RTS with active communities?

[Cheeseplug]

I'd been away from the RTS genre for a while when recently I decided I wanted to hop back into Empire Earth and see if I could get back into deathmatching. I was horrified to find the servers had been shut down years ago. The same for EE2.

Looking around today, what "traditional" RTS games have active communities? The kind of games where you gather resources, micromanage and either rush in the first 10 minutes for victory or end up with a 2 hour long stalemate with turtling giants. I was quite big on RoN and the EE games before I got away from the genre.

What RTS games have a strong community that has a variety of players of different skill levels and the gameplay style to give me my fix? Or am I stuck skirmishing AI?

 

[Sacraster]

starcraft?

 

[Zenoth]

StarCraft
WarCraft 3
Command & Conquer 3
Red Alert 3

 

[Fox5]

Supreme Commander.
Dawn of War 1.
Company of Heroes.
Starcraft (mostly lame money maps).
Warcraft 3.

 

[ZzZGuy]

Supreme Commander: Forged alliance (Expansion that I consider to be superior)
Sins of a Solar Empire (Much slower pace even for rushing if you go beyond small maps) -Edit- Not a traditional RTS -Edit-

 

[jlchoi]

I would guess that Company of Heroes and Dawn of War 2 have the largest player bases right now.

 

[AmberClad]

DoW2 is a squad command RTS. There is no base building and it's not a turtling RTS. DoW1 is a bit more traditional, but there's still a low cap on the maximum number of turrets you can build.

Personally, I've spent many, many times more hours on the Relic RTSs (including Homeworld) than the Blizzard ones, but I don't know if CoH and DoW are really the style that the OP enjoys.

 

[evident]

war3

 

[WhipperSnapper]

You might consider Sins of a Solar Empire, though you'd need the Entrenchment expansion to play it online since that's where most of the action is now. The other problem is that most of the people playing online are very good and it can be hard to find newer players. Sadly, the online player counts aren't very high (about 125 during prime time, which is pathetic). It's a great game that deserves to have more people playing it online.

 

[Maximilian]

Company of heros then starcraft II when it comes out.

CoH has a very active community with 7000+ people online regularly, theres always good people and conversation in the gamereplays channel its amusing anyways, and theres plenty of noobs to be stomped on.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Originally posted by: Maximilian
Company of heros then starcraft II when it comes out.

CoH has a very active community with 7000+ people online regularly, theres always good people and conversation in the gamereplays channel its amusing anyways, and theres plenty of noobs to be stomped on.

Agreed, Company of Heroes and its expansions are very good online. Also you can usually find a lot of comp stomp type games to get some experience against the AI. However, it is somewhat different from traditional RTS games in that you earn resources by capturing control points instead of building structures.