Strategic RTS. Everyone's viewpoints all bottle down to this simple label I slapped on.
A Real Time Shooter,
that requires strategy in order to succeed.
Or, in other words, we're going to fuck you up really fast and really hard while making you think about what you are doing. Strategy RTS's suck. They really really do.
On the other hand, Strategic Lapse RTS. Which I just made it.
It is basically the same thing, yet between fights you are given a brief time of "lapse" as such where you are free to do what you wish. Or, in other words, you are given time to prepare and execute a battle plan. Now THIS is where things get interesting.
Take, for example, CoD: Black Ops 2 approach to side missions in their campaign. They have put you as a commander of a force that has to hold off waves of attackers, and they allow you to switch from first-person view (to command a unit or units yourself) and birds-eye view (to command your units to do something, with full view of the entire field). Let's take this, and improvise it a little to fit in with our "time-lapse battle strategy" idea.
Say, you have 120 seconds to organize whatever you have on the battlefield before you are put into permanent first-person as your character. This means you could, say, buy c4 and place it at certain choke-points you will lure the enemy in, etc.
Then comes the idea of enviromental change, as some people have suggested. Such things as wind being affected will be downright annoying, but if we scrap the idea of having "environmental change" and replace it with "player-created environmental change" we're getting somewhere. That is to say, the environment only changes if the player wishes to do so. Say, the player wants to open up a wall in order to slip by, he can do this by blowing it up with c4. Or maybe he has set up a trap that blows up a buildings structural grounding, causing it to collapse on enemy's approaching him, maybe enable you to "kick" which causes you to hit debris into enemy's distracting them or dust or whatever, etc.
"The insert underpowered class here class is overpowered". This is heard too much in games, why? Because people do not allow the players themselves to choose their differentiation's rather they create pre-made classes, slap labels on them and pretend they're giving players a "true" choice of how to play. Scrap this, no-one really wants classes. Or rather, no-one wants to be limited by their classes. So choose either having classes being able to use whatever they wish, with slightly different stats, or just have one goddamn class who can be whatever kind of bad-ass he wants to be.
"I'm level 20 and just unlocked an overpowered weapon, GG". This is true too many times, players simply have to attain a certain level to unlock something so stupidly overpowered you just sit there thinking WHY. Instead of rewarding players with an overpowered gun that makes them invincible for sitting there for 20 games going afk, reward players in a way that does not affect gameplay. Say you play as a thief every game, you didn't unlock an overpowered weapon for it. Rather, you get a special attire for your thief class that says "yeah, Imma thieving all over". And then, say, your a fucking bad-ass who tips hats to snipers all day and assassinate them. You get an attire that says "I'm a bad-ass snipers, prepare to cower in corners".
PEOPLE SEE WITH THEIR EYES. Games just cannot understand this concept, players do not see with their brains but rather with their eyes. Rewarding a player for killing 100 people with a title is like saying "we put zero effort into making your time worthwhile". Rewarding them, on the other hand, with some bad-ass attire is like saying "bitch, we know how things roll".
Let's look at an example, League of Legends. Entirely free game. ENTIRELY FREE. it doesn't not have a shop where you buy a sword that utterly destroy everyone. ever. No, the only thing that you must pay money for is skins. And you know what? EVERYONE BUYS THESE SKINS. BECAUSE THEY SEE WITH THEIR EYES. yet basically zero companies do this, instead they slap in an item shop to buy overpowered in-game swords instead. Yeah, they have clothes for sale, but they're not even worth calling clothes. More like pieces of shit slapped with a clothing label.
ohk ohk, that's enough. Not only have I started digressing, I'm getting into a topic that annoys me. Not a good thing when discussing such things. I believe I'll let it be here, and you can see whatever I spewed out of my mouth. Because, really, I have no clue what I just said.
Also, just noticed there were three pages. Only speed-read the first one. So yeah.