Human-Beings' Mission Statements

Borrowed things

Civilization

1. Political questions are meaningful.
   The social rules evolve along changes of political organization.
2. Technical/scientific evolution (city batiments, transport means and military units evolve).
3. Possibility to fortify military units (also exists in StarCraft w/ Siege Tanks).
4. The whole game is played on the same map (e.g. the game is NOT a campaign with several missions/maps).

Dune2/Starcraft

1. Realtime is vastly superior to (Civilization's) turn-based, for emotion, balance of fights, and network play (don't need to wait for other players for ages).
2. Well-balanced and interesting war fights: energy handling rather than win-or-loose/random of Civilization.
3. (Starcraft) surfaces of map and units are meaningful.
   The map is not divided into squares (or hexagons); each unit may be "close" or "closer" to each other unit depending on space occupancy of each unit ("size"), and have a metric speed (rather than moving between granular positions).

SimCity

1. Simulating one large city on the map (or 2/3 cities), rather than many small cities, is interesting because then you can finely tune the insides of the city (like in SimCity but a bit simpler).
2. Geographical organization of cities is meaningful.
   You need to organize the city so that social/technical functions (houses, industries, power supplies, roads) interfere efficiently.

Original things

1. Weights are meaningful.
   Each unit has a weight and each terrain type (in particular bridges) has a maximum weight resistance. As Pixel suggests, this needs to be handled partly automatically when sending groups of units to not become a pain.
2. There is no limit when selecting groups of units
   If more than a certain number of units are selected, you won't see them in the status bar but they can still receive the group orders.
3. "Size" of the whole map is between Civilization's (continents) and Dune2's (~ a valley), e.g. a "region"
   Each player will have a central city and possibly a small number of annex cities.
4. Some military units must be more/less efficient depending on the type of the target => need to handle some characteristics of units/batiments such as "armor", "alive exposure" so that for example, a gun can do nothing on an armor but is very effective on alive things.
5. There is no apparent money: the cities are themselves capable of producing goods and each batiment means a continuous levy on the city's provisioning (such as SimCity's power needs, but extended) and work force (for example, building a batiment means "using" engineers would can't do scientific research during that time, operating a factory means "using" some workers).
   Goods are produced depending on the geographical/technical organization of the city. For example, a tank factory needs 10 power, 15 steel, 5 oil; if something is missing the speed of the factory slows down.
6. Building any unit "costs" on population (like Civilization's settlers, but extended)
   When in older political systems, the cost is only on males and fecondity is impacted.
7. Enhancing the difference between quantity of communication in older times and in recent times, by speed of units and also by telephone/radars/satellites.
8. (fpons) You can trade goods between races.
9. You don't destroy enemy batiments, you capture them (with a cost of adaptation): more realistic, more interesting.