Highlights
- Real-time strategy games often overlook tower defense mechanics, but these indie strategy games offer a unique blend of resource management and strategic positioning for beginners.
- The White Laboratory, Death Crown, and They Are Billions all stand out in the saturated market of base defense strategy games, offering creative gameplay, simple aesthetics, and challenging survival modes.
- Dungeon Of The Endless, Diplomacy Is Not An Option, Mindustry, Thronefall, and Creeper World 4 all offer their own twist on the tower defense genre, combining base building, resource management, and tactical positioning for an engaging gameplay experience.
Real-time strategy games have long since featured base building as a part of their gameplay structure, and while defenses are sometimes present in RTS games, rarely do they lean into tower defense mechanics.
8 Indie Strategy Games For Beginners
The following eight indie strategy games are ideal for newcomers to the genre.
These games combine the resource and unit management of RTS games with the strategic positioning and upgrading of tower defense games, creating a unique blend that's often great for strategy game beginners.
8 The White Laboratory
This physics-based sandbox RTS game features a modular system that allows players to construct robotic defenses and units, commanding them around the game's levels. The White Laboratory's RTS mechanics are light, and the game leans more into tower defense overall.
The White Laboratory features a clean, minimal aesthetic with a stark color palette that’s highly readable, but its greatest strengths are by far its physics-based gameplay and modular system, allowing for a great deal of creativity and customization. The White Laboratory manages to stand out in a relatively saturated market.
7 Death Crown
This game features a simple 1-bit pixel art aesthetic, a minimal color palette, and highly accessible gameplay that's both easy and quick to learn. Death Crown allows players to plot paths for their units in real-time, as well as build various structures that focus on the economy, unit creation, or defenses in the form of towers.
8 Best Pixel Graphics Strategy Games, Ranked
Players who enjoy the charm of pixel graphics should enjoy these creative strategy games.
There are only three buildings in Death Crown, but each type is equally important to success. Instead of bogging players down with different options, the strategy comes from players balancing their buildings correctly, ensuring that their economy is strong, their base is defended, and their unit production is steady.
6 They Are Billions
This Steampunk-themed base defense strategy game features colony-sim elements and tower defense mechanics, tasking players with defending their colony from massive hordes of zombies.
13 Games To Play If You Liked They Are Billions
Those who enjoyed Numantian Games' They Are Billions, the real-time strategy survival game, should make sure to check out these other great titles.
They Are Billions also features light RTS elements, allowing the player to construct units and move them around the map to explore and fight zombies. Players can also control these units in real-time to help defend their base, though they will need a good defense to complement their troops to survive. They Are Billions features a lengthy campaign, but it’s the game’s randomly generated “Survival Mode” that steals the show.
5 Dungeon Of The Endless
This isometric rogue-like game tasks players with controlling a party of sci-fi adventurers in real-time, exploring dark industrial dungeons, and protecting a valuable crystal with the help of various defenses and structures.
In Dungeon Of The Endless, players must keep track of their food (which can be used for healing) and economy, building resource-gathering structures and defensive towers to fend off the game's various alien foes. The game also sees players commanding the movement of their characters, ensuring they are positioned strategically.
4 Diplomacy Is Not An Option
This tongue-in-cheek physics-based base defense strategy game has players defending their castle from an unending siege. In Diplomacy Is Not An Option, thousands of enemies assault the player's castle walls, and they're tasked with commanding and positioning their various units and defenses to prevent them from destroying the castle.
Diplomacy Is Not An Option is more reminiscent of an RTS than a tower defense, with its resource-gathering and base-building mechanics. However, building catapults and producing archers to position them on and behind the castle walls, as well as the game's tower structures, makes defending in Diplomacy Is Not An Option feel much like a tower defense.
3 Mindustry
This factory management game features automation mechanics and factory-building gameplay similar to that of games like Factorio, tasking players with defending their ever-growing factory from waves of enemies.
In Mindustry, the factory building mechanics tie into the game's base defense aspect. Turrets require ammo to fire, meaning players need to build production lines and supply chains to keep their defenses working. Players can also use their production lines to create mechanical units, which they can use to complement their defenses and capture territory to expand their base.
2 Thronefall
This minimalist tower defense RTS mash-up tasks players with defending their Kingdom from waves of enemies. In the game, players will have to choose which buildings to place on the map's allocated plots, choosing between economy buildings, defenses, and units that can be loosely commanded by the player.
The strategy of Thronefall lies more in tower defense, positioning, and economy management, rather than the micromanagement-heavy gameplay that's common in more complex RTS games. The game's simplicity, intuitive controls, and tactical depth make it worth playing.
1 Creeper World 4
This fourth entry in the Creeper World series takes the popular formula of the Creeper World games and transforms it into 3D, making the physics-based liquid enemy, the "Creeper," a physically rising, globular threat.
9 Most Unique Tower Defense Games
Players in the mood for creative tower defense games should take a look at these examples.
Creeper World 4 is heavily focused on resource management and real-time tactical positioning, tasking players with building a multitude of defenses and choosing the optimal approach against the Creeper. Players can also maneuver their turrets in real-time, deactivating them to move them to a more advantageous position.