I'm a bit biased because starcraft: brood war is the greatest game created of all time, but I think it's resource management is a little too mechanical in the worker aspect. It is a very strategic game but the pace is kind of funky, in that it becomes incredibly rapid sometimes and actually fairly slow at others. This is compared to say, C&C, which is much slower throughout (though I don't know of competitive or really any 1v1 competent command and conquer). Something like supreme commander is very slow.
About the OP: warcraft 3 designers (I am not too familiar) do talk about camps (units "farmed"/killed for resources) as really economy management for Experience, since it forced the game to be a resource management of getting XP for your hero and thus forced the map movement to be clusters of your army around your hero, where maybe it could be more spread-out otherwise. I.e. the "fourth economy" of XP farming is like resource gathering tied to specific areas of the map.
Even distributed resources like that rather than discrete, mineable bases like starcraft impact the map. Which sometimes discrete bases spreads the game out across the map, or causes people to be more turtley the way starcraft 2 ends up more often than not, with zerg getting strong benefits of staying on their own territory (creep) and bases being taken close-together rather than at corners of the map as in sc:bw.
I kind of wish MOBA's, maybe moreso dota/dota 2 specifically, get called as action RTS (ARTS) as that term is sometimes more appropriate, as there is a very strong economy management in XP farming and sharing and "mining". Westerners use MOBA, as do easterners, but a lot of koreans use the term "Aeon of Strife-like" to even describe some games. People discount moba's as an extension of RTS and they really are, but I guess some people think RTS is only essentially slightly-faster tabletop gaming.
Coincidentally (for cfc), a podcast was done with soren johnson (civ series) interviewing Rob Pardo (lead design starcraft 1/brood war, a designer on warcraft 3 and a designer for much of starcraft 2 pre-release) about stuff. The warcraft thing from above is buried somewhere in here, so he talks abput resources in RTS a little.
https://www.idlethumbs.net/designernotes/episodes/rob-pardo-part-1
Part 1, Starcraft 1 sections:
00.38 (game balance)
00.46 (Zileas using reavers)
00.51 (fastest game speed)
00.55 (apm)
01.07 (Maps)
01.10 (Broodwar specifically as opposed to starcraft vanilla)
01.18 (Amount of hours he worked)
01.21 (Meaning of balance, Boxer using vultures)
01.22 (emergent gameplay, spellcasters, move and shoot units)
part 2 has stuff about sc2 and other things, I didnt listen to it
anyways:
I dont like "maintenance" concepts in economies for RTS, or limited slotting of units (allowed 5 units of X, 1 unit of Y). If you want a hero-based army, make it very distinct in low number of heroes and the game not be as much about resource management.
I also am strongly more in favor of "many buildings" rather than only a few, which ties back to resource management in perhaps requiring more workers (eg protoss in starcraft doesnt need more than 1 worker to construct stuff).
For instance, you could have a building spawn 10 units at a time or make 5 buildings spawn 2 units at a time, im in favor of the latter.
So, I'm in favor of discrete countable resource categories (could be 2, like starcraft, or you could make a game with 4 or something with it being wood, stone, iron, copper) and tying those resources to large amassing of armies/buildings (e.g. wood and stone could be required for making buildings, iron and copper for army creation from those buildings). I inherently support needing many-workers to collect such resources, and probably support "common worker" that can mine any resource (e.g. 1 worker/peon could collect all 4 resources in this running example, rather than 1 that can do wood/stone and 1 that can do iron/copper)
