their bases (or towns) up and then defend them against overwhelming numbers of enemies. It’s a game where success hinges on the ability of players to properly build up their defenses and sustain their strongholds against waves of increasingly more powerful and numerous enemies. It might be a bit more stressful than the kind of turtling experience you might be looking for, which is to relax and watch the enemy struggle against the might of your defenses, but if you’re looking for a turtling RTS that challenges you, you cannot go wrong with Diplomacy is Not an Option.
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