Unit skirmish button!

This feature could be abused so easily. For example, everyone will set their bot fabbers to skirmish mode so tanks won't ever be able to catch up and kill them

C'mon, I didn't say stupid, and I've suggested a very enjoyable reading, that's for smart people

I agree but that can be countered by 4 ways:
1. The more conservative being don't put the button for non combat units.

2. U can mess with the mechanics of acceleration of fabbers, so that tanks can catch up to them.

3. U can give them a smaller field of view so the tank sees them before they see the tank

4. The less conservative being u don't use tanks to hunt for fabbers, for that u have to have a more mobile unit perhaps bots or aircraft (maybe tanks are good at destroying metal extractors, structures, and other armor), so if u wanna raid u have to have a mix of units or choose after what u wanna hunt, to counter the raid of faster units u protect the fabber with the armor AKA tanks. also a lone fabber retreating from a tank is not building anything and the second it stops it is dead (so it is in fact neutralized).

Kiting a dozen infernos down with dox requires a lot more than "one click". It can take 2 to 5 per tank (depending on the number of dox), and you're left wasting lots of time as a result. Oh, and that's just a dozen. Pretty sure you'll have more than that to deal with.
And no, infernos do not need nearly as much micro to be effective. Leaving the dox alone means they lose to a single tank, when they could take out all of them.
Leave an inferno alone and it automatically chases units thanks to the roam command mode, which is much closer to optimal behaviour for it.
If PA has a 'roam' feature, I don't see any reason an 'evade' feature should not be included. Having one without the other gives certain unit types a major advantage in unmicroed altercations.

I don't think it would be a problem for fabbers, because activating it would make interrupting construction very easy. Also, maybe it would give dox a bigger role if tanks had trouble chasing down fabbers (which honestly makes sense to me anyway).

This kind of feature would nerf the hell out of infernos, vanguards, and tanks in general. I kind of like it when my enemy doesnt notice that his units are being taken out hehe.

I don't think it would nerf aventails too much. If you see a group of dox defending something and they're set to evade, they'll stay away and let you destroy whatever it is. It's just a tactical option after all, with negative and positive consequences, like choosing between 'roam' and 'hold position'.

And why a bot fabber should be that stupid to let a tank kill it? Fabbers shouldn't be in Skirmish mode while building. But even so, it would be already a victory for a single tank to force a bunch of fabbers to interrupt their building queue.

Using balance as an excuse as to why something shouldn't be added can apply to anything. Balance can always change.

And how exactly is that a problem? It's well known that the role of Infernos and Vanguards is currently extremely OP against mobile units - just due to the lack of automated dodging.
They are required to break fortified positions, so their role is justified. But their impact onto regular unit formations is off limit.

Besides: Reduction of micro is one of the major design goals for this game and it was from the very beginning. Don't even bring that "but I have nothing to do if I can't micro"-bullshit. You are always free to micro whenever you think that you can do better than the AI.

But crippling unit roles beyond recognition by stripping the command system from any meaningful automation is just off the limits.

Automation is required, the scale of the game makes it plain impossible to micro units at every single front by hand. The AI can do it, but no human player possibly can. Denying this feature means making large scale multi planet battles impossible and very frustrating.

It's not a balance issue its a fundamental flaw in game mechanics if units run away because of auto manuveur. Imagine sniper bots on evade and you have radar... It means that all you have to do is build it, set rally point to location and turn on evade. You've just locked down an entire location and you haven't done anything yourself, let alone challenging or fun. It just takes away from players playing the game. There is a fine line between the mechanics helping you to do simple tasks, e.g setting up a patrol over an area, but making the game micro for you because you were silly enough to neglect your units is way over.

I don't have a problem microing all my units anyway. Every group of units I have I give them a hotkey so if they are needed or are in trouble i can quickly get to them. It seems too much like a command you turn on when you units arent doing squat because you don't know what to do with them. All it would do is lessen the advantage of an offensive player. Ranged units would rule. It would almost be an exploit. It would be like hiring Matiz to micro for you because you suck at it, while you're making 'important decisions' like whether you want to build moar t1 tonks or go errbutal or get your combat fabbers to open their own micrami workshop.

Just relax, you can get on top 30 of PAStats even if your avg. APM is 80. You don't have to have an APM avg. like elodea and matiz. Combat maneuvers shouldn't have passive commands like skirmish or evade. Active ones are fine, like area attack etc.

The reason why skirmish is in Total War is because its a freaking b**** when you have to reform a line of missile units, which you are directly looking at. It's not like the skirmish feature lets you just win every conflict as long as you have range. You still have to keep an eye on your units - something which wouldn't be needed in PA.

Apart from this game having been advertised as trying to eliminate micro...

It is also about playing on a whole solar system with potentially LOTS of planets and thousands of units and no average player will ever be able to micro all units at the same time. And to me (being a relatively average player) it is not all that much fun to micro units all over the place.
Also, complex strategies could involve attacking multiple locations at once, which is downright impossible to do effectively right now because you can only ever micro one of those armies (if you are not some crazy pro who switches the camera location using anchors every second...and even then it would be hard) because a few infernos could take out your whole attack that would have been devastating if you had microed that particular army.

Also, if microing makes up most of the fun of PA and the other things you do are not "'important decisions'" (I am not arguing that this isn't the case), then Uber utterly failed to create a game that fits the original vision that was conveyed to me and (apparently) many others.

I don't care for the PAStats ladder, btw., and neither will most other people. They care first and foremost about having fun while playing the game they paid money for.

An offensive player should not have an advantage because his opponent was too stupid or too slow to "micro" his units, but because he found a weak spot in his opponent's defense (or created one by doing fake attacks, etc.) and exploited it at the right time using the right units, for example. Actual STRATEGY, you know ? Not small scale combat tactics.

And as others already said, balance can not be an excuse to not implement such "tools" (especially since Uber claimed not to want to purposefully strip the game of such tools but implement as many as possible of them).
If sniper bots become op, if such features are implemented, they need to be rebalanced (and yes, they would become op). Make them set up before they can shoot and make them take some time before they move again after shooting. Make them be slower than smaller bots, so a couple of Dox can chase them down if they are unprotected, etc.
Make them have stealth to allow them to destroy interesting, undefended targets from afar in a single salvo, before the enemy notices and then retreat (like actual snipers..). But if they are caught while setting up or just after attacking and have no army to protect them, then they are utterly annihilated.
But if they are simply walking around, they should not be walking straight into an inferno or vanguard, simply because the player didn't babysit every single one of them in a game that is about having potentially hundreds or thousands of such units.

Any single unit can be balanced to work with such features. It's simply about whether Uber lied to us about PA being "the ultimate macro game" and whether they are willing to spend time on implementing the features that are needed to fulfill that promise.

Pointless micro.

Not automate the unit's so the player doesn't need to command them.

Ignoring the fact that IMO perfectly accurate radar blips are a problem in at of itself there are probably plenty of ways to deal with that situation given proper balance. If someone defends a location with just skirmishing sniper bots a) bomb them, b) rush them, or c) outrange them. The idea is making the right decisions, not executing actions in the fastest possible manner.

If you can handle that many units efficiently, you'll still be superior when faced with smart unit AI. At the worst, even people with a significantly lower APM will pose a bit of a challenge to you due to their units not being utterly useless when left alone for a minute.

Also, any predictions you make when considering this feature, in this case ranged units overpowering everything else, are quite likely to change drastically with proper balance patches.

For a game striving to be the "perfect macro game", APM should only in some few edge cases be the deciding factor.

No matter the unit AI, in the foreseeable future it probably will never be a good idea to entirely ignore whatever your units are doing.

Where do you draw that line? Manually directing units that could easily kite others automatically seems pretty pointless to me.

While we're at it, it probably couldn't hurt to mention the other threads we already have on that topic.

By that logic, we can get a command for dox which makes them zig zag when attacking tanks because we need to focus more on macro. Imagine watching a zaphod cast and he's going "Err yeah that was great micro of those sniper bots by the... ai...". The fun of a human opponent is that humans make mistakes. Diversions, distractions, trickery are all part of the game. The only thing that brings your units to life are you, otherwise we could get commands to just auto build a desired build or whatever.

You're giving the attacker a huge disadvantage: Attacker has to micro while defender is not doing anything.

They absolutely should add something like that. Why shouldn't small, fast units not be able to dodge slow projectiles? They should try dodging artillery shells and rushing e.g. laser defenses they wouldn't be able to dodge.

Nothing of that would be taken away, instead it would happen on a different level of gameplay. With extensive micro you're only matching purely mechanical skill with your opponent. That's not what I imagine when thinking about the competitive aspects of strategy games.

Unit AI works both ways as long as we don't restrict it to kiting. There are perfectly viable ways to make assaults smarter as well. The deciding factor is how well your decisions are thought through, that's true no matter how smart your individual units are. Unit AI (ideally) just reduces the mechanical overhead for implementing your decisions.

Yes you could. I have implemented zig zaging as well. Did you consider that you do not always want to zig zag because a straight line will enable you to reach firing range faster?

The main argument of those against this type of automation is that it would trivialize battle management. That people could just a-move their armies at each other. I have a game quite similar to PA with this type of automation and battles are not trivial. So I don't see how their position is supported.

So say in a chess game your opponent hasn't noticed that your pawn is just about to take out his queen, you think it would be okay for someone else to point it out to him because he can't see it? It's similar to what this command would do. I would have to micro to keep chasing after a unit thats evading while he has the time to surprise attack me. To me this is a bit unfair that the advantage is flipped to the other side because I am attack microing.

If you hate micro so much why not just add a seek and destroy command for every unit, they micro themselves, find targets of high priority, make their own clusters, flank, do everything for you. How would this be fun, enjoyable to watch in a stream or play?

Anyone ever consider that auto-kiting might be a drawback for unit groups using it? Something do be exploited by both sides? I do not care about single units kiting - if single units start being so powerful that this actually matters we are on our way to Blizzard-land and have far bigger problems than too much automation.
So, bring a bunch of fast units and scatter a kiting group with literally no effort. All of a sudden the un-microed, auto-kiting, scattered subgroups might find themselves be divided into unfavourable new compositions. Your originally cohesive and complementing group might now be spread across a huge area. And fail to provide sufficient anti-air coverage. Enter the bombers.
An inverse of the 'greater than the sum of its parts' principle, if you will.

Drawing comparisons to chess is a tricky thing, given that you play it with perfect information and usually without time restrictions. Not noticing a player's move is an entirely different thing from not anticipating it.
In PA, time and attention are valuable resources you need to weigh your decisions against. Micro takes both time and attention, which IMO is more detrimental to a strategy game than beneficial.

Then again, you would not have to follow units with heavy micro. This is an option open to you but given a decent amount of automation it probably wouldn't be the most viable one. If you get sidetracked like that, a surprise attack will usually be effective. I'd rather outsmart an opponent than outclick him.

It wouldn't be because that kind of change would remove all agency from the player. You can do much with automation but you need to decide which level is best for the game you're making. I could conceive of a game that essentially plays itself where you just get to fudge with the parameters the AI uses. While probably not that interesting to watch it could pose quite a bit of a challenge to the individual player. PA should not be that game, though. On the either hand, it shouldn't be a game that's won mostly on mechanical skill either.