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Real-time Strategy, or RTS for short, is a genre of computer games characterized by being wargames which take place in real-time, where resource gathering, base building, technology development and direct control over individual units are key components.
Real-time strategy titles do not involve "turns" like turn-based strategy video or board games. Rather, game time progresses in "real time;" it is continuous rather than turn-by-turn, and all players may give orders to their troops at any time. While the word "strategy" originally referred to high-level war planning (armies, campaigns, and entire wars), in real-time strategy games individual units or persons are given orders. Also integral to the gameplay of real-time strategy games are economic and production aspects (resource gathering, construction, positioning of buildings, expansion, and production of units), and though military confrontation is a significant part of real-time strategy gameplay, it is most often heavily stylized with relatively little emphasis placed on simulating real warfare, in contrast to games of the genre known as real-time tactics.
It is common for games to be miscategorized as belonging to the real-time strategy genre. This is partly because real-time strategy is a vague denomination, giving rise to the assumption that all games involving strategy played in real-time are "real-time strategy" games. It is also partly due to the fact that the genre is so commonly recognized and well-established that there is a tendency to classify many different types of games within it. For instance, SimCity, which is a city-building game, Railroad Tycoon, an economic simulation game, and games of the real-time tactics genre of military simulations are often classified as "real-time strategy."
Halo Wars, designed by Ensemble Studios, was an RTS game, which released on Xbox 360 in 2009. It was later ported to Xbox One and Windows 10 as Halo Wars: Definitive Edition. A sequel called Halo Wars 2 was developed by Creative Assembly and released in 2017. Halo: Combat Evolved was also originally planned to be an RTS game, but it was converted into a First-person shooter game.