No one gave me a crystal ball, but I do have a couple of RTS titles worth of experience. Perhaps enough to answer the question du jour: What’s the future of RTS?  

Well, I saw my good friend RTS the other day. He was hunched in front of his monitor lassoing troops, building hundreds of tanks, and looking downright bored. You know what I said?

You need to get out more.

If he does, RTS has a bright, bronzed skin, stud-muffin kind of future. If he doesn’t, he’ll end up looking like the pasty-faced folks I saw at E3. Here’s why.

RTS game developers are spending way too much time looking at themselves in the mirror.  To make their games better, they study RTS titles past, present -- and when they can get their hands on them -- future. That’s fine, but it’s not the key to that stud-muffin destiny. Innovation is.

Now any developers reading this please note that the following things are not, I repeat (as the Hollywood military types say) NOT, innovation: Better graphics, thousands of units, improved interface, more detail, lame-assed –“Well my brother said he could write a little”—stories, and three hours of poorly acted full motion video.

Innovation, and its first cousin, inspiration, can be found anywhere -- books, movies, Sarah Michelle Gellar -- but perhaps the easiest inspiration can be found in other gaming genres. The key to real-times strategy's future is the intelligent cross-pollination of genres. Not only does cross-pollination breed good games, but strong sales. It's not surprising: produce a RTS with strong role-playing elements and you not only bag the strategy crowd, but role-players as well. No news there, but it seems a difficult point for developers to grasp.

Some folks, like Sweden's Massive Entertainment, are getting the message. Their "Ground Control" is THE FIRST RTS science fiction game to employ honest by-God military tactics. (Gamer's note: baiting an AI opponent or swamping a defense with Zerglings aren't tactics, merely gimmicks.) Massive dug deep into turn-based war gaming archives to pull out several features -- such as differing armor thickness on tank's front and sides, the ability to hide troops in tall grass, and the importance of combined arms -- and inserted them into smack dab into the middle of Ground Control. The result is an engaging game that challenges the brain as well as the click-finger, and attracts RTS folks AND wargamers.