The good side of Micro

That's why we often say attention is a resource in supcom. I don't see why we would want to put load away from the player, its a game, not an interactive movie...

The level of micro possible in supcom was awesome, you could kill a uef t1 tank with a mech simply by running in circle around it faster than its turret was able to turn, and these kind of things won the early game. Don't remove that, don't try to make the game 'noob friendly', it is supposed to be hard and we were all noobs one day and we all survived, i don't see the issue here. Please explain why micromanaging is so detrimental to the gameplay of an RTS?

Becuse micromanagment is not stratigy, it is managment.

Your ability to control a unit to the best of it's ability should not over shadow your stratigy, and neither should micromanagment be the only way units on the battlefield will actually do anything.

Micromanagment is not detrimental to gameplay, but nither should it be required 100% of the time to actually have your units do what they were built for.

That's why I suggested that unit be abile to control themselves to a short and predictable degree, not to take away your bloody micro, but to prevent a situation where micro is totally domonant in the game.

Attention is a resource even in chess(unless you got unlimited time for each turn), you don't need micro to make it a resource.

One thing I dislike micro is the way it maximize the efficiency of units pretty monotonous, it's mostly a action thing instead of a small scale tactical thing in the most cases, although action can be very fun too.

You know, that micro is almost never is a ridicoulous power boost except for special cases (like a 1v1 between two different units) or units which are explicitly designed to be microed (spellcasters and a lot of other units in a Blizzard RTSes)?

Besides stutterstepping, which is prominent everywhere where moving and attacking at the same time isn't possible, what you want is already the normal behaviour.
That's a big besides, but as far as I know, in PA units can move while shooting, so it should already be the way you want it.

Micro is never required, it is a plus..

Stutterstep is a requirement in Starcraft because otherwise you lose much easier against Zerglings for example.
If micro can give you a huge boost you are forced to do it because otherwise your opponent will do it.

In supcom it does give you a boost but you can very well play without using it and win.

Just like you can do other things, but the problem is that micro is really on/off with no middle ground.

So again, I suggest

As the middle ground between using micro and none.

How do you play SupCom without micro?

The quality of that game didn't seem to depend on player micro. The cast focused on base tech decisions and troop movements. The way that these large scale things interact within the game probably has to do with micro but it is not necessary. Deep interaction between units on the tactical scale will drive interesting strategic choices but it doesn't matter so much whether the player or the AI has to do each action. The player should choose how to use a unit because that relates to overall strategy. This doesn't mean they have to do all the actions.

The cast does have a bit of micro in base raiding. With AI I think this would remain. Zero-K has a lot of interesting base raiding. I have not tried to automate it because I think it is impossible. I'll explain why and hopefully it explains what I think AI can do. The current thinking by anti-AI people seems to be that AI can and will do everything if we let it.

"how to use a unit" can refer to really low level stuff. With base raiding you are rapidly choosing how to use your units. For example it could scout, kill extractors or kill constructors and while doing so you have to choose whether to sacrifice your units for immediate gain or keep them around for future raids.

You could make an AI (with great difficulty) to automatically do any one of those ways to raid a base when given the high level command "Raid Base". But if the game is well balanced that inflexible goal can be exploited by the defender. So, you say, lets add several options that players can configure what type of base raiding the AI should do. But information changes very rapidly, players can only decide how to raid a base when they see what it is made of. Additionally there are a lot of nuances and optimisation problems to do with base raiding.

So to use a complete AI to raid bases the player would have to rapidly set slider bars and options in a large unwieldy interface to tell the units how to behave. By now I think it is much easier for players to give the units order themselves. The important decisions are being made too fast so AI would just get in the way.

If an inflexible AI turns out to be the best at raiding bases then I the base raiding game has shown to be a pure micro challenge with little strategic worth. If you do the same thing all the time regardless of the situation then it is not a decision.

D-gun was micro and even micro haters know it [but don't admit to it]!

I don't hate micro, but boring or silly micro like the stutter step.

My concern is what if the AI and scripts are horrible, that something breaks? We all know that there's always something left to be desired by computer control of actions. Every RTS game has that "thing" you have to micro in order to get it to do what you want, even if its supposed to work on its own.

To me micro is a part of RTS gaming, but it just varies how much you need it or where you choose to lay that focus.

To me the idea that you can receive some form of optimized control of a particular area from micro is a nice idea, because in a game with multiple fronts, multiple planets, seems like it would be nice to have the ability to put your focus somewhere and receive a benefit. I think of it like sending your best general to the most important fight.

D-gun micro is the best micro. You fire, and things die. What's not to love?

I wouldn't mind if d-gun was autocast, if Sorian puts half a month into perfecting d-gun AI. But the gun is by design reckless, dangerous, and expensive. Manual control is always going to work best.

I doubt any kind of script will properly judge "should I fire the D-gun and blow away that tank and my own solar collector or should I wait until I can get a shot where I don't lose the collector".

The fact that it blows up everything in its path makes it rather hard to auto-cast.

Anyway, what do you want? A dance button on the com? A move if arty button on your Kbot? A choose the best spot while i do important macro button on your arty?

Micro is a part of the game, i do not see how you can remove it or how you should remove it. Plus Micro is not boring, it forces you to do something to get an edge over your enemy, i do not see how this is boring.

I want forces to have a limited and prediactable number of automatic commands that units will follow that will get the most out of them when they are left to their own devices.

Just like in Zero-K.

And micro is boring dependant on what you are doing, if you are having your tanks and mobile artillery go in circles to avoid fire on the front line then really you are spending too much time on a simple command.

I find this boring so thats why I have said my proposal multiple times now (If you have actually read them), what you find interesting when compared to me is none of my concern.

Thinking about what command to give my troops. If it doesn't have that, it's boring micro. If it does have that, it's interesting micro.

Dodging shells does not really require thinking. It's something you'll always want to do if you can, and the only location you really care about occupying is "not the current one". It can easily be automatic.

Deciding which building to target in a raid on the other hand, requires a lot of critical thinking, so it's good micro.

And even simpler way to state it is as follows:
Anything that can be automated should be automated.

Computer! Play the game for me while i watch!

If the computer plays the game better than you do, you should either learn to play or teach us how to build AI like that.

There's a reason the AI always loses to good (and usually even decent) players, and that's because the AI is really bad at most of the things involved in an RTS.

Unsurprisingly, those things the AI sucks at are exactly the things that make them so exciting. So yeah; anything the AI can do better than I can, it can do. It's obviously not very interesting to do if a bot can do it. I'll handle the fun stuff.