For example, you can tell a soldier, "attack this general area" or "attack in this direction", but you can't actually micromanage their movement and other actions.
Then you introduce mechanics/stats like "communication effectiveness", "professionalism", "morale" which increase or decrease the precision, latency, and effectiveness of commands. For example, an elite special forces unit might have perfect command reception, allowing you to micro it. But a grunt would have very low reception and need a nearby commander's aura to boost their reception and allow even the most basic commands through.
The only player input is to move a beacon. The beacon has the same movement speed limit for all players, so the only thing left is to strategize how to move the beacon so the "army" can engage in the best way.
There is a reason why they are a completely different genre of games.
I enjoyed playing Age of Wonders (all titles) because I was getting frustrated with Starcraft: Brood War.
But I also like the real-time aspect. I like the urgency. I just want something in the middle between "You can't move your hand ultra fast so you lose" and "I will spend 10 minutes considering the optimal move".
There is an itch to be scratched by people who want to fight with a balance of quick and strategic decisions. Where "quick" is fluid. For example, when your 1 second decision is a really good 1 second decision, and you realize that with 10 seconds you wont improve it much - then you want to be able to make the decision in 1 second and then not be punished by someone who took 5 seconds to make an equal decision, and spent another 5 making it only slightly better. You also dont want to be punished by people making your quick decision obsolete through brute force of action.
Basically, something that promotes thinking before acting - while also promoting thinking efficiently over thinking exhaustively.
I am not sure yet what design principles best bring this out in a game, but I have been thinking about it a lot.
turn-based is great (big civ5 fan) but it has the opposite problem - it favors the player who takes the most advantage of the turn timer.
Ive thought a lot about possible hybrids, but havent settled on anything really catchy yet. Some ideas are cooldowns instead of turns, or turn timers that are so aggressive that barely anything is accomplished each turn - but you get a lot of turns so it's okay to burn some rather than commit to a mistake
It tends to mean more: splash damage, retreating, turtling, bigger units, expanding, scouting, moving along side lanes. All of these work to get you more for your clicks.
There is a very real sense in which you can shrink your pool of tactics to those with "good UI", allowing you to play more abstractly, similarly to how you'd want expressiveness in a programming language. If you treat your strategic plan as an engineering solution, and then try to reduce moving parts and possible failure points...turns out that is in fact possible.
Retreating, for instance, is a much simpler (in the Rich Hickey sense) endeavor than attacking. It's just less likely to go wrong---fewer things behind you, simple movement rather than dismantling a defense, etc. Doesn't mean you should never attack, just that you should appropriately cost complexity when weighing your strategic options.
Splash damage lets you work on an area level rather than a unit level---another source of abstraction.
Expanding tends to give huge benefits per click compared to other things, and lets you afford bigger units which require less micro.
This doesn't come for free, you do have to play more conservatively and think outside the box ("moving along side lanes" is how you get space for free, which we are quite profligate about sacrificing when we retreat), but it's very possible.
I love turn based games, but there is definitely a different feel with a RTS that feels less ‘boardgamey’.
I know what OP means - ie StarCraft without the micro.
I have played it for almost 50 hours now and I don't feel you have to do things too quickly if you aren't aiming to be in the top 100. If you have already memorized your plan and responses, it becomes pretty slow and stress free.
At some point I toyed with the idea of an Idle strategy game. Battles would play automatically, and as a player your intervention was purely at the strategy level: manage your armies, resources, etc. Think Total War but every battle is auto.
This was a bit boring so I pivoted a little: battles would be mostly automatic, but players had a limited number of actions. For each battle players would set up their troops and these would fight automatically. You'd have a limited number of action points, say 6, that you could spend on things like spells or reinforcements. Also you would win 1 action point for every minute.
I wrote a prototype for this, but I never made it work. In my mind I imagined an epic struggle where two players would fight tooth and nail for several minutes until one just about won the battle. In practice battles were either an endless stalemate or one player quickly steamrolled the other.
There might be a good idea there, but it might require far more work balancing and pacing that I could put into it.
It's only 1 second or so, and lots of actions are off the GCD, but all you would need to do is extend that time and put more things on the GCD and you'd effectively get what you're looking for.
I don't think it'll slow things down as much as you're hoping for, though.
... if you meet the bare minimum.
You won't have large success in StarCraft if you won't even notice the banelings running toward your marines, not even talking about splitting them.
- you made marines
- they are accessible to a-moving banelings without having to go around terrain and/or through tank fire, marauders, mines
It's quite possible to do low-apm styles in SC2, but you have to actually do them, rather than trying to be budget Maru.
Most engagements are just: form a concave, pre-split/siege, cast a couple spells, a-move.
Also check out Beyond All Reason, it's a modern Total Annihilation where you're essentially trying to automate economy and production and the game provides a lot of tools to do that.
It's an RTS but with very calm/slow pacing and is very forgiving if you don't want to zone into it like other fast paced rts games.
I would have preferred it to be either "enter tile and attack what's there" vs "retreat".
2) Anachron is a RTS with time travel, and issuing commands in the past depletes a resource, so it does something similar but for a very different purpose.
Give the kids a fighting chance, ya know?
Look, I'm an old man now. I can't compete on reaction speed against 13-year-olds micro-managing each unit to perfection. But I can macro. I can plan. I can strategize. I can do that better than those damn kids.
I want everyone to have a pool of 5 orders, refilling itself by 1 order per <time period> (1 second? 3 seconds?). Orders can be to as many or as few units as you want. And if you give too many orders, they queue up until you have more to give.