I have always been a fan of real-time strategy (RTS) games, particularly those with a historical theme such as Age of Empires, Empire Earth, and Stronghold. I have always dreamed of creating my own RTS game. I have a lot of experience with Unity and C#, but I am aware that the scope of such a project is huge, even for a small prototype. That's why it is crucial to have a well-defined and solid concept for the game, starting from a vertical slice to alpha and beta versions, all the way to publishing and ongoing support.

I have thought about combining the best features that have stood out to me from various games, including:

• The rich historical depth of Empire Earth
• The user-friendly interface and well-paced gameplay of Age of Empires 2
• The engaging base-building mechanics of Stronghold: Crusader
• The detailed economic aspects found in city builders like Banished

Here's a user journey that I have envisioned for the game:

1. Create a skirmish game.
2. Begin by assigning villagers directly to resource deposits, similar to how it's done in Age of Empires and Empire Earth.
3. Research technologies and develop your economy and military forces.
4. As your military strength grows, you may want to automate certain aspects of your economy. This is where the mechanics of city builders come into play. You can choose to gather resources directly and transport them to nearby settlements or resource camps. Alternatively, you can construct specific buildings, such as a woodcutter's hut, and assign villagers to gather resources continuously. This concept can be applied to other resource types like stonecutters, hunters, and more.
5. With a mostly automated and stable economy, you can focus on defending your base or launching attacks against the enemy.
6. For defense, you have the ability to construct complex walls around strategic points and important areas.

I am wondering if there would be any interest in such a game, or if anyone would be willing to discuss the concept further.

There definitely is interest out there for RTS games. If not, StarCraft would never have gotten a remaster. Of course SC is mega-famous and one of the original e-sports and still played competitively so... yeah, it's not like they are trying to revive forgotten titles because of new interest. Still, it shows that people still enjoy this type of game.

I think the single most important thing is going to be the interface and how everything feels to control. This genre is notorious for making the player perform repetitive and annoying tasks, while your units trip over each other in some other corner of the map. I've thought for some time about how to make an RTS that is more heavily focused on strategy (i.e. placement of buildings and armies, unit abilities/combos/counters, build orders/research paths) than on mechanics (i.e. remembering to go back to your base to click on a worker and send them to mine every 5 seconds for the entire 2 hour game).

I felt that one way to accomplish this might be to reduce the overall number of units and/or buildings as much as possible.

The reasoning for this is pretty simple: Fewer units are theoretically easier to control, both for the human and for pathfinding. It might also help to keep the resource numbers small-ish. It is tempting to allow players to build hundreds of units and mine thousands upon thousands of resource X, but the superficial coolness of the big numbers will wear out fast. Keeping things manageable will make it easier for players to quickly understand and react while playing, and hopefully reduce the overall number of clicks needed to make stuff happen.

I'm not the biggest fan of walls and I felt that StarCraft really benefitted from not having them.  You could blockade using buildings but none of the buildings were strong enough to hold back a full attack... this encourages focusing on army movement and active play rather than just bunkering behind walls.

Automating resource gathering is a plus in my book. As a player I want to be making choices about how many workers to build, and where to send them. Searching around the map for idle workers is just annoying. It makes sense that if a resource patch is depleted, they could go idle. But I should be able to set a waypoint so that every worker that pops out immediately goes to mine there. 

Pathfinding is probably the most technically difficult aspect, it's going to be expected that units can navigate around obstacles. The more robust it is, the less often you'll have stray units going on vacation (or just getting stuck at home), but this will have to be balanced with processing time.

Anyway those are my thoughts as someone who enjoyed quite a lot of StarCraft but got really exhausted with the insane amount of clicking/button pressing/frantic scrolling involved. 

Thats some super nice ideas! 
I also always liked the idea to not have hundreds of units at the same time. (The opposite to Supreme Commander & co).  I really like to give every unit value. Like rather heal a unit than creating a new one. Maybe we need an rts where you're not that big super powerful empire but rather a tribe or a village fighting against others (like the settlers). 

User Interface is one of the top priorities, as you said! The UI in AoE2 just feels right with super intuitive shortcuts, just the right amount of info and satisfiing interactions.

The RTS i would wish for would not be as stressfull as AoE or Starcraft. Clicks per Minute should not take the topmost priority. Thats not what i would want to play.

Thank you for your input and feel free to come back if you have any of those great ideas! I'm still trying to get to know what people actually want in a rts game.