Nroug7: As mentioned above, ill be handling programming/coding.
MonstaMunch: What he means is, you might want to start "handing" it before you even begin looking for front end people, as if you find them now, they will be gone/busy again by the time you're ready for them to get going on their part.
As others here have suggested, at very least you should consider working from an existing engine, if not starting out by simply modding a few games that give you the code and an SDK. Trying to do it from scratch will have a high chance of causing you to rage quit the project altogether.
Precisely, coding for some genres in the modern era is less important than for others. RTS is a particularly tough genre to code for as you absolutely have to optimize the hell out of it if you want to avoid having lame resource limits. Trying to path find for 600 or more units which can happen on a large scale game is going to push just about any machine to it's knees even without the other associated calculations.
If one were coding for an oldschool point and click adventure, even with current graphics, you'd be more likely to get away with putting off the coding tasks for a while.
EDIT: Additionally, this is a very big idea from the sound of it, and you're not going to know how much scope you can complete if you aren't hard at work, like today, coding it up. Some of these ideas are probably not going to work or are going to involve too much computational time to work as slated. The last thing you want is to have assembled a team only to find that you're only going to need a third of the models requested because you had to cut back the scope or that you're having to cut out a type of civilization because you couldn't make it balance.
