Welcome to the official strategy guide for Halo Wars 2. If you’re new to real-time strategy (RTS) gaming, or you’ve played RTS games before but your skills are a bit rusty, we suggest you carefully review this Getting Started chapter, as well as the Difficulty Levels section at the beginning of our Campaign Walkthrough. In these places, we give you an overview of basic RTS gameplay, including common terms and strategies.
Veteran and competitive-level RTS players may find some helpful tidbits here as well, particularly if you’re unfamiliar with innovations the Halo Wars franchise has brought to the genre. However, we’d also direct more experienced RTS players to consult our Multiplayer and Data chapters, notably Multiplayer Basics and the Units section of Data.
Once you’ve familiarized yourself with RTS conventions, you’re ready to jump into the Halo Wars 2 Single-player Campaign. The full story features 12 missions, and our Campaign Walkthrough guides you efficiently through each one. We think the overhead maps alone are worth the price of admission, and our step-by-step tactical guidance steers you carefully through every primary, optional, and bonus objective in the game.
Tactically, each Single-player Campaign mission builds from simple to complex and organically directs you toward acquiring the fundamental skills necessary to survive in a Multiplayer environment. But it would be misleading to assume that the Halo Wars 2 Campaign is some sort of “tutorial” experience. Indeed, even in Normal mode, the Campaign missions become quite challenging and often insidious in design—and we mean “insidious” as a high compliment.
After you beat the Campaign, you’re ready to dip your toe into Halo Wars 2 Multiplayer. Check out our thorough Multiplayer chapter, loaded with unit/structure data, insider advice, and detailed maps. You also get an in-depth discussion of Halo Wars 2’s exciting and innovative new Multiplayer game, Blitz.