Keeping PA from Becoming a Clickfest that Doesn't Rely on Strategy

Yes. That is a huge clickbait title. But it's also a fairly accurate title.

Specifically, I'm talking about the technique of rapidly clicking from left to right to make bots zigzag from left to right to dodge enemy fire. It works best in small groups with bots.

That is not strategy. That is "clickfest dodging" and in my opinion has no place in a true RTS game.

Winning an engagement because you clicked at the right tempo rewards players for their clicking technique instead of their strategic choices. This is not strategy. It's clicking rapidly and winning engagements because of it.

With current gameplay it seems to be a component of early small bot raids. But with the buff that bots have gotten and with who knows what else to be had, I really don't want PA to fall into this hole that StarCraft fell into. It's not a component of RTSes that I like.

Remember, the goal of Planetary Annihilation is supposed to be about large scale gameplay and focusing on the big picture rather than focusing in on single engagements.

Not completely sure the best way of removing this from the game. Maybe slowing down the turn rate of bots?

What do you guys think?

Should players be rewarded for clicking at the right tempo?

If you this mechanic should be removed, how do you think it should be removed?

Nice thread, cant I imagine that that this has not been asked before
So yeah my first thought would be to lower the turn rate of bots, but only a bit that you cant make this "clickfest", but they must be so quick like bots should be quick in turning, this should be balanced.

I agree completely. It rewards constant microing in a game that already has too much APM. I hope they patch it. A couple ideas I have are to either make the bots be hit a % of the time or to add a secondary attack to weapons that always hits but does less than standard damage, like a laser for example, while keeping the primary attack that misses.

Comparisons between Starcraft and PA are common and the clickfest nature of Starcraft does get brought up.

But I haven't seen any threads that specifically talk about clickfest techniques in PA and how to deal with them. That's because high micro techniques are few and far between and are often patched rather quickly, like how bombers, particularly Hornets, used to be so crazy OP when microed that they could hover over enemies and drop bomb after bomb.

Uber is doing a great job of keeping PA from being a click fest so far.

Yes, Starcraft is a true clickfest ( some people have like 500 APM!), but I don't like it too, that you must micro bots, I doesn't matter if you have 2 bots more, you will lose.

Personally I think that ability should be added to bots inherently.

It's clearly a case of you stopping being the overarching general, and assuming the intelligence of an individual unit.

Which is in my opinion a very bad thing. You should not be having to assume the intelligence of individual units to do stuff that they should be figuring out for themselves.

I like the maneuverability of bots, they actually feel different to vehicles. I am slightly worried that patching this out by removing the ability to dodge just makes them feel like worse vehicles.

I don't want PA to have a very high APM requirement ceiling either (the fact is that higher APM will always help even when only relatively low APM is required) but I do want some level of tactics to factor into individual battles.

If PA battles only depend on unit quantity and unit composition I think it would result in less gameplay depth. Tactcical maneuvering initiated by the player can be a good mechanic that adds to gameplay depth. For example flanking maneuvers, speed boosts to evade some hits, formations that allow more units to fire simultaneously, etc.

Now the example with bots that you mention is a bit of a gray line... I'm not really sure if I think it's good or bad.

I love the maneuverability of bots as well and I don't want that taken away.

Auto dodging could be a nice addition.

I just don't want PA to be a click fest.

I don't think doing that kind of bot control is very good actually. Ofc you can do it and in some rare situations it will be good, but in most cases the attention you spent on that one little thing could have been spent on expanding more.
That's much better in most cases.

I like this idea of making zig zag movements part of the unit AI for bots. It would preserve gameplay depth without requiring more APM.

OP is absolutely correct, but I would add that this is a high quality problem to have.

Auto raiding, auto skirm, and so on are fairly simple behaviors to automate. Bots can easily be programmed to run in random patterns when in battle, or skirmishers can automatically back away while firing.

What we have is a great foundation for a strategy game, but currently players are almost totally unassisted, and the economy scales exponentially far too quickly. The result is that there is just way too much stuff to do, and the player must do it all manually. In terms of order of implementation, things like automation of player tasks should be late in the sequence because an automation widget would need to be redone if significant changes are made to the base game.

Probably the rampant economy needs to be addressed before any player command automation and intelligent UI work is necessary.

Oh, what about making it a triggered ability that utilizes energy so that it will still require player intervention to utilize without require a lot of APM?

I really dislike triggered abilities in a game this large scale.

I think the zig zag being part of the AI would be terrible. Imagine 300 bots moving toward a base and zig zaging on thier own which u cant control, which slows them down, lets them get chewed by laser towers, and other defenses, and looks stupid. Also, it would probably add lag with all that happening. It would not work at all for me and would break the game really. I'm pretty sure the devs know better than to put that in there.

That's a good point. Players need to be able to tell bots "go a straight line" or "do zick zack stuff".
Also to be effective the zick zack stuff must be adaptive to the attacker or it will fail.

The raider micro widget in ZK is very simple, and very effective. Certain raiders (especially glaives/bandits) need to stay in motion constantly in order to be effective because unless they are in motion they are easily destroyed by almost anything. The constant motion of those units are central to their design, and balancing them against other units.

From the perspective of being a high-level commander, you should be able to instruct an army of units to just "attack," and have those units work out the details. This includes moving into range, aiming at appropriate targets, keeping moving to avoid damage, and so on. A force of units should be smart enough to execute a more high-level command like "attack" without micromanagement.

Ideally, eventually the intelligent UI would keep forces coherent, spread against splash damage, focus fire, and other things that are the universal principles of "obvious micro" in games like Starcraft.

Bots are better at dodging shots than any other unit.

They also happen to be a unit that is exceptionally good at dodging artillery if microed correctly.

I really do not have an opinion on this. It's something small that doesn't effect the game in a massive way (besides making bots way more effective)

As long as this clicky stuff isnt expanded to other parts of the game via memorization of build orders or something silly, I'll be fine with it.

Auto-maneuvering has some precedent in bombers, and while it's accepted by the playerbase, there's some begrudging it. How many times have your bombers looped away after delivering their payload, only to circle into AA fire to take prolonged damage? Adding it for bots would be a terrible idea.

The question I have is, which types of fire are being dodged here? Regular tank/dox fire, or artillery? The latter is inevitably going to miss most moving targets as it stands, but the former you can't correct without homing missiles or some such nonsense. The only solution I can see is to keep ratcheting up the "macro" aspects of the game, such that taking time to direct forces in such a way comes at a hefty price - or, at least, moreso than it does currently.

Even without juking left and right, though, do bombers/gunships suffer the same problem? Gunships in particular I worry about having a Starcraft analogue, since it behaves a lot more like that game's air units.

Or they could simply go in a straight line until they get under fire then the start zig zagging.

But maybe you want to chase that one commander and you want to do it as fast as possible?