No topic on recommended strategy games is complete without the obligatory mentions of
Command & Conquer (everything up to
Red Alert 2, anyway...),
StarCraft, and
WarCraft.
Lately I've been quite fond of the
Company of Heroes games as well. I think the first game (and its expansions) are generally better than the sequel, but CoH2 is still a damn fine game regardless.
Another one I really liked was
World in Conflict, which you can pick up pretty cheap these days on both Amazon and Steam. It's fairly short, but I thought it was a lot of fun. It also has some of the most visually awesome artillery barrages and air strikes I've seen in a strategy game.
If you like squad-based strategy games, you can't go wrong with
XCOM: Enemy Unknown and
Jagged Alliance 2 - especially if you download the fan-made 1.13 patch for it (just as a heads-up, it's a fairly large download since it's been under constant development for years at this point). Avoid
Jagged Alliance: Back in Action and
Jagged Alliance: Crossfire though... they're pretty unimpressive.
If you like space combat, I can't recommend
Homeworld or
Homeworld 2 more highly. Gearbox is putting out remastered versions of both soon-ish too, so that's hopefully going to be pretty cool.
Elfgore said:
...that along with Submarine Titans.
Heh, I'd actually kinda forgotten about
Submarine Titans. I loved the hell out of that game back in the day.