This thread seems to hold a lot of experimental RTS games, almost as if making something niche in an already niche genre isn't the best business idea XD
I've got some more stuff to throw onto the pile too.
First off Battle Realms, fairly old (2003ish IIRC) RTS with a fantastical asian setting of sorts, what it did uniquely was incorporate the themes from the setting into the gameplay.
So you start with your basic peasant unit, it builds buildings, key one being the peasant hut which pumps out peasants at a slowly decreasing rate up to your pop cap. They also gather your two basic resources, water and rice, water is infinite, rice regenerates slowly (can be sped up by watering it). Where it gets real funky is how you get almost every other unit, each of the factions has several training structures, the basic good guys have a dojo for example, you send your peasant there to train, and for a small fee and time investment you get a speardude, you then say, send your speardude into the alchemist hut to train, and out pops a kabuki warrior, which is a sort of support melee fighter that has some nice cc abilities. Pass the dude trough an archery range and you get the final tier samurai, which are tough and good at both range and melee combat. There's also stamina that depletes when fighting or moving fast so managing that is very important. You then have the third advanced resource, depending on the faction combat gets you Yin/Yang points which are used to purchase upgrades or hero units. You can also kit out most units with extra gear, for example taking your basic archer dude trough a fireworks factory gets him fire arrows, which set things on fire (did I mention you can set both buildings and rice fields on fire? because you can). Oh there's also horses scattered around the map, which your peasants can tame and you can then use them for various things, depending on the faction. Either boosting your peasant carrying capacity, mounting warriors on them to make them faster and harder to kill to simply feeding them to your wolf den so your beastmasters can have pets.
Really, the amount of shit going on in this game is pretty damn amazing, especially once you consider how old it is. Its biggest failing seems to be that it came out around the time of WC3 which kinda meant it was overshadowed by that titan of the RTS genre.
I had a few other things on my mind but seeing as this post took like a week to write up properly for various reasons, they kinda slipped my mind :V