How to make an RTS and not an RTT

I agree with OrangeKnight that this is too much automation, and I additionally think it wouldn't work that well. Often you don't care if you lose your engineer when he builds a mass extractor in enemy territory, but if you could have a better UI element to control its actions with little effort, you could prevent its death.

The ability to apply an area (oval or rectangle) to any command would be both flexible and reliable. Here are some examples of how different actions would behave:

1. For movement, the unit would patrol the area in such a way as to cover all of the ground with its line of sight, or radar range if it's a radar unit.
2. For attack, the unit would bombard the area uniformly with its gun, spread out according to the blast radius of its projectile.
3. For building mass extractors, it would put mass extractors on all the mass spots in the area. For kbot and vehicle labs, it would fill the area but leave enough room for movement in between. For solar panels, it would pack them in tight.

Those are a few examples, but basically for any command, the unit would do the most reasonable thing in the specified area that corresponds with the action chosen, the properties of the unit itself, and the properties of the building being constructed, if applicable.

Neutrino, what do you think about the idea of comprehensive area commands?

I think area commands make a lot of sense. We'll certainly run some experiments along those lines.

I don't think it so much rules out automation as much as the UI making it so easy to do the same things as you would with automation there isn't any point in automation and it does mean there is some skill element to it, which is required for the competitive scene.

Mike

I guess this is where we differ in opinions. I certainly don't want to pick a fight, because I can see you have more invested in the RTS genre than I do, but the thing that drives me nuts about real time "strategy" games is that the ability to order around a worker unit is somehow a competitive skill. I just wish skill correlated more to strategy than who clicks the fastest.

If you selected a metal extractor and click-dragged a huge area, where the engineer would only build on the metal spots, do you think that it could save you enough time and also give you more control than just telling the engineer to decide where to build extractors?

Is there any confirmation on wether or not there will be an active pause function in the (single player) game. I think it would be very useful at times to get to know the game mechanics.

Yes, no question about it, but I think there are scenarios where both would be beneficial. I'm all for area commands, but I think a little automation like I outlined would be helpful sometimes too.

Did you read my giant post? It explains pretty well that in terms of managing your economy, FA is already waaaaaaaaaaay easier to deal with compared to SCII, especially when you consider how limited Queuing is in SCII compared to FA due to teh Flow Eco FA has and I think your classifications for skill and micro are way to broad. Yes, building an extractor requires you to click on an engie and tell it to build an Extractor, but that isn't skill and it certainly isn't micro.

Frankly, the ACT of building extractors doesn't require skill, click Engie, click the extractor build icon, click mass point done! The skill plays into it when you start improving how efficiently you can build them. when you start only sending 1 Engie to the cluster of mass points and use the queue system to set the orders for all of them much faster than doing each individually.

Think of it this way, asking for automation on building resources is like getting a bed that makes itself after you get up, it's something so easy to do there isn't any point in automating it, especially when you consider that you can make a better bed than the automated system can.

Mike

I read all of the ones after my first comment in this thread, but none seemed particularly giant. Can you specify which one?

viewtopic.php?p=510501#p510501

Mike

Ok, I read it and I definitely agree with you. I cannot stand trying to play Starcraft II because I just get my *** handed to me in mere minutes by crazy APM junkies. I still play FA to this day, and I agree it is far easier on micro than most games. I just wish micro could be minimized as much as possible as far as economy goes so I can keep my focus on blowing the **** out of fancy robots. In FA I find myself shifting focus between the battle at hand and making sure my engineers are still grinding away.

The only way to get rid of that is to get rid of economy entirely like in Wargame: European Escalation. But in the end FA's eco not only requires your attention less often it also tends to be less urgent, combine that with tools like Strat Zoom and Flow-Eco-Queuing and you get a system that's pretty light on the skill requirements.

Compare that to a Zerg player in SCII where if they miss a few Larva injects it can seriously effect both the army and Economy(Larva=Drones) all at the some time.

Mike

I disagree with that, especially in late game on large maps where sACU units can be outfitted with that damn resource generator and economy gets crazy exponential.

FA had the perfect amount of micro for me.

Haven't read your alledged giant post on the topic, but you seem to contradict yourself. You say both "there must be manual control if the RTS is to be competitive" and "you can make a better bed than the automated system can." So let's say there's an "auto build mexes" button that helps new players multitask but might send a con to its death. You know you can do better manually thanks to your mad skillz, so why would you complain about its presence? Is it because it prevents noobs to fall below a certain level of incompetence and you can't humiliate them as much as you'd like?

(This said I am against annoying automation, area mex command is much better than any auto-build button.)

If the computer can do it better than humans, I don't see the point of competing on that, especially in a game of massive scale like PA (even though we'll have small maps). The interesting points of competition are those where humans beyond a certain skill level are simply better.

So, let's automate everything as much as possible for the people who don't find pleasure in kiting enemies because they'd expect their units to have some basic survival sense. Then the pros can go into manual override mode because with their APM and skill at splitting their attention they can micro better than the AI. Everybody wins.

I think Zero-K (haven't played it much but I did watch games) is a nice experiment in that domain: units have smart feature like auto-kiting (and unless I dreamed this up, also auto-reclaiming of nearby features/wrecks by engineers if you're starving for a particular resource). The game's still competitive though. And AFAIR the automation doesn't get in the way of advanced players because the automatic stuff only kicks in if you leave units idle for sufficient time.

It's like cars in North America: most people drive automatics which do a good enough jobs of managing the engine, but you can still find one where you manually switch gears if you like more control or are into racing.