Rise of Nations (originally released back in 2003) had/has some interesting ideas to reduce some of the busywork:

• Worker units will automatically try to gather/build nearby after a short (configurable) delay if they're not doing anything.
• Cities (the main worker-producing structure) has a rally point option that's essentially "all nearby empty resource gathering", so you can queue a dozen workers and they'll distribute themselves as they're created.
• Production buildings can be set to loop over their current queue, letting you build continually without intervention as long as you maintain enough resources each time the queue "restocks".
• Units that engage in combat without being given an explicit target will try (with modest success) to aim for nearby units which they counter.

For the most part, none of the implemented options are strictly better than micromanaging them yourself:

• You will always spend less time idling workers if you micromanage them yourself.
• The auto-rally-point doesn't always prioritize the resources that you would if you did it yourself.
• Queueing additional units is slightly less resource-efficient than only building one thing at a time.
• Total DPS is higher if you manually micro effectively.

But the options are there when you need them, which I think is a a nice design. It doesn't completely remove best-in-class players being rewarded for their speed as a player, but does raise the "speed floor", allowing slower players to get more bang for their buck APM-wise, and compete a bit more on the strategy/tactics side of the game instead.

I love this concept; I had a friend from school viscerally defend SC: BW as superior to SC2 because in his words SC2 removed skill because of not having the unit select cap that BW did. That’s just less, as you put it, busywork, and then the player is more free to consider army compositions and positioning rather than drawing tons of rectangles. Removing more busywork in favor of actual strategy would be amazing.

There’s no micro in Chess, just strategy.

Supreme commander was what you describe. You setup your factory to make a unit or a set of units and repeatedly build them until canceled or not enough resources. You could zoom out to view the whole map. it was very much a strategy game and not really tactics or micro.

You might like: https://www.beyondallreason.info/ (gratis and open-source)

Hell, I should be able to upload an economic playbook with hundreds of rules like the one you described, and load it on game start. Then all I have to do is the actual unit movements.

Yep, take some ideas from single player colony management games.

It's astounding how much you can "automate" when fully using the filters and rules options in vanilla Rimworld. Mods increase that exponentially. Granted, different genre, singleplayer, and pausable while you configure things.

I think the challenge is balancing that with the real time events you have to react to, so it doesn't further compress the meta to an even smaller set of "optimal" options.

Why can't you just set a standing order of "make unit x" or "make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them"? That's strategy. Having to tab back to a building and manually queue a couple of units every several seconds is just creating busywork for players

I agree completely. Related: have you considered turn based strategy games?

Because too much of SC2's design catered to the progamer crowd that liked that kind of stuff. They made some things easier from an APM standpoint but intentionally added more things to make the have not APM intense.

They really bet wrong on how popular that approach would be.

That is not true, at least in Age of Empires 2 which is the RTS I'm most familiar. Have a look at the limited viper series to see a good player destroy using only 60 APM. If you make good decisions, you don't need to click as much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7moDQK1Yng&list=PLrFe08sgKX493Gax5DFNkpEbgICGDc0YJ

Why can’t you just set a standing order of “make unit x” or “make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them”?

Because while this will make casuals that will play the game for 3 hours and drop it happy, the typical RTS fans will not enjoy this. There is a trade off between queuing a lot of units and having more resources available for other techs. Having units auto produce without any disadvantage is just kind of boring. Then you are just watching the game, not really playing it.

Maybe you should try turn based strategy, if you don't like real time strategy. In the later, like the name implies, time is the most important resource. You don't need a lot of clicks, but you need to use it wisely.

FYI, there are a handful of games that put unique spins on the genre out there. Most of the ones I can think of off the top of my head put you in control of a "cursor character" that's like a commander. It puts a speed limit on APM, which I think gets the genre back to focusing on strategy. There's also Northgard, which is like a cross between an RTS and a 4X game, and pieces of the map are tile-like, so rather than this unit moving to these coordinates, you're commanding a unit to move from this tile to the one next to it. Then there's the Total War series, where the battles are slow paced, and the macro level resources are handled in turn-based strategy.

You may enjoy Zero-K more than most other RTS, at least. It's in the Total Annihilation style like Supreme Commander or Beyond All Reason. One of the ways it sets itself apart is with a diverse array of commands you can issue to your units so they can micro themselves. I haven't played much of it, so I can't give a ton of examples, but it has commands to do stuff attack while maintaining distance, compared to how StarCraft 2 forced you to learn to stutter step your Marines, manually alternating between moving and shooting.

It's also free and open source, based on the Spring engine, and available on Steam. It felt like it played well and was filled out well in terms of mechanics and units when I gave it a try a year or so ago, but I just haven't been playing any RTS lately.

moba feels like superfast mmorpg. the only reason i don't like it.

Shooters are much easier to understand: aim and shoot. You don’t need to follow YouTube guides to understand that.

They demand so much time and patience. Whats the best weapon load out, where to move to be safe from fire, how to avoid enemy snipers, trying to figure out the excessive complexity of what WSAD does.

RTS games are much easier to understand. You drag a box around your units, and click the enemy and watch them blow up. You don't need to follow youtube guides to understand that.

God is that ever true. A remake that's true to the spirit of the original could have all my money

I liked tiberium wars.

One of my favorite games actually.

Try the Total War games, especially the older (non-Warhammer) ones. Units take time to carry out actions, there is no point and not really a way to do insane actions per minute counts, as if a unit is engaged in melee, it can't really disengage without losses. There is also a great scale to the whole thing. I loved Shogun 2 for example.

I also like Eugen games like Wargame, Steel Division or Warno if a modern shooty type thing is more your game. Maybe try Regiments, that one is also good and maybe a bit less complex than Eugen titles.

Neither of these has base building, both are more of a "this is how many soldiers get for this battle, use them wisely" type game.

Tom Clancy’s End War?

Endwar! I remember yelling into the mic to attack because it never understood me lol

I think that is a separate genre of games now, I've seen a few different games like that.

Why would you punish high apm? Thats punishing people for being better.

If you free up actions, good players will use the free space for other options.

If it only taked 50% skill to defend an expandion, people will double expand or expand and attack at the same time.