"*Arguably Dawn Of War killed Civilization inspired Real Time Strategy games like Age Of Empires and Empire Earth."

I'm pretty dubious about Dawn of War killing the genre. It's popular, yeah, but a massive genre-changing blockbuster? Not really.

The idea of base building is being phased out. Don't know which series attempts to obsolete Base Building like Autohealing shooters did to medpack based shooters (with "survival" horror being the exception.). I mean an iconic series (Command And Conquer) has phased out base building in their newest one. And Civilization Style Real Time Strategy is pretty much dead as the major proponents of such series are in limbo due to the producers are in development hell with trying to make a new game.

The reason Empire Earth died is because the third game flopped. The reasons the "Ages Of" series died is beause Microsoft close Ensemble to focus more on Halo and Forza Motorsport. The changes made to C&C4 are already being decried by pretty much everyone in the fanbase, so I doubt that wil stick around. Let's see how Starcraft 2 (which has base-building) do before making any prediction.

Starcraft 2 will survive, but any new real time strategy will be more in the line of real time tactics. The only RTS that will survive in the end will be Starcraft