Guess it's my turn to post something here.

I'm really into strategy stuff Command and Conquer, Starcraft, and Warcraft are some of my favorites. Shining Force and Fire Emblem are really high on my list too. Other than these i've seen a few scattered rts/strategy games that don't really seem to be that interesting. I think the coolest one i've found yet was one called Operation Darkness.

Anyone have any suggestions for rts games or games where you use your players almost like chess pieces? I don't exactly know the name for it.

in regards to using your characters like chess pieces you might like turn based strategy games, as that's how it usually plays out, like a game of chess.

The best newer tactical turn-based strategy game is the recently released X-Com: Enemy Unknown, it's gotten great reviews and it's a very fun strategy game, I highly recommend it.

As far as other strategy games go:

An oldie but goldie is my personal favorite RTS series, the Myth series by Bungie. It was a RTS game taht focused purely on combat, no base building, no resource harvesting. It was all about the combat and storyline. Terrain, weather, everything had an affect on combat and it was one of the first games to use physics back in the late 90's. It's a very fun (and bloody) rts game.

If you want something newer I recommend looking at the Total War games, they are the most popular RTS series out there and have a focus on a much much larger scale then most RTS game with you controlling thousands of troops. The newest one of Shogun 2 and it's expansions. They are currnetly working on Rome 2 Total War, but it's still over a year off or so.

Also you can try both the excellent Company o fHeroes (WWII) and Warhammer 40k RTS (same developer), both are very fun games. There's a new Company of Heroes coming out sometime early next year I believe.

Mmm yes a co-worker was telling me about the original Xcom and it sounded just like what i was looking for. I've never heard of company of heroes or Myth (which sounds wonderfully graphic)

I will certainly check out warhammer. I never actually looked at the box because someone told me the entire series was literally like world of warcraft, not just the warcraft rts so that turned me off.

Another of my favorites i played a while back was one named Paraworld. Got a lot of negative reviews, mostly based on the story. Honestly the story wasn't bad and one person described it as taking vikings, dinosaurs, and robots out of your toy box and smashing them together. a bit more sophisticated but it was awesome to take a T-rex (one of the super units) and tear an opposing army apart

He may have been thinking of  Warhammer Online which was an mmo made by Mythic EA. 

The RTS series is called Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. It plays very similar to Company of Heroes (same developer, Relic Entertainment).  There's been two of them, which many expansions for each. The newest one is Dawn of War II Retribution IIRC.

Warhammer is a very popular Tabletop game, there's two versions the classic fantasy warhammer, and then the "40k" version which is a sci-fi futurustic game.

The MMO is based on the classic fantasy version whereas the RTS is based on the sci-fi futuristic warhammer.

Here is a youtube video of Dawn of War II so you can see how it plays and looks:

Also it is funny you mention Warcraft.

A bit of gaming history, Blizzard was actually wanting to make a Warhammer RTS game but  They didn't get the rights to it and ended up making it into Warcraft.

Starcraft, another popular blizzard franchise, is also VERY similar to Warhammer 40k.

You can read about it here:

http://kotaku.com/5929161/how-warcraft-was-almost-a-warhammer-game-and-how-that-saved-wow

If you enjoy games such as Fire Emblem, then you'll probably also like Elven Legacy & Fantasy Wars. In those games you have units that levels up as you go along, and if they die, they die permanently. The games are also turnbased & tactical in nature. Unlike Fire Emblem, your individual soliders don't have personalities of their own, only a handful of important characters have that, but the gameplay is similar enough (they are not clones though, Elven Legacy does in many ways also remind me of Panzer General, but the feel of Elven Legacy is more similar to that of Fire Emblem, with the bright fantasy world) A bundle just launched that contains Elven Legacy, and a few other strategy games:

http://www.indiegala.com/

Elven Legacy is by the way part 2 in the series, Fantasy Wars came before, but you can play Elven Legacy first. in fact, I would recommend it, as Fantasy Wars is punishingly difficult, and there are not a whole lot of story connections. The expansions to Elven Legacy does tie in closer with the story to Fantasy Wars though.

Another game in that bundle that I would recommend is Majesty 2, which has a rather novel take on the whole base-building RTS sub-genre. Instead of directly giving orders to your units, you recruit (classic fantasy) heroes, who have minds of their own, and who you need to give rewards for them to do what you want them to do. I think that the first game in the series does this a lot better, as the heroes have stronger personalities of their own, but Majesty 2 is still a good game, and probably a bit more strategic than the first game. 

And it also contains Knights of Honor, which is my personal favourite Total War-like game, and the two incredibly deep grand strategy games Hearts of Iron 2 (+expansions) & Europa Universalis Rome (+expansion).

The Warcraft games have similarities to Warhammer, but where Warcraft has a somewhat lighthearted tone to it, the Warhammer games are quite dark. Also, they play very differently. Also, Dawn of War 1 & 2 are quite different from each other, so they are both worth getting. I think that the first one is better, but the second one does have its fans as well. DoW 1 is more strategic, and is more about controlling a somewhat large force, while DoW 2 is more small scaled and tactical. 

 Shame that Warhammer Fantasy has not been treated so well by modern games. The last non-MMO game released based on Warhammer Fantasy was Mark of Chaos, which while good, was not that special. The last really good Warhammer Fantasy game was Dark Omen, released in 98. 40k on the other hand has consistently got great games (not counting Fire Warrior, which was a rather lackluster FPS)

Another great game, that on top of all is free is Battle for Wesnoth, which is a solid turnbased strategy game, where unit conservation is key. It also has a lot of user-generated campaigns, so there is a near endless amount of gametime in that one. 

If you enjoy StarCraft you'll most likely like Armies of Exigo. While it might look like a WarCraft clone, its mechanics are more similar to that of StarCraft. For some strange reason, this one was never marketed properly, and though the game looks & feels like a lot of effort & resources went into it, it remains relatively unknown. Strange for EA to just ignore a game like that. 

And finally Jagged Alliance 2, probably the finest TBS (turnbased strategy) to date. You have a band of mercenaries that you need to hire, and also take care of. They will get better at things they do, but can die permanently, so you need to take good care of them. There is also a really good amount of tactical depth to the combat, in terms of how you use terrain, lighting conditions, make noise, what weapons you use with what character and so on. The graphics are a bit unappealing, and it turned me off for a long time, but from a gameplay point of view, the game is top-notch.