Computational Fluid Dynamics is thought to provide in the near future an essential contribution to the development of vertical-axis wind turbines, helping this technology to rise towards a more mature industrial diffusion. The unsteady flow past rotating blades is, however, one of the most challenging applications for a numerical simulation and some critical issues have not been settled yet. In this work, an extended analysis is presented which has been carried out with the final aim of identifying the most effective simulation settings to ensure a reliable fully-unsteady, two-dimensional simulation of an H-type Darrieus turbine. Moving from an extended literature survey, the main analysis parameters have been selected and their influence has been analyzed together with the mutual influences between them; the benefits and drawbacks of the proposed approach are also discussed. The selected settings were applied to simulate the geometry of a real rotor which was tested in the wind tunnel, obtaining notable agreement between numerical estimations and experimental data. Moreover, the proposed approach was further validated by means of two other sets of simulations, based on literature study-cases. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.