You'll notice there is a distinct lack of RTS tournament action planned for the upcoming Beatdown. This is because RTS gamers are the minority when regarding the gaming entity in it's complete, frothing form. Not to mention RTS on LAN makes little improvement over the online formula we are usually given. Are those pings even relevant anymore when you are goading forth a battalion of demons from the mouth of Hell itself?
Not to mention one round of strategy takes up a lot more time than a round of any other given multiplayer genre when you don't include the time-sinks that are MMOs. Each round of a standard RTS is akin to the conversation rates between the Euro and real money. Of course I'm not talking about games like Supreme Commander or Warcraft III where one can close a game off in minutes with a quick and easy Blademaster rush or UEF artillery spam. I'm talking about everything else that takes time, Age of Empires II for instance, the over-balanced Battle Realms, and 4X games.
Also as far as I know Real-Time 4X (RT4X) is limited to a tiny handful of games. But this handful represents an unfortunate situation for people like me, that is, people like me who crave the unprocessed fun of turn-based/real-time strategy; it's a tremendous amount of time out of your day just to plan the subjugation of a single system. Annexing the entire galaxy is a meal consumed over the course of a fortnight, even at the full speed that not chewing achieves. It is a time destroying free-fall, and like the evolutionary imperative found in lemmings, we are bound to leap over that cliff no matter what.
So as I was saying about strategy gamers being the minority, the point is I like strategy games as well, and if you're into it maybe we'll be having plenty of games at the LAN that don't involve looking down the barrel of a rocket launcher. If you're up for your time going towards that kinda stuff.
Now stop messaging me about it.