Sins runs fairly well on my laptop :S

I've had a stack of fun with the patched up SunAge of late. It's quite good fun, like a Starcraft-KKND2 mash-up. The dev team are closely talking to the forum users and fans for what they want in updates and patches.

It's quite like the whole Data Realms situation, with the devs actually listening and taking advice. Check it out if you have time.

I liked the Act of War games quite alot. Infantry were quite powerful, including the anti-tank ones, but tanks could do them equally large amounts of damage, as a tank should. It was pretty balanced between the Consortium and US Army factions, but Task Force Talon was a bit over-powered. It had some good gameplay mechanics like critical wounding and POWs.

Another good RTS is Faces of War (sequel to Soldiers: Heroes of WW2, and there's a new one in the pipeline called Men of War), it's a WW2 RTS, but it's like commandos quite a bit. It's real-time, tactical and really quite realistic. You need men to crew tanks, every vehicle and soldier has an inventory, it had realistic weapon values (Apart from range, that was reduced alot for playability's sake, however, mods have changed this), armour penetration on tanks and pretty good physics for an RTS. There was a problem in the way that navigating buildings was a disaster. One of the best features was direct control, implicitly it allows the player to take control of a single unit (Still from 3rd Person), allowing them to wreak havoc with |_|34r 1337 5|<1|_|_z. Had pretty good animations and graphics too, and a squad system (Which was actually quite buggy). There was no base-building involved, and the lack of a Vs. AI skirmish mode and poor multiplayer let it down. There is a dynamic campaign generator mod though, which is basically a series of skirmishes.

World in Conflict dudes

Cortex Command is kinda a RTS sooooooooooooo

The only rts thing i see in CC is the bunker building. Other than that its action and AWESOME!!

WIC was hugely over-rated if you ask me. VERY repetitive gameplay, and it's on a huge scale so small-scale tactics don't work at all.

It can be awesomely fanatastic if you can micromanage well and are good at your role. Also I don't see how it's on a big scale considering you only control 4-6 units at a time.
Rule of thumb - don't play support and use your mic and this game will be fun

I can't believe no one said anything about Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns. The game is awesome. Advancement levels in troops, aircraft that can blow up a squad of troopers in a second...It's like Age of Empires 2 with aircraft and jedi and without as many boats.
I also think that Force Commander was also an awesome game. It's quite an old game, yet it looks great and is quite fun to play.
Then, there's Empire at War, a.k.a. Force Commander on steroids. Crazy amount of units and it's got awesome graphics.
As I mentioned, I like Age of Empires 2 mainly because of the swordsmen and medieval stuff.
Finally, there's C&C Generals. Each civilization is different, and it's awesome like that. Chinese have their two troops for the price of one deal, the GLA have their crazed guerrillas and the US just all around owns.
Last note, I think Starcraft 2 is awesome, but holy crud, I think the original is just pathetic. It's basically run-around-and-make-your-enemies-explode-into-a-pile-of-crummy-non-changing-blood. Yeah. Long post.

EMPIRE: Total War

can't wait to pwn America with my redcoats

SW:GB Was a huge disappointment to me, it being just an AoE clone - I've never been a huge fan of that series. Also, Force Commander was just bad due to it's crappy interface and bad development - wiki it to see the details, I also hated the command points. It had it's good points, I enjoyed the artillery but it just seemed so tedious and slow I hated it after a while.

Empire at War = Win. The land battles still suck, but the space battles are just awesome, especially when you have a few mods to tweak the lasers and spawn lots more fighters! I've always enjoyed the CnC games, Generals took a bit of a dip, but that was due to the storyline not being connected to ANYTHING CnC, the gameplay was fun and there are some amazing mods out there.

You all lose, Total Annihilation is the best RTS game ever made.

Too lazy to go back through this ♥♥♥♥ of a thread but:

Tiberium arc of Command and Conquer was always fun. C&C98 was the first RTS I ever played.

I agree with this man.

I think SupCom is pretty damn awesome though. One of my matches was 3 hours long! It was pretty epic but I lost (He attacked me from the land, air and sea all at once). 'Twas pretty amazing though, he sent in the ground units first to take out the A.A. turrets that I set up on the perimeter. He then sent in gunships, fighters and bombers to take out my entire airforce and a crapload of ground units. All while bombarding me from the sea.

Best RTS?
No question.

RISK.
best RTS/Board game ever.

If you don't accept that, Supreme Commander.
Tied with every Red Alert.