The enemy comes and then they hit your walls and break like waves. It may take hours but it results in a grand finale where every endgame troop and technology can come into play, the sky thick with artillery or dragons. The pleasure comes from anticipation, careful planning of defenses and the escalation of repulsing smaller attacks before the final push comes. It may seem like a boring playstyle, but I'd argue turtling is just differently fun. Turtling became a noob tactic, a no-fun way of dragging out a match that you'll lose in the end anyway. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes force you to leave your base and capture points that are spread across the map to win, and everything about StarCraft 2 is balanced to push you into a rush. On the internet a quick game's a good game, and real-time strategy evolved to encourage blitzkrieg tactics even more. There was a noticeable shift once strategy games moved online. Those are all old games though, where the focus was on LAN play and skirmishes against braindead bots.
In the early Total War games blocks of spears were the favorite for defensive players on battle maps, and in the campaign you could make a few early conquests to take all of, say, the British Isles, and then settle down to turtle from there. So were several of the Command & Conquer games (long live RA2's French Grand Cannon), and Age of Empires 2 had those great forest maps where well-placed walls could shut down half the land.
Strangelove, Supreme Commander was a turtle's dream. Though you had to turn off nukes in the sequel if you didn't want every game to end like Dr. And if that wasn't enough there were also mobile anti-air guns that were, at the lowest tech level, better value for money. For air defense you'd start with straight-up anti-air turrets, then go to anti-air flak artillery, before finally bringing out the big guns of anti-air SAM launchers. It spoiled you for choice with different kinds of turrets for air, land, and sea, as well as variations for each of the three tech tiers. Supreme Commander was a natural fit for turtling, especially if you downloaded one of the mods that made the AI more threatening.
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