I would discuss about the best game engines. My top list now is: - UDK - Unity - Visual 3d.NET - NeoAxis - Esenthel I thoght about price for Indiee developers, RAD Tools for content creation, 3D Exporters and easy-to-use API. A long, long time ago I thoght about beatiful game in world of Dune. But first question is genre of the game, strategy isn't only ascpect of Dune. There is summary of intelligence, strategy, troops tactic and field tactic. A lot of good of features for world of Dune have hybrids like FPS/RPG (DeusEx) or FPS/RTS (GroundControl, BattleZone).
