Defining micro

Then maybe you should try to out micro this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKVFZ28ybQs
We don't need anyhing like this in PA, it will consume too much cpu for a game with realtime bullet simulation, and the game will need something else to keep the aoe weapons useful against fast units, but it is a good example to show how powerful AI micro can be.

why is there even a discussion on this?

physical skill? common folks your moving a mouse clicking a button, or pressing a button on the keyboard. Your not playing football.

Anyways if you can manage your units better than the other guy then you should win. Automated battles should be a disadvantage to human controlled army. Being able to manage your units is part of being a commander. You are always trying to engage your enemy when you have a advantage, or when they are at a disadvantage. Through out history this is the difference between a good General/Commander vs a bad one. You as a commander must be able to put your forces in best light.

If you choose to focus your efforts on your base building, then you should loose that battle, unless you had much more firepower. Its just how it is. I don't understand 90% of these comments. Oh lets make the units do everything on their own, because I lack the ability to manage them.

It is pretty easy to understand, as a commander, you should be able give units generalized and durative commands (like keep the maximum range while firing) instead of controlling their every moves to achieve the same outcome.

You are entirely missing the point. The point is not for units to react to unexpected situations. The point is for players to be able to tell units what to do without clicking 10 times a second just to continue implementing a decision they have already made.

This post was going to be about something else but I just thought of a decent heuristic for acceptable levels of unit automation:

The player must know exactly what they are telling their units to do

This already has a few problems because new players know nothing and great players will learn every nuance of unit control. Regardless of this I think it is a workable definition when it refers to some average player. Maybe it could be thought of in terms of complexity which is loosely how long it takes to explain exactly what the command does.

For example it is easy to figure out how to keep a unit at max range. It is not easy to explain when a unit should retreat or deal with unseen threats. In this regard sylvesterink is also missing the point slightly as well. The unit AI should not be able to deal with all situations. It should do a predictable thing to automate tasks which are easy to explain yet mechanically taxing.

No, I definitely don't think that one should expect the AI to deal with all situations. There's certainly a point where human control is better than AI control, which is why human players tend to find AI players to be easy opponents. But the thing is, of the three layers of involvement, micro, tactical, and strategic, AI can do most micro just as well, if not better than a human player. On a tactical level, the AI can make good decisions most of the time, but once you start getting to the craftier tactics, the AI will break down. And on a strategic level, we have yet to see an AI that can design and implement a proper plan as well as a human can.

So there is a point at which you don't want the units to make their own decisions. When to call a retreat is an example of a decision that rides right on the edge of this point. On a lower level, if your units are damaged to a certain point, their individual AI can decide it's time to retreat more accurately than a player can. It's just up to the player to dictate whether the situation allows for such a retreat and set the units to behave accordingly. On a higher level, the human player may scout an incoming army that's too overwhelming to deal with with the forces he assigned, and manually pull his group back to implement a different attack, whereas the AI wouldn't be able to accurately determine that this would be a proper time to retreat.

It's also important that at a basic level, the game be designed so that micro does not have such a big impact on the battle. In Starcraft, units aren't easily healed, they come in small numbers, and their shots hit instantly with no chance to dodge. Also, resources are limited, making the game an extended war of attrition. As a result, every attack is critical, and player control is required at the lowest level for maximum effect. In games like Supcom and TA, these aspects are very different, so already the importance of micro is reduced. The only thing the unit AI needs to do is to take care of that final bit of micro that would distract the player from the bigger picture.

In fact, depending on how the PA's combat system is implemented, AI micro might not even need to be considered, and I'm fine with that too. As I stated before, my end goal is that micro and apm should be of little importance in the game.

Last night I sat down and played a game of FA on one of the 81 sq. km water maps as a kind of "how would this work if I didnt have ships" Building transports and using them to move land units island to island.

I ended up needing quite a lot of air units to maintain my own airspace, but I consistently had one problem with both my airspace patrols and my suppression patrols. Both patrols had airbases away from the target, in which I had a few AA towers, a gen, and a few airpads. after 20 minutes of patrol, even though I had intentionally constructed the patrols so that I had good spacing between fighters, they eventually amalgamated into a single clump of planes for each rotation direction.

Besides that, Adding planes to each patrol requires setting a new patrol route for each group of planes, eventually filling my strategic overlay with a solid blue bar in both cases. That being said, I'd like to add my voice to those suggesting patrols as first class entities, but ask that if that is done, the engine modify patrols or give us options to modify them such that we can have a single ring of fighters maintaining distance from each other (in the case of airspace defense at home) or groups of 2-3 spaced evenly in the case of a suppression patrol. It's a horrific amount of micro when you consider that the enemy i was fighting was routinely sending out groups of 6-10 strategic bombers and I had 100 t3 fighters suppressing his island. if the the clockwise or anti-clockwise cluster was nearby, great! if not, I had to reroute them and then return them to their patrol.

I'm not asking for the devs to include AI such that I don't have to play the game, just that a unit be able to perform it's role without an overabundance of micro.

Certainly air unit patrols should be easier to control than in SupCom/FA. For one a preset patrol route that you can easily add planes to (and perhaps even have them auto-space to avoid clumping) would be very good indeed. Also, is there any gameplay benefit to having limited fuel as in SupCom? The intention behind it appeared to be to make patrols on massive maps require staging posts, but in reality all it meant was that you had to piss about babysitting patrolling planes, or just leave them on the ground.

And to anyone arguing against a StarCraft-style system: you're shooting at a straw man, there is no way in a month of Sundays that PA micro will resemble StarCraft's system so there's no need to argue against stutter-stepping or any of that nonsense.

Interesting fact: the record APM for StarCraft is 800. That's 13 clicks a second. Mind-boggling.

I want the gameplay to remove all micro until the battle is decided by a computer flipping a coin, I find human interaction exhausting and want to keep it simple

Can't tell if trolling, or simply got PA confused with Gratuitous Space Battles.....

Mike

This thread is filled with a lot of hemming and hawing without much actual content.

In order to increase the scale of the game, it is necessary to relieve the player of the burden of low-level management of individual units. This should be obvious. Starcraft armies typically consist of about 50-100 units, and Starcraft occupies a player's full attention (even if they have 400 apm), to manage that army and to produce a comparable number of units. While Starcraft is a fun game, this is an extremely small scale.

Suppose we increase the size of the map drastically, and increase the number of units drastically to match. Either we have to simplify low-level interactions to the point that the player can exercise low-level control like in Starcraft, or we have to relieve the player of needing to manually handle all low-level interactions individually.

The best way to resolve this dilemma is to allow the player to specify their units' conduct without needing to give express orders every single time, to every single unit. A higher level of abstraction and control is needed. The units do not "do everything" for the player- the player specifies what they do, and those orders are applied to lots of units with few actions. This is not the AI making decisions for the player- this is abstract commands allowing the player to express their strategic or tactical choices in fewer raw clicks.

You’re missing the point- automated micro will never be good as player-driven micro, and only a shitty UI would require 10 clicks a second to achieve this. I understand people want their hand held which is fine like I said, as long as its something that the player must turn on, im cool with it.

Somebody sucks at micro.

Ahahaha, let's see you play a ZK game on that SupCom map (Seton's Clutch) 1v1AI. Just try microing all those units. Go on...

It's basically impossible to manage the couple of hundred units that will result. Playing 1v1 on a 4v4 map is a rough representation of what PA's scale looks like to me.

Ahahah! Brilliant! I finally got around to watching this, and PKC . . . if you can do that, then I concede the entire debate to you. Truly, automated micro will never be as good as player-driven micro.

Also, qwerty3w, you misquoted. That was PKC not me.

[EDIT] More lousy bot micro:
http://youtu.be/mrbYd4OFrWE
Heck, here, have several:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Automaton20 ... ture=watch
[/EDIT]

That's not exactly a fair comparison, there are a lot of differences between Starcraft and TA and SupCom right on down to the engine and the game design itself.

Things like Strat zoom, lack of "Spell-casters" and less micro focused unit design in general along with how the economy requires a lot less hand holding by the player drastically changes the dynamic used for that kind of comparison...

Mike

Another thing that should be mentioned is that the rts games with much micro require good network supplier, playing starcraft multiplayer games with more than 800ms ping is a terrible experience, while it is fine for kohan 2.

Hate to say it, but a multi-planet PA style game with projectile physics would trump starcraft 2 for network activity.

then it has a **** UI.

that vid has exactly nothing to do with the debate.

why are there so many bads in here?

network activity for gaming is tiny.