Are you a general ordering troop movements across a vast combat theater or a drill sergeant trying to get your platoon to take and hold a single hill? Are you planning the utter destruction of your enemy's base or are you trying to keep your men from wandering into danger? I would like to see an RTS that features battle plans that can be executed like football plays, and more intelligent soldiers -- you know, the kind that don't allow themselves to be bombarded without independent retaliation.

If you think of the latest football simulator as a real-time strategy game, it becomes obvious that controlling multiple units at once could be handled very differently.  Football and field combat have a lot in common. Standard battle tactics and playbooks are analogous and should be treated as such. I'd like to initiate simultaneous assault, building capture, or bombardment plans without having to continuously tell my troops NOT to destroy the building I want to take over, or to exit the transport vehicle (especially if it's under attack), or to stay out of range of base defenses while continuously shelling the enemy.  (Also, given that artillery uses indirect fire and there are rarely civilian targets to be worried about, revealing the shroud shouldn't be necessary for these units.) Combat playbooks would seem to me to be a logical step in the evolution of the RTS game.

All in all, I'd like to see smarter troops on my battlefield. Ones that have the common sense to perform complex maneuvers like loading into an available transport automatically and disembarking with the same autonomy or respond to ranged attacks with more than a generic "your units are under attack". Where? How badly? I missed the flashing blip on the minimap because I was too busy micromanaging my defensive emplacements! Currently your troops can't give detailed reports, and as a battle commander, you need that intel. "We're being pinned down by sniper fire at the east bridge! We're going to flush him out!" Now that's what I want to hear.

Some games allow the player to choose to have all troops that move together to move at the slowest unit's move rate, which is great for protecting those extra fast or extra slow units that would otherwise get separated from the group. Unfortunately, the traveling hordes in most games hold no structure in transit, often leaving weaker units on the outside of what usually becomes a slow-moving column. I think heavily armored units could be preprogrammed to protect lightly armored artillery and fast-attack units.

I tried to avoid giving any game names, but I think there are two games that come closest to providing the kind of control I've been looking for in my RTS games: Star Trek: Armada and Warlords: Battlecry II. Each game allows the player to give its units standing orders in different ways. Battlecry even lets you instruct every unit that a particular building produces to follow those orders (I don't remember the functionality of Armada clearly). Auto-use of "spells", fallback at 25% health, protect a particular unit/building/area, and scout the map are a few of the automated behaviors that these two games allow the player to use. They're good examples of what could be done and should be expanded upon. If I could build a game of my own, I'd start with a hybrid of these two games, tack on a basic battleplan/playbook structure and flesh it out from there.

What I'm saying is that Real-Time Strategy games should be about the strategy, tactics and logistics involved in managing warfare, not holding your troops' hands through maneuvers you spent resources to teach them.