First off, I'm not giving up on my RTS idea. It's too awesome to forget about it, but sadly it would take years working with 3D stuff before I would get to the point of making anything playable. That said, I've completely changed directions and am making a turn-based strategy game. In 2D. Probably even in space so I won't even have to worry about making maps with backgrounds. I'm borrowing a lot of the crazy technology ideas from the RTS though.
The main goal of this project is to create a multiplayer game that can be played at each player's leisure and yet still as fast paced as possible. The game will use a simultaneous turn play-style. How this works is that everybody takes their turn at the same time and submits their choices to the server. Once everybody has told the server what they want to do (or a pre-defined time period elapses) , the server parses all the commands from each player, resolves the combat, makes an updated map, and sends it to each client. The process repeats until there is a victor.
The major problem with this is the server will have to handle all the combat. It would take forever to resolve a skirmish via this method. Now, I'm not usually a fan of computer-resolved combat. It's always too boring and doesn't have the excitement that real human intuition brings. That said, units in the game will be able to be 'programmed' with some rudimentary commands for battle that are executed in order. Things like "fire long-range missiles for X turns; retreat" or "flank army; attack from rear" stuff like that. I toyed with the idea of having a full-blown lua script or something that players could create to control their ships, but I figured most people wouldn't want to deal with that and it would be unfair. I still plan on having lots of options in order to make combat interesting, however.
I believe this format will also lend itself well to portable devices. I'll be getting a Pandora soon, and I'll surely be making a client for it. PC will obviously have a client as well, and maybe the DS if it can run Python. The portable device will connect to the server in the morning, get the updated map, and the player can take their turn while eating lunch or taking a crap. Later, when they get home or within range of a hotspot, they can upload their turn.
Anyway, the server code is coming along nicely. I hope to have a simple server by the end of the week that can move units around on. Obviously there is way more to do than that, but it's an exciting first step.