Dragonshard is a could-have-been RTS title that sounded as good on paper as it didn't deliver on screen.
The pure RTS elements, while partially original, are wisely chosen. You get to manage some "city nodes" (strategic points on which you build your structures) which have a fixed number of squares meaning you can't just build everything at once. Your city nodes also irradiate something like an "influence area", as already seen in Kohan. While in this influence area, your units replenish their life points plus your commanders marshal some supporting units into their squads - again, like in Kohan, except you can't customize your squad's unit members. Then you have your tech tree, your production queues and other classical RTS ingredients.
All these features sound better than they actually feel. You are not limited to your number of building slots, since you only need those slots to improve your units' levels, but once improved you can still demolish your buildings and rebuild something different in that slot and all the former research is still available. That is, to research the best barbarians you need four dwarven forges, but once your barbarians have reached level 5 you can demolish all but one dwarven forge and still you will able to recruit level 5 barbarians. So, the building slot limit is actually more of a progress scheduler than an actual boundary to how developed your army can become.
The economics also have some innovations I'm not particularly fond of. Dragonshards, one of the key resources, replenish after all the resource gathering places have been exhausted. Gold, as in Kohan, accumulates slowly according to how much troops you control, plus you can gather gold in some other ways such as tomb raiding or enemy mashing.
While I don't find the RTS features especially innovative or pleasant, what turns me down the most is mainly the RPG setting. Some of the RPG features may seem alright, like leveling up your units. However, this is only giving a different name to an already existing feature, since all RTS allow "level improvements" to your units by building some extra structures. The only true RPG ingredient here is that the resource needed to improve your units is called experience. That's about it. Paradoxically, your heroes cannot improve their levels, so the whole "experience-based leveling RPG component" is nothing but a mirage. In fact, Other RTS titles, such as Warcraft III, have more meaningful, integrated RPG elements. Still, these issues do not have such a negative impact in my gameplay experience as the setting does.
Simply put, the setting feels awful. Having those dragonshards flying around to build an impossible army of golems, dwarven barbarians, elven-like flying units capable of casting lighting blasts, human paladins, clerics, thieves and machine-tweaking elders, topped by a phoenix juggernaut unit, is overkill, plain and simple. While I thought it could be interesting to have a sword and sorcery army to fight tough opponents like beholders and dragons, your units don't feel like an army at all. Thus, one of the basics of any RTS game, which is having appealing factions, is absolutely spoiled by the very same feature that could make it a worthy gameplay experience.
Dragonshard is a could-have-been RTS title that, as it is, has its downfalls in what could have been its greatest assets.