I've played a lot of RTS games, and would like to drop them here for discussion, as well as see if anyone else had classic favorites.

The ones I'm most familiar with are Stronghold Crusader, Warcraft III, Age of Empires, and Age of Mythology.

Crusader is a unique game, because the whole point of it is to mount the best defense, building a beautiful and efficient castle. I've never experienced that in these other ones.

But the Age games allow you to advance through eras, which is always cool, because they let you pick your leader/God between shifts.

Warcraft III is arguably the most versatile of these, it actually got re-released recently. The plus of this game is it has a trove of custom maps. There's even a DBZ hero map where you can play as one of forty characters. It's fun to play as Yamaha and make him actually worth something.

Got any good ones? I know I've been looking at some really interesting stuff aside from this, like Planetary Annihilation.