One of the four games below has no working multiplayer, which is the sort of thing a “which RTSRTS. Real-Time Strategy — a strategy game where everyone plays at the same time, continuously, instead of taking turns. should I start with” answer usually gets wrong. This site already has a primer that separates turn-based 4X from real-time grand strategy as time models, and a guide to Company of Heroes 3’s four factions that assumes you have already bought Company of Heroes 3. Neither one tells you what to install tonight.
What this piece adds is the install decision, settled on three things a store page and a patch note can actually prove: what the developer hands you to learn on, whether the online modes you are being sold are running this week, and which build you will be learning when you press play. No tier list, no “skill ceiling” rankings, and no player-population figures — none of the official pages I read publishes one.
What this covers: Age of Empires IV, StarCraft II, Company of Heroes 3 and Stormgate, judged only on the on-ramp each developer ships and the state of each game’s current build. Why it matters: two of the four have a patch landing inside the week this is published — Company of Heroes 3’s 3.0 on 5 November — and one has had live-service multiplayer disabled since May, so a chooser written from memory would send you to a dead lobby. Who should care: anyone who has never won an RTS match online, and anyone returning to the genre after years away with four plausible store pages open.
The install decision in one table
| Game | What the developer ships to learn on | Online play, as of 2 November 2026 | Build you will actually be on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Age of Empires IV | A tutorial system plus a “Campaign Story Mode designed for first time players”, across 4 campaigns and 35 missions (store page) | Live; the store page advertises PvP and PvE modes with ranked seasons | Update 17.0.12182, shipped 22 October 2026 |
| StarCraft II | Multiplayer is free-to-play in full; the Campaign Collection is now included with PC Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate | Live, with Blizzard still programming StarCraft II matches for BlizzCon’s Classic Cup | Patch 5.0.17, published 7 October 2026 |
| Company of Heroes 3 | Full Tactical Pause, which the store page describes as giving “total control over the pacing of single-player action”; campaign and skirmish before multiplayer | Live, but the multiplayer economy is reworked on 5 November | 2.5.6 (16 September 2026) until 3.0 arrives |
| Stormgate | A free Vanguard prologue chapter of three playable missions; offline Campaign and AI Skirmish since May | Versus and Co-op disabled; the Steam peer-to-peer netcode is unfinished | The 1 May 2026 offline-transition build |
Age of Empires IV: the tutorial is not an afterthought
Most RTS tutorials teach you to click. Relic’s and World’s Edge’s store copy for Age of Empires IV claims something more specific — a tutorial system “that teaches the essence of real-time strategy” alongside a Campaign Story Mode “designed for first time players” — and backs the claim with 4 campaigns and 35 missions spanning, in the page’s words, “500 years of history from the Dark Ages up to the Renaissance”. Thirty-five missions is a lot of supervised practice before a stranger sees your opening.
That matters more than usual this month, because the game moved twice in eight days. Update 17.0.12182 landed on 22 October with balance changes aimed, in the notes’ own framing, at “increasing landmark diversity and bringing civilizations better in-line across the board”, and Raiders of the North arrived on 29 October with two more civilizations, the Vikings and the Scots. The Update 17 preview coverage is the place for the patch’s intent; the consequence for a newcomer is simpler. Landmark diversity is the earliest decision a match puts in front of you, and a patch that explicitly rebalances it, next to two brand-new civilization pools, means the opening everyone copies is being rewritten while you learn it. Starting on the campaign, where the point is the mission rather than the meta, sidesteps that entirely.
One small thing worth knowing before you patch: the notes state that saved games and observable matches made on previous builds cannot be loaded or replayed after updating. If you were mid-campaign on an older build, finish or accept the restart.
The store page hedges its own scale in a way worth quoting exactly, because the marketing copy predates both recent additions: it describes “10 diverse civilizations” and, for the Anniversary Edition, the Malians and Ottomans. The live game is larger than that sentence.
StarCraft II: cheapest to test, hardest to read
StarCraft II is the only game here where the entire multiplayer component costs nothing — Blizzard’s own Game Pass announcement states that “the entirety of the original StarCraft and StarCraft II’s multiplayer components are free-to-play”, with StarCraft: Remastered and StarCraft II: Campaign Collection now sitting inside PC Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate. If you want to know whether you enjoy the genre before spending anything, the answer is already installed on your drive.
The cost is in the reading. StarCraft II’s ladder expects you to arrive with a plan for the first ninety seconds, and the plan you find depends on which patch the guide was written against. Blizzard’s developer note on 5.0.17 is blunt about how much moved: “Based on that feedback, we have rolled back most balance changes to the live release of StarCraft II from patch 5.0.16 to 5.0.15.” The first bullet under Economy is “Worker Start Count increased from 8 to 12” — so the eight-worker opening that patch 5.0.16 introduced in June is gone, and any build order written during that window describes an opening the game no longer plays. This site’s 5.0.17 rollback coverage walks through what that restores.
The scene is not the problem. Blizzard is still booking StarCraft II into its own events: the Blizzard Classic Cup roster announcement lists a StarCraft II 3v3 Entertainment Match alongside Legacy matches for IdrA and MC, with Serral and Rogue billed as RSL Revival Season 6 finalists, inside a Cup carrying a $100,000 total prize pool across all its titles.
So: pick StarCraft II if you want zero cost and a genre-defining ladder, and accept that your first week is partly a research task — check the date on any build order before you practise it.
Company of Heroes 3: the one that lets you stop the clock
Company of Heroes 3 sells four “multiplayer & co-op factions”, two campaigns and a set of tactical verbs the store page spells out — flanking to expose side armour, infantry breaching to clear garrisons, and True Sight, where elevation changes what your units can see. The on-ramp is the one feature almost no other RTS offers: Full Tactical Pause, described on the store page as giving players “total control over the pacing of single-player action” so you can plan an attack and queue it before unpausing. For someone still learning that cover and suppression exist, a pause button is worth more than any tutorial.
Timing is the whole story here, though. The 20th Anniversary Update, version 3.0, arrives on 5 November and Relic calls it “the biggest update to the game since release”. Among the multiplayer changes: “a major rework to the economy, a rebalance of artillery, changes to reduce the prevalence of massing vehicles, and a stronger emphasis on the importance of positioning”, plus one existing Battlegroup reworked and several others adjusted. The campaign gets its own economy change, with resources split into Manpower for units, Munitions for abilities and Fuel for upgrades, and towns offering an exclusive upgrade choice.
Read the order of operations off that list. If you buy in the first week of November, the ladder you learn on 2 November is not the ladder you have on 5 November, and the economy rework touches the thing a beginner is worst at — spending. Play the campaign and skirmish until the patch lands, then read the faction guide and pick an army.
Stormgate: leave it until the netcode ships
Stormgate’s store page is still promising the most newcomer-friendly design of the four: three highly asymmetric factions, co-op against AI with legendary Heroes, and “a hero-free competitive ranked ladder focused purely on player skill”, on top of a free Vanguard prologue of three missions. Frost Giant’s own pitch is that the interface was built “for both depth and approachability”, with streamlined inputs and automatic control groups.
Then read the newest post on the game’s Steam news hub, dated 1 May 2026, and the promise stops matching the build. That patch disabled live-service Versus and Co-op, added offline support for Campaign, AI Skirmish and Custom games with progress kept locally, and removed the game’s dependence on the Hathora and Pragma platforms ahead of Hathora’s shutdown. On the multiplayer rebuild the post is candid: “A few of us have been hard at work adding Steam peer to peer support to the game, but the netcode is not quite ready yet”, joining another player’s peer-to-peer game “will result in a placeholder error”, and ladders may return with “no confirmed plans yet”. The offline-transition coverage sets out the full patch.
Two checks I ran on 2 November 2026, because a five-month-old announcement is not proof of the current state: the newest item in Stormgate’s Steam news feed is still that 1 May post, and https://playstormgate.com/ returns a page whose only content is the sentence “This service has been suspended.” The studio site at frostgiant.com is still live and still links its Stormgate news to playstormgate.com — which is now the suspended host.
None of that deletes the game. Campaign, AI Skirmish and Custom games run offline, and a 1 May patch that improved performance by roughly 30% by fixing systems that scaled badly with large unit counts is exactly the kind of change a skirmish player benefits from. Stormgate is a reasonable single-player sandbox this month. It is not a first ladder.
Store-page requirements for the three titles Steam lists
| Game | Minimum | Recommended | Install size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Age of Empires IV | Intel Core i5-6300U or Ryzen 5 2400G, 8 GB RAM, Intel HD 520 or Radeon RX Vega 11, CPU with AVX support | 3.6 GHz 6-core Intel i5 or Ryzen 5 1600, 16 GB RAM, GTX 970 or RX 570 with 4 GB VRAMVRAM. Video RAM — memory on the graphics card used for textures and frames; more of it lets you run higher settings. | 50 GB |
| Company of Heroes 3 | Intel i5 6th-gen or Ryzen 4-core at 3 GHz, 8 GB RAM, GTX 950 or R9 370 | Intel i7 8th-gen or Ryzen 8-core at 3 GHz, 16 GB RAM, GTX 1660 or RX 5600 | 40 GB |
| Stormgate | 6 cores at 2.3 GHz, 16 GB RAM, GeForce GTX 1060 | 8 cores at 3 GHz, 16 GB RAM, GeForce RTX 2060 | 15 GB |
Two details in that grid are worth flagging. Age of Empires IV’s minimum line requires a CPU with AVX support, which excludes some older builds outright rather than merely running them slowly. Stormgate asks for 16 GB of RAM even at minimum — more than either of the two full-priced games — while asking for the smallest install.
What the first week looks like in each
For Age of Empires IV: campaign first, then skirmish against the AI, then ranked seasons. The 35 missions are the tutorial with a story attached, and the balance churn of the last two weeks is a reason to learn the economy rather than an opening.
For StarCraft II: free multiplayer means you can test the genre at no cost, but treat the first week as date-checking as much as playing. Any guide written between June and October 2026 may describe an eight-worker start that 5.0.17 removed.
For Company of Heroes 3: campaign and skirmish until 5 November, with Full Tactical Pause doing the teaching. After 3.0 lands, the economy, artillery and vehicle-massing changes mean every opening guide on the internet is due a re-read.
For Stormgate: offline campaign and skirmish only, and only if you want a single-player RTS. The ranked ladder the store page still advertises is not running.
The one thing this piece deliberately does not give you is a tier ranking. Which of the four is “best” depends on whether you value a tutorial, a price of zero, a pause button or a working lobby — and on 2 November 2026, one of those four lobbies does not exist.