This took a moment to sink in but that's quite exactly how I played it (and Dune 2000) back in the day. Way before I even knew Tower Defense games :-)

Ah, I miss those long windy trails of concrete and rocket turrets built right at their base :)

Also the first game I learned to 'hack', and it's what set me on the path to learning programming: I discovered a hex file editor on a floppy and had a hunch about how things might fit together.

So I saved a game, waited a second until some money was spent in the game and then saved again into a different slot. Thereafter I went through the two save game files, visually figured out which parts were different between the files, changed the magical numbers I saw, reloaded the game and slowly figured out how to make myself rich :)

(This worked much better than my earlier attempt with the disk editor I found where I thought I was really clever compressing files by changing their size to 0.)

Yea I remember that! Was it a utility or something off a bbs? I remember a hex editor!

Indeed, and I often came up with solutions that looked like Vauban star forts[0]. I also remember having a hard time in a C&C3 mission (where you raid the Nod temple), whose defense is tiered similarly.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_fort