Having played a number of RTS games, I personally reckon that an extra game mode that could be added would be one akin to the historical battle section in the total war franchise.
Instead of this mode making you focus on building and development, it should make ou focus more so on actual combat tactics. You start with certain units, and have certain objectives to achieve. A whole load of these matches could even be just exterminate all enemies, using the units you start with.
Imagine booting it up, having a few squads of marines and having to say get to a certain part of the city, get out of the forest, or maybe get a few tanks and have to take out some structure.
The idea here is mainly instant carnage, just into the fight, do what you can. It’s something I’ve often found to be quite good in other RTS games, and I think it could work here too, depending on the flow of combat.
As an alternate to the standard gameplay, this sounds fine. Also works as additonal campaign-like missions and boosts replay value and single-player appeal.
It’s been done in games like men of war assault squad (many of the maps and engagements were modded in, and I imagine it would be on a smaller scale) so I reckon it could be done… Just making sure it’s fun and actually like halo is the catch
They kind of had that in HW on some of the campaign missions… You started out with a few units and had to fight your way to where the base was going to land…
But a more dedicated game type might be cool.
Or to add to that in a vs mode you get so much for you population cap and you have to select your units at the menu screen and you face off against your opponent in a wave type mode. So you get a unit and then after a time limit you next wave… Of course it would have to be balanced so you couldn’t just go over with mammoth tank when they have some grunts… but maybe have objective points around the map and to win you have to control objective points to get points per wave… and if you opponent loses his units that wave they aren’t out of the game just have to wait til the next spawn wave… Could be cool.
A wave defense mode could work as well. Battle outcomes are decided by skilled micro, so it’s not like every wave would play out the same for every player. Higher skilled players could achieve varying success with fewer units than a beginner. And then practice makes perfect, so it would have replay value, as of course wave defense games always do.