Professor Paul your idea of time sensitive ideas is interesting:
However there are only two time sensitive ideas I can think of:
1) Human Colony Rebellions. The player base not to long ago voted them among the worst things in the game, so their cost for failure dropped significantly.
2) Advanced Hybrids with Dyson sphere on: Players clamored to make this easier.
I bring this to illustrate that the core of AI wars to allow you to decide how far you want to press time. The base game has the option of setting adding aip over time, and these minor factions have the option of being turned on as well. Few players take advantage them in a significant way, meaning the players for whatever reason don't want the time restraints in their current form. Slapping on additional time restraints won't change tactics if the player simply can turn them off unless perhaps there is a carrot as well.
To be a bit clearer, I don't necessarily mean time sensitive in that they are timed from the start of the game, I mean time sensitive in the context of tactical combat. I guess to be more accurate, I'm talking about things that would be time sensitive because they affect each other.
A lot of operations in mil-sims and real life often involve things that once they get started, a lot of other things have to happen in a relatively short period of time in order to succeed.
It's rather common to have situations where you need to accomplish A, B, and C, but you generally have a lot of room to prepare and wait before you get started on A. The catch is that B and C have to happen pretty fast once you decide to commit and get started on A.
Take having numerous important soft targets combined with threat of reinforcement/retaliation. The player is not in a hurry in the sense that the player decides when to attack and take out those targets. However, the time sensitive nature of this would come in when the player decides to commit to the attack, as the player would be encouraged to kill all of those targets quickly and regroup before reinforcements arrive in response. The player still decides when to commit to the action.
The hypothetical groups or emplacements that do a lot of damage unless being attacked also works this way. The player decides when to commit to the attack and send their blob through the gate, but once they're through they're pressured to send something to fire on those units and suppress them before they do too much damage. Again the player decides when to start, but once things get going they have to follow through.
As you probably notice, a lot of this would involve strengthening how the AI responds to what the player does. Player does decides to do something, but when they do the AI responds, and the player is pressured into doing something to respond to the AI's response.
Basically it would involve encouraging more situations that for a short moment temporarily take tempo away from the player while they run their course.
Some of this does exist in the game, destroying command posts frees all of the units for example, and some guard posts that cause retaliation when destroyed do exist.
What I'm proposing is to have more such action at a more tactical level, where the AI responds to something the player does things to more significantly affect smaller scale situations, like when the player attempts to take the planet.
