I grew up with C&C and definitely prefer base building. It adds a very important dimension to the game. I honestly never understood the more tactical RTS where you just command a lot of units, it feels like micromanagement spam. By having base building you have an upper strategic layer where additional decisions matter. Though the problem usually becomes that people discover optimal build orders (i.e. Starcraft) and then the whole thing again becomes who can micromanage commands faster. I'm afraid this is why RTS are starting to get less popular.

For this reason I find RTS with good single player campaigns a lot more enjoyable than multiplayer, and asymmetrical base building adds to the experience of progression. With other genres I generally prefer multiplayer over singleplayer.

Base building is a staple for RTS games, making the right choices on building and resource acquisition and management is a great part of what makes RTS "strategy". However I do enjoy a more purely tactical approach where you have to care about how to reach a target and going out unscathed like in Men of War, Blitzkrieg (I didn't play much of these, so maybe there's base building later?) and similar.

In my opinion, base building makes the RTS game more engaging and the decisions on it have a bigger impact on the battle. Certainly base building makes RTS more fun for me.

I prefer the base building most of all. World in Conflict was well done and remember it being enjoyable, but there's a satisfaction to growing your base that is more fun. I hate that multiplayer on those games turned into spamming hotkeys and becoming a robot who knew all the combos to press and the timing where if you watch them play it might as well be an AI playing. Long ago, you used to be able to play RTS games online against normal people just having fun but even back then after a few years it started getting into the hyper efficient stuff. Starcraft online was the WORST for this.

There's a great community for finding and enjoying more games in this style, for those interested: look up /r/BaseBuildingGames/ on Reddit. I personally played AoE II, Empire Earth, C&C, Earth 2150 (and an unusual outlier - Netstorm) and in every one of those I just liked building a big base with lots of defenses and slowly expanding across the map.

I prefer base building. Could never get into the arcade style games, like Dawn of War 2. But I can keep an open mind. I remember having fun playing Faces of War.

Base building for me. To be fair I don't remember playing RTS games where there wasn't base buulding in them

Thanks for the opportunity! Good luck for everyone!