Good RTS War Game?

r.u.s.e. and wargame series.

First that comes to mind is Age of Empires 2 (available on steam), but most other ones I know of are things like Warcraft, Homeworld, and other very old games like Seven Kingdoms Ancient Adversaries.

Check out the games by Paradox. Europa Universalis, Victoria & Hearts of Iron all deal with (potential) world domination.
Also, Command & Conquer 3 has a mode where you play a map campaign of the entire world. The individual battles are done with a basic RTS-style maps, but it also has a grand strategy layer. Rise of Nations is another game you might want to take a look at, as it also has a similar mode.

If you can live with it not being the real world, the two standalone expansions for Dawn of War 1 has a map campaign where you try to take over the whole world (or in the case of Soulstorm, a system, but it works pretty much the same way).

Do note that most of the games I mentioned has a turnbased map-mode (only the ones by Paradox are pure real time). Do you mind if there are TBS-elements or do you want a pure RTS? You mentioned Total War, which I view as leaning more towards the TBS-side of things.

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