Best of E3 2006 Awards

Best Strategy Game

Command armies or cultivate civilizations; this category covers all strategic warfare and management games.

• Best Shooter
• Best Role-Playing Game
• Best Online Multiplayer Game
• Best Racing Game
• Best Massively Multiplayer Game
• Best Strategy Game
• Best Action/Adventure Game
• Best Original Game
• Special Mentions

Winner: Supreme Commander

Best Strategy Game: Supreme Commander (THQ)

Chris Taylor's spiritual heir to the Total Annihilation series is just plain stunning. It's vast in scope: You can zoom seamlessly from a view of the whole planet to a close-up view of the fighting. The interface is just as ingenious as Total Annihilation's -- still a benchmark for real-time strategy games nearly a decade after its release. And you can custom-design your own units.

Better than all of this, though, is the way Supreme Commander transcends the limitations of traditional RTS by giving you the tools you need to manage a war, not just an individual battle. The game's interface is built to remove the micromanagement of units that takes up the majority of the player's attention in most other strategy games. Here, you're free to kick back and concentrate on the large-scale strategic decisions -- you know, the ones that really matter.

In fact, the only thing we're not looking forward to about Supreme Commander is having to wait until 2007 for its release. While most of this year's awards took considerable deliberation, this one was a no-brainer. >>>More info

Runner-ups

Spore: Why didn't Spore win? Because Supreme Commander just blew us away - and who knows how far away Spore is? It'll be in the frame for a big win next E3, no doubt. >>>More info

Medieval 2: The Total War series continues to impress, and this revisit to the medieval period could well be the best yet. >>>More info

Company of Heroes: Fresh from finishing the marvelous Dawn of War, Relic is turning their experience onto World War II strategy, and the results are looking stunning. >>>More info

World in Conflict: Massive Entertainment's unique class-based twist on real-time strategy conventions.>>>More info

Sid Meier's Railroads: Railroad building strategy games have fallen out of style recently, but this Sid Meier beauty looks like it has what it takes to bring them back in style. >>>More info