When I talk about RTS games these days, all I hear is Starcraft, Rise of Nations, Age of Empires, etc...
All those RTS games have one thing in common: They aren't about strategy, they're about resources.
This is something far too common in RTS games these days, focus on collecting resources faster than your opponent. There is little strategy involved, just which unit is the counter to which, and having bigger numbers than your opponent.
There is, however, one RTS that predates all of those, and fixes those flaws. Total Annihilation. This game came out about a year before Starcraft, and featured beautiful graphics, great gameplay, and plenty of strategy.
Total Annihilation, designed by brilliant gamemaker Chris Taylor, was very ahead of its time, practically reinventing the genre. It was not about how fast you got your resources, but how well you used them; There were only 2 resources, Metal and Energy, but they could be gotten in a number of ways.
Metal, for instance, is gotten normally by building a Metal extractor on a Metal deposits, which, depending on the map, can be plentiful or rare, and each deposit provides different amounts of metal. However, when there isn't enough metal deposits, you can build a metal maker to convert much more plentiful energy to metal.
Energy, on the other hand, is gotten in a number of ways. Every unit provides a certain amount, as well as Solar Power Plants and Wind Generators, which, like metal, vary in effectiveness from level to level, and you have to plan accordingly.
Then there are the units, which is where Total Annihilation starts to shine. Out of the box, it has around 100 units and buildings, all perfectly balanced. But the company that made the game, Cavedog, took it a step further, every week releasing a free unit download, as well as making it extremely easy to design your own units and buildings. One popular mod that is still being updated 8 years after the game's release, Absolute Annihilation, features around 500 units, all useful, all balanced.
And you cannot win with just masses of a unit, either, like in some RTS games. Every unitis balanced, it has strengths and weaknesses, and not as simple as in some RTS games, like Age of Empires, where one unit beats another. The Peewee, for instance, one sides basic infantry, has a vey high rate of fire, and in groups can tear most enemies apart very quickly, but they have a short sight and get killed very quickly. At the same time you build Peewees, you can also build an infantry unit called Hammer, which is a slow moving and relatively well defended mobile artillery, but with a short line of sight, not being able to see many things that are shooting at it.
Take these two units together, however, and they compliment each other well. Peewee runs in as a fast scout, allowing the Hammer to fire at units beyond its normal line of sight.
This balance applies to base defenses as well-unlike many RTS games, you cannot turtle(surround your base with defenses so you don't have to focus on it). Many units can fire on turrets beyond their line of sight, making it nessescary to have radar nearby, which, rather than revealing the map all around like many RTS games, simply reveals all enemy units and buildings in its range, in the form of blips. You then take your turrets-some of which have EXTREME range-and have them select targets that the radar reveals, making base defense much more hands on than in other RTS games.
Total Annihilation also removes the idea of your main base being completely defenseless-rather than having a construction site building churning out workers, your main base IS a worker. Rather than a base, it is a commander. It can build faster than any other unit, though is limited to basic structures, and has great health, regenerates, has a laser and a weapon called the D-gun that destroys ANYTHING in one hit. To top that all off, upon death, your commander explodes with a nuclear sized blast, which, depending on where he dies, can be very good or bad. This can be an effective kamikaze attack in multiplayer, though some games have a setting that makes losing him game over.
Then there is the actual battles, which is another area where Total Annihilation shines; Units shake when firing the larger cannons, tanks rock back and forth, ships splash around in the water, shots have splash damage that damages everything around what they hit. Units and buildings don't just die, they explode in spectacular fasion, sending shrapnel into the air and leaving behind piles of debris that other units can actually use as cover from other shots. You can move units around to dodge shots; ALL units can pivot their weapons seperate from their legs and move while firing, making it much more possible to win a battle in which you are outnumbered.
Finally, there is the mod community-Total Annihilation was among the first games to be easily moddable, and some mods are still being updated to this day, including one particularly impressive mod called TAspring, which completely revamps the graphics, updates and rebalances the units, even adds deformable terrain and multiple camera angles, as well as adding many features that are common in RTS games these days but missing, such as binding unit groups and setting rally points, and even adds a first person mode.
There is much more worth mentioning about this game, but I wish to keep this article somewhat short, so I will end by saying that if you are an RTS fan, this game deserves checking out.