Actually, it kind of reminds me of Perimeter, that was a fun, albeit weird as hell, game that I never did finish.

Personally, I've always preferred my Strategy Games a bit more of the Grand Scale, generally games made by Paradox Interactive.  My current favorites being Victoria II and Crusader Kings II, Really looking forward to EUIV, sad MM died, though I had a personal connection to that game...

Still, looks awesome, definitely already has a good soundtrack.

The computer in WC3 cheats, which made the game unfun for me.

I never had both a good enough PC and a good enough connection to play most any RTS with others. The only exception is a title on the PS3 which is effectively RTS dumbed down as much as necessary to be playable without a keyboard. Still a fun game, but nothing compared to say Red Alert.

As a result, all the RTS's I've played, I only played against the computer. Which should lose every time because it is tactically stupid (WC3 is no exception). But my level 8 hero + army always got squished by their level 5 hero, and there was always a second army to wipe out my base when my army died.

Compare with Starcraft, where I cannot lose to a single AI, rarely lose to a team of 2, and can sometimes come away with a victory against a team of 3, and I just stopped playing WC3 altogether.

I also thought the whole food system in WC3 sucked. No big armies, and even a scouting party costs you half your income.

No matter the difficulty, I could never win a game.
In the campaign it works as it should, but in a free for all it goes crazy. I've even watched replays to see if I did something wrong, but no.

You make a great point about the community stuff though, it was pretty amazing.

Haven't played SC2, but I've watched a few games and clearly it is an awesome game. I can't wait to give it a try.

The main thing was the AI always knew exactly where you were and exactly what you had, therefore knowing exactly what it would take to finish you. There were perhaps some balance issues as well that contributed to the problem, as I favoured the undead (recently have heard pro's talking about the undead being hard to play with compared to the other species).
In general, with RTS, I find the AI will always know exactly where you are, but not know your unit composition and numbers, and run its own strategy. But in WC3 the AI is hard countering you as you build your forces, ensuring a spectacularly difficult game.
The only way to counter it at all is by turning the fog off, but then you can hard counter their hard counter and the only challenge is keeping up with the AI's macro.

Most strategy games rely on some AI Cheats to keep the balance, even at normal difficulty level.   Even Paradox games rely on cheats, mostly with Attrition.  The only Paradox Game without any such cheats was MM, which, well....

The only game I can think of off the top of my head that I know didn't use any AI Cheats until the really hard difficulty levels was Galactic Civilizations II, which easily had the best AI of any strategy game ever.  Seriously, the AI was smart enough to evaluate different victory conditions according to their personalities, and was capable of actively recognizing when it was aiding another civilization's victory over its own, and working against itself to keep the other power from achieving their victory first.

Back to games I liked; Rise of Legends.  That was an awesome game, had a balance very similar to Starcraft, and it was really fun.  The AI also was fairly good even without cheats, its biggest strength being that it was really good at trading resources and coordinating with other AIs.  Seriously, it got to the point where me and a friend could total a single AI on Very Hard, but get a challenge from two AIs both on Normal, and Three AIs all on Normal totalled us.

Also fun; Earth 2150.  Had the best Single Player Campaign I ever played because it gave you a Home Base, and a full map of the World with multiple possible missions to take, leading to an actual question of Logistics, albeit a simplified one.  It also had the only truly dynamic campaign I have seen.  You could actually lose plenty of battles and still win the campaign since the overarching goal for every faction was the exact same: HOLY CRAP EARTH IS DYING SO GET YOUR ASS TO MARS!

And you know, I never actually played Supreme Commander.  Back when it came out my computer was too crap to run it.  Now that this situation has been resolved, I should get on that...

Gal Civ II's AI is pretty impressive, I agree. Apparently it will even simulate anger somewhat. There is a AAR of a game of Gal Civ II where a warlike species was avoiding killing the player the whole game, because he wanted to prepare to destroy his allies and claim a conquest victory. If he had killed the player he and his allies would get a diplomatic victory, something the AI did not want. The player kept attacking the aggressive AI, and it couldn't help but retaliate with some of it's forces. Pretty amazing.

I have Rise Of Legends. It's pretty good. I liked watching a very hard AI take over the map against a assortment of ffaing easier AIs.

Ill have to look up Earth2150, that sounds interesting.

I understand that RTS AI's often cheat, and I don't really mind, but I had just never noticed WC3's AI cheating as much as Vastet was talking about.

I played WC3 a couple of times, but not very much.  I will say I don't remember being very good at it, and I've accomplished damn near a World Conquest in EU3-MM, so I would say I'm pretty good at strategy games.  Eh, like I said, I never played it very much, maybe it just has a really steep learning curve, but I really can't picture any game with 'Warcraft' in the title having a learning curve like that.

If you want a game similar to Warcraft, but different, Dawn of War was awesome and I think the AI cheating was reasonable.  It even had Orks!  Only played the first one, Chaos Marines all the way.

I did play the crap out of Armada and Armada 2, those games were awesome.  They're the only Star Trek games I can think of that had a decent representation of The Borg.  Like how Empire at War was the only Star Wars game that properly represented the Imperials.  I loved getting The Executor in that game, filled the entire screen pretty much.

Also nothing  says awesome like being able to build the Death Star, and then actually use it to blow up planets!

And I've read that AAR too. That's what I was thinking of when I described the AI being able to work against itself.

Earth 2150 is a pretty old game, so it's not the prettiest anymore, although it had the best unit system ever; You just researched Components, and could then essentially arm your units however you wanted, similar to GalCiv2, or actually, closer to Sword of the Stars because your Chassis remained the same.  Still, each faction had a unique play style and unit type.  I do remember one of the cool things was that your buildings needed Power to work, and each Faction had their own way of getting Power, and the faction I played the most used Solar Power, which didn't always work out too well because the game had a Day-Night Cycle...

As for the state of the industry, I think Tactical Games have been a little under represented, however Strategy Games have been in a bit of a Golden Age.  I mean just in the past like 2 years we got a new Civilization, new Total War, Crusader Kings 2 and Victoria 2 A House Divided, EU4 is coming out next year.  There's plenty to play.  For RPGs I kind of agree, the only big thing to come out was Skyrim, which was awesome, don't get me wrong, but yeah.

Eh, the Industry will bounce back, it always does.  Though I too am looking forward to a Kickstarted World.