Have you played Warzone 2100?

I came to this subreddit only recently and it's been great to see people acknowledging my old favorites, like SupCom, Total Annihilation, and Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. There's one game that I haven't seen mentioned here that I think you guys could really enjoy.

Warzone was a crazy old Playstation RTS I think, but it was since taken over by an online modding group and completely overhauled. The game features a long campaign where your base carries over for several missions at a time before you move to a new region, but it's the multiplayer that I found so interesting.

The game features a single resource (oil) and a massive tech tree. You can build a maximum of 5 research buildings and have them going simultaneously, researching new chassis, reactors, propulsion, and weapons system. You then design every unit using these components, creating blueprints which you then build. There's some basic interaction where weapons have both Damage and Armor Penetration, and different propulsion methods like half-tracks and tank treads have different speeds on different terrain, plus different armor values.

What makes this game super interesting though, is that about 2/3 of the way through the tech tree you start unlocking long-range missiles and ballistic weapons. These cannot be fired on their own; they have to be tied to a Spotter unit which goes out and spots the enemy, at which point a withering barrage of death descends upon it. Late game matches transform from tank combat into artillery spotting matches with air units providing vision and sniping sensor towers.

You get an even more interesting behavior from Counter-Ballistics sensors. The CB sensor detects ordinance incoming from enemy artillery batteries and directs your own batteries connected to it to fire on the enemy batteries. So it is a common event for two players to rapidly build up artillery batteries that are in range of each other, but not shooting each other since they have no spotters. With CB towers on both sides, they will continue in peace until the moment one of them uses a spotter to fire, at which point CB towers will light up and the two batteries will unleash explosive hell on each other in a spectacle that is absolutely glorious to behold.

I last played this game several years ago and I know nothing about the state of the community. But my friends had a good time with it back then, and I've never seen another RTS that had such a strong set of artillery mechanics in it.

EDIT: And immediately after posting this, I saw that Warzone 2100 is in the recommended games section. Well, now you know more about it and you can follow the link from there if you'd like to try it out.