Keeping PA from Becoming a Clickfest that Doesn't Rely on Strategy

@philoscience it's tedious and the game has become all about this where it shouldn't be.

Post a single cast where "the game is all about this". It's not true at all - it only dictates the outcome of pickups in the first 5-10 minutes.

take your pick.
while it is true that it looses importance as the game progresses that doesn't make it any less important and the way the engagements are handled stay victim to the no-retreat or reinforcement rules.

Hah, funny dude. I've watched all of those already... would you like to actually pick one that demonstrates a game being dominated by micro? So that we could actually discuss it? Because none of them do. If you watch, it's important in the first 5 minutes with raiders. By late game it's all about encircling your opponent and sending them in from multiple angles while also macroing your T2 expansion and defending counter raids.

Here, let me do your work for you. In the latest video we have a perfect example of what i'm talking about:


Kikser's micro is far superior to Zaphod's - he dominates him in both of the early raids, preventing Zaphod from doing much. But this early advantage is totally outpaced by Zaphod's better eco management and strategic encircling. By constantly sending units around Kikser, it doesn't even matter that he's winning some of the first engagements, because he simply cannot expand. It's a perfect example of where the micro did add to the strategic depth a bit, but didn't even come close to dominating a match.

Edit: also you can count several times in that video where Zaphod retreats a group of raiders due to losing micro and then makes use of them again. So I don't know what your talking about regarding "no retreat and reinforcement rules".

My solution to this is to use two different commands. The Move command gives the player complete control over the movement of the unit. Units with a Move command will try to move to the location as fast as possible, their legs will ignore enemies (but of course their gun will fire at things in range). The other command is the Fight command, this command tells units to move to a location but engage enemies intelligently along the way. For small fast units this in includes jinking when a unit with slow projectiles is encountered.

It is vital that the behavior be implemented as two distinct commands. The usefulness of a UI feature is related to how easy it is to choose whether to use it. A state toggle is unwieldy and unqueuable, an option in the menu is even worse. Players need to be able to quickly switch between telling their units to engage safely but slowly or to run headlong into your opponents commander without slowing down because they are trying to dodge shots.

As far as I can see the only reason that Star craft is noted as a click fest is because of the number of unit, size of the battlefield and optimised base/economic manage.

PA has butt loads of units, espically after the last patch.

PA maps are huge and hard to see in one go, making the use of extensive macro past the first 30 mins (Looking at you 1v1's!) improbible.

And the economic and base management in PA is a bit more complicated then star craft (Not that I am insulting starcraft, I actually really like most if not all RTS games for something).

I find that when my micro does max out, its when I am managing a multi front attack whilst building new bases AND scouting manually.

Epic battles to me should be like 2 massive ocean waves colliding together, I agree with @brianpurkiss, not a fan of click jerking units.

Units having the ability to reverse should reduce some micro.

I feel in this type of game, click-dodging to trick trajectory and pathing to not collide, is probably not an intended or desired feature and is closer to a bug.

Generally, if they can fix trajectory or pathing where sudden clicks don't prevent correct shot placement, that is best.

If they had to slightly widen the turns of bots, that would be fine, or add a slight amount of tracking to some kinds of shots... As long as doing that results in the same amount of dead bots really.

Bots being able to strafe, and naturally some missing occurs, is probably alright, it encourages moving them alongside an enemy instead of straight against. As long as no form of direct clicking during combat creates higher precentages of survival.

If you will note TA (I feel like this might be getting old) surface untis couldn't really turn that well, and took time to accelerate.

Making micro difficult to do if your units have to slow down to turn, or in some cases stop accelerating in-order to turn on the spot before driving forwards again.

So players could only realistically give more broad orders, and hope that the units themselves did a little micro themselves (some even did with the movement orders).

i see what you did there lol