Interestingly a slo-mo fighting game is one I'd love to play ;)

I actually had a Space Opera styled MMO in mind that was heavily influenced by the idea of a near turn based fighting style to get around issues of lag and server load. Kind of abandoned the entire thing when life and reality kind of set in and I got swept away by actual paying work in other fields. Rather tempted to go back and revisit at least the fight system for it. Would have been focused around guards, attacks, and building energy. It is however terribly off topic for the most part.

A big challenge I can see to this idea might be how lo-fi or hi-fi to make the depiction. Likely you'd get a map of some sort, which could be very abstract and vector-based. Modern commanders are increasingly getting real-time feeds from helmet and gun cameras though, so if you kept that detail you may face all the downsides of rendering a 3d battlefield and none of the hand-on, visceral benefits (multiplied, I'd imagine, across however many drones, squad leaders, gunships etc. that would be on station).

The next factor would be audio, although you might get away with a library of callouts and background chatter.

Or you could go completely lo-fi and make it text-based, even procedurally generating text to match real-time battle situations. If the pace of movement was broken into real-time phases or the overall pace of real-time action was slow enough, I could see this working with text.

It would be a fascinating experience if you could get the trade-off right of getting players to identify with names units ("ok Patton's over here, Stormin' Norman's over there") they might come to personalize and indirectly care about versus limited resources (not everybody can get the air support they're begging for).

I think it would be great if you could employ the standard AI in games like C&C to do your bidding.

Such as "Build a small base over here and collect resources, spend 20% of the income on defense, save the rest" or "defend this passage".

Rather than being spammed with "unit lost, units under attack" it would be "area A is holding / requires reinforcements", "base complete, harvesting in progress" or "not enough funds to construct base"

I love strategy games but I really get annoyed when i am expected to make 500 commands per minute. For me, that isnt what strategy is about. It should be possible to ignore a sturdy battalion of units for 5 minutes and not have them replaced by a pile of bodies.

A big challenge I can see to this idea might be how lo-fi or hi-fi to make the depiction. Likely you'd get a map of some sort, which could be very abstract and vector-based. Modern commanders are increasingly getting real-time feeds from helmet and gun cameras though, so if you kept that detail you may face all the downsides of rendering a 3d battlefield and none of the hand-on, visceral benefits (multiplied, I'd imagine, across however many drones, squad leaders, gunships etc. that would be on station).

The next factor would be audio, although you might get away with a library of callouts and background chatter.

Or you could go completely lo-fi and make it text-based, even procedurally generating text to match real-time battle situations. If the pace of movement was broken into real-time phases or the overall pace of real-time action was slow enough, I could see this working with text.

It would be a fascinating experience if you could get the trade-off right of getting players to identify with names units ("ok Patton's over here, Stormin' Norman's over there") they might come to personalize and indirectly care about versus limited resources (not everybody can get the air support they're begging for).

Yeah. Being able to "see through the eyes" of any of your units would be on the one hand potentially really cool but also completely changes the dynamic. I think it would risk diluting the core concept if not done very carefully. Certainly it'd have to be done in a realistic way not a "God view" typical RTS style.

I think it would be great if you could employ the standard AI in games like C&C to do your bidding.

Such as "Build a small base over here and collect resources, spend 20% of the income on defense, save the rest" or "defend this passage".

Rather than being spammed with "unit lost, units under attack" it would be "area A is holding / requires reinforcements", "base complete, harvesting in progress" or "not enough funds to construct base"

I love strategy games but I really get annoyed when i am expected to make 500 commands per minute. For me, that isnt what strategy is about. It should be possible to ignore a sturdy battalion of units for 5 minutes and not have them replaced by a pile of bodies.

Amen to that! Clicks per minute is the one thing I hate about RTS games and the reason I suck at them competitively. I don't play multiplayer because what I like to do is nurture my base's growth and build up a big army.

I started working on an RTS years back - actually entered a very early version for 4E4 on this site - whose premise was a typical WarCraft II/C&C game but with just such ideas as you describe. Sadly it never got beyond the basic RTS engine - the only idea I implemented that was new was putting units in squadrons (10-12 IIRC) who could be commanded "guard this location" etc. I do keep thinking about it but I only have the code, no resources, and it was written against D3DX whereas now it'd have to use some engine like Ogre.

Reading Tom Clancy books recently made me wonder if there is a genre of war games where you don't really ever see the battlefield, but have to rely on intelligence from your units out in the field to direct strategy. I suppose I'm thinking of a game which is to a typical RTS what Football Manager is to Fifa

i'm not familiar with football manager, so the analogy is lost on me.

but back in the day, about the time of wing commander 1 and 2, there were 2 versions of a tom clancy naval warfare game, very strategic. there was a map of the atlantic, and you'd dispatch utnis to perform ops, and then it would display the results.

Harpoon...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpoon_(video_game)

It was pretty popular. #2 after wing commander 2 with the hard core crowd. The arcade crowd was playing doom 1. IE commander keen in 1st person view.