OK here’s my pitch. The game has three main phases. The first is kind of like a 3rd person stealth game. You control someone sent into an enemy camp or fortress or whatever who has a limited amount of time to gather details about the area. You have to avoid detection and get in the base and then try to snoop around and climb on roofs and stuff to find out what the enemy’s defenses are, then make it back to your own base alive. The game will record the details for you automatically to use later, but it also helps to just remember it on your own. And if you do a bad job there will be things you overlook that will hurt you in the later parts of the game.
In the next phase you allocate resources to recruit units based on the intel, and then give basic instructions about who will go where and do what at what times. At this point you also choose a loadout for your own character to complement the strategy that you’ve chosen for the army you are leading
Then in the final phase the actual battle begins in real time, and other than your own main character’s actions all of this will be basically be ai controlled once you start fighting, but it could still be possible to give new orders on the fly in case something weird happens.
I think this would solve the problem most of the 3rd person rts games have where the behind the back camera set up is kind of useless for coming up with more complex strategies. But it wouldn’t be as awkward as just pausing mid battle to zoom over to where the other units were to give them new directions.