Top 5 best real-time strategy games on mobile (2010)

Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington didn’t take turns to move their armies; Alexander the great never patiently waited for the enemy to attack before attacking back; and Rome wasn’t built in one turn.

Real-time strategy games know this. They know that the combination of time and strategy equals games that leave you on the edge of your seat, and force you to rethink tactics on the fly.

The mobile platform looks like a terrible fit for the genre. The lack of any mouse or keyboard to hot-jump across wide expanses quickly should, in theory, make them about as much fun to play as they are on home consoles (read: "not very").

Yet over the past few years there have been a number of games that have either perfected a special RTS control scheme on the mobile, or adapted the genre’s conventions to make it work on the smaller screen.

These five titles are guaranteed to keep any armchair general or city planner on the edge of his seat.

The Age of Empires series is one of the best interpretations of the RTS genre on mobiles. 

Age of Empires III: Asian Dynasty improves considerably upon its, already pretty good predecessor by adding in improved troop AI and some grand battles.

Very few corners have been cut to transplant the classic PC series to mobiles, with research, harvesting, and the familiar rock-paper-scissors combat system making it across intact.

If it’s traditional RTS gaming you’re after, Age of Empires is bound to satisfy.

Normally, mobile franchises are built around pre-existing games from the home consoles or PC.

The Townsmen series, in contrast, is unique in that it’s solely designed for play on handsets alone.

The latest entry into the long-running city-building series is arguably the best yet.

Townsmen 6 combines familiar economic micro-management gameplay with the volatile environment of revolutionary France to create an involving and absorbing strategy game of the highest standard.

EA’s Command & Conquer 4 sidesteps control issues altogether by redesigning the RTS for the smaller screen.

Thankfully, the game still retains most of the tactical layers that made the original series so successful on the PC.

The unit limits may be a paltry ten, and the lack of a Skirmish mode will rankle with the old school RTS players.

But if you’re after gorgeous small-scale battles with an intuitive control method and clever unit abilities, you can’t go too far wrong with C&C4.

Taking the exact opposite route to Command & Conquer, Art of War 2 attempts to put a large-scale RTS into the mobile handset without making any significant compromises in the process.

This means unit limits of up to 50 per side on screen at once, huge maps, and a wide range of varied troops to command.

It also makes it one of the hardest games in this list, but those willing to put up with some mean AI will find a lot to like about Art of War 2.

The series has been going for almost as long as time iteslf, but there’s always something about the core gameplay of SimCity that makes it worth revisiting.

SimCity Deluxe is one of the best mobile interpretations of the game yet, combining fantastic graphics that bring alive your sprawling metropolis, with excellent controls that makes keeping tabs on everything a breeze.

The introduction of short-but-sweet scenarios with this latest iteration makes it the best way to experience the classic city-builder on the go.