Advancing along a tech tree has to be featured.Resource gathering has to be present in some form.Combat has to take place under similar conditions for all parties.Some sort of base building has to be possible.What we came up with was fairly straightforward, and might even seem a little too basic at first glance:

We sat back and tried to figure out what would qualify as 'traditional' for strategy games, or rather at which point a game is starting to stray from some relatively basic genre definitions and conventions. Before we get into why modern strategy titles generally fail to reach the iconic status some of their forefathers have, the criteria for our expanding deserve some elaboration.