> Unlike Dune 2, which only allowed the user to select a single unit at a time, and which necessitated frenzied mouse-clicking to initiate joint-unit tactical combat, it was obvious that enabling players to select more than one unit would speed task-force deployment and dramatically improve game combat.

Dune II is the grandfather of all of modern RTS (for good and for bad, the genre hasn't changed that much). But the unlimited unit select wasn't there and starting/cancelling an attack when you had twenty or so units was a joke. I wasn't even a teenager at the time and I can remember desperately trying to get large groups of units off the sand when the sandword was inbound (some people will know what I am talking about).

What I find really interesting in the article is this:

> Later in the development process, and after many design arguments between team-members, we decided to allow players to select only four units at a time based on the idea that users would be required to pay attention to their tactical deployments rather than simply gathering a mob and sending them into the fray all at once.

This, this is probably the reason why Warcraft and Warcraft II (even Starcraft!) had this limitation. As a kid I could never figure out why this was the case when Westwood had no limits on unit selection from Command and Conquer and onwards.

Starting and canceling an attack was actually quite easy: Turn game speed all the way down to a crawl, click all the stuff you have to click, turn speed up again :).

The article mentions that. Apparantly it was playing Dune II at lunch that inspired Warcraft, and the unit selection was put in since Dune II only allowed you to select one unit at once.

It was apparently Command & Conquer that added unlimited unit selection.

No, it didn't. Eventually it was rewritten (by fans I think) as Dune2000, and this version did have unlimited unit select.

Dune2000 is an official successor by Westwood Studios. It is based on the C&C-Engine and basically plays and behaves like Red Alert 2, right down to the awful C-Movie cutscenes.

Actually it was Red Alert 1 with altered graphics and just a single new feature: technology overview screens. The graphics for the G.I.'s were exactly the same as in RA1.