What i can''t understand is why people love micro managment so much. This is not a whinge, i just want to hear it from the horses mouth/s. To me, all micro managment in RTS''s or any strategy game for that matter usually just comes across to me as a really bad patch job or a job that should have been patched. It just seems strange to me that more and more RTS''s are coming out and the micro-managment just gets worse and worse anyhow. I just don''t understand Is it meant to be some sort of new advancment in strategy games or something. Or maybe the programmers were too lazy and said that they prefer to let the player do all the tedious work or something. (now i''m whinging, sorry) But seriously, who of you''s out there like it sooooo much that you wouldn''t by the next version of warcraft or C&C if it didn''t feature micro managment (and can you explain for me). Yes, i used to like micro-managment then i changed and now i don''t know why i liked it in the first place. How strange? I love Game Design and it loves me back. Our Goal is "Fun"!

Well it appears that no one thinks the other Dak. I mean, MM is a definitey a fudge job.

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

My wife likes all those micro-management things. She plays AoE2 mostly to build city and infrastructure, almost like she was playing Sim City or something. Of course if you take it like that there is not enough to do in that area. There should be more different buildings and there should be more challenges in maintaining your society. It shouldn''t be just building more new buildings and gathering more resources.

Yes, I know, RTS games are probably not designed for that but there might be more people like her. Maybe RTS games should specialize. There should be some real strategy games featuring large armies and formations but no micro-management (is Shogun like that?) and there should be RTS games more towards civilization building and maintaining. Then again, those management type games could be turn based but RTS games just tend to sell more today.

I think there was some game many years ago that was like Sim City but you also had some military units. You couldn''t see enemys city, you just sent your units outside the screen and they fought against the enemy. Sometimes enemys (some kind of aliens) troops came to your city and then it was a bit like RTS. I played it with Amiga but can''t remember the name. It might have been Utopia.

I''m more in favour of pure strategy. That''s why we sometimes used to play AoE2 in multiplayer mode so that she built our base and I controlled all the military units. It worked quite well.

-Ratsia

I love micro-management. Alpha Centauri is a great example of how the basic coolness in Civilisation can be drawn out for even more mileage and fun by allowing even deeper tweaking of small parameters. Micromanagement is more and more popular as the overall macromanagement can only be done so many different ways... it also adds more longevity as the more variables there are, the more approaches to gameplay you can try.

I think the real issue here is not that micromanagement is bad in itself, it''s that the interface used for controlling it is often inadequate. Instead of having to keep chasing units and clicking, they should have some sort of intelligence and priorities, which you can select. Compare Age Of Empires, where you can set a guy off chopping wood and have him do it for hours, to Command and Conquer where you have to forever ensure all your units are being useful. AoE had got it right: you can control each unit''s actions down to the smallest detail, but that control didn''t have to be ongoing or ''high maintenance''.

quote: Original post by Voodoo4

I believe microM is helpful only when you have to control a few number of units.I mean when they''re just a few of them detail matters.

But when it comes to battles with big numbers of units it is not nice to control their every movement.It is not possible to control each unit in real time during a battle and it is not realistic.

I thought my post addressed this: micromanagement is not the same as ''lots and lots of clicking''. It simply means management on a smaller scale, which -implies- a lot more individual effort, but not necessarily. It may not be feasible to control individual units when it comes to each movement they make, but it is perfectly feasible to control individual units by telling them beforehand what you want them to do.

This is all an interface issue: you need to be able to apply these ''micro-effects'' to many units at once. For instance, you have 30 infantry guarding your base. You need to be able to select 10 of them, and set them all to ''guard base: do not pursue enemy'', select another 10, and set these to ''relectlessly pursue foes''. Then leave them as long as you like. No reason why this ''micromanagement'' should need more than 2 drags of a mouse and 2 clicks. The beauty is that you can apply it to as many or as few units as you like.

You need to be able to give a unit a set of orders to perform and be able to leave them doing it. For example, in Total Annihilation, I''d set the old reclaimerbots (ok, so I don''t remember the name ) going on about 20 trees by holding down shift and clicking on the route I wanted it to take. This freed me up to control my combat units, without having to keep checking back. Yet, I still controlled the exact actions of the reclaimerbot... which would constitute micromanagement.

You need to be able to set hotkeys to some, if not all of the following: structures, map locations, key enemy units (while visible), your groups of units. Intuitive ones should be specified up-front, additional ones should be available for the player to customise. With good grouping and ''bookmarking'' facilities, launching a full-scale assault with hundreds of units is a matter of maybe 5 or 6 keypresses and as many mouse clicks.

You need intelligent defaults: micromanagement should be a way to tweak your unit to get a more specific response out of it: it should not be a prerequisite for your unit to actually act. Generally, you''d want your units to fire back, for example. But occasionally, you don''t, so it''s nice to be able to turn this off.

Using all of the above, micromanagement becomes something done in your mind, not in a thousand mouse clicks, and therefore starts to reward the thinkers, the tacticians, which is often what these games are really about.

I like micromangment, and i allways use micro a lot in RTS''s... I mostly play StarCraft on b.net...
anyway ill tell u why micromanagment is good...

1) any unskilled player can macro.. u c there are so many zergs that jsut build tons of hydra, mutas, or lings... it doenst requiere any skill to build like mad and atack with just mass...

2) micro requires skill and it takes a lot of time to master... the big diffenrece between a good and a bad players is that the good player can micro....

3) if an rts would not require any micro then it would be pretty hard to get better.... or improve the game.... and whats the point on playing a game where almost all players are equally skilled?.. I mean u could have played the game for 2 years and u would have hardtime beating a guy that has just started a few weeks ago...

4) micro is fun...like droping a few reavers over an undefended peon line, or storming some ugly mutas that tryed to atack my base, or irradiating some mutalisk, or droping some nukes over a base, or tankpushing a protoss.... it just makes me laugh...
sc wouldnt definetely be as fun if u couldnt do those things in the game