How to disincentivize focus fire

We know how this works: When your tanks meet their tanks, you have to make them all manually shoot the same tank in turn, so that the enemy tanks die faster and they get a lower overall damage output.

I'm afraid this 'feature' is neither realistic, nor particularly awesome. Nor, especially, is it in harmony with the gameplay goal of low micro.

Some have suggested a whole AI program to make units focus fire by themselves. This seems like an inelegant and wasteful solution. As far as I can see the problem can be solved by a simple design switch:

A unit's damage output should scale with its remaining HP%. So a unit that has 50% HP only does 50% of its full damage.


This way the damage output of a tank column is lowered by the same amount whether you kill half the tanks or reduce them all to 50% HP. Focus fire is no longer a brainless APM-requirement booster but limited to actual strategic choices like focusing on the Commander, important buildings etc.

I would at least like to see this tried out in Alpha.

A far simpler way to fix this is just letting it be, and possibly upping the range on units a bit. Focus fire only works in very specific amounts. When you order 50 tanks to shoot 1 tank, you're going to suffer from massive overkill.

It's only worthwhile to focus fire if your group size is roughly as big or smaller as the number of shots needed to destroy a tank. Otherwise it simply stops being a viable option.

Interesting idea. The question is would it make a battle get one sided quickly? Person losings can't do as much damage? Suppose there's no veterancy bonus and the damage drop off could always be tweaked to get the balance right.

I'd rather see the micro taken out of the economy than the battles. Make patrol reclaim more efficient than manual. Not having mex upgrades and 4 levels of power generator. Assisted building not being a major feature.

Or you do the sensible thing, and give tanks some smarts about who they decide to shoot.


Make them micro themselves, and shoot just enough shoots needed. It's not hard to do. I think it's pretty damn elegant.

The problem with auto-micro in this situation is perhaps that it looks really stupid. Just enough tanks focussing fire on one other tank to one-shot it might be efficient, but it also looks silly.

(Plus you'll get into the whole random trajectory thing; how much is "just enough"?)

No.

By what logic does damaged armour reduce weapon power?

Aside from that it's a non-issue and any attempt to change it would be overly complicated and non-intuitive.

The only time you would bother to focus-fire is in a very close match, or when your opponent is well ahead of you. An anti-slippery slope mechanic in other words.

Don't mock it until you try it. It doesn't look stupid.

It looks better than having your entire line of tanks shoot at the closest scout and waste 80 shots on it.

Just do your stats on it, and say you want to be 90% confident that you'll fire just enough.

Do you have an example somewhere? I can't imagine it looking anything but weird, but if it's been done and it works... well, then it works.

http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?t=34776

Vested interests, I made the mod myself.

Making focus fire the status quo is not a disincentive. :lol:

This idea would destroy a nice distinction between armies made of small swarmy units and those made of large chunky units. I think unit chunkyness should be an important attribute, it is boring when a hypothetical unit which has the same stats as 10 small units acts in mostly the same way.

I prefer increasing the unit AI intelligence to automatically focus fire.

It sounds interesting BulletMagnet, but would you happen to have a video of it in action? I don't own Supreme Commander (which I guess this is for?)

Nah, sorry. No videos of it.

Still, I don't see why the OP wants to disincentivize focus firing, but thinks having the computer do it for you is inelegant. I'd like to see some sort of justification for that claim.

Further, when you have;

I think players will completely avoid committing troops to a fight, unless they're 100% certain they'll steamroll the opposition.

See, if it's a risky fight, then your combat strength may plummet very quickly (relative to the opposition's), leaving you with a pile of impotent tanks that flounder about until destroyed.

What the OP suggests is basically a slippery slope mechanic which isn't desirable at all.

If you really want to de-emphasise that kind of micro, just give the player 200+ units and show them that;

A] When you have that many units there's a limit to how many small one hit groups you can effectively control.

B] That even if his micro does give him a small advantage in that one battle, show him hat while he was doing that his opponent used that time to grab more economy, build more factories, adjust his unit composition, do some scouting and launch his commander to he moon.

Mike

There needs to be an AI setup for auto-micro unit shots to be optimal and reducing over kill of targets. This reduces the need for micro management and for a game of this scale is just something that very likely will be mandatory. However, there would be situations where focus fire micro may still be needed and would allow a skilled player to get a slight edge.

Example, an army of units, mostly smaller ones that are swarming your own army, but in the back are artillery units or some sort of heavy unit. What will you do? Let the AI run it's course and walk your army into the enemy or do a little bit to focus fire micro down the heavy units? The micro in the second option isn't much, but would nonetheless gives choices to the players of either a little army micro or focus on marco, building bases, ect.

Well I'm convinced, I guess having the AI do it would be better after all.

I think the obvious solution is better AI, which at times should include allied units selecting the same target as other units near them. What I'd prefer to see, though, is encouragement of more diverse unit compositions, and then have all those different types of units automatically trying to use their strengths to maximum effect. Now, suddenly, it might be smarter to have artillery automatically firing at places they can get the most splash damage, and high damage/high recharge weapons automatically targeting enemies with lots of HP left when they have nearby supporting units to finish off low-health enemies.

When the AI is naturally being more efficient than a human can micro, humans won't micro them.

I think it should stay this way.. people who are micro-managing their forces can't focus at other things. While people who macro-manage their forces can lead multiple forces..

Hummm...

Damage reducing combat effectiveness.
I see two problems with this tactic. First ignorance is king. The idea of damage reducing combat effectiveness is counter-intuitive in video games, so people are quite likely to focus fire anyhow, despite it being ineffective. Also, your idea assumes all units are the same. This is not true, some units are better than others. Micro opportunities would still exist to focus out more important targets in your army.

Auto-Focus
While maybe possible, AI costs CPU cycles, which can add up fast in a game with huge numbers of units in play. But even more importantly, an AI has to be perfect. Everyone assumes AI are inferior to what players can do. So it's completely normal, for people to focus fire manually because they don't trust the AI, or because they simply know they can do a better job, or because they have different target priorities than the AI might, etc. Designing an AI that actually is as good or better than the player is a daunting technical challenge. Selling the idea that the AI really is that good, is difficult as well. And in the unlikely even that you actually do manage to pull both off, your very success will discourage people. If the AI plays this game better than I do, why am I here again?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for reducing the importance of micro to encourage people to focus more on macro tasks in PA. I'm just not entirely sure what's actually going to work. Both tactics have been tried historically, many times. Neither has really ever worked well. Micro still happens, frequently.

So all I can really hope for on this subject, is to minimize the overall value of micro in little ways. I seriously doubt we can eliminate it entirely.

I think it's funny that there is another thread about bombers that is the exact opposite of this thread. You'd have 100 bombers flying at an enemy base and they all decide to shoot at the same turret. They drop enough bombs that in total would do enough damage to blow up several turrets, but since they all dropped on the same target only one turret explodes. And ironically all their T3 SAM turrets would fire at the same bomber and let all the other ones slip by.

Playing sup com I've seen this sort of thing happen a lot, and not just with bombers. Missiles, artillery, torpedoes, tank shells, almost everything. And in one of the live streams they mentioned tweaking the AI so that units spread fire, not for game balance for focused fire or whatever, but because it's actually a good tactic.

Attack move: units spread fire. Right click on a dude: units focus fire. Sounds fine to me.

Maybe focus fire would be an issue in a different type of game, like an MMO where people have a bazillion hit points, or the old school D&D board game. but unless you are trying to shoot down an experimental or bum rush someone's ACU I really don't see this being an issue.