How to disincentivize focus fire

Didn't they already talk about this in one of the livestreams? Thought they had already gotten some preliminary results where an army will preferentially focus fire in order to avoid massively overkilling. Sounded like exactly what you were talking about earlier.

Don't remember which livestream it was, but I think sorian was talking at the time?

-Stretch

Since when did Uber say they're actively trying to discourage micro? Might as well make the game play itself.

Edit: Agreed with everything OrangeKnight said

I'm really getting tired of people squawking about how making the game less micro intensive means the game plays itself. Probably about as tired as I am hearing people argue that an idea is too cpu intensive when they have absolutely no idea what's involved.

If you want to APM yourself up the wazoo go play Starcraft so you can click 157 times as you move your 10 units around.

If you want to manage battles across multiple planets, STOP telling us we should be doing busywork like telling our 1 unit out of 10,000 what to shoot at.

I was under the impression that they are trying to at least lower the micro needed in this game.

If I wanna micro so much, that my fingers hurt i'll play Starcraft 2. They should keep the Micro to a minimum in PA.

Fights should be on a scale that the player doesn't care about micro. The gross angle of engagement, large scale troop positions, composition, etc. should matter. Making tanks die as fast as possible by telling your soldiers how to do everything but breathe (or the robot equivalent) should not.

Here at about 43 minutes in, they talked (briefly) about making it so that as a player, the micro of combat was not really a concern to me. They also talked about it in the Q&A in the vicinity of 48:40. I should be able to tell my entire army to "attack this place" and it will go there, and it will divvy up targets in an efficient manner such that fire is spread among all targets in an effective way.

The idea that I would EVER in a game this size be required to worry about micro in combat between two armies is kind of silly. All I can see coming from that is my defeat if i get attacked simultaneously on two different planets. My armies should be able to on an individual basis fend for themselves, while I worry about their position on a macro scale.

To avoid being misquoted here (too much):
I do NOT endorse the idea that I should be able to set my forces up on one planet, then "turn the planet over to the ai" such that my base/armies really defend and take care of themselves. As a player, I am still responsible for positioning my defensive units. For example:
If one of my bases is attacked on one side, I would expect to be responsible to deploy my army to block that attack or defend against it. If there are two attacks in a pincer, again I would be expected to split my army and send part of it to the first attack and part to the second. This is something that could be realistically done on multiple planets simultaneously. What I would not expect is that I would then be required to babysit each of those two defensive forces to make sure they focus fire in an optimal way.

-Stretch

In FA it is valuable at least in the early stages to be able to manually dodge raiders around defenders, I would not like to see this made impossible.

Reducing DPS of damaged units solves one micro issue but adds another: Specifically damaged units would be taking up space in the battle line blocking full strength reinforcements from moving into position to fire.

You'd want to keep cycling damaged units out of the line while keeping the enemy front line as damaged as possible without destroying it - depriving him of DPS and population cap.

That's probably a lot more micro-intensive than stopping unit overkill.