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Balancing is important to me, and since that is my primary purpose, I think it would be wise if the team made a sort of way to test balancing with an actuall visual interface etc. My first recommendation is WC3: it's stable and very easy to set up a basic game for preliminary testing. It might be diffictult implementing connected buildings or battalions, but representations of these things can be added. I don't know how many people have WarCraft, but I know that I have it and I'm actually capable of working on it. If anyone has a better (and perhaps easier) game that can be modded on mind, then please be sure to post it.

balancing is important yes, but it will only be important once the engine is finished and all units have been created, so we don't need to use WC3

Using warcraft III to test balance would be impractical.  Getting even a few of the features we've talked about implemented in warcraft III would take a sh!t load of work that could otherwise be spent on the engine.  Moreover, no matter how well we did it the difference between the WC3 test and the actual engine would be so great that any balance we came on in the WC3 variation would be useless.

I randomly pulled WC3 out of thin air. I have used it for prelimnary balancing before, and found it vaguely useful, but 2playgames had a good point with balancing should be done after the engine is complete. I'm not positive you're correct Darvin; I find WC3 very easy to mod, it would simply be difficult to get things like Add-on buildings in the engine. Mind you, this was more of a "passing fancy" than anything else.

[walkable walls]

Warcraft III is better than any other game out there for adapting and testing ideas, but it's still completely insufficiant.  Getting a squad formation and AI, flanking, managing collision, walkable walls, automatically developing cities, automated workers, more than two resources, stealthed units (not invisible, just difficult to detect near the edge of your line of sight), unit stamina, and squad levelling would all be very difficult, and even if it was achieved you'd only need a few minor differences in the way the algorithm worked out in the individual engines and you could have drastically different results, making the balancing worthless.

The Warcraft III editor is powerful, but it has its limitations.  It can only manage things as complex as it was designed to, everything else has to be manually coded, and you're stuck with the procedural Jass language.  In terms of work, that's like writing a RTS engine in the C language...

writing a RTS engine in the C language...

Yeah, I've worked in C.  Trust me, the moment you've done OOP, there's no going back.

i've never done anything procedural in fact, apart from PHP

I've done some C programming for an engineering related course, and Jass for the warcraft III map editor is procedural, and I've done my fair share of coding in that.

I am currently teaching myself C++, as it seems an appropriate language to learn for game dev. Also, OGRE3D is a SDK for C++; which is why I'm learning it!

If you ever need any help, feel free to ask.  Programming is a lot like writing an essay.  It's one thing to have sentences that are grammatically correct (ie, code that compiles), but quite another to have an approachable style that conveys a message (design and reusability of code).

I'll certainly seek you out if I run into an obstacle, though so far it's been smooth sailing for me.