The closest of all the games like Age of Empires is Age of Mythology: Retold, because it is built by the same studio family on the same bones: villagers, drop-off points, and a build order you can feel in your fingers. If you want that for nothing, 0 A.D. is free, open source, and closer to Age of Empires II than anything else on this list.

Players hunting for similar games like Age of Empires usually want one of two halves. Either the boom, meaning the economy loop where you grow a town while nothing is on fire, or the rush, meaning the moment somebody’s cavalry shows up before you have walls. The five picks below are sorted by which half they do better, and the Mac question gets its own section because the answer changed this year.

1. Age of Mythology: Retold

Start here if you want the Age of Empires loop with one twist rather than a redesign. The villager economy, the age-up decisions, and the pacing are all intact. The twist is that each age-up also picks a minor god, and each god hands you a power and a myth unit that can turn a fight you should have lost.

It is on PC Game Pass and Xbox, and support has not slowed down. The 2026 roadmap adds four more premium packs, including a Demeter pantheon and a full 12-mission Aztec campaign. If you liked the historical end of the genre, this is the softest landing away from it.

The honest complaints: there is no native Mac build, and the paid DLC cadence is steep for a game that already sells at full price.

2. 0 A.D.

0 A.D. is the free pick, and it is not a compromise version of one. It is a volunteer-built ancient-warfare RTS that copies the Age of Empires II skeleton almost joint for joint, right down to gathering rates and phase advancement, then adds formations and territory borders that the original never had.

Release 28, nicknamed Boiorix, landed on February 18, 2026, and you can pull builds for Windows, macOS, and Linux straight from the project’s own site. There is no storefront, no account, and no paid tier at any point.

Two real caveats. It has been in alpha for roughly two decades and still has not called itself finished. And the skirmish AI is soft enough that experienced players will beat it on the hardest setting inside a few games, with no scripted campaign to fall back on.

3. Tempest Rising

Take this one if the rush half is what you actually miss. Tempest Rising is a straight Command and Conquer descendant, so it swaps villagers for harvesters and gives you a sci-fi war instead of a historical one, but the tempo of scouting, teching, and punishing a greedy opponent is exactly the thing.

It has held up. Its Steam page sits at 88 percent positive across more than 5,200 reviews, and 2026 brought 3v3 multiplayer and an active-pause option for solo play. A single-player expansion called The Veti’s Wrath was announced in July 2026.

Be clear-eyed about two things. The setting is science fiction, so anyone here for Roman legions will bounce. And the design is deliberately conservative, which is the point for some players and the whole problem for others.

4. Company of Heroes 3

Pick this when you are tired of macro and want every squad to matter. Company of Heroes 3 deletes the villager economy outright. You take and hold territory points to earn resources, so the map itself is the economy, and a lost crossroads hurts more than a lost building ever did in Age of Empires.

Cover, suppression, and flanking do the work that unit counters do elsewhere, and the World War II setting keeps it firmly in historical territory. The Italian campaign also wraps its real-time missions in a turn-based map layer, which puts it closer to Total War than to the building-plus-battle corner of the genre.

Its launch in 2023 was genuinely rough and the reputation stuck longer than the bugs did. There is also still no Mac version, which stings given that Company of Heroes 2 had one.

5. Northgard

Northgard is the pick if a full Age of Empires match is more evening than you have. It runs on claimed territory tiles rather than open map sprawl, so expansion is a series of deliberate commitments instead of a villager sprint, and a match wraps in well under an hour.

It also travels further than anything else here. There are builds for Mac, PlayStation, Xbox, iOS, and Android, and the Switch version is a reasonable entry on the handheld strategy shelf. Each Viking clan changes your opening enough to be worth relearning.

The tradeoff is depth. Northgard is a smaller game than Age of Empires by design, and once you know the clans the strategic ceiling arrives faster than you would like.

Games Like Age of Empires for Mac

The best answer for Mac owners is now the real thing. Feral Interactive brought Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition to macOS in May 2026, natively, and existing Steam owners got the Mac version without paying again. That reframes the whole question, because the alternative you were looking for may no longer be necessary.

Beyond that, 0 A.D. ships native Apple builds and costs nothing, and Northgard has a proper Mac version. Age of Empires IV, Age of Mythology: Retold, and Company of Heroes 3 all have no Mac build at all, so those need CrossOver or a Windows partition. We keep a running list of what actually runs on Apple hardware for the rest of the genre.

Which One to Start With

Pick by which half of the game you were replaying Age of Empires for.

Boom players go Age of Mythology: Retold, or 0 A.D. if the budget is zero. Rush players go Tempest Rising and will feel at home in an hour. If it was the campaigns and the sense of a real war, Company of Heroes 3 gets you closer than any base builder. If your evenings are short or you play on a couch, Northgard. And Mac owners should check whether Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition solves the problem before shopping for a substitute at all.

Worth saying: Age of Empires itself is in better shape than it has been in a decade, with a native Mac port and a PS5 release inside the last year. The games above are the ones that take a single piece of the formula somewhere the franchise cannot follow. More of the genre gets sorted out in our real-time strategy guides. The full library lives at Strategygame.org.

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