The good side of Micro

Around here I often see the opinion, that micro is bad in all ways shapes or forms and generally bad for strategy games, because it distracts from the strategy.

As you can already guess from the title of this thread, I disagree with that sentiment. Now before I go on, let me tell you what this thread is not about: Getting more micro into PA. PA isn't Starcraft and I don't want PA to be Starcraft, in other words, I know what PA is about and it's not big micro-battles. If you think I want more micro in PA, you are simply wrong.

This thread is about stopping those who want to see every hint of micro gone at whatever cost. I write this mostly, because I have seen some suggestions, which are driven solely by a no-micro-agenda instead of solid reasons and I think there is a need to discuss what good aspects micro has, which should not be eliminated.

First let me address the statement, that micro has no strategic value. Sorry, but that's wrong.
Let's take a look at the Mutalisks from Starcraft. They are a very fast and fragile hit-and-run unit, which excel at harrassing and chipping away at your opponent. The strategy behind going for Mutalisks is, that they pin back the enemy in his base until he has set up enough defense to move out with his army. This serves multiple purposes: It delays the enemy push, giving you more time to build up a good economy, it even forces out static defense, which are resources he can't use for attacking. The catch however is, that this strategy relies on having good Mutalisk control. In other words Mutalisk-micro is a tool used for a strategic purpose: Delaying the opponents attack in order to gain an economic advantage.
This was a rather micro-intensive example, but micro also includes other, less clicky stuff, for instance a tactical retreat tricking your opponents units into overextending and getting flanked. That's a maneuver which involves about six or seven clicks involving a few boxes and an a-move.

I agree, that the clickfest-micro has no place in PA, the Mutalisk example is mainly there to show, that even high-APM micro can have strategic value. However, the big scale of PA definitely allows for tactics like flanking, since those can be easily done with big unit groups and in no way are a pain to do as a player.
In essence, micro is performing different sorts of tactics in a battle and therefore it is a tool, which is used to follow your overall strategy.

An other point to address is, that micro distracts from strategy. I think I have to somewhat agree to this, since you are pretty much never thinking about your strategy during micro, however, these phases are normally limited to single battles, which are not taking place all the time. Also, it should be noted, that micro is a very engaging and also rewarding activity. Performing a drop, dealing a big blow to the enemies ecnomy simply feels great, not to mention, that the very direct control you exert puts you in the mindset, that you are doing what your units are doing.
So yes, micro is distracting and therefore should not be prevalent throughout the game. However, short bursts of it can add more variety to the overall gameplay and therefore preventing it from becoming stale.

In short:
Having no clickfest is a good thing, but micro isn't exclusively a clickfest. Removing every ounce of micro would also get rid of players performing tactical maneuvers, which while being temporarily distracting are also engaging and provide more gameplay variety.
Furthermore, those tactical maneuvers are tools which can be used to implement the strategy a player follows, which also speaks against their removal.

Small bits of non-tedious micro are a good thing, not a bad thing. Just like a counterintuitive deviation from your usual strategy can sometimes be the right choice instead of the wrong one.

Flanking your opponent, dropping troops in his base, raiding his economy, tactical retreats... all these things are examples of strategy, not micro.

What makes these things micro, is the requirement to manually click each unit, load it into the transport, move the transport to the enemy base, unload it, then start picking targets.

Nobody would be opposed to being able to drop troops into the enemy base, as long as it's a matter of doing it in 2 clicks ahead of time instaed of 25 clicks during the entire operation.


People are opposed to micro, because micro is considered to be the "babysitting your units because they are dumb and your ability to order them is too limited" part of starcraft, not the part you described.

Sorry, there are people blindly opposed to micro. Just look at the directional building thread were some people think that placement of building is not important and that require too much micro.
I've even seen people willing to add a few second of lags to remove micro ...

I agree with dmii when he say:

People are opposed to needless micro, which involves using more clicks to perform a series of actions that are needed for the player to unambiguously express their directions.

For example, suppose I want to load a bunch of units into transports and move them. This is going to take at least two clicks because I am making two discrete choices which I could have specified differently. I might have ordered the units to move without the transports, I might have just ordered them to load and wait.

Needless micro would be manually needing to box units and load each transport individually. I have only made one decision- I want to load these units into these transports- but I have to perform a large number of clicks to implement that decision.

Ideally there is a strong correlation of player input to game choices. The player isn't making a huge number of choices in a bundle with one click, and the player isn't required to click hundreds of times to implement one choice.

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Secondly, I agree that the potential for micro is both inevitable and desirable to some extent. In order to completely squeeze out any possibility of micromanagement optimization, you really do have to design extremely boring units and combat mechanics. The primary intent of such design should be to make these interactions as rich and interesting as possible. Then, by giving the player so much to do, the player has to prioritize where they want to put their attention. Given a sufficiently large scale, and with more important things to do, it is unlikely any player will waste APM microing individual units (unless you think it really is that important in some situation, in which case go right ahead).

Now, it is important to point out that the absolute best players in a game designed this way will still have high APM. However this is unavoidable. High hand speed is never going to be worse than low hand speed. However if the game is designed with the right priorities (large scale decisions significant- outcome of brief battles not as significant) then high hand speed does not help as much, although it obviously confers an advantage.

Yes, people are opposed to needless micro, however as I already stated, there are people who take it too far with what they see as needless.
I simply have seen a few too many people displaying their hate for micro, that having a reminder of its good aspects seemed neccessary to me.
Also the devs are reading these threads too and it can't hurt that they get to see an other perspective on it. Especially since the views you normally see here are directed against micro in general, even if people actually only mean the needless part of it.

Do not forget that there is not only one group of 'mutalisks' you have to micro.
There may be lots of battlegrounds that need attention.

It is thus very important that we get rid of any micro that is unnecessary.
We will be busy enough managing the macro

Though it will always be possible to micro EVERY unit yourself if you can handle it.
You do not have to use the unit AI !
Do consider that it would be exponentially more intensive then the most intensive starcraft game ever played.

PA is not just an RTS, it is a whole new scale we are talking about.
Unit and planet numbers are only limited by server hardware.
Tens of thousands of units or even millions that need to be managed over hundreds of planets. (if current hardware can handle that)
The battles can be so large that it is impossible for one person to handle, I foresee clan vs clan battles or something similar.

Imagine the new e-sport:
A team of 100 people that plays in 4 groups of 25 against a similar team for a total of say 24 or 48 hours straight on some sort of dedicated cluster that runs the simulation.
It would be an epic RTS weekend.

I think Ledarsi nailed it.

The definition of bad micro is game concepts that INCREASE player actions (keypress / mouse clicks) without increasing the number of DECISIONS being made.

The better your action:decision ratio is, the better the game becomes.

I'm one of those opposed to nearly all forms of micro. But there is a difference between micro and tactics. (And between tactics and strategy.) A game can have a lot of tactical depth without needing any micro at all. The example I always turn to is the Close Combat series, in which micro is totally impractical. (Most notably because your units respond on their own time.) And yet the CC games are very deep indeed, more so than Starcraft in all it's micro glory.

I don't mean to imply that PA should go that far though. Supcom more or less got the balance right, and even TA did to a degree. Zero K went another route and achieved it with its unit AI, and I don't think anyone would call the game less tactical or strategic because of that.

I just think that many RTS players have a form of Stockholm Syndrome going on. They're so accustomed to micro that they can't imagine a good RTS without it.

Uhm. I hate to break it to ya guys. The only way to get rid of micro is to not allow any unit capable of accepting orders.

That's not the point. The point is to reduce the ratio of decisions to clicks to as low as possible.

Eg.

Move 100 troops from A to attack B, and prioritize high damage low HP units first.
3 decisions (troops, attack, priority).

How many clicks would this take in Starcraft 2? How many in Supcom? How many in PA?

If PA can achieve the same result as Starcraft, with less clicks than Supcom, we have achieved a reduction in 'micro'. Exactly the same amount of control over your units, just better interfaces for executing repetitive actions.

I really don't need to say anything; everything I've wanted to say has been covered by others already.

My feelings are that micro should let you swing a tactical encounter, but not win you a strategic game.

Maybe like a 1.25x force multiplier?
I think the mutas is a good example, or like marine-dropship harassment.
But micro marines with stutter-step being an advantage is too far.

All of the above examples can be automated with a simple script. Which is basically the whole idea.

The idea is de-emphasizing micro. Which means, if you want to do it you can, but your actions are better spent doing something else.
As long as units can move and shoot at the same time and are not designed to reward micro, the scale of PA will pretty much eradicate any tedious micro. Simply because it is not worth doing it.

It is far more elegant to let it naturally phase out, than to make it artificially unneccessary.
I don't get, why people want micro to go away and then propose to let it stay and have an AI do it. Sorry, but the only thing you are doing in my eyes is doing it wrong.

I'm not sure what you mean by "micro" but I'm seeing it as "ensuring a unit is fighting optimally", which is something you'll want at all times, but is preferably done without having to get involved manually. It is simply optimal to move back while firing if you outrange your enemy. That's not something you'll want removed from the game. It's something you want to happen automatically.

That's what I meant by automated scripting. More powerful commands. More intelligent units.

But that might not be what you mean by "micro".

I find Zero-K's fight mode does a really good job of handling this, but even then there are often times where it is worth tweaking the paths of a few units, since your opponent is still acting as well, so that may mess up the automated systems.

Also, any game with a physics simulation for projectiles is going to have dodging shots and stuff blocking shots be a thing, which can be handled automatically, but is still a candidate for effective micromanagement.

I am sure farriers know your pain. Get back to us when you've stopped arguing like a grandpa talking about the "good ol' days". :roll:

You may have enjoyed the means (micro) to get to the ends (strategy), but when a superior system comes along to replace those means (AI/scripts) and get the same results (strategy), going on a quest to get people to appreciate the "old way" is not really about the method as much about your inability to cope with something that makes skills you've honed and enjoyed irrelevant. You become a Don Quixote with the windmills being the "ignorance of people who don't appreciate or understand micro like I do."

Much like the automobile replaced the horse in transportation, AI/scripts can replace micro as the means towards achieving strategy, and this shouldn't bother anyone unless they've placed a lot of pride and identity in their micro.

If one wants to argue that the "old ways" of doing things were better, that's fine, but don't expect to get much sympathy from folks who didn't care for the "old ways."

Given the size of the battle any individual unit micro is IMO really, really bad (when I think of stuff from SC2 like stimpacks, fungal growth, force fields...).

Requiring the player to literally babysit his units like you need to do in SC/SC2 (as you don't really have too many of them) takes you away from the outthink the enemy to the level of outclick your enemy.

SC2 micro shows skill, yes (I hope for the pros that they make enough money for their pending carpal tunnel syndrome treatment). But rather on the keyboard/mouse smashing level.

Building placement micro, I'm totally fine with that (as you do it only when you build the structure). But adding buttons/keyboard shortcuts to units for something special... I'm not a fan of that as then I will have several thousand units to babysit with this game's scale.

Your example doesn't prove this. The strategy of "hit and run"/harassing isn't bound to micro. Imho strategy in general isn't anyhow related to how you do it, but rather what you want to do. The way you achieve your goals is called tactics. Therefore if the strategy is to harass your enemy, you have different (in this case two) options:

• You can micro your units to achieve it.

• Your units are able to do it on their own.

The second option may sound strange at the first glance, but thats actually the way generals command their army. They don't need to direct every tank, but tell their lieutenants or whomever: "Harass all enemy units in this area."
Even if you disagree about my view of strategy and tactics, harassing is still something not necessarily only achievable through micro and therefore micro doesn't add a new strategy. It's just the common way of realizing this strategy.
I think micro should still be possible and sometimes a human will micro better than a AI, so you can still directly control your units, if desired. But not microing would not result in a fatal disadvantage and could encourage players to step back sometimes, analyze the battlefields and create a new strategy.

This is a good example of the situation human micro likely more effective than AI, moreover it'd need some advanced unit commands to "automatize" this tactic, but since we don't know the UI of PA it may be theoretically possible. Nevertheless a human player would perform better, since the can collect more parameters and more flexible analyze them. So you'd have still situations when micro is rewarding, but you'd also have the option to set up a bunch of ambushes without permanent attention.

While microing units offers great possibilities it's possible to automatize (some) of this options, for example the air-transport-bridges introduced in SupCom.

tl;dr
Microing doesn't add a strategy, it just represents a tactic to realize this strategy. Giving units the ability to perform this tactic itself won't reduce the strategical options, but give you some additional time to make strategical decisions. Microing should be possible every time, mandatory only in few situations.

One thing people don't seem to talk about enough is that while the cost of micromanagement is the splitting of attention, said splitting of attention is a core differentiator of skill in an RTS.

And before you say "well then just fight on multiple battlefields", I'm aware that involves dividing attention, and I'm aware that PA is a game where doing such a thing is going to be quite common. It's also the only one that comes to mind where splitting one's forces is going to happen naturally, rather than be a useful tactic occasionally. In most games, and in PA on a single planet, splitting up one's forces is basically doing your opponent's divide-and-conquer strategy for them. Unless you are specifically trying to harass multiple undefended strategic areas, it's generally not worth it to split up like that.

So, basically, the important question to ask is "how much does the player's attention get divided?" rather than "how much micro is there?", since micromanagement seems to have a lot of definition issues and emotional baggage. From there we can ask "how much should the player's attention get divided?" and I'd say 2 to 3 ways constantly, with peaks of 4 or 5 in larger games with many planets. Note that these are just ballpark estimates from my own experience with RTS.