Soul-less soulstorm
Soulstorm is definitively all about this. It's basically a collection of Skirmish maps, with a vague story to connect it all together. The game also offers a sense of progress as you battle your way through four separate worlds, for the purpose of dominating the entire solar system.
You can choose freely which countries you want to conquer, and in which order. Figuring out the order is a turn based mini game in itself, and as you progress you can give each country a permanent defense bonus. This is useful as enemies will try to take back countries you have conquered , and if the defense bonus is higher than the attack bonus of the enemy you can let the battle be resolved automatically and win without having to replay the scenario. If the defense bonus is too low you need to defend the area by replaying it. Which is in fact a bit slow and tedious, so managing the defenses well is a good way to make sure you progress fast.
Every time you conquer a country, you get some bonuses, like additional shields or weaponry for your heroes, or other permanent bonuses. They can help you win in the later stages. So, conquering the countries in the right sequence is important.
Each race has their own strongholds, and this is the only places where you can find something a bit different. Unlike the rest of the maps, they seem better planned, and has some kind of story elements to them as well as many secondary objectives.
You are not going to play this for the story though, you see a short in-game cut scene prior to attacking a stronghold, and after you complete the job. Except for the Orc stronghold which shows some sense of humor, these are kind of dull. You never feel close to any of the characters, they seems artificial and soul-less.
I found the difficulty level to be quite low. Its mostly about patience, not really a challenge. You can allow the computer to cheat though, to give it better than normal stats, but I did not do that even though I found the regular lever was too easy. Its not fun to play against someone that cheats, even if it is the computer. Its like playing a chess game with some of your pieces missing. This is where the game fails a bit in comparison to regular skirmish battles. In Skirmish battles you can usually tune the difficulty level much better to suit you, by adding more enemies...
All in all, a good way to waste time, but nothing revolutionary here. There are some new races and units to try out, but honestly, I do not really care much about having a million different races. Yet, this seems to be the most important update to this game. The rest is pretty much the same.