Unit skirmish button!

I was thinking, wouldn't it be great to have a skirmish button for units, it reminds me of the system in total war. Well what does this button do u might ask me: well it tells a unit to engage targets at maximum distance and automatically retreat to try to maintain that distance. To do that now it requires a lot of micro, this should be automatic.

With this implemented your T1 tanks and bots can easily kite those infernos and vanguards, your t2 bombers don't run into ground anti-air, your artillery actually try to avoid an incoming army.

It would make hit and run tactics much more fun and easy to use, in one move it would make unit speed and range actually matter. And it is a button so you choose when you want your units to use those tactics.

TL DR:

Kiting.

I dunno. This is borderline letting the game play itself for you.

Not really. Back up to stay out of range from threats might be useful, but it wouldn't be nearly as good as micro.

I don't think so, its just an tactical option that decreases the micro in the game and it is by no means the best option all the time. It gives the player more option witch tends to be a good thing.

So many things can be argued as being a "Tactical option" that it's really just lost all meaning to the general vagueness in which you use it.

Simply being a option doesn't make it good or even smart, no matter the amount of times people have insisted that being so makes something a good idea.

Being a option in of it's self doesn't self validate it's self into existence.

In the first post i explain why I think is good tactical option.( "With this implemented your T1 tanks and bots can easily kite those infernos and vanguards, your t2 bombers don't run into ground anti-air, your artillery actually try to avoid an incoming army.")

The post you quoted is a response to Brian's assertion that this option would be like letting the game play itself. In it, I say that giving the player more options to tactically use their units TENDS to be a good thing. Not always.

The main drawback of using this is that your units can end up retreating too much. Example: instead of holding their ground and the enemy can push you back to your base. Thats why is an option, and it is a tactical one hence the use of the expression "tactical option".

But in this case i see no drawback in letting the players chose the instance in witch they use their units. Do you? Please elaborate, I placed this idea forward so that we can discuss it.

Automating the unit behaviour kinda takes away from the point of doing anything other then attack moving.

And your pitching this to a multi-player and competitive focused forum, so there isn't a way in hell people will agree with this.

If people find it more fun to micro their armies let them, but i think is nice to have options not to need to do so if u wanna focus on macro.

The devs are always saying this is not Starcraft, that they wanna people to focus more on the grand scale of things. And in my experience with other games when this was implemented it didn't make the game play by itself, but allowed people to use hit and run tactics that are not in use in this game, it incentives people to use a mix of units including faster ones, that is the main difference in heavy units and light units, mobility, so it opens up another layer of gameplay IMO. And if u find it automates the game too much for you just don't use the button and micro your units manually.

It appears there is already a bunch of auto-micro handled by units. E.g. the air units dodge incoming attacks, as do bots. Having a 'keep-back-at-my-maximum-attack-range' doesn't seem much of a stretch from what already exists. No sure if it tips the balance to heavily away from macro tho. I'd guess probably not, since I'm much more interested in attack routes for my armies than how each unit is moving.

This game isn't starcraft because the game is different, and that shouldn't be applied to what every you think it does.

Having the ability to turn it off is not a reason to include something, that is a circular argument.

I gave you the reasons why i believe it would be a nice addition, it's not a circular argument if i tell tell you that, despite those reasons, if you still don't like it, you can just not use it. And the only reason u gave thus far not to implement it is that you don't like using automation, so the argument for you not to use it if you don't want to, makes perfect sense in this context.

And i gave the Starcraft example because the devs in several occasions mentioned they want to move away from micro, and we all know that game is a clickfest.

Hope this help you understand what I said.

This would remove one of the hardest game mechanics: micro. Sorry, not a fan of this.

You must be a great fan of vanguards and infernos then.

Here's my issue; if I want to counter a vanguard or inferno, I need to micro a lot. The player using vanguards or infernos, doesn't. For a macro-focused game, forcing you to tell units "don't hug the inferno" manually and constantly is annoying.
Units already have a guard radius, and by default will roam to attack enemies automatically within that guard radius (the roam setting on the side bar dictates this). I haven't seen anyone complain about this automatic behavior.
How is an evade / retreat setting to automatically stay out of enemy range any less warranted than a roam setting to automatically put enemies in range?

(Also, somewhat ironically, it's the roam feature that lets you throw infernos at units without micro since they benefit the most from closing the gap, will follow enemy units autonomously and cannot benefit from kiting anyway)

TIL: avoiding infernos is super hard micro. That one click is so hard to do...! No, optimally using infernos and vanguards requires more micro, albeit a slightly different kind of micro.

Also, sc2 is trying to get rid of meaningless micro. For example your workers will now automatically go to mineral patches on game start. Moving away from micro also does not necessarily mean cutting it out, but simply giving more value to attention that is spent on macro.

As for the 'clickfest', it's a part of the huge appeal of the game. Easy to learn, hard to master. A golden principle that goes all the way back to tetris.

Your discussion could move beyond pure theory by looking at Zero-K. This feature has been implemented there for years. In short I think lmalukobr is right in saying that it would add real tactical options. If you want a game to not be all about micro it is a good thing to add.

Automatic kiting does not make an RTS trivial because ZK has it and it is not a trivial game. So to argue that PA would become trivial has to use some special feature of PA. The balance may in fact be such that some reasonably fast and long ranged unit becomes much too powerful with automatic kiting. If that were the case I think the unit in question would already be OP for high micro players. Being unable to micro that well would effectively cut people off from high level play so such a unit is bad if you are trying to achieve the goal of micro being not that important.

A similar counter argument can be made for the inclusion of Attack-Move. This order is not strictly needed to play the game and it is just a piece of automation. Players could just use Move commands and then manually tell their units to stop if they find an enemy to ensure it stays within range.

It sounds like a nice to have feature. In Total War a similar option helps a lot in focusing on a bigger scale of the battle. After all even Sub-Commanders have been proposed and they take control of en entire base. So why not having units deciding a little bit for themselves, if told so?

After all, the AI already practice kiting. Easy for it. And time/click consuming for a human player.

In matter of balance, it could be made that in Skirming mode a unit slows down the rate of fire, to compensate the fact that it is actually firing and moving in range. Aside the fact that not holding position could have a tactical cost higher than retreating.

Anyhow, it's a bit annoying when people close their mind up in a denial for the sake of it. Here's a good read for those folks (with love )
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0141039167/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y

It's also annoying when people call me close minded and frankly stupid just because I don't agree with them.

"Planetary Annihilation is the ultimate macro game." - Jon Mavor aka @neutrino

This sentence made me buy PA.
And so far I have been utterly disappointed by it.

Therefore, I fully agree and wish for generally smarter unit ai, area commands and more high level command features.

Many things have changed since the days of Kickstarter, but a bold statement like this indicates that focusing on macro is a guiding principle in the design of this game and therefore I expect such features.