I played the hell out of Supreme Commander and Forged Alliance, but the biggest thing I didn't like was that there was way too much micro-management. I felt it took away from the massive scale because I was constantly finagling with minor details and re-issuing the same orders over and over. It was just busy-work, and not anything to do with responding to threats or creating my own. For example, say I want to reclaim some debris. I send my builder out to reclaim and it gets killed by a passing tank. I can't just have another cheap unit automatically build and go to that spot, I have to manually build another one myself, wait for it to finish, then give that same order all over again. Similarly I order a huge complicated complex of resource generators, and then a single passing bomber drops a single bomb and kills all my builders. Now I have to give all those orders all over again because the orders were tied to the units, and not the other way around. That's just one example of many. The bottom line is I shouldn't have to constantly check back on every order I give to make sure that it's still there. I should be able to focus on broader problems and let the petty details of what exactly each builder is doing at the moment be taken care of automatically based on priorities I set. So what will this game do to reduce the amount of micro-management that SupCom required?
I agree, as far as unit micromanagement you should check out this thread: viewtopic.php?f=61&t=46037 viewtopic.php?f=61&t=46037&start=29 SupCom also had a lot of economic micromanagement (adjacency, upgrades, T1 engineer assist, etc.) and I think Uber does plan to address most of that stuff.
You sound like a casual player crying that the game was too hard. Decent FA players would have a dedicated factory always building engineers, and would know that you can attack with the factory to reclaim with the engineers. Im already starting to think that Ubers style of game play will be a flop in terms of an actual competitive RTS and that it will have to fall back on mods, but i will only know that once we enter beta and 90% of the game is in place, if not all of it. Simpler != better Im not saying complex == better, but i definitely think the equilibrium lies much higher than what they plan, and what most of these threads want to do.
i would say i don't mean this personally but I've had enough of the influx of starcraft players lately. what was your rating on GPGnet? what's your rating on FAF? never played FA competitively? don't talk about what skillset was required for competitive play.
I have played not only starcraft , i and many others, have played a lot of different rts games. -earth of empire -all command and conquer titles -supreme commander 1 and 2 -company of heros -ruse -men of war Just because you played starcraft 1 and 2 does not mean that you are a "starcraft player", you are a rts fan who liked to play starcraft among other games. The reason why i sticked with starcraft for so long was that it has a decent match-making and leaguage system. And i cant understand this negative undertone ,when talking about starcraft 1 Its very respected among most rts fans and the esportcommunity. It is the driving force at the moment in terms of esport. Even if i find starcraft 2 not nearly as good as starcraft 1, i cant denial that it had done a lot for the esports in general and in terms of respect for the esports comming form people which dont play videogames at all.
The difference between complexity and unneeded complexity is how repetitive the action is. Placing the same ring of mass storages around mexes was repetitive when an upgrade would have worked just as well. Building engineers to exponentially increase economic strength was clunky, cluttered, and annoying, but is the best solution without a tech tree. Or they could have just had Air Engineers.
you're moving the goalposts garibaldi, i asked whether or not you played competitive supreme commander and what your rating/rank was. if you didn't i don't think you're qualified to speak on the matter, there's good news though, you can get started now on forged alliance forever.
No im not . You said that you had enough influence form "starcraft players" lately. I dont consider me as an starcraft player . I hate this fraction thinking. And therefore this was the most importend point to adress. I played supreme commander 1 for two month multiple games each day, and i had a winrate about 70% .I think two month are long enough to come to an standpoint. My average ranking of all the other games i have listed was propably somewhere around the best 20 % of the players, its hard to say exactly. And i cant remember what batch i had exactly in supreme commander . Its too long ago , and i have to admid that for me and many other rts players it was not the most meaningfull rts. It had very good ideas, but it was way to anti micro , for my taste
Sry Garibald, I like you just by your name and avatar but I'll have to disagree with you here. If you follow the FAF community, maybe watch a few of the many casts of pro games on youtube (it's still a very alive and growing community!) you would see how much micro really is employed at the top level! Players like Lu Xun&co can win games against less experienced opponents just with sneaky acu maneuvers and stealthy engineer backcaps. The most micro even at "lower" comp levels though is probably seen on tech1 where even the very first bomber counts a lot. On an air rollout, 2 missed bombs can mean a lost bomber and an inicial disadvantage already. A good player will quickly exploit this and gain a considerable advantage. Restorer spam also depends on good micro of restorers vs fighters sometimes and non-seraphim light mobile artillery is pretty much useless in the hands of a bad micro player. If anything, I would like PA to remove the need for micro to even out bad pathfinding. This can often cause problems in FA and I am very optimistic that Uber will get this straight.
simple is better, at least if you value elegance. if you get the same depth for less complexity it is by definition more elegant. the devs don't want less options than were in FA, they just want things to be more straight forward for novices.
The bickering here made worried I had stumbled into a stray b.net SC2 thread. Can't we have opinions without getting elitist on each others' backs? Did you try using the templates? I felt they addressed the issue okay.
I do agree in this case. One of the advantages with the style of RTS PA is taking (or rather, redefining) is that being so very vast in scale, the amount of macro control has no ceiling. The more that you can do every second puts you ahead of your opponent and that is what I see as what is to define this game in the esporting community. Simplifying the little things you need to do just allows for you to focus more on this big scale; which is what this game is about. Seeing as you brought up starcraft, you can only blame yourself twisted for the comparison I'm going to make. Starcraft (I'll note I am thinking of SC2 when I say this, over all they parallel so woot) is actually capped as far as vastness goes, so the main defining factor for it is the micro required. Hence even the macro in starcraft is pretty much micro if you compare it to what we see in store for PA. Anyway, with micro being the main defining skill factor, blizzard has to be careful with simplifying the more tedious things else there will be less that defines the best players from those just below. They did make many good changes in the sequel (and many not so good, but that is another topic). Such things as making the rally point of workers actually make them mine if it goes to minerals. In SC1, selecting 12 units is just dumb. Yes it *raises* the skill ceiling, but only by making a simple task a pain in the ***. Changing it to... I think it is limited to 144, can't remember... is much better. But if changes were made such as making economic spells of the races automatically casting themselves, this would take away from the game as an esport due to the design and goals of starcraft itself.. A comparison change could be the removal of connectivity between buildings that were in Supreme Commander when going to PA. This takes away a rather tedious task for people playing for the game for fun, but doesn't detract from the game competitively (IMO). It simply allows for more focus to go to say, managing a moon base!
I'd say FA had a good amount of micro in it. Not too intense, good micro skills aren't required to win in less experienced averageish games. But in top level games they are obviously required. Average players don't need to know all the tricks like how to micro planes or artillery properly. But those tricks make the game interesting for top players. Isn't that a win win situation?
no. when you start imposing APM barriers to properly use units it gets unintuitive. Take the T3 land units in FA. The Seraphim T3 Siege Tank was the most powerful T3 land unit for cost, however all the T3 bots had superior range. In higher level games the Seraphim T3 Tank was bad and outclassed by high level players kiting. In low level games the T3 Siege Tank demolished equivalent armies. When balance becomes the subject of APM things get convoluted. StarCraft 2 has this problem across its many leagues and professional play. Understandably there's a lot of QQ about certain strategies at different levels of play. Addressing OP strategies at one level will impact the others. Zero-K elegantly sidesteps this problem.
APM will still be a defining factor in who wins a match, as it is in probably every RTS. Even if all the units available to each player are identical, if player A can do more things every minute than player B, they will pull ahead. You can observe this StarCraft 2 in mirror match ups. You see the difference between the races in StarCraft 2 as a problem? I believe it adds variety and depth. Skill isn't just a function of how good your control is, but what composition of units you choose in a particular match up from the information on your opponent (that you put effort into aquiring). A natural consequence is that there are many tears shed because people like to point their finger at balance rather than their own lack of mastery. A lot of effort is put into getting the balance right, and it is shown that across the leagues it is close, but it will never be perfect. In PA, while to a lesser extent with only one set of units (in vanilla anyway), I guarantee that there will still be threads on how strategy X is too over powered (idk, spamming bombers early game or something). Many people will think that the strategy is fine, but the tears will still come. Hell, the differences between commanders will be contested. I'll just reiterate that the focus in PA should refrain from being micro intensive as I explained my opinion on that in an above reply. But APM will still be an important game defining factor and people will still find a way to cry about balance, because losing sucks and adjusting your play is not the goto solution for some people. This will be a minority, just as the B.net forums don't represent the majority of the SC2 player base.
I understand this sentiment, but the worry is that in order to make it more straight forward for novices, you cut out depth. You used the example of seraphim tanks before, and in High level game they are kited. I would counter this by saying that you DON'T need high APM to play competitively there, there was a thread not so long ago that showed the APM of some top players. It barely spiked over 150. I agree with your comments about needless APM, but that is poor example, in my opinion that adds depth, as in some situation, the pure brunt force can be more usefull, although it is nit as effective in most situations.
sure, you've mentioned the lower APM requirements for competitive FA before and I really can't disagree. I've seen FAChart's CPM graphs. One thing I will say in response though is that generally FA is a very attention demanding game. In fact I would go so far as to say it's more attention demanding than StarCraft 2. And that is not reflected in FAChart. I'm not saying competitive play shouldn't demand focus or attention though, just that this burden on new players was excessive in FA. So while you may not be spam clicking anything you definitely had to pay careful attention to many things. I think this excerpt articulates the point far better than me: http://youtu.be/jVL4st0blGU?t=1m38s
