Zero-K

After numerous hours playing this game I cannot suggest it. I prefer to play solo and the computer is infuriatingly stupid. The focus is PvP and online play. Good for the people who enjoy that, not good for people who want to play alone. There are many aspects I admire about the game, but the lack of enjoyable solo play is a major downside. Unfortunately this is likely the best RTS game out there right now. It's just rough on a few edges. Also remove jumpbots.

great music, maps and bots that are smarter than I am

A very solid free(!) and still supported RTS that stands out by several aspects: - no Tiers in the usual sense. You can build top units at the start of the game. The trick is, your economy won't allow you to have enough. - terraforming. Dig holes, erect mountains or simple walls. - the best unit manipulation toolset I ever saw: every unit tries to dodge projectiles automatically, you can order an army to march keeping the formation and at the speed of the slowest unit, etc. - different branches of units to counter/dominate different strategies (e.g. spiders crawl on any angle of surface, jetpacks just jumping - a good counters for terraforming; tanks are slow but powerful and armored, rovers are fast and the best flankers etc.) So the main con is: - steep learning curve (campaign does not help much, but makes it somehow easier). Be ready to read wiki to trully understand the game

Development team made posts in their Discord they support transitioning children. DISGUSTING! Say NO to PDFs! Game is a relic and dead anyway. Good riddance!

so many units and so many possible strategies that i could spend pretty much forever playing this

normally ai in rts games suck to some kind of capacity ... not this game it kicked my ass front to back had some good laughs to i find its so interesting the ai will even kite you attacking outside your existing units weapon ranges and will abuse weaknesses like if you have extractors exposed sending small hit teams to destroy them and slow you down you need to put thought into the game more so than other rts games ive played were the ai just sends blots of enemy forces with no real clear strategy or they just stand there at a loosing battle like a gonk ive seen the ai actually run away and regroup with a larger force to jump me lol and then ran me down 10 out of 10 and itches the supreme cammander itch im ganna enjoy this

This game has the most important feature to come from the ancient halls of SpringRTS and it's lineage. Simple framework, and ever advancing units of scale. On a surface level, this is amass waves of units and send them to fight and die. Defense tech needs some early work, as you can probably not build enough defenses against a early rush unless you have unit to unit counters for it. Number tuning will take forever or at very least some interesting compromises once the math is ground out in testing. I can assure though despite the shell, this game is a good breach back into Total Annihilation style RTS.