Sacrifice

Sacrifice is the cult-classic 2000 real-time strategy game that built its identity by stripping the genre back to combat. There's no resource gathering in the traditional sense — no harvesting trees, mining ore, or building chains of resource extractors. The only two resources you manage are mana, drawn from the environment, and souls, captured from defeated enemies and used to summon your own units. Need more troops? Take souls off the battlefield as you push.

The game frames itself around a holy war between five gods, each offering a different selection of spells and a different mythology. Choosing which god to support shapes both your aesthetic and your tactical kit — fire-themed deities give different combat options than nature-themed ones, and the campaign branches into separate storylines depending on whose side you choose. The player character is a vagrant wizard named Eldred drawn into a prophecy where a traitor among the gods threatens to destroy them all, and only a wanderer can identify and stop them.

The banish-by-sacrifice mechanic is the headline trick. To win a map, you don't just defeat your opponent's units — you sacrifice one of your own allies at the opposing wizard's altar, which is what permanently banishes them. The interplay between summoning, spellcasting, terrain control and altar timing made Sacrifice unlike anything else of its era, and the game holds a devoted reputation among RTS players who encountered it then.