My friend and I want to design a real-time strategy game in the same vain as Warcraft, Age of Empires, or C&C. We've decided to use Microsoft's Direct X 7.0 API and Visual C++ 6.0 for building the game, but we would like to save some time and skip writing our own engine. Does any one know where we can get an inexpensive engine that would speed up the process of creating a real-time strategy game? The game will be purely 2-D, so we would like to stay away from the complexity of a 3-D engine. It would also be nice if the engine came with a level editor.

Thanks in Advance, Kevin

Yup...check out this website..there are tons of links and a pretty decent 2D Isometric engine too with it's source code.Goto: http://www.multimania.com/hatti/MrY/isoxeng.html

And check out the Isometric discussion board here at Gamedev.net