Ah, but Red Alert 2 was, for me, the perfection of the singleplayer RTS formula.
@Gromnir Tbh, looking back on it I couldn't tell you how I felt about resource gathering in the game. I didn't mind it, I guess.
Thinking about it the only game where I would say resource gathering was done particularly well is Homeworld 2, but in multiplayer. Because you could salvage your shipwrecks and probably because that led to the best pvp match I had in any game.
For context and on a tangent, my main strategy playing pvp in Homeworld was to rush battlecruisers. The usual guy I played against liked to build out the normal path, fighters in to mid tier units. Our matches usually ended up with me building the first bc and running away with the game, or him managing to harass me enough to overwhelm my early fighter/bomber combo. One day he decided to try my strategy which led to epic fights culminating, at one point, with around 10 bc each a **** load of destroyers and a lot of fighter/bombers on my side and a bunch of flack frigates and missile launchers on his side. He had better unit control and effectively targeted my bc modules and weapons, but I had better positioning. All in all what we had leftover was not enough to finish off the others mothership and at this point we drained the whole map of resources, but at the middle of the map there were a LOT of wrecks. Enough to unit cap for the next fight. We agreed that the next fight was to the last ship and the winner would take all. So we hyperspace in and start closing in on each other and...the game crashes...
I guess it's for the best as it left something to the imagination and no one lost.