Sorry for necroposting (and my bad English, I'm from Korea), but I think an RTS game on Outerra would be fantastic!
A couple of years ago I had a dream of playing this Rise of Nations/Empire Earth/Age of Empires/Civilization/Spore themed game on a massive as hell planet (by "dream" I don't mean wishing for something, I literally mean sleeping & dreaming... yes I know, it's sad... I must have been playing too many video games during that day to get a dream about playing a video game...). It is a game where you go through all of the periods of human civilization (maybe an additional future era just for fun + science-fiction lovers like myself) and as you go through each era, the way of playing the game also changes e.g. less amount of micromanaging (like managing your armies - AI sometimes doing battles for you when you shift your camera to another fight to command on another part of the map at the same time maybe, since the planet you will be playing might be freaking huge... if you choose to play on that kind of sized map). You also control the camera like in World in Conflict/Shogun 2 Total War + Supreme Commander where you can zoom out to see everything you've explored (well, during the ages without satellites like the Medieval era you get a 2D paper map, but when you get to the Modern/Digital era you can see it all in 3D), hover around the beneath the sky and move the camera freely at whatever angle and can zoom down to see the smallest details of everything if you know what I mean. Difficulty levels will change the amount of micromanaging you have to control (maybe) aswell.
(Going to write about the dream I had in a kind of "tutorial" or "2nd person" way of speaking)
You start off in some Prehistoric/Stone Age/Ancient era with some nomads on top of a hill. You find a suitable location for a settlement, you get them to begin building their settlement one hut at a time (they have enough resource with them to create the first hut, you have to get more resources from the surrounding area to build more, so...), you get them to collect some resources from the surrounding area, hunt & gather during the day for food, be on guard for any dangerous wild animals that may run into your settlement and attempting to kill your population, sleep at night to get their energy back up etc. Like, it starts off as a kind of survival game where you only have a handful of people trying to gather food, fend off wild animals, go on hunting parties etc and you have to micromanage each person.
As your settlement and population grows over time, there is less micromanaging (e.g. one gatherer unit will eventually be a 10-person group of gatherers so you don't have to click on each individual designated gatherer to collect fruit/wood/whatever resource), the huts you created will gradually get upgraded into stronger-looking huts, uncontrollable people will start going about their own business around the dirt roads kind of like the citizens in the game "Black & White" (they aren't just eye-candy, each person you see is a part of the small population living in the settlement. If unassigned, they consume some of the resources you gather, expand the settlement, breed etc. If you want to create a new unit of gatherers/builders/warriors/settlers, these random citizens will be called up to form that unit group, like the military platoons in Black & White 2), you will also be allowed to begin to research things for the first time (e.g. farming - another food source, enhanced tools - for gatherers - axes for chopping down wood faster, animal husbandry - another food source, the wheel - higher carrying limit for amount of resources carried by gatherers maybe, bronze working - better weapons for warriors, horseback riding - faster movement over long distances with the use of horses maybe, clans - get to recruit settlers and build settlements elsewhere), bandits may start appearing, you can go off exploring to chart new areas or find other settlements etc etc you get the idea.
Once you've progressed quite a bit through the techs and your settlement is now too big to micromanage every little thing there, you will advance to another era (maybe the Classical era or something), you will no longer have to manage gatherers for resources - the towns will automatically gather things around the area like civilization maybe, you will finally be able to use a strategic zoom (but limited, depends on the amount of land you've charted by exploring) to zoom in and out on parts of the map (like in Supreme Commander. You can zoom in on your settlement to see the gatherers at work (it's eye-candy this time), the citizens walking around the roads/riding on horses or maybe zoom in on some random road to see farmers transporting their produce to the settlement. When you zoom out to the maximum, you get a 2D piece of old-looking paper which has things charted on it e.g. icons representing your settlement or your units, different coloured areas for forest areas, water areas, rivers, lines representing different levels of terrain etc. As you explore more of the world, the icons representing the settlement/units and different coloured areas decrease in scale in order to chart more of the world you've explored. As you progress through more eras, the type of paper/look of the icons on the map change to fit the theme of that era (like the crappy looking paper in the Classical era is replaced by not-as-crappy paper in the Medieval era. When you finally reach the modern/digital era, when satellites become available, 2D maps are obsolete and you can see the entire world from space) and other things.
The dream seemed to skip some stuff and go straight into this... digital-renaissance age with some giant as heck robot (is it called "robot" or "mech"?) standing in a place which looked like a northern-European city like Helsinki or Oslo and then zooming out to see the planet and then zooming in on something else on another part of the world. I can't remember the rest, but as soon as I woke up I was like "Man, I wish I could play that for real".
Well, that's the end of it. Although, I think such a game would require so much developing time and money that it would be impossible to create. Also, I don't even know myself if Outerra would be able to handle an RTS game like I've described, it probably won't be able to. But as the Professor from Futurama says at the end of an episode which was all about "dreaming" of things people wanted or imagined...
"A man can dream though... a man can dream..."
