Lament of old-school RTS

Been on a bit of an RTS burn lately and I've noticed some things I've been missing from the modern RTS. Main thing I miss are research trees.

Lately I've been playing Supreme Commander, Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, Medieval Total War II (though it's only half-RTS), and Dawn of War II. Now, while some of those have got minor amounts of research to unlock further things, I'd love to see proper trees come back, like there were Age of Empires, or to a lesser extent, Warcraft.

Other things I miss are defenses that are still effective towards the end of a game, and having to worry about managing my resources and setting up smaller bases away from a main one to move to where the money is.

So, here we go, time to round it up:

Supreme Commander - Small amount of research (tiers at your production facilities, but they progress way too quickly for my liking), and defenses towards the end are pretty much useless. Resources are constantly coming in and a source cannot become depleted. Long-range artillery can get past shields, hell some artillery has a range that will stretch more than half way across a 4-player map, and hit harder than shield batteries can regenerate.

CnC Red Alert 3 - No research (unless you count the tech upgrades at Japanese production facilities), but that's normal for CnC, and the lack of a formidable defensive turret makes it difficult to establish a defensive position. Of course, if you do manage to pull it off, some huge superweapon will get past it and destroy your construction yard and half your power grid anyway, knocking your turrets offline and leaving yourself open to frontal assault. As for cash, everyone should know how that works, and it's not really an issue.

Medieval Total War II - You know what, I'm not going to go into depth on this one... tech tree's huge, battles are good, but it's not an RTS in my eyes... it's TBS with real time battles that only make up a small amount of the game.

Dawn of War II - Love the depth of customisation in unit equipment, variety of units isn't bad either, and while there is a tech tree of sorts, and unless you're doing a blitz offensive it will take a while to get through, the style of gameplay tends towards a blitz offense. Create some units, grab some command points, build some more units, more command points, then stalemate battle until someone builds something bigger than the other guy's got.

At first I thought I was suffering from nostalgia, and RTSs of old weren't as good as I recalled, so I reinstalled AoE2 and the expansion for it. 2 hours later I was still having a great battle of resource management, base building, and skirmishes with 3 AI players (2v2). Units that can outrange your defensive towers are rare and extremely fragile so a small group of cavalry just inside your walls can take them out, and there's no 'cheat' ways to destroy a base (such as CnC's super weapons).

Did the same with Warcraft III and Warcraft II, I actually enjoyed Warcraft II more than III, not sure why because III is an extremely good game. That one could be down to nostalgia.

I could go on to talk about other RTS games that were great for different reasons, and some had their shortcomings - Metal Fatigue, Tzar, Empire Earth, Stronghold, Starcraft, Total Annihilation, and more. They all have something in common - there's a tech tree you have to spend time and resources progressing through, it's possible to build a base with solid defenses behind which to build an attacking force, resources are a commodity you have to manage, most of your units can have their stats improved through research, research can also improve your base as a whole, and the games can last for quite a long time.

Now, maybe I've got it completely backwards here and the problem is my playstyle, but my favourite thing to do in RTS games is to establish a defensive line around my base, improve my base and units through progressing down the tech tree and researching improvements, and then start building up a large strike force.

That's my rant over, feel free to leave whatever comments you want.

Just to add a final note:
I don't think any of the RTSs I listed are bad, they're quite enjoyable. I also just had a thought while making coffee - most RTSs that have tiers have huge differences between them. Supreme commander - T3 units absolutely destroy T2, T4 absolutely destroy T3. Taking Age of Empires as an example again, there's less of a gap between the tiers, there is a gap but it's not unsurmountable with a well-balanced army, and of course multiple armour and attack types enforces balance in your armies. Warcraft III has a very good implementation of this too, probably the best I've seen.