Im missing a lot of charm that w2 and first starcraft games had, and i did not see any open engine recreations, nor clones that lived to this day. With warcraft 3 i only ever finished half of the game, by the time sc2 came out, i was already too old to even bother trying.
Ground Control is does not feature the base-building of WC/SC, but are excellent RTS mission-based games.
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is another excellent one.
Earth 2150 includes the base-building, as well as a very cool “persistent homebase” mechanic for the singleplayer campaigns, where you build bases in the mission sites but also have a home base that you can transport units to/from, for use in future missions.
Official Blizzard, idk if you’ve played just the original basegame or the Brood War expansion. There is Starcraft Remastered, which has updated graphics and usability improvements but doesn’t add much other than that over the original.
An open source Brood War engine seems to exist but development appears to have stalled.
For SC2 the coop missions and the custom games are imo the most fun to be had in that game.
In terms of RTS genre, BAR is an epic scale free and open source RTS that feels like a distant cousin, but doesn’t have the deep lore that Starcraft has yet.
I’d also recently caught word from a fellow Lemming about a new game in development called Stormgate, worked on by some ex-SC/WC devs under a new studio. Gameplay has a very similar look to the former two.
That stormgate looks promising! BAR is mentioned and bookmarkd.
Wargus and Stargus is an open source engine recreation that is still active
https://stratagus.com/index.html https://github.com/Wargus/wargus
This is what i was searching for haha. Time replay tides of darkness but with better controls
