There has been a mini renaissance of RTS games on Steam as of late. The first computer game I ever played was a Math Blaster type game. It allowed you to play a game in between solving math problems. At some point in the 90's I discovered Command & Conquer. The classic RTS game. Every gamer has fond memories of it. And there was about a gazillion iterations of the same base building/resource gathering concept.

As much as I loved C&C I was absolutely floored when I discovered Total Annihilation. Chris Taylor somehow broke out of what quickly became the standard model of so many Red Alert/Warcraft clones.

• Destroyed units stayed on the battlefield. That alone was huge. Games didn't do that at the time. 

• Redundant unit selections amazing. Like massive redundancy. The vast selection of units meant that you could always see something new. 

• This sounds archaic now but there used to be 'unit caps'. The game would stop you from having too many characters. In the game you paid for. TA did away with that too.

• Taylor also put in a unit creation tool. Users could make and trade units they created. And users created thousands upon thousands of units. There were entire websites where content creators posted units for download. He probably created a generation of coders and game designers. 

Sadly Cavdog Games went bust and the larger RTS genre seemed to ignore the innovations the likes of Taylor was making.

These things might not seem like a big deal- but they are. Starcraft still plays up the same tropes from non TA games. I cannot help but think that the reason we have seen so few new RTS games is because these game developers did not try innovating like Taylor did.

TA is woefully dated in terms of it's graphics. But it has now been mostly resurrected as Zero-K on Steam. Check it out.