Unit skirmish button!

This argument is tricky PA. The main feature isn't 1vs1 on a single, tiny planet, it's massive matches, possibly with shared control, spanning several large planets.

Past matches and tournaments have shown that players are already APM capped in such systems, even with teams of 4 players. And that's already just by managing whole platoons only on a tactical level, not even micromanaging units but mainly using queued up commands. Simply because there is no time for micro managing units.

If you send units in attack, then it's not skirmish. Unless we want roaming to function as kiting.

Also, vanguards and infernos are slower than other units, therefore if you mix up your armies, they come late to the party, as you wish. And this should be the goal with specialized units and units variety.

Anyway, heavy units (like vanguards and infernos) have not reason to skirmish. Their range of fire is ridiculous, and they're too slow anyway. Skirmish is a behavior more suitable for scouts and light units. Perhaps for AWACS and mobile radar if we would ever have any.

Or for mobile artillery. But, of course, assuming units would adopt a smarter behavior, like trying to get themselves out of enemy fire (if told so - they could also been told to hold position), lacks and deficiencies in the balance aspect of the game, or its strategic deepness, would be more visible.

For instance, artillery units retreating from an incoming enemy should suffer some sort of penalty in fire range, rate and accuracy.

So, in the end, it's a matter of balance.

wow some long posts.

I'd just be repeating arguments that have already been made so I won't write a long epic post other than to say... For the love of god please do NOT implement this sort of feature!

Thanks for your opinion.

Indeed this is a lot about time management.
I am not 100 % sure but I dare to say that I want PA to be less about time management. I don't want to decide whether I fight effectively or whether I care for my production.
I want to be able to make the "best" decisions about everything at any time. I want to feel in control of everything.
And since PA is a game with potentially lots of things going on at the same time, I believe you should not be forced to spend much time on certain things that don't give you meaningful choices.
I think this is also interesting when it comes to competitive gaming, as I (being mostly a spectator ) like to see who of those players/teams was able to outsmart their enemy by making the better decisions. Too often this is skewed because one side wasn't able to spend their time as effectively as the other one.
I think this is why turn based games (chess has been mentioned here but we can talk about actual computer games, as well) are often perceived as being more tactical: Because it is only about the decisions, not so much about time.
I believe that to be more interesting.

Also, I don't want full unit ai. I don't want the units to make any big decisions for themselves. That might be an area on it's own (giving ai control over parts of your forces) but it's not what this is about.
Your army should not be afraid to attack some turrets. Maybe there could be some mechanism that prevents units from accidently walking into a turret's range when you are giving move commands to a large force (although I don't think that would be reliably possible and it's not that important, anyways), but if you move some units into a turret's range, the units simply move there. If you leave them there, they wouldn't automatically retreat (you should get a notification or something about it, if anything). Instead, that would be a different area of unit behaviour: If a unit gets shot at, it doesn't stand there and die without reaction.
So I would expect those Infernos you moved into range to simply attack the turrets. Same with any other unit. If it gets attacked (maybe even if another unit close to it gets attacked), it might try to simply fight back.
It probably might be needed to make this toggleable, as it could be easily exploited.

These unit behaviours should not be about mitigating human errors but about preventing unintended behaviour.
If someone doesn't scout base defenses and sends a force to attack then that is a clear command and the force will attack and probably die. In that case I would only want the attacking force to have some smart target priorities, so I don't need to tell every single unit what to do (target combat fabbers instead of Infernos and stuff...bombers area attacking should target aa first and so on...if I manually tell them to attack the energy plants, then they attack the energy plants and possibly die..my error...or gain..depending on the situation). I would want my aa and combat fabbers to stay behind my combat forces and I would want everything but Infernos to stay out of range of other Infernos if possible. I would want my forces to do the basic things by themselves so I don't need to babysit them, but if I don't see that I am sending them to their death, they will walk to their death. I certainly don't want the game to play itself

I don't know, with mobile artillery they aren't particularly fast and don't have a huge rate of fire, that seems like a perfect example of a possible role for the fast weak units that now serve basically as not very useful scouts. The only real issue that I could see would be that mobile artillery able to kite would make turtling more effective, and since turtling currently is basically a non-viable strategy, it would seem that it might actually open up some more strategic diversity going forward.

This is a RTS, at the very core it will always be about time management.

That's true, but PA tries to be an RTS of a much larger scale than most (all?) other games of this type that came before, so we need to manage more units/factories/battles/PLANETS and therefore managing each individual thing needs to be a bit faster than in other games or it will be unsatisfying to play because you will end up not being able to manage your time effectively ENOUGH (subjectively), as it is physically impossible to handle every aspect of such a massive game in a decent way if we don't have the proper tools.

It IS fun microing an army and improving its effectiveness, thereby doing a lot of damage to your enemy.
But in a game of this size it should be a choice, rather than a necessity. If I micro my army it will be more effective and therefore (time management) I can decide to do so in important battles.
But I can in no way micro every single encounter in the game and it will soon become frustrating if every army needs babysitting but I am not able to babysit each of the 1200 mobile units I have spread across 3 planets.

The tools are simply to allow the larger scale without bogging the player down.

At least to me an RTS should give as much strategic breadth as possible for adapting to situations and strategies. The interface for interacting with units, the scope, and balance of the game as it is results in players being pigeonholed into a set of a couple of viable strategies. Adding the barest minimum defensive unit control, or other changes like it that result in more strategic variability would go a long way in putting more of the strategy back into the RTS.

Yes. This is entirely true

Proper balance.

Unit's defend themselves by attacking.

Eliminating meta.

Im not sure what your comment had to do with mine.

You appear to be arguing against having a "skirmish mode" for units, and being simultaneously incredibly self-contradictory. You say that the game has tools to allow the player to deal with the larger scale without being bogged down, and arguing that those tools should not be implemented.

From what I can tell, you seem to have a very narrow view of what an RTS should be. Something along the lines of an RTS where defense is basically non-existent and pre-emptive strikes and attacks are the only real strategy, which isn't really an RTS anymore.

If that's not what you're arguing for I have no idea how to make sense of all of your posts, that seem to be at least that you're arguing against your self back and forth.

automating a retreating defense will make this an incredibly dull turtle game. imagine trying to invade a planet with massed retreating aoe units like shellers implaced. To attack you'd have to use a crazy amount of micro while the defender could be smoking a cigarette doing nothing and still probably win...

defense should be as tough as attack in terms of moving units. defenders already have the advantage that they can place walls and turrets to funnell attackers through chokepoints.

So what you are saying is that I have a complicated opinion and hasn't really made my mind up?

Sigh.....

I don't personally like the idea of a tool that allows unit's to skirmish as I feel it is a nice tool for micro oriented people to have and use, when they have the time that is.

Tools like area commands and factory repeating ques help with the games scale, but for me a unit AI tool doesn't really help achieve that, because a unit is a small scale thing.

In war, a offensive strategy is superior to a defensive strategy, a RTS is about using a strategy that counters your opponents, this isn't a narrow minded view, this is a view on war that has been honed over the last 5000 years of civilisation. This isn't a opinion, it's a defensive policy too, keep the war on their turf.

And Im not saying my views are even correct, so don't believe you are kicking me off some high horse here or that you have unravelled some great plot.

I haven't made up my bloody mind.

I think a happy medium would be a kite move button. You still have to activate it similar to an attack move and yes they will kite just fine until their order is complete. You should have radars and scouts to help with slow reaction speeds.

To have bombers move away from fighters or units to move when under threat removes awareness, reaction times micro skills. Build a scout and your skirmish units are never in danger is not good for gameplay in my opinion.

The attacker would simply use an area attack command on the whole planet and the shellers (which cannot fire and move as fast as units like tanks or bots if balanced properly) get butchered if your attack wasn't too weak anyways ?
That's exactly...one click.

As it is right now, the attacker would use one click and the defender would be microing like crazy to try to keep his shellers out of the enemy's range, probably clicking dozens if not hundreds of times to achieve mostly the same battle.

I don't see why everyone believes defending would become too easy. If the attacker has to micro for no good reason, I am all for giving him proper tools, as well.

That sentence, it doesn't make real sense.
You apparently got that the game mechanics have to scale with the number of units / size of the system. But at the same time you are saying that a tool which helps patching around a specific component which doesn't scale naturally won't help? You are contradicting yourself.

And it's my bloody right to.

A unit AI helps with tactical stuff, where as factory auto-ques help with strategic stuff.

I don't feel like there is much of a point to having something that helps with tactical stuff, because it doesn't cover up for the games increased scale, it isn't important.

Nice post, valid concerns and civilly brought forth; let me just address this single last point.

Never! Primarily, automation should provide sensible default behaviour in the absence of user input. You want your fighters to sacrifice themselves over enemy flak? Uhm, sure, go for it.
Secondarily, it should enable you to pull off simple things with little to no continuous effort: Patrolling, evading, free roaming (which thus enables both harassing and scouting).
The big moves such as flanking, splitting, suicide bombing should be user driven. But I want to be able to concentrate on that stuff instead of having to babysit every single one of my units just to ensure at least some minuscule baseline effectiveness in what they are supposed to do.

But what if I have a mixed unit army ?
I select the army, deselect the infernos, set it to kite move, then i select the infernos again. tell them to attack move, then I notice that my whole formation is broken because now the rest of my army charges forward while my Infernos are slowly crawling through their wrecks...

And yes, intelligence gathering should be of vital importance, so you can react to a threat.
But to me reacting means making sure I have the right units in the right position and maybe conduct some counter attack while I know where my opponent's main force is instead of telling each individual unit the basics of how to fight a battle

Also, I don't see how having units keep their distance to other units will prevent them from ever being in danger ?
Fighters are faster than Bombers, so if I don't retreat my bombers to a place that is guarded by my fighters or lots of AA, they will get destroyed, no matter whether they retreat.
If Dox automatically kite Infernos, it won't save them from being one-shotted by ...basic tanks.. that have higher range and therefore can defend any target from their attack. I simply don't see how any unit that is properly balanced would not be in danger simply because such a basic behaviour was implemented.

If the whole game breaks down if units have the most simplest sense of self-preservation, it simply wasn't constructed very well.

This isn't StarCraft, where you play on small maps with few units and lots of the fun lies in commanding those few units. That whole game was constructed around that and carefully balanced so it can be played effectively.
But you can't simply expand StarCraft to a whole solar system and expect it to work. A game of PAs size needs to work a bit differently or it will fail.
This game is the successor of Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation and those games were about providing decent tools to handle large scale conflicts in real time. That's why they were great.
Not because they tried to be the 1000th failed StarCraft clone.