The good side of Micro

Supcom already allowed you to have UI mods in ranked games. I don't see why PA would be any different.


I'd personally love to see a screen when you're *starting* a ranked game that goes "Your opponent is using these mods: -mod1,mod2,mod3."

And then, after the game, the system could go "Would you like to try any of the mods your opponent was using? Click to find out more information and install the mod "

Not just for gameplay mods but also for UI mods, you mean?

Of course it depends on how powerful the mods are. But you obviously have to draw a line somewhere, after all there is no doubt, that a maphack is a too powerful mod. (Just an example.)

The problem is, that the more room for customization is there, there automatically is more room for abusing it to get an unfair advantage.
Also it most likely is too early to discuss where to draw the line, since we don't exactly know how powerful the different kind of mods are going to be.

But this is derailing a little from what this thread is originally about. (Which is highlighting that not all forms of micro are bad, in order to prevent that the good parts are removed together with the unneccessary clickfest micro.)

After rethinking my view, I am mainly against advanced stuff, because I think it is unneccessary. Micro only works on a small scale and once it gets too big people focus on the important parts aka not micro.
Micro automation on the other hand would make the small scale advantages of micro available on a bigger scale, kiting for instance, which by no means doesn't work, but also requires special attention when balancing, since micro after all can be very powerful.
In retrospect the position I presented in the posts before was oriented on a skewed version of automation, which I think would also go too far for people who advocate it.
In the end I can only see the unneeded work as something that's always bad about advanced AI.

Neutrino actually already explained that you can't make a maphack, because the server will only feed you data you're allowed to know about (based on line of sight and such).

So basically, any data that comes across the stream to your PC is something you're allowed to see, so you can completely go wild with mods. Anything goes. You can't cheat, because you don't get any data that would allow cheating.

It's a really interesting system, I think.

I do like Micro and dont understand why everybody hates it. I think its not that bad to have some micro, it wouldnt be bad if there would be less. Many think can be scripted automaticly, but a game completly without micro? Wouldnt it be boring, if your Units just do whats the best, what are you doing then.... Such games like Anno or Oil rush dont have any micro at all, but Anno is not an RTS and Oil rush is kinda meh.
However, if everything is scripted, the enemy can still abuse the AI and messing around with it, like if your Units kite automaticly, he can abuse it to get them way out of position.
Or if your Units fire at important targets, he can dance theese around so the units wont loose aggro, but also do nearly no damage.
And automatic spreading vs splash damage would make any sort of splash damage completly useless!

I like micro too, I just don't want it in PA, plus the multiple playgrounds thing just can't go well with micro.
Automations can certainly break the game if they are anything like those starcraft 2 micro bots, but I guess Uber could find a way to restrict them.

You can design the game to avoid such "easily exploitable" automations.
By giving units slower turnrates, acceleration and turret turnrates for example this makes automated micro much more complicated as the decisions about skirmishing most be done much earlier making "perfect" micro be very situational and hard to arithmetize.

Micro can have very different requirements. Stutter step kiting with marines in Starcraft is something that requires almost all of your attention and is something that you can hardly keep up at more than 1 place. Not using stutter stepping against Zerglings for example is almost always a "mistake" in Starcraft as your marines can use their reload time to move away from the Zergling causing the Zerglings to lose damage per second because Zerglings are unable to move when they "reload". After that the Zergling hits it remains stationary until it is ready to attack again. If the Marine move after it have been hit, the Zergling have to move up to the Marine again and therefore lose time that it could have used for hitting the Marine another time.

In TA, SupCom and Spring games most units can move and fire at the same time. This makes kiting much less micro intensive, especially when units have similar speeds, as 2 units that are going in the same direction will keep the same distance to eachother and the kiting unit will keep kiting the lower unit. Micro is still important as you can change direction on the units and the unit that is being kited might be able to break off and flee or reach the kiter if the player controlling them is not microing them.
When kiting is automated the usage of kiting becomes more about map control and unit composition. If there is no room to kite then shorter ranged units will be able to drive the kiters into a cliff or other units by surrounding them. There is still lots of depth to this.

Dancing to dodge shots is something that has been done since TA. Dodging usually requires alot of attention. Usually you must see the enemy unit, watch the turret facing and enemy micro in order to be able to dodge the incoming shots. In order to let the units dodge automatically like a player can do the script would need to access enemy turret facings and projectile paths. It is unsure if scripts will be able to access those in PA.
In Zero-K dodging exists in the form of automated jinxing. They don't calculate where enemy projectiles will go but they just jinx back and forth. It can be pretty effective against slow moving projectiles.
However jinxing isn't free. If the units are trying to catch up with an enemy, jinxing might make them unable to do so. In some cases it might be better to take the incoming damage and reach the enemy as fast as possible. There is still room for important micro and decisions even in a system with automated jinxing or dodging.

Automated spreading causing splash damage to be useless in Starcraft 2. There are some things that makes this unlikely to be as effective in PA:
1. The Zerglings spread out even before the Siege tanks fire. The script have access to the aiming of the Siege tanks. We are not sure if scripts will be able to have access to aiming or projectile paths in PA.
2. Network lag. In the Spring engine there are Gadgets and Widgets. Gadgets are performed without network lag and has to be included in the game. Widgets are performed locally on your computer giving orders to your units for example. Network lag would make the Zerglings unable to dodge the shots in time.
3. Bandwidth limit. If the scripts are constantly spamming orders to your units or accessing stuff on the server you might reach the bandwidth limit. The host might even arbitrarily limit the bandwidth you can use for the game making large scale scripts have to be conservative with how much commands they spam.
4. Instant turn rate. The Zerglings can turn almost instantly and can easily run away from the targeted Zergling. Units in PA will most likely have much much slower turn rates.
5. Instant acceleration. The Zergling accelerates instantly giving it enough time to both change direction and accelerate away from the targeted Zergling.

More complex unit behaviours and physics means it will be much harder to develop effective automation scripts using "perfect" micro in PA .
Silly game mechanics = silly automated micro

Yeah, there's no complete map hack, I already knew that. However, to have a correct display of the fog of war it is possible, that your computer has to know at least a little bit more, than is shown. An extended view mod sounds pretty viable to me.
Also, you shouldn't underestimate the ideas hackers can come up with to get what they want. I wouldn't put it past them to trick the server into thinking that everything is within sight of a unit.

But that's getting into hacking, not modding. The game of course puts constraints on the mods but currenty we really don't know enough to discuss about whether there still are problems or not.


As for the micro, most people actually don't hate it. They hate that it can be extremely influential to the point, that it is required to compete at a certain level. If it simply was one of many viable playstyles they would be totally fine with it being in a game.

You could easily make a mod that removes fog of war... you just wouldn't see anything else, because the server calculates line of sight and only sends you what you can see. There's nothing you can mod here.

Yep, that'll always be a problem, and never legal. But from everything I've heard, the goal is to allow players full freedom with every bit of information they get from the server, because the server is the one calculating everything, so you can't trick it.

The only thing your client sends to the server is orders, not updated gamestate. All the state is on the server, and the server sends back what you're allowed to see. There's no room for cheating with a mod; you'd need to hack into the server itself for that.

It's a very ingenious system and I'm amazed it hasn't been done before, really.

Micro isn't an issue because it is micro, it is an issue because the scale of the game doesn't permit you to focus on micromanaging anything. Multiple planets means multiple fronts and multiple places to be attacked from.

It is probably possible to exploit how game internal mechanics work to obtain information you couldn't otherwise. Things like using the pathfinder or special orders.

eg. the Jump command in ZK will fail and remove itself if you order it on a spot with a building, even if you can't see the building. by using a script to order jump commands in a grid, you can "ping" the exact location of unobserved enemy buildings in fog of war.

You may be able to detect enemy terraform (assuming modfying terrain is in the game) if the pathfinder updates to it by ordering a unit to move places and retrieving its waypoints.

This is assuming that the game will respond with a "cannot be done" based on information you don't have, which I doubt will be the case. I assume it would simply queue the order anyway and complete it to the best of the unit's abilities.

That seems like the most logical outcome, anyway.

There is the pathfinder though. That one is usually expensive enough (in PA with thousands of units, the pathfinder is pretty much going to be the most expensive part of simulation) that various optimization tricks like route caching and such like will be used.

It is theoretically possible at least to game the pathfinder using scripts to elicit information that the pathfinder can access (due to said optimizations) but the player cannot. Eg. pathing around enemy buildings / detecting that the enemy has walled off a chokepoint

Removing optimizations on the most expensive part of simulation isn't likely to work out well.


There is also things like overshooting weapons by making a ballistic unit fire at a point in space to reach a spot on the ground beyond its unit stat's maximum range.

I'm not convinced that this pathfinding info needs to be routed back to the player. Since the server is handling the pathfinding, it could just be sending updates on where the unit is going, or merely return small sections of the path (up to where the player can see) and updating them as he goes.

Overshooting weapons sounds interesting, although that can probably be compensated for as well. Absolute worst case, you bake the script into the game so that everyone has access to it, I guess.

True. In Zero-K they have disabled this by only allowing you to target the ground and not above it.
But really this is just a case of silly gamemechanics caused by arbitrary range limits.
Physically limiting ranges is the real solution.

Guys, you may want to talk about outwitting the server later, when there actually are servers to outwit. ;D

You're the one who started with "needing to draw a line" As far as I know, the design plan is to have no need for a line to be drawn and allowing players to do whatever they want as far as scripting is concerned.

Maybe we should stop here and wait for the alpha to come out .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKYiDtM1F4

It start at 1:30, that's what micro is and that's what separate the great from the greater. Micro is important and trying to prevent it is a mistake.

You exsample only works when that is the only thing happening at a particular time.

But when 10 of these small conflicts are happening at the same time, across the diffrent world the expectation if micro them all is rather absurd, so while micro is good for controling somthing the way you want it, a level of automisation by the units should still be present to prevent units from putting themselves in situations where they will just outright die.

The automisation will be a present number of actions that the unit will carry out like strafing and retreating even, and will be predictable by both players, but cannot overide a direct command by the player.

Zero-k's unit intelligance is rather awesome to behold, but still not fully polished (Units going in circles to avoid fire, preventing themselves from returing fire).

That's what I want, limited and preditable intelligance to get even 90% out of my units when I am not looking, and when I am then I can go all 100% (If I am able.)