Idea continued:
Resources sit where they land. No collecting all the wood on island A and building a bunch of houses on island B without first moving that wood from A to B, and then to the construction sites. Your soldiers on the front lines will also need a steady supply of ammo. Shoot a car and kill the driver, put your own driver in there and take the car. Hit a gun turret enough and it may just stop working, but it can be repaired and start firing again. Humans heal, fires spread, buildings on fire are eventually destroyed, and they need power line attachments to run properly.

I'm not into gaming, but loads of success.
Tommy

What Tommy said. I have no idea how this game differs from or advances the state of the art.

I'll wait and see what the gamers in the crowd say.

Agrees with Vanhess..will takeme few more day to comment positively. DO enlighten us more.

It is not detailed enough. Is kind of like saying "PacMan with a way bigger maze", "House of the Dead with better looking zombies" or "Michael Bay with more suck". Maybe one of those games is old enough to have released some source code to the public (like i.d. did with doom/quake), and so you could take a game you found decent, and extend it to do what else you want (have bigger scope)?

Hard to do, crazy rendering time... but if you could do it this would be cool

All I could think about while reading your description was Spore. Spore is about the most expansive RTS game ever created. You start out as a single-celled organism and the game plays kinda like asteroids. Eventually you evolve into multi-cellular organism, and keep playing asteroids. Soon after the multi-cell phase, you switch into 3d and you are a shrimp swimming the sea. Now you have to avoid bigger fish that try to eat you. Oh yea, and all along this process you are continually making decisions about how to evolve. The game takes the decisions you make, and through procedural programming, dynamically animates your creation (how it moves, how it eats, how it hunts, even how it sounds latter on in the game). So, you then evolve more and more to become something like a seal, and eventually you can grow legs. Then it switches to a FPS type game and you roam the land scavenging for food and looking for mates. Once you find a mate, you can lay an egg and evolve some more. Soon you will get a big enough brain to become self-conscious and create a society, and now the game becomes RTS. You can build some weapons, keep getting better brains, build some cities, and fight other tribes/civilizations. Everything is customizable right down to the buildings you build. Your creatures dynamically adapt themselves to your style of playing and move to and from buildings as they probably would if they were real. Eventually you become smart enough to build a UFO and travel to other planets. You can colonize these planets if they are hospital, and travel the galaxy. This is where it gets really cool! When you travel the galaxy, you can actually search for radio signals, and these signals are emitted from planets/civilizations that other people have created. You can then go over and conquer them if you wish or befriend them (the civ is downloaded to your computer, so the other player does not actually interact with you and find that their civ is all dead for no apparent reason).

This game is being developed by Maxis, and can be found at http://www.spore.com. I have been looking foward to this game for about 2 years now, and Maxis, being the creator of Sim City, is about due for another GREAT game! I wish you the best of luck, and if you can think of a way to top this, please give me a msg, I'd love to help out.

you could use the google earth game intagration tool

...this might be my most "naive" comment but am thinking why not put a kind of MMORPG or somehting like this inside 2ndlife?