Dark Reign Style Unit Automation

I'm very excited to hear about TA:Spring style area orders (It sounds like you are going a lot further than they did). Something similar that was done in dark reign was unit automation, you could tell a unit when to automatically retreat to go and repair as well as to automatically search our and destroy or harass enemy units.

Are you considering exposing this kind of unit automation to player control? Is this a feature other people want, or do you think it doesn't really fit with the TA/PA style of RTS?

This is the thin end of a very massive wedge about all kinds of UI, AI, automation, and abstraction topics that have been discussed at length.

Suffice to say that there probably will be quite powerful tools for this. And if there are not, the customizable webkit UI can issue orders, so an enterprising JavaScript programmer might create such an abstract automation control system and distribute it to others.

We were all idiotic LAN playing noobs in the Dark Reign days. Hardly anybody had any micro skills because the genre was so new.

I am sure their unit automation would be vastly unpopular today because it was so primitive and achieved so little.

Most orders were only there because RTS had no decent queueing mechanics yet, and units before TA usually didn't move and fight ar the same time. That and strategic zoom has closed the lid on that topic alltogether.

I'd rather shift-click-spam across the map 10 times in an entire match for my scout units than permanenty give up a spot on my UI real estate for harrass/explore/seek'n'destroy buttons.

Additional Unit AI control would affect gameplay far more than the UI I think. I agree that the reason for its existence was negated by better UI and player skill, but in a game like TA/SC/PA you can end up with so many units its difficult to actually apply tactics to large battles. Area commands help with that a lot, but if you can tell a unit when to automatically cancel an area command and move on to the next command in the queue it adds another degree of control.

From the sounds of things if its a feature the final game could use it will end up being implemented one way or another.