This is the same mindset that gave birth to Command and Conquer 3, which is one of the best RTS games ever made, so there's a lot of potential here. Conversely if you want to go back to the past and see where RTS games began, fire up Dosbox and play Dune 2. It's clunky, slow, and and chunky as hell but the gameplay holds up generations later.
Let me oldfag even harder by saying C&C3 is neither great as an RTS, and is downright terrible as C&C game. It was the second step in murdering the series dead by being a 100% esports/MPfag game first and foremost. See, the '00s was not a kind period for RTS, chief among them cnc. Primary goal for everyone under the sun was becoming the next SC, and in the first half of the decade, this effort resulted in some manner of success. SC2 was not even close to being on the horizon, and the Dota ball hasn't started rolling yet, so games like C&C Generals got free real estate to shine on the scene, which almost solely comprised of people bored with Brood War looking for a new game. Read, it wasn't the old C&C audience growing or settling into MP, it was a migrating SC audience jumping game from game for MP. This audience brought with them their MPfaggotry to every game they touched, and as an incredibly vocal and active audience, drowned out the native audiences opinions almost completely, thus leading to SP being an afterthought, as "nobody plays RTS for the SP", that old mpfag chestnut, and developers pandering solely to them because of that alluring SC esports money, which noone got to. This mentality defined, and ruined RTS in the '00s for good.
Now, one of the games they settled on back then was Generals, the first step in murdering C&C, expanding on that in a bit. Generals, right? One of the classics, it's in the The First Decade! Absolutely not. The people that played TibSun, RA2 and older C&C games
, fucking hated that piece of shit. Frankly, it didn't play like C&C, a lot of hallmarks of the C&C design were missing, the universal sidebar and unpack button, replaced with single construction units and a SC esque upgrade and unit ability system, lacklustre campaign that was missing the series hallmark FMVs, and unit behaviour that felt completely different from the grid based movement in all the prior games. Emperor is sometimes brought up against Generals as to how a 3D C&C game would play and feel.
But then where did the love for this game come from? Well, to quote SC esports fag and ass cancer victim TotalBiscuit, "I didn't play much RA2 and I didn't like it, but I played so much Generals and it was great!" The afformentioned migrating SCfag latched onto their 'first' C&C game and proclaimed it the greatest. In reality, it was a SCified bastard child in the franchise aimed directly at capturing them, but they wouldn't know or care about that since they never really played and thus knew what real C&C played like. And since discourse was defined by SC/MPtards for RTS in the '00s, Generals became regarded as one the 'core classics', despite being a complete no show with the old C&C audience. From Tiberian Dawn to Emperor fricking Battle of Dune, top down to isometric, 2d to 3d you'll find C&C played in one very recognisable and consistent way. Generals was completely at odds with that, but since it got propped up at the time on the scene, it became the baseline for future C&C games, and thus the series was coopted by the new MPfag crowd near entirely.
Moving onto 2007, the MP success of Generals convinced the developers that they were doing good work, and thus C&C3 was made as a full esports game, ready take everything over. Patches solely existed for the sake of MP balance, no matter how much the campaign missions got fucked over by balance changes. For the gameplay, they used Generals as a base and built on top of it. Some of the superficial mechanical quirks of old C&C were replicated, but at its core, 3 moved and felt like Generals 2.0. Narratively and art wise it was a soft reboot, gone was the C&C2 grungy 90s scifi feel, replaced with late 2000s clean SciFi channel shit and comic book-y art and a return to C&C95 tanks and shit. Despite the initial hype and success, the game failed to gain foothold as an esports mainstay, it had a flavor of the month window with the MPfag crowd, but EA and the devs miscalculated the staying power of their new game over this sensation called Dota. See, a lot has changed since 2003 on the MP scene, in the interim period Dota gobbled up almost the entire post Brood War MP crowd and was snowballing and simultaneously bulldozing the esports RTS. The audience gained with Generals evaporated. The old RA2/C&C2 crowd? They were drawn back with the nostalgia milking of Kane and the brand, but were soon alienated by the game being a Generals-like, a game that audience never like to begin with, and the jarring regression in story and setting compared to Tiberian Sun left people confused. This was the first great blow that killed the series in the end. This was followed by the jack of no trades, failure of all RA3 flopping.
C&C4 is wrongly credited as the game that killed the series, as well as being a game that came into existence for no reason. Reality is, it was last ditch effort shit being thrown at the wall to see if it sticks after Tiberium Wars and RA3 shit the bed.
There's a bit of karmic schadenfruede over the SC audience killing every other RTS in the 2000s by SCificying them, to then later go play Dota instead, and as a result kill SC2 and the what was left of the genre as well.
tl;dr: it fucking sucked bro
As an aside Dune 2 aged like milk. If anyone wants to 'play' it, I'd recommend source ports/remakes with quality of life improvements of later C&C games backported instead. Y'know, like selecting multiple units at the same time.
