Check out the Gratuitous Space Battles demo.

You have never experinced such sadness as when your cutter-beam filled cruisers open fire upon an enemy craft, and succeed in tearing a hole in your flagship dreadnaught.

Or you accidentally wipe out your own colony because enemy ships got past your lines and your torpedoes missed and ploughed into the planet.

Yes, you can hit the wrong target. The severity varies depending on the situation.

Overly complex for a man in my position (2 children - one of them an infant)

To be more serious, I did have a look at Dominions 2 and found it rather overwhelming. I like complex games, but I want them to guide me into the complexity (CIV IV does this rather well).

A little update here. I bought Etherlords II on impulse, and although its old its still a little gem. The battles are hard and varied. I have played one campaign and just started on the second one. A recommended buy from me.

On my watch list:

Elemental (obviously)

King Arthur (Total war series with fantasy creatures - count me in)

Dawn of Fantasy (interesting - but will it ever finish?)

Disciples III (anyone know anything about release date here?)

Kings Bounty - Armoured Princess (to be released 20.11.2009 - I have gamersgate preorder)

Supreme Commander 2 (gonna be great on my soon to be bought new pc rig)

I took a look at it and I dont think its my cup of tea. Its based on American Football and as a European thats a big turnoff. The reviews are mixed as well.

I wont try and push you in to something you wouldn't like but honestly your reasons for being put off are the wrong reasons.  The American football theme is super lite, the main theme is fantasy characters getting together under the premise of scoring touchdowns and then knocking seven bells out of each other to do it, it's about as close to American Football rules as Rugby is.  One of the players is a goblin with a chainsaw for gods sake   The game is English, made by an English company called Games Workshop.

The game plays like chess with dice rolls and tons of (mostly comedy) theme, it's very tactical but with a huge random element, the best players learn to play while mitigating against the random element.  The extra fun also comes from developing your team, buying cheerleaders, apothecaries, how you skill up your players with experience and buy in new players who come with different skills based on race and their player position.

The PC version isn't bug free but what game is?  But they are updating and fixing it and we have a new patch iminent very soon, I know some guys beta testing it and it adds a new race to play.

My views on a few strategy games I can remember playing moderately recently (with the main focus on the game's single player since I have a strong preference for single player campaigns over multiplayer skirmishes)

Battle for Wesnoth - I'd probly give it an 8 (9 if you factor in it's free price) - good gameplay, acceptable graphics (it's free afterall), overall good fun.

Galactic civilizations (+ expansions) - probably an 8 from me. A good game with loads of content with the expansions, but I lost interest in it after a while - I'm more of a campaign sort of person than a sandbox player, and GalCiv's campaign wasn't very strong. I'd definitely recommend it if you're a fan of turn based games though - I've found turn based games to be a bit more hit and miss myself which was probably part of the reason it didn't grab me that much.

Sins of a solar empire - 8.5 - I didn't like it at first, then liked it a lot, and then got bored with it. The lack of any campaign/story hurt it here, although I did play a bit trying to grab some achievements, and when I played it was good fun.

Demigod - 8 - Good fun, able to play reasonably quick games, but again the lack of a real story hurt it and so while I enjoyed playing it quite a lot I didn't play it that much.

Supreme commander - 9 - This game has soaked up loads of hours for me, and overall has been great fun. My main criticism with it is the lack of variety - all 3 factions are incredibly similar in the original supcom, and while the expansion forged alliance addresses this quite a bit it suffers from a campaign effectively 1/3 of the length (that is, the same campaign for each faction with tiny differences).

Red alert 3 - 8 - Nothing spectacular or terrible. Entertaining cut-scenes and a good variety of units+factional differences. My biggest criticism is that you play the campaign with an AI co-op, and can play co-op online, but there's no support for co-op over a network (even though you can play normal skirmishes).

Universe at war - 8 - A weak start but it gets better quickly and has some great units in it (namely the walkers) along with highly varied factions. Can get it very cheap at the moment making it great value. It's not amazing, but it's definitely worthy of attention.

Dawn of war - 8.5 - Good but not great. The campaign started to get repetitive since the missions repeated all the time, but overall it was a good length campaign with some replayability (albeit not much) and some nice RPG elements. I didn't enjoy the skirmish side of the game though, which is completely different in nature to the campaign. Overall I preferred the original DoW (+ Dark Crusade expansion) more, but it offers a nice alternative to your typical RTS.

Out of these universe at war and supreme commander exceeded my expectations the most.

check out this game called FreeOrion. Its on sourceforge.net, and is an open-source (w00t! FREE STUFF!!!) TBS in the style of MoO2.

So far there isn't much to it, as they are on 0.3.1.3 stable, but for v0.4 they plan on integrating a fully 3D TBS combat scheme, where you make your moves and watch as it unfolds.

The tech tree is HUGE so far, but some subjects do nothing (at present, I don't know if it'll change). About 120 some odd MBs to D/L. An SDK of around 200-220 MB is also available.

Another open-source strategy game- Warzone 2100, also on sourceforge. A ground-based RTS, the graphics kinda suck, but the gameplay is excellent. The only RTS I know of to integrate a unit designer. Choose from different hulls, propulsion systems, and weapons/support turrets to create a unit. Very interesting, and the tech tree is pretty big. Installer is between 80&100 MB D/L, but also downloads a 200 some odd MB "videos" pack.

While not necessarily RTS/TBS games, some that you should check out- Nexuiz, an open-source FPS (SourceForge FTW!). Very simple, and surprisingly addictive. The SP campaigns seem to be a plug to get you online, but you can also set up a simple match between you and some AIs. The different "mutators" change aspects of the gameplay in interesting ways. Very fun game. The bad part is D/L size, a whopping 651 MB! Good thing it is just an "unzip and play" game.

Also, Vega Strike, an open source space sim/game engine. The game is very interesting and has a lot of dynamic elements. I found it very fun, and am going to have to get back to it again. Also on sourceforge. Bad part- 400 some odd MBs of download.

There is also "Prometheus", which is currently on the v4.0 "UDK" version. Which means no UT something or other game needed, just D/L the 371 MB? size installer, install, and play. Essentially you work with past/future selves to accomplish objectives. I found it very interesting in concept. Especially the explanataion of it, as its supposed to be "different quantum states", not time travel, which also means you can "kill" yourself and nothing bad happens.

Be careful with used copies, not sure if the serial code is attached to the online account...

Blood Bowl has a hell of a lot more in common with Speed Ball than American Football although it's turn based, the real time game I haven't even tried but is meant to be a bit rubish.  You don't need to know anything about American Football except that a touchdown is when one of your guys holding the ball crosses the opposition line, that's it.

Blood Bowl is excellent. The AI is not that bad now, but I usually play it in multiplayer anyways.

Beyond Good and Evil, but thats PS2... so is War of the Monsters but they were both great games. One for story the other for how replayable it was.
So those were daft recommendations nevermind

The information here is interesting though. But the graphics on Wesnoth are putting me off (Im part of the younger generation cant be helped)

And does Universe at War actually turn into a decent game? Cause I played through a bit of it and was put off by no skirmish until you unlocked them. Got a few minutes into the 3rd mission and gave up :/

Huh? I distinctly recall playing UaW skirmishes before even touching the main campaign... anyways, my main problem with the game wasn't that, or the fact that it used the attrocious GFWL, or even the corniness of the whole setting and specially the campaign's plot but rather, quite simply, that the camera sucked. Your choices are essentially "close", "up-close" and "uncomfortably close" and the minimap hasn't learned anything from SupComm or Sins so it doesn't show you any info about units other than its team's color, so you end up playing blind most of the time.

I do admit the individual races were pretty interesting, each with their own little twist, and the graphics were pretty good as well, but the camera simply made it unplayable for me. If they had only copied SupComm's camera instead of trying to mimic that of Warcraft 3 and failing, it'd have been a great game... ohh well, it was only $5 on Steam, so no big loss  either way.

As for recommendations, how about East India Company? I think there's even a demo around. Turn-based strategy game with real-time (naval!) battles, it's a slooooooooooow game, even at the max speed, but it's pretty fun, specially once you get the hang of naval tactics. Plus the game is just *so* *freakin'* *gorgeous*, even if its slow you'll have fun watching it.

Found it on the site of the game, actually.

http://www.bloodbowl-game.com/index.php?rub=medias-rulebook