The scouting problem

We should totally get godde or gunshin to play iron420, building identical units and buildings at the exactly the same time and watch as they defeat him with pure micro skill.

We have some changes that will be coming that will make full planet scouting a lot easier. It may not fix every case, but it should minimize the problems with seeing what's on a planet without rushing to advanced orbital.

Mind you, it still has costs and requires a factory to build units, but it should minimize the micro needed to effectively scout.

Wouldn't a AWAC type aircraft be better for scouting......Give the T1 air scout radar.

you are the only 1 who said that.

Build templates, coordinated timed attacks using way points for flanking and other tactics, patrols, default orders for new units and idol workers, a "seek and destroy" order, etc. Obviously manual orders such as attack or move have to stay, so it's not possible to eliminate those... until good vice recognition software comes about you make fun but having the AI deal with building expansion bases based on my build templates means more time for me to co-ordinate additional avenues of attack for my multiple forces moving at your base from different angles. No worries that I'm not watching my bases, cause it knows to keep building forces for me and how I want them used while I'm away....

Bear in mind micro means "micromanagement".

"Jenkins, get me the TPS report" is management, not micromanagement.
"Jenkins, go to your computer, open the TPS report, select the print option, select the 3rd floor printer, print double sided on standard letter paper, go to the printer, retrieve the document, staple it and bring it to my desk" is micromanagement.

Ordering your wad of Ants to attack-move to the middle of the enemy base is not micro.
Visually following your Ants and giving them arrays of specific on-the-fly orders is micro.
Commander rushes are very micro intense.

I think one of the overarching goals of PA is to make it so that a higher level of management is more rewarding than micromanagement. I think this is largely true for ground units and to some extent for bombers (if you use area-attack) but not presently true for commander rushes or fighter-ball duels (air and orbital).

https://forums.uberent.com/threads/different-blips.49424/

Thanks for an official response, garat. Though the scouting problem I've outlined isn't the biggest problem in PA, it's nice to see that it at least merits some future changes to minimize the issues with scouting.

If you have not played him, you have not surpassed him on the ladder. All that proves is that the ladder is inherently flawed in its design.

One of the changes that I was hoping to see in the future (and I haven't seen anybody else mention it, so maybe this is just me) is player markers for scouted buildings being visible when zooming out.

When I send out a scout plane and then go back to building units, queuing up buildings, what have you, and then go back to my scout plane, unless I look really hard at the map, it's hard to tell if my plane found anything unless it's right over the enemy base, where the markers for buildings, units, etc., are visible.

I have surpassed him on the ladder because I have more points than him. That is how the ladder works. Just because he have refused to play a game with me in this ladder yet doesn't mean anything else.

Something that hasn't been discussed here at all really, is the need for scouting in the early game...

Sure it helps a lot and if you want to play the game very well it's needed, but I myself use very minimal scouting. I never need much, my metal extractors are very good lookouts and I try to find a place where any thing coming near me is spotted by said extractors.

When I play personally, I forget about combat on the planet itself and move as fast to orbital. Because combat on the ground is similar to other RTS, and not as interesting. Making scouting easier would mean that many of the strategies I play would be much much harder. If it's easy to scout me, it's easy to know where I am and what to build to counter my strategy. Therefore, any rushes to late game orbital would be easier to counter.

If scouting was too hard to do, my opponent would have a much smaller chance of winning. He won't know my orbital strategy and I may have left the planet by the time he eventually finds me. I can hide the fact I left in the first place and use the original base as something to gather resources and distraction.

The game is focused around macro, that is easy to see. A game like SCII is a focus between the two, you can get off decently by being good at one and alright at the other. But to be good you need to micro, and that doesn't require a high APM. The game, sins of a solar empire shows this off quite well, that game isn't really focused on micro in my opinion. More macro, micro is there to give a small edge when you need it but it's not required.

Scouts move out automatically with a click of a button and that is good for the game, enemies can spawn in a random position and you don't have the time to manually check each system only a few units have abilities and most of them autocast so you don't have to micro it. While units in starcraft have many target-able abilities and strategies with micro. Stutter-stepping and such,

Planetary Annihilation is different from other RTS, very different in it's strategies. They are only slightly comparable, so using other RTS to judge how this game should work is a mistake.

Also, in top level play of SCII there is no randomness, all of it is eliminated. If you don't focus enough on getting multiple scouts for bigger map and get rushed. It's your fault, every problem is your fault because you other player has to do the same thing. While in PA the randomness of finding the enemy is much bigger, and isn't always your fault.

This game is not other games, stop acting like it is. We need to find a good balance and not either or.

After examining the ladder, it does appear flawed. He has a higher number of wins, and a lower number of loses then you do. Therefore until proven you are not the better player, the ladder says you have more points but that doesn't prove anything. Even if you have faced what the ladder would call "harder" players based on their score that still shouldn't be the real determiner of play. Skill can only really be determined by you two actually facing each other.
But even skill isn't the reason you could win, play style is. And even if someone is outright better then you if you are brilliant against his play style then you could win almost every time.

So don't go around saying your better because a number on the internet is bigger.

I never said that. Just because I surpassed him on the ladder it doesn't mean I am for sure a better player. It just means that I am higher ranked than him.

Idk, the fog of war or whatever is definitely a problem. It is too easy to probe with radar, but also too easy in general.

In my opinion, it isn't "game Armageddon" or a silver bullet against the game. The game by all means is playable, it isn't even the most annoying thing.

I just think that radar could be scaled back a bit, and that some units could use with not being pinged on radar. Possibly even the commander itself (give it a surprise advantage), but more preferably scouts (be able to sneak peaks without being obviously seen by enemy via radar) and a low powered filler unit (makes an army bigger than it appears on radar but has fairly sucky damage output and health), maybe make that filler unit t2 and expensive for slightly less power than a t1 unit just with radar invisibility. Maybe even make scouts able to reverse radar, or make enemy radar show up to the scout when the scout is within the radar's range but not the scout show up on their radar, that way radar has it's downside and is reverse trackable when scouting for enemies.

That would at least make the "seeing everything" thing have it's shortcomings. Downsides as well as upsides. Possibilities of getting trampled by something you didn't see with the basic umbrella intelligence system. Line of site is pretty legit right now, when it is obtained it is both earned and deservably accurate.

That was probably the best part of C&C Renegade. One could amass stealth tanks to rush an enemy, but an enemy could still manually scout for that kind of things by using bullets sweeping to ping for it. You could still get 4 tanks the enemy didn't know about it, and you could still get 4 tanks in completely unnoticed, but the enemy still had "responsibility and liability" for having been the ones tasked for watching for it. Just like here, even with radar invisible units, it is the player's responsibility and liability to make sure something doesn't come out of the blue without relying on passive radar, or "checking the accuracy of his intelligence". Because not verifying intelligence falls on the player's shortcoming, whereas right now the intelligence in the game is total-coverage and infallible.

I think that this gives a solid reason to actually use radar jamming units (not for the scouts of course, they should be "small" enough to not show up on radar). The filler unit is definitely a good idea as well.

Scouting is meant to be important. Lack of information or misinformation in war is what makes most moves in this game effective. If a player were to put up a solid front line, your proxy base should com around and hit it from behind while you constantly pound their front lines. The only current difficulty in scouting in this game is remembering to do it. That is surely far to easy.

As for the OP, scouting on large planets isn't very important. You don't need to react to a threat on the opposite of the world, if it takes 10 minutes to find the enemy, you should still be sucking up eco, and setting up proxy bases. The game is still very similar, only less rushed. If they spawned within a dangerous distance of you, your scout will find it fairly fast if you scouted correctly.
Also, it's tough to declare the nature of game play that is NOT currently testable. You can't just declare how scouting on a radius 2500 planet is, because you can't play a reasonable game on that, even if you mod the UI files.

What about an auto-scout ability for scout units?

Sins of a solar empire uses a auto-scout ability that works quite well, however micro the scout is still better than letting it auto-scout 100% of the time...

And that's what ranking means. An equal ranking means that if you play 100 games, you can expect 50 to be a win, and 50 to be a loss.

That's one of the inherent flaws in the ladder system, that you can surpass him because you have more points.

If he is number one on the ladder, it shouldn't be possible to surpass him without beating him. The reason is that with a points based system, if I gain 100 points in a week, and he gains 99, eventually I will surpass him on the ladder. That could be because he plays one game worth 99 points, and I play 100 games worth one point each

It's a problem inherent to system. It's the disadvantage. Essentially the system can be abused by selection ofopponents.

Giving commands to your units is not micro.

If you honestly believe that every mouse click you perform is micro, you are the only person who shouldn't be taken seriously.

This is micro:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EasyCommunication

It doesn't happen in real life. In a real army, you don't need the General to order you to wipe your ***, because you get on and do it.

Remember those strategies that were possible in StarCraft for the AIIDE Starcraft Competition, because the AI agent's were actually able to perform the micromanagement which makes sense in a given situation?

You shouldn't need to explicitly order a doctor to be a doctor,every time any of your units needs a doctor. The micro which should be eliminated is the micro that is as simple as "Hey dude. You're a doctor. These units are hurt. Be a doctor".

Yes and I never said anything else. Macro is more important than micro. But for example leading your ants around stationary defenses is considered micro. If you just a-click them into the middle of the base, foget about them and then think that's skill I have to disappoont you. Micro might be not as important as macro, but is still very important in the high levels of play.

The statement that micro should be taken away as much as possible, obviously must be coming from someone that just a-clicks their units into the middle of the enemy base and then forgets about them. And that behavior should NOT be rewarded.

Scouting isn't as important in PA/TA as in games like Starcraft. In PA i Don't really care what my enemy is doing for the first 10-20mins because it doesn't matter.

You'd be correct if I sent them to the middle of the enemy base and then sat there and watched them.

The real question is which is best:
A) You micro your Ants into attacking my base in the best way possible
B) I send my Ants blindly into your base and take all that time you spent microing and spend it instead on further expanding my economy, building new structures, expanding into space, ordering up new bombers, scouting the edges, etc.

"A" is micro.
"B" is macro.

Starcraft is an "A" type of game. Good macro strategy might get you to skill 5 of 10 in Starcraft. Anyone can learn the build orders and basically what to make because there's only so many ways to go, but to get to skill 10, you need pro level micro.

PA, like TA, is a "B" type of game, which is what makes it unusual in the RTS world. Good micro won't get you very far. If you want to be a pro at these games, it's macro that gets you there, due to a huge diversity of things to build, things to do and an ever-expanding economy. With a few exceptions, micro is literally a waste of time in PA. Your wave of 20 micro'd tanks will lose, as will my wave of 20 non-micro'd tanks. Problem is, my next wave will be 40 tanks while yours is 25 because you spent too much time on micro and it didn't benefit you as much as economic growth and expansion benefited me.