Back then, most people thought : Well, yet another real time strategy game. And that's what most people believe today when they see this game. But even though the basics look so much like any other RTS game, the actual gameplay experience is totally different, once the onboarding phase is over.

Why? Because of controlled autonomy.

What the hell is that? Let me explain. First you start building your base with buildings and units, just like you would in Warcraft or some other game. In the beginning you control every unit manually, but your base keeps growing and so are the units. In Warcraft-like games, you either create groups and treat groups as units, or you become really good at really quickly using hotkeys to control everyone at the same time. For larger campaigns, this is almost impossible, because you need to retain a complete mental model of the whole map and the state of all activites anywhere on the map, with constant updates.

This game lets you walk a different path: Every unit can be given patrol-routes. So your harvester units patrol to the resource and bring back the harvest. While your military units scouts the perimeter or protects the harvest routes. Each unit can have its completely own routes, set up by the player. And in addition you can define the behavior when an enemy appears. You can manipulate how far the unit will stray from the route to engage enemies, you can tell how aggressive it should be toward enemy sightings, and you can tell how early your unit will retreat to get some medical/repair help.

In the beginning of playing this game, it feels like this is a total unnecessary extra, nice to have but you can manage RTS perfectly without as you had before in other games. But once you start to get overwhelmed by too many actions around the map, you quickly learn how valuable this is. Instead of micromanaging, you become a leader that gives complex instructions once, and revises only when necessary.

In my opinion it is very sad that many RTS games have moved toward a hero-minion-approach, where only the hero is micro-managed while very dumb AIs take over the "minions" in cannonfodder behavior. This is not real time strategy anymore. If there was a game with a similar system for creating smart unit behavior (maybe also for buildings), ideally combined with the very awesome formation system of Age of Empires 1, real time strategy as a genre could become great again.

So yeah, play this game to learn more about what strategy in games could be like, admire the complex Fog of War system that was way ahead of its time, and try out some civlizationesque espionage action on unit-technology - then you'll understand how complex strategies can be developed in this old but remarkable game.