Warzone 2100 was produced by (now defunct) Pumpkin Studios and was made (I think) in 1998/9.
Plot
In the year 2080-something, a nuke satellite went nuts and nuked a bunch of cities. In the ensuing nuclear winter, a few different groups took control of military equipment and went into hiding, to reemerge later and try to claim technology for their own cause. The people who stayed outside became scavengers, nervously cleaning their guns and taking whatever little resources they could get.
Your team holed up in a military base in the Rocky Mountains. After a while, you felt like you got enough equipment and transports running to re-emerge without dying.
On emerging, you find that noone has successfully claimed power. You sieze an oil derrick to power your units and base with and get to work claiming technology and defending yourself.
Unfortunately, there's a lot of other groups that want technology too ... and they've been looking a bit longer than you have.
The net result of this is that your enemies are always slightly better equipped than you are, and you have to defeat them with sheer numbers or with better tactics. In lesser games, it might be possible to get a good defense going and then just let your computer collect resources and set your factories to loop building forever ... But missions have a time limit.
As a result, they can afford to have unlimited resources. Every oil resource you mine brings you 1 oil/sec. (towards the end of the game, vehicles cost several hundred units, between 400 and 1000) Many of your battles will revolve around trying to get (and keep) oil.
You also have to research the little scraps of higher technology you find in order to figure out how they can be used to your advantage. To this end you must build research centers, and wait for them to chug through new advances.
Aside from multiplayer, there is only one team you can be on. You can select its color, but you can never, ever fight as the enemy.
Also, you don't just select units - you have to design them too. You choose between different chassis, propulsion methods, and weaponry.
Multiplayer supports up to 8 single or computer players, and there is a patch available which increases the number of technologies you can research.
You can rotate the camera to whatever view you wish. This is very useful if a building is blocking your objective or your units and you need to be able to see them.
You can give your units complex orders, contributing to a real commanding type game instead of micromanaging. You can tell them at which damage level to retreat, whether to fire at will, return fire, or hold fire, what range to attack at, and a few other things as well. Eventually you are able to build a "commander" unit (takes place of weapon), and assign units to that commander. They will then fire at whatever target the commander has selected.
I like this game because although the graphics are (by no means) new, the gameplay is still quite good. Being able to give complicated orders to your units is a huge improvement on other real-time strategy games.
The game was made by Pumpkin Studios (who no longer exist) and published by Eidos Interactive in 1999.Pumpkin Studios also produced the playstation game 'Saboteur'.