The best strategy games like Dragon Force are Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen, Shining Force II and Unicorn Overlord. Below are 9, each with the reason it is here — and, at the end, what filtering to strategy costs you.
Filtering to strategy means you want to be making decisions rather than executing them. It is the right filter when what you liked was the planning.
What you get: Losing that teaches you something. A good strategy game makes the reason you lost legible, so the next attempt is different rather than just longer.
What made Dragon Force worth playing in the first place is covered on the full list. This page is the strategy part of that answer, and only the strategy part.
Same era, same idea — armies on a map, battles that resolve semi-automatically.
Sega's other great strategy RPG, and the character roster is just as large.
The clearest modern descendant, and openly built on Ogre Battle and Dragon Force.
For the recruit-and-build-a-roster half.
If the two-hundred-soldier battles were the draw.
An indie strategy RPG built specifically to be Ogre Battle again.
Commanders with squads under them, remastered and easy to get.
Kingdom map, knight recruitment, squad battles — very close in structure.
Saturn-era tactics with the same bite.
Pace and immediacy. Strategy games are slow by design, and the good ones expect you to sit with a screen for a while before anything happens.
The full list is on games like Dragon Force — 9 picks, no genre filter.
Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. Same era, same idea — armies on a map, battles that resolve semi-automatically.
No. Dragon Force released on the Sega Saturn, but a recommendation is only useful if you can play it, so the picks above span platforms and eras. What they share is the genre and the reason.
Scale. Tactics is one battle, unit by unit. Strategy is the campaign around it — economy, territory, and which battles to fight at all.
Turn-based ones, yes; the genre started on consoles. Real-time strategy is genuinely worse without a mouse, with a handful of exceptions built for the pad.
By hand. Each pick was written for the full Dragon Force list first, on what the game actually does, and this page is the part of that list that is strategy — never a genre tag lookup, which is how "best racing games like Super Mario 64" used to be a page on this site.
Or read the strategy guide for where to start in the genre generally.