I love resource management. It’s just that I prefer to play it on a really macrosopic, resource-focused scale where I won’t have to worry about the movement of every single unit/marker/element on the map, and most of the games that allow me to do this are turn-based nation-building games like Europa Universalis. On the other hand, when I play in the military aspect I prefer to focus solely on it, temporarily or permanently setting aside the question of resource gathering–so in this case I tend to lean towards real-time tactical (not real-time strategic) games like Microsoft’s Close Combat series. I still dislike micromanagement, though, which is why I’m singling out Close Combat for particular mention; in this series, the soldiers can do entirely unexpected things (sometimes the exact opposite of what you want them to do) if you micromanage them too much.

The article writers makes a salient point when he mentions the Total War series and its two distinct strategic and tactical modes. I’m more comfortable playing the Total War games than most other games because it does allow me to concentrate on one thing at a time–resource-building on the strategic map and limited-resource battles on the tactical map–and, moreover, it packs both features within the single game. Unfortunately, I think these games still allow too much micromanagement. Sometimes, just for fun, I artificially restrict my choices on the battle map by grouping most of the units into an AI-controlled “corps” or two and not personally directing any units except for a few mobile (usually cavalry) units I’ve grouped into a central reserve. Believe me, trying to rescue the AI-controlled groups from their inevitable blunders is fun.

BTW, Jakob’s last comment reminds me of a fairly old RTS game titled Total Annihilation. Many of its scenarios are designed so that the players will have to fight for control of several concentrated resource nodes and to defend/secure the resource harvesters working on these nodes from potential attacks. Maybe these scenarios were designed to please old-fashioned hex-oriented wargamers?

About the only RTS game where the concept sort of made logical sense to me (aside from AoE and similar, as Gavin notes) was Homeworld. It’s a war fought on the run and so there’s no home front to produce weapons, which means you have to guard your little asteroid harvesters until they return to your base ship to feed the production lines. Even then, you have to accept that your base ship has a factory which can produce (and crew!) all sizes of spaceships from fighters to battleships multiple times within the course of one battle.