I played Total War: Kingdoms, on Steam, and have played a number of other RTS games, from Clash of Clans, to Command & Conquer, etc. I think that one of the advantages of RTS games is that the ongoing nature of the game requires a complex planning and project management mindset. Between prioritizing resources, buildings, and units, and the fluid nature of adversaries who may attack or seek treaties at any time, RTS games have the potential to be used in almost any content area where dealing with novel or ill-defined problems is required.
For my own teaching, I would love to find or develop a game that would allow the teacher (or gamemaster) to manipulate some of the parameters of different regions or players. I teach chemistry, and I think that it would be interesting to challenge students with such problems as depriving them of certain key elements, or making different elements more abundant, or changing the physical and chemical properties of various elements and getting the students to work out how this would influence the world and the gameplay. What is the freezing point or boiling point of water was different? What if iron was more rare than gold? There could also be a trsing component to this, if the resources could be deliberately and unevenly distributed, as they are in the real world. What if one country had no silicon, while another had an abundance of silicon, but no copper?
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