There have been new plays on the scorched earth idea. One company named Team17 made a series of games that were a mix between Lemmings & Scorched Earth called Worms, worms 2 and Worms Armegeddon games. You can download demos from www.team17.com

Why not make a cross between chess and scorched earth.
At the beginning of the game, you place your tanks where you want on your territory and your opponent do the same thing. When the game start, you have the choice to fire or move. The goal would be to destroy the base, the king, of the opponent. It should be plyed on a 3d landscape in a turn based way.
How about that ?

Ah, history... The Schorched Earth was absolutely one of the coolest shareware games that I played. I used to play it with my friends more than weeks, but then I just got bored for whole game. Still I think that it''s pretty cool, but something is missing... And now, after 4 years, I found "scorched earth 2"
It''s called TOTALTANK (If I remember right), and it''s not actually real game, it''s extra an extra game included with Duke Nukem 3D Sega Saturn version. Idea is to simply kill the enemy, but WOU it''s cool

Total Tank is realtime game, where you can drive your tanks, use "jump packs" and ofcourse shoot. The reason why I love that minigame is simply that it''s so addictive when both players really are facing total chaos :D

If you don''t want to create turnbased game, maybe you should add everything MUCH MORE than Scorched Earth. I ALWAYS wanned features like this for scorched earth:

-Moving tanks... Scorched Earth tanks just slide a bit
-Bases !
-Capture The Flag !
-Scrolling playfield with Parallax background
-Cool effects
-LOTS OF WEAPONS
-Team Deathmatch (was included in Scorched Earth)
-Different vehicles, commando, sniper, humm-vee etc.

Yap, think about those features