Mods in ranked games.

Do you consider it possible that your insight and knowledge compensates partly? Do you think that you could achieve a higher rank if you would have more APM? (Also honest questions, not sarcastic or rhetorical.)

You are right, I concede that statement. I should know better than to generalize like that.

What do you think about carefully moving around 10 groups of Dox in an opponents Metal Extractor territory? Micro or macro?

EDIT:

I would say extreme examples show the nature of the problem, or the quality. While raevn's argument was about the quantity (in the form of being significant with respect to other areas of the game).

Everyone in the top 10 (and some outside of the top 10 aswel) has a really, really good understanding of the game. It's partly why you don't see bot only strats in high level play (not counting the occasional random one). Do I think if I could get rank 1 with more APM or keep destroying people just because of APM? No definitely not. Learning to read terrain in seconds, multiple great opening builds and by far the most important aspect it to learn how to adapt to the strat your opponent is doing. All these thing, come from experience. And there are a lot of players with a lot more experience than me now I think of it.

Macro is if you express an intention, rather than specifying the precise execution of your command.

Micro:

• Commanding your units to take out THAT defense tower first
• Commanding your units to move 1 feet back to stay out of weapon range
• Checking each single factory manually if the build queue is empty enough to produce another unit
• Assigning each individual mex construction to a specific fabber
  
• Manually aiming with bombers, or manually dodging with Dox
• Manually outrunning turret turn speed by close quarter maneuvers

Macro:

• Defining towers as priority targets
• Enabling auto-kite
• Issuing fabrication commands to an abstract group of factories instead of to a single one
• Declaring a structure blueprint and have it auto-distributed to idle fabbers
• Platoons just being reliable in executing your orders, such as "Bomber platoon, take out that other platoon"

As a rough rule: If your command does not specify HOW your units achieves a goal, it was macro.

Right now? Bit too much micro, since these Dox are to stupid to avoid the threat proposed by stuff like simple T1 towers unless explicitly told so.

Depends on whether you had send them to patrol that area, or if you had assigned the paths manually and reassign them to attack every single time you get a notification about an enemy mex being sighted, carefully avoiding all stray towers by re-plotting their paths.

But it's a border case, it's not low-level micro, and there are just no functional higher level commands which would allow you to express your full intentions properly.

I appreciate your reply. but you can skip number 3 and 4 on the micro list as no one sane is doing that, and on the macro is a list of what you would like to see implemented.. What is there ingame right now. The lists don't compare well.

Also lets say you give your dox a move order.. there happens to be a single laser turret there. .your dox move away, BUT that totally was not your intention.. you wanted them to go to the location you told them. Iss'nt that hampering your play? to suddenly see your dox running around to some other location?

EDIT: Also if you have your dox automatically avoid laser towers.. whats the point in PD's near your mex.. cause you Either have to cover every single mex in a cluster or else the dox will just find a way through. Or am I missing something?

At least number 3 isn't something you wouldn't do manually, well, in some way you still do since you are still assigning the construction job to an explicit selection of fabricators. Which by the way is immutable, for some weird reasons you can't just swap the fabbers out or redistribute parts of the queue to additional fabbers.

But number 4, happens in time. When you have to check each single factory to see which one has which fabrication queue can be discarded.

And yes, the lists missmatch with the current feature set. If they didn't, we wouldn't even have this discussion about gains by macro mods.

Depends. Depends on whether you have told your Dox to kite or to hold position at all cost. Either way it did what you told it to do.

No, you are not missing anything. The Dox will find a way, and that is precisely what you had intended for the Dox to do: Not to die from stupidity.

You understood me wrong so I probably didn't phrase my sentences correctly but what I was asking was, What are the micro thing you do now in PA live build and what are the macro things you do in PA live build. Where do we draw the line of what is and what issn't considered micro/macro.

You're micro list pretty much sums it up except I still don't agree with you on 4 because I never find myself searching for a fac with his queue almost done. It's all on unlimited build and when I need something I select a few fac's press "S" and queue up the unit I need.

But what are the Macro things people do right now? Should it be a lot more? so more automization on the micro front or the other way around? more automization on the macro front. If you do both than IMHO you can just let Sorian's AI play the game for you.

But what is the point in PD's then?

EDIT:

So, if I understand correctly you would rather let players contantly watch on what "state"the units are and change them on the fly for various attacking groups. To me that sounds like mechanic screaming for a lot of misplays. THus making it even more mirco intensive.

Automation on the micro front just creates new levers on the macro front. It's still you making the decision HOW stuff should behave or how the result should look like, but you are no longer responsible for the execution. Btw.: "Formations" do count in this category as well, especially when you are able to define DEFAULT formations.

More automation on the macro front is rarely useful or even possible. There are comfort features like "default settings", but that's about it. Anything beyond that requires high situational awareness and an understanding of the intended strategy, and these two points are far from trivial.

But then again, we already have some interesting commands at this level in PA right now, such as the refinement to the area patrol where possible targets in the patrol area change the behavior of the patrol command away from random movement towards distributing units onto targets. Just the execution isn't so great since units still fail on the micro level.

There just isn't much macro being used currently. Area assist (patrol), commands chained to factories and portals, partially area attack if you don't bother the stock target priorities, long range path finding. And that's about it, for everything else you are better off doing it by hand.

And no, I don't count batch build (area build stuff) as real macro, it's just a simplification but you are still explicitly assigning a fixed unit group to a specific construction task. Mex and catalyst placement where the game actually assists you with easiest matching to optimize the path partially excluded, but even that still could use some refinement.

To fortify locations and to increase the cost of capturing critical locations. A stray PD is a harassment at best, but a rather effective one giving the mind boggling stupidity of units in PA. You can just toggle them between "I don't care if I die" and "SUICIDE!!!! ".

So the decision is clearly unanimous. No mods in ranked games. I will let the top brass know.

Noooooo, I just need to hotkeys from hotbuild2. Uber pls.......

Some people don't realise they should use hotkeys either, others don't know you can look up great build orders. I don't feel guilty when I beat them.

There's a difference between using hotkeys built into the game, which anyone who loads up the game can use and a mod which someone with programming skills can develop to give them an edge which only they have.

Not sure if you are taking the piss or serious.. I'm hoping the latter.

I don't agree that the client allows for anything unfair to occur. We might as well complain that the game favours younger players while we're at it.

And some people get overly hung up on the advantage a hot key mod gives them and lose to me, a non hot key using scrub (apparently) anyway

No uber pls I need hotbuild. Take anything else, but not hotbuild...

well maybe we can duplicate ping code to make a non audio, less viual secondary ping?

get the G710+, I literally just unboxed it.

I'm not using hotkeys either.

There is no strategy in FPS, at least no true to the definition of strategy. Unless of course you count morally destabilizing your enemies over the course of several matches as a strategy. You are making tactical decisions, but the strategical decisions have already been made by the map designer. You are just developing and executing a tactic which fits with the given strategic goals, not more no less.

There's nothing wrong with that, given that a average human player can stretch his mind only so far between the different layers of abstraction. But that very same limitation is also true for true RTS games, even though the base level of abstraction is shifted much higher - at least it should be or otherwise you get different colliding approaches to the game due to different players trying to shine at different layers of abstraction.


And before we continue to talk about the legacy of mods in general, shouldn't we start classifying mods in general first?

One can hardly say anything against pure cosmetic mods in general, or do we want to brand custom skyboxes next?

Is hotbuild even a case of automation, or is it just an refinement to the controls? Yes, it does offer advantage as it reduces number of key strokes, but it doesn't allow to define new intentions which weren't possible to express with the stock system.

When does a mod even start to give an "unfair" advantage? When it raises the base level of abstraction? But isn't that just the fundamental goal of RTS games, to make decisions on the highest abstraction level possible and to put up your minds against each other? Isn't the skill to script your intentions not actually catering towards that one basic goal? Isn't the true champions league of RTS to send your very own AI into battle?