Defining micro

Also, a question that I find interesting, but in the instance of ZK do you need or want Auto-Dodge, Auto Kite and the like?

Mike

Reading this topic and thinking a bit:
I also don't really want my units to dodge automatically or kite automatically, not only because those tasks are too hard in many situations for an ai, but also because I think that a player who is able to micro units really good should have an advantage. It is part of the game -and part of the fun- to become good at micro and it just feels epic to outmicro 2 tanks and 2 engies with a single light assault bot.
If units automatically dodge shots as good as possible it would take away something that should separate a good player from a not so good player, apart from that it doesn't change anything. Sure we dont want to fight the user-interface like you basically do in Starcraft (at least in brood war) but moving units around has nothing to do with fighting the gui. Make the gui good, so we can efficiently control many units, but dont make the units control themselves. Controlling units is part of the game, not part of the gui.
Following this path of automation leads to a game of throwing numbers at each other. We could play ogame for that.

ZK would work without unit automation and indeed it did work fine before that feature was implemented. It's just that it's better with automation. TA worked fine with fixed zoom, SupCom would work fine with fixed zoom, but it's a step back.

Automation does not mean the end of player micro advantage. In ZK at least, a good player can run rings around the automated units.

It also doesn't mean units doing everything on their own. Again taking ZK as an example (because it's the only game I know that has unit automation like this) units will behave differently if issued with a move, attack, patrol, or fight command in the direction of the enemy. There are also move and fire state settings for units that affect for instance whether they will chase retreating enemies or hold their ground.

The advantages of automation are largely that units behave according to their roles, which serves to further differentiate the roles and increase the variety of the total unit ecosystem.

A summary of unit AI is that:-

-Skirmishers and more agile kinds of light artillery stay at their maximum range and kite shorter ranged attackers.

- Less agile artillery run away when confronted with a frontal assault (most larger artillery units can't fire with their back turned in ZK so this is a sheer retreat tactic). Cons and some support units also flee if they're idle.

- Fast light bots zigzag towards enemies in an attempt to avoid shots, and run in circles around larger enemies as they shoot them up close. Note here that light units do not calculate the trajectory of incoming shots and reactively dodge, they just jink around randomly.

- Units that deal damage/more damage at close range try to close distance with enemies. This results in slow assault units being permanently kited by skirmishers if the player isn't paying attention. Settings for move state and/or retreat zones are important to prevent this behaviour.

And... that's pretty much it. It's just a little help, but it feels natural. It just adds a characteristic to units, like the way that brawlers circled enemies in TA, would you want to have to manually shift-queue circling there?

Again, the only way to really experience it is to play ZK, which is a free game and you could already be playing it by the time you've read all this, so why not do that so you can debate this on equal footing with people who have actually experienced the topic at hand.

So far in this thread we have two types of people, those who have played a game with unit automation and support unit automation, and people who have never played a game with unit automation, don't fully understand what it means, and so reject it.

The crux for PA is that no one can micro effectively over multiple planets, and if a unit is useless when it stands there like a stone then why force it to? I want armies that behave like armies, not like idiots.

Automation doesn't have to be better than manual micro. In fact, I'd expect there to be limitations just because it is AI. Basically, dodging shots should be a wiggle while closing to the enemy. Kiting would be limited to the units movement stance (just like chase logic). Also, I feel AI should never override a player's command.

It would be fine for me if they implement the same kind of pathfinding from SupCom2 (it is awesome).

First of all let me say this: I've never played a game with that level of what I suppose I would call "unit intelligence".

I find it appealing that in order to get the best out of my units I might not need to issue a whole list of commands just to get them to engage in a manner that suits their armament. Particularly more so if they are in a control group of mixed units. I don't think it is wrong to expect a unit to maximise it's effectiveness when I issue an attack order.

Working on the principal that it is a commander's job to issue an attack command and a units job to carry it out to the best of it's ability. A bit of intelligence on a units part wouldn't go amiss. Especially as the player will have more to manage than ever before.

I think also however, that it should be a feature that players should be able to turned off on the fly if they wish to have more direct control over their units and have a go at a bit of DIY.

Nah. I don't really like their implementation. Felt unnecessary on the scale of that game at least.


And keep in mind that if you've got a battle where both sides are not microed, it doesn't really matter if they're both automated with complex algorithm or both acting straightforward. As long as they're acting the same for both armies.

Also it's a strategic decision if you're managing battle tactics or finetuning your economy at any given time - I wouldn't really like if staring at your base all the time and just giving rough movement paths to my units would be the optional way to play the game, I want to experience those battles too damnit.



Edit: and to clarify the part I didn't like in Zero-K unit behaviour is the automation (auto-skirmish, auto-dodging etc), not the rest of the stuff which is usually shared by other games on the same engine too. Being able to give orders efficiently is great, but the automatic kind of giving "meta-orders" is lame.

I played ZK for ... 10 minutes. The zoom felt weird and the gui was pretty much counter intuitive for me somehow. Didnt like it :S
However we all have experienced unit automation of some level, cause even simple things like automatic patrouls are automation.

Units that randomly run of are not good.
Anyway the points you described sound okay, even though I cant see how it improves gameplay much and I can imagine quite a lot of pretty annoying problems it can cause if implemented poorly. I also don't want idiotic armies, but what I really don't want at all are units that try to play the game for me.
The thing with unit roles however is a good point. But thats more about formations, arty should try to stay behind assault units. Which can be pretty much impossible for an ai to do, cause in many situations you have a constant stream of units from the factories to the front -> No clear "behind".

And then, the times when you want artillery to get in front of assault units - maybe they barely outrange enemy turrets so you don't want those heavy units to go in between to take fire from them. Or maybe there's an army chasing you, should the AI decide in what formation to flee - you could want to just leave the slow artillery behind and evaquate fast units, you might want the fast units to defend the artillery, who knows... I know I'd be more pissed about having a complex AI algorithm misuse my units than when they were just following my exact orders.


What is most important, I think, is that when I give an order to a unit I will surely know what it will do. I say move and it moves. I say "move forward in this exact formation" that's cool too, if they can manage it. If I say "move there in a manner you decide is best" it just leaves **** down to luck to whatever they'll do a bit.

Speaking of unit roles, a couple of units were described to me, and at first I thought they were talking about a new Heart of the Swarm Terrain unit;
"An example from ZK is the heavy vehicle napalm tank, which fires a napalm grenade then scarpers, with around a 5 second reload on each shot. That tank also has enhanced HP regeneration which suits its role."

The unit is designed to be micro'd, and if there are more like it it makes me question the reasoning behind the Automation you know?

Mike

Something I hinted at in the OP that other people have also mentioned in passing: if army A and army B all follow the same dodge/kite etc AI, how will either army have an advantage? Whichever way you look at it, X action will cancel out X action from the opposing side, and you will always be left with the winning side being the one that had human intervention.

So unless unit micro cannot influence the game at all, it will always be a powerful skill to have. If unit micro cannot influence the game, this is when the physics sim becomes moot.

I don't think there's an issue with unit micro affecting the game. In fact human micro SHOULD be better than AI micro. It's just a matter of damage mitigation. Just like your units should shoot enemy units within range is a matter of damage mitigation.

In my opinion, the two keys to any kind of automation are (1) It should be a toggle and (2) It should be consistent. Therefore, if you know your arty is going to kite the enemy units and you don't want it to, you can turn it off. Therefore it still meets the need for player interaction while giving you a level of automation so you can control other units, or be in other places.

Also, don't take this as a need for all units to have automation. Not every unit needs some kind of auto mode, I just feel like arty* is one of several special cases.

*specifically arty that can move and shoot, not arty that has to plant itself.

Uhh... yeah. That's true. That tank needs micro or it fails horribly. Not all units are (well) automated in ZK, but maybe Uber could do it better?

I'm prepared to hold judgement until Alpha but I do suspect that units might need to be capable of taking care of themselves more in PA than in games on a lesser scale.

Having said all this I'm actually a massive micro player. I think I'd be better if I concentrated more on macro stuff. But as a micro intensive player it's still nice if units do sensible things sometimes when your attention is somewhere else.

AI-controlled tactical micro is a terrible, terrible idea.

Same for kiting or jinking. When you give the unit a fight command with it's AI state set you are telling it to try and move safely. The unit's automatic movement is simple so you can predict it and know what you are ordering it to do. It is still a command ordered by the player. Additionally it is easy to not use AI because move commands are still move commands, they have no micro AI attached to them.

Personally, I really dislike the concept of micromanagement in any sort of strategic game. In fact, for me the game with the perfect unit AI (so far) was the Close Combat series, even though that was more tactical than strategic in scale. In those games, your orders didn't directly affect your units instantly. For example, when you told them to move, it took them some time to pack up their equipment and move out. If an enemy started shooting at them, they took cover, and sometimes even stopped moving to avoid getting killed. Did that reduce the complexity of the games? Indeed not. (In fact, since the games are wargames, they tend to be a lot deeper in many aspects, than TA/Supcom.) Trying to micro in those games is pointless and completely ineffective.

But PA is not Close Combat, so we'll end up with more direct unit control. But I still despise micromanagement because a player should not win due to clicking skill, but rather due to planning skill.

As for trying out Zero K for 10 minutes and giving up, remember, you're not trying to evaluate it as a game, or even as a game you would like to play. You're trying to evaluate individual features of that game. There's a lot of room for improvement in ZK, most notably the zoom, interface, overlays, etc. I'm definitely much more of a TA/FA fan. But that doesn't mean I'm too closed-minded to see the potential in several of the features used in that game.

An RTS that doesn’t reward tactical positioning isn’t much of an RTS imo.

Oh, I definitely don't mind controlling tactical positioning. Controlling high ground, making sure your armor is facing the enemy, bounding overwatch, smart artillery placement, bait and switch, etc. I find all of these things very important in an RTS.

What I disagree with is stuff like the aforementioned stutter-step, selecting individual units that are low on health and retreating them, manually dodging slow projectiles with fast units, telling my long range units to keep their advantage by shooting enemies from LONG range. These things shouldn't even need to be said. Units should be smart enough to do this themselves.

After all, a soldier in war doesn't need to be told by his commanding officer to get his head down before the sniper blows it off. If the commander had to do that, he wouldn't have time to think of how his team would go about taking down that sniper in the first place.

I like how everyone assumes that micro will always trump good strategic choices. Just because you get more efficiency out of some units isn't an IWIN button. I think you're exaggerating the benefit of micro. What you micro, how much you do it, when you micro, all of these are just yet more decisions that allow more diverse gameplay. Keep in mind that while someone is heavily microing some units, their attention is necessarily not being spent elsewhere. A good player can capitalise on that.

yeah fair enough, i agree with all of this (other than units doing things themselves).