>>60346132A 'classic' RTS is built of 2 main gameplay pillars
Building structures which generate resources and recruit units at the cost of those resources
Commanding units to combat enemy units and destroy enemy structures
The issues stem from this. The outcome of a game is decided in combat, but the most effective means of increasing the combat effectiveness of your units is to simply have more/better units than they do. Since the primary limiters on unit availability/quality is resources and buildings, this means both that the 'best' army is simply a solvable cost-effectiveness equation and that the outcome of a game is, more often than not, determined in the first few minutes by how efficiently each player constructs their base and acquires/spends their resources. Build orders become rigid and solved and involve no decisionmaking, just a mechanical reproduction of the same series of actions which players end up genuinely automating simply because it's trivial to and there's no reason not to.
And of course, as a zero-sum competition, there's the essential issue that your first mistake places you at a disadvantage which never balances out, and being at a disadvantage increases the likelihood of future exchanges being disfavourable. It may take 20-30 minutes to complete a game, but the actual outcome can be decided in the first 5. Losing from an advantage requires a mistake--winning from a disadvantage requires your foe make a mistake. There's very little agency involved in the outcome once an advantage has been established, and often that advantage is established before any actual interaction between players, just due to how efficiently they carried out their build order.
RTS designers have at various points tried to ameliorate these issue by increasing the amount of manual control necessary to make units effective--which is good. But the fundamental issue remains that more resources in units equates to a stronger army. The player who executes the basic 'economy' aspects of the game more efficiently is at an immediate advantage, and advantages snowball without mitigating factors because it's a zero-sum numbers game.
