Turn-based combat is back, and Space Engineers finally has someone to shoot at (genre gaming news roundup).

It has been a while since we last ran a proper genre gaming news roundup, largely because every time we sat down to write one, another publisher announced another thing with the word “Warhammer” in it and we had to start again. August 2026 has been a monster of a month: Gamescom happened, several studios remembered that turn-based combat exists, and at least one long-running space sim has finally decided its players might enjoy having someone to shoot at.

So here is the lot, in sections, because the alternative was one unbroken wall of text and our editor (also us) said no.

Ships, empires and other forms of void admin

Let us begin where SFcrowsnest always begins: in space, doing paperwork.

Elite Dangerous has had its August development update, and Frontier has shown off the new Rhino surface vehicle, surface mining, and the next in-game Operation. The genuinely interesting bit is that planetary work is finally acquiring some mechanical substance, rather than being an elaborate excuse to drive across seventeen kilometres of grey nothing to look at a rock you could have looked at from orbit. Progress, of a sort.

Star Citizen pushed Alpha 4.10 live on 26th August, restoring the Siege of Orison event and rebalancing fuel capacity and consumption across the entire ship roster. Development has already moved on towards 4.11. As ever with Star Citizen, the word “released” is being used in a sense that would interest philosophers rather more than it interests lawyers.

Space Engineers 2 has revealed the Renegades, hostile NPCs and space pirates in development for the Almagest system. This matters more than it sounds. Space Engineers has always been a superb, physics-accurate shed-building simulator that happens to be set in orbit, and the addition of people who want to take your shed away transforms it into an actual game. Nothing sharpens one’s engineering standards like the prospect of somebody ramming it.

Snail Games used Gamescom to give For The Stars a substantial gameplay reveal: planetary exploration, persistent multiplayer, alien ecosystems, outpost management and customisable spacecraft. It sits somewhere between No Man’s Sky, a colony builder and a survival MMO, which is either the most ambitious pitch of the year or a bingo card. Wishlist it and find out.

The one we are personally most interested in is Deck & Conn, a turn-based starship-command game about running a nuclear-powered space corvette in a Cold War-flavoured 1989 that never happened. Crew, resources, patrols, boarding actions, tactical combat, and it openly tips its cap to the old Super Star Trek mainframe game, which means somebody on that team has definitely typed a course-and-speed command into a teletype at some point. Reader, we are the target market, and we have never felt so precisely aimed at.

EVE Online has become an AI research laboratory, with CCP working alongside Google DeepMind using an offline copy of New Eden and its historical records. The research concerns agents operating in a persistent world of markets, incomplete information, alliances and betrayal, which is to say the perfect training ground for machine intelligence and possibly the single most alarming sentence published this year. CCP is at pains to stress that this is controlled, offline research rather than AI players being quietly seeded into null-sec. Of course, that is exactly what you would say.

X4: Foundations landed its 9.00 “Empire Update” back in June, and it was too big to leave out: the largest combat rebalance in the game’s history, revised weapons, shields and ships, sharper AI, movable resources, redesigned stations, and RTS-style Priority Orders so your fleet does the thing you asked while you are still alive to see it. Egosoft’s news page has the detail.

And Stellaris: Nomads, also June, throws out settled worlds entirely in favour of Arkships, Waystations, trade networks and contracts: a properly mobile empire. The Season 10 roadmap promises the ideology-flavoured Willpower expansion plus two scenario packs in the fourth quarter. Steam reaction to Nomads has been mixed, so treat this one as a “read the reviews first” rather than a blind buy.

Strategy, or: everything is Warhammer now

Paradox has unveiled Afterworld, a post-apocalyptic grand strategy from the main Paradox Development Studio. You start with a handful of survivors in a procedurally generated North America and build settlements, supply routes, laws and eventually an empire, with technology emerging from what your society actually discovers rather than from a tidy research tree drawn up in advance. It is a lovely idea, and exactly the sort of thing that will eat a fortnight of your life. Wishlist here.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000 had its first public playable build at Gamescom, with Creative Assembly taking registrations for future test opportunities. The pitch is one expandable galactic sandbox rather than another trilogy, which in Total War terms is roughly the difference between a mortgage and a rental agreement.

Meanwhile Total War: Warhammer III – Lords of the End Times arrives on 24th September with Nagash, the Glottkin, Thanquol and Boris Todbringer, plus new heroes, units and campaign mechanics. Undeath, plague, ratmen and an apocalyptic winter wolf. The strategy genre appears to have collectively decided that subtlety was taking up valuable disk space.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War IV has a date: 3rd December. KING Art promises four factions, seventy-plus campaign missions, skirmish, multiplayer and the return of Last Stand, which remains one of the best co-op modes anybody has ever attached to an RTS and then forgotten about for a decade.

Game of Thrones: War for Westeros showed off its RTS gameplay at Gamescom: Great Houses, hero-led armies, shifting alliances, fortifications and large real-time battles, still slated for 2026. The shifting alliances are presumably handled by a system that occasionally invites your allies to a wedding.

And Heroes of Might and Magic III is returning twice at once. Ubisoft has announced a full 3D, 4K remake for 2027 with the original campaigns, both expansions, nine factions, new story material, multiplayer and map-making tools, while the untouched 1999 original and its expansions have simultaneously landed on Steam. A rare case of a publisher hedging against its own remake by selling you the thing the remake is competing with.

Finally, Star Wars Zero Company launched on 27th August: the Clone Wars as turn-based squad tactics rather than yet another third-person lightsabre workout. Base management, a customisable irregular company, and optional permadeath for anyone who felt XCOM was insufficiently upsetting.

RPGs, vampires and things in the vents

CD Projekt has announced that The Witcher 3 is getting a free Remastered upgrade on 29th September, covering visuals, combat, movement, monster AI, the skill tree and, praise be, horse handling. Existing owners have also been handed Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine gratis. A new paid expansion, Songs of the Past, follows in 2027 with a new region called Letten. Roach, one assumes, will still find a way to end up on a roof.

Final Fantasy VII Revelation has a firm date at last: 8th April 2027, with PC preorders open and story expansion promised. Cid and Vincent become playable and the Highwind opens up planetary-scale exploration, so the trilogy concludes by finally letting you leave the corridor.

The Blood of Dawnwalker arrived on 3rd September. Rebel Wolves’ open-world vampire RPG runs on a fourteenth-century setting, a day and night structure, and time-limited decisions: essential reading for anyone whose bookshelf contains both The Witcher and Vampire: The Masquerade, which, statistically, is most of you.

Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons has revealed gameplay, a single-player dark fantasy adventure following Kaatri, whose magical pact allows different combinations of power and consequence, due in 2027. Wishlist. Pacts with unspeakable entities: still the only career path with clearly documented terms and conditions.

Solasta II gets its first major Early Access update on 10th September, adding four-player online co-op, hot joining, dialogue voting, the Warlock class, more character options and thirty world events. Dialogue voting means your party can now democratically decide to insult the duke, which is the most authentic tabletop feature yet implemented.

Shadow of the Road is dated for 12th November: a party-based, turn-based RPG set in an alternative 1868 Japan where steam machinery, samurai and supernatural yōkai are having an extremely complicated political disagreement.

The Expanse: Osiris Reborn was playable at Gamescom and remains firmly one to watch. Owlcat’s crew-focused action RPG opens on Eros, lets you maintain your ship and your companions, and makes background and dialogue choices central. No firm date on the store page yet, but Owlcat rarely does small.

Alien: Isolation 2 now has an official premise and a Steam page: a survey team uncovering a crashed vessel on a colony world, single-player survival horror again, with stealth and resource management to the fore. No release date. Do not buy a motion tracker sound effect for your doorbell; you will regret it.

Onimusha: Way of the Sword launched on 3rd September, sending Miyamoto Musashi into a steadily more demonic Kyoto, with Toshiro Mifune as the character’s face model. Casting the late star of Seven Samurai as your protagonist is either magnificent or slightly ghoulish, and having watched the trailer, we have decided it is magnificent.

And The Sinking City 2 arrived on 18th August, moving Frogwares’ Lovecraftian survival horror to a flooded 1920s Arkham, with exploration, puzzles, scarce resources and shortcuts through a drowned city. Wet, grim, and full of people who really should have moved house.

The indie shelf

Four smaller things worth your attention. Solar Wave hit Early Access on 17th August with space-empire simulation and indirect-control 4X. Space Tales fully released on 19th August, a colourful, story-led science-fiction real-time strategy. Liquidation went into Early Access on 4th August and cheerfully refuses to choose between science fiction and fantasy. And Fleetbreakers, a space-fleet RTS roguelite from developers with Age of Empires, Age of Mythology and Halo Wars on their CVs, enters Early Access on 15th September with a demo available now.

That is the state of genre gaming as autumn arrives: the strategy shelf has been fully annexed by Warhammer, the RPG shelf is knee-deep in vampires, the space sims have discovered planets and consequences, and somewhere in Iceland a machine intelligence is being taught economics by the most treacherous playerbase in the history of the medium. Sleep well.