Well if any interested individuals want to band together...I'm all for it.

I have toyed with the idea of an MMORTS. One soultion to the "While off line you loose everything" problem, was to have each player's lands seperate from all others lands. Only while they are online can they connect and be connected to other players.

In my design, the world had been shattered in a magical war and only through rifts could you connect to another player's realm. When a player was off line then their realm was surounded by an Etherial Storm, which ment that not rifts could form to them (its a cheat, but it works thematicaly).

Another restirction I placed is that a player can only own a certain number of realms at a time (if they owned more they had to discard them). This ofcoures would not have been a hard and fast rule, and I would have allowed several methods of "breaking" this restriction, but at a cost (either loss of magical power or needing certain items, etc).

It's called EVE-Online, go try it.

Economy is all Player based.

I think the main problem with a MMORTS is that if you leave things behind, you're leaving it up to a possibly sub-par AI to defend you. The tactic of choice would then be to simply attack when your opponent is offline.

To borrow a bit from Talroth, you could have a world where each player is a kind of independent attack unit for their nation. There are a variety of possibly fictions to explain this, from member corporations of a Corpnation, to Houses, and so on.

Players would not own any buildings on the front line, only their units, which would go with them when offline. Similar to MMORPGs, where players attempt to upgrade their avatar, so would MMORTS players attempt to upgrade and build more their units.

Your home base would exist in a non-contested area, and mostly consist of several buildings you've purchased with your earnings. Buildings would range from storage hangers for your vehicular units (and this limits their numbers), barracks for infantry, and eventually various research/upgrade buildings (similar to professions in MMORPGs, you'd be limited to only a couple, creating a market for trade).

When you're ready to hit the battlefield, you take a look at the map, add a few missions to the queue, and pick a deployment spot.

On the battlefield, it's your typical RTS, minus building. Instead, somewhat like DoW, you capture points on the map. This earns you requisition points (or whatever you want to call them) that let you call in additional units.

So your typical session would go like this: Add some missions to your queue, and pick a deployment spot near them. Deploy your initial group (fairly small) and stake out some territory so you can call in more units. Hopefully other players haven't caught you setting up, but if not, they'll know as soon as you start firing. Beat down any opposition, complete a mission, maybe nabbing a few enemy parts along the way that R&D might be able to mimic, retreat and log out.

Yeah the basis of my MMORTS was like that; you're base isn't generally the front line. I did however consider that if your enemy beat you or you beat yuor enemy by so much an amount, you could persue them to their base and have a stage off sort of thing going on.

My main juice on my MMORTS was the ability to do custom research, and use X concetpt technology to design your own stuff; and then personalize everything a la When two worlds war.

For instance, I research ultra light weight explosives. I can take this and roll into my barracks. I take my troops rifles, and modify them with explosive tipped rounds. Now my infantry pack more punch per shot. Unfortunatly, due to the tempremental nature of this ammuntion, their ROF goes down. (balances) Also, because of the light weight explosive, I can upgrade their grenades with it and make it so they carry more or something along that line.