I am one of the elite people in StarCraft as well as a coder. Purely from a gaming standpoint micro management is essential to provide full capabilities of strategy, if you know the game, its nothing, you hardly even think about it, i am flying around the map building buildings and flying back while I''m in the middle of a battle, no problem, I also have a routine for starting the game and other such things. But what am I gonna do, let the computer build my base? fat chance, if we did that then pretty much everyone in the game would be the same and who wins the game is simply a matter of rock paper scissors, the basis for startegy games is exploiting other people''s flaws (or brute force if you wish, but that is still exploiting a weak defense). Basically you can take recon of someone''s base, anticipate what they are doing, and react with a defense that will catch them off guard. same thing goes, dropping in SC has been around for quite a while now, yet people still don''t protect from it, in which case they are idiots, but nevertheless, if computers were to manage it then they would either build it or they don''t. I mean dammit, you guys are idiots, IDIOTS, the whole basis of RTS is micro management, the ability to build and customize your base, to develop and adapt your own strategy, to build and develop your defenses, in many cases in SC you use your miners to build things, some people have different preferences on how many miners they use, zerg players usually place many miners, while protoss and terran are not so many. Part of my main strat is taking a miner and some forces and siezing another base and building it up so I can manufacture at an expedited rate. What am I to do if it is all done by the computer, will it build my forces for me? will it let me pick a strategy and do it for me. The deal with RTS is that the player is in control of everything, and that everything effects the strategy they implement, what they build and when they build effects the outcome of the game.

I have not played Command and Conquer, in fact SC is probably the only game I play when I have the spare time and I cannot picture playing SC without being able to control all of my units. I mean if you are truly an accomplished player, controlling trivial things is automatic and you can fly across the map and multitask your entire base and battle forces very easily. That is also what that little minimap is for =) as well as those cool hotkeys which let you assign battle groups and buildings to a numeric key for easy access. Also consider that once your forces are doing battle, you can''t really influence the battle by watching them, you might as well build up your base during the battle and/or send out reinforcements to sway the battle to your side. or maybe the battle was just a decoy and you are secretly going to drop many evil things into their base. who knows, but micro management gives you the ability to fully strategize your entire game.

and also consider this, a commander may not have to direct the actual miners in a game, but he must direct someone to direct them, and since there is only one person that can play on a computer, it might as well be you.

Thinking outside the box, I say that Real Time Strategy games can be improved. I understand that many gamers enjoy MM of mining units and such but, some find it anoying (like me).

The control of the resource units doesn''t make the game fun. In fact this should change the genre from RTS to RTRMwaW which would stand for:
Real Time Resource Management with a War

Don''t get me wrong I enjoy RTSs tremendously... I just think that there is room for a genre of games that has RTS elements minus the MM. That would place this game inbetween the RTS fans and the Hard Core wargamers. In fact with Talonsoft moving into RTS and leaving hard core wargamers wanting, this could be a good place to be


Dave "Dak Lozar" Loeser

quote:

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.

Well, Paul, I have to disagree with this. For the most part, in RTS''s, MM comes from the idea that you have an enormous amount of units to work with, and a lot of territory to cover. Like in Warcraft II, when you have to constantly check up on your peasants/peons to make sure there gold mine hasn''t expired or that they''re still cutting wood, and you have to check your food levels, etc.... That is a bit much. But in the new breed of what I''m going to call "tactical" RTS''s, there is a lot more individual unit control and less general MM of your colony. Like what I read for WarCraft III... you only spend a few minutes in town getting your team together, and then you really only need to pay attention to your troops, rather than what you''re doing back in town. Myth is similar in this--I don''t consider having a few dozen troops to deal with MM. (Dealing with the camera is another story...)

For anyone who read my MMORTS idea (http://www.geocities.com/draqza.rm/sidea.htm)
I covered not having to deal with MM of your entire territory by just calculating (in code) how much of each type of resource you can gather in a certain time period, and have that automatically added to your totals at each interval. Of course, you could go back to any of those territories and MM during your free time between battles and exploration, but you don''t have to.

quote:
You guys must be slow, I''ve been able to have total control or my 100+ unit armies in AoE2. I shift around my army acording to the situation. That also what makes it fun, and since I almost always get more kills than loses, its a good strategy for me to do that. Micromanagement is fun anyway, without it, youd build up big armies, send em to die, then do that again the next time and so on, it wouldn''t even hurt you. All the resource gathering would be done for ya, which, sometimes can be good, but other times its fun.

It''s not about speed. Even if they are Real-Time, that doesn''t mean you should have to have lightning-fast reflexes to control everything. Using keyboard shortcuts helps--that''s how I usually build things in RTS''s, rather than by clicking the building/unit portrait on the menu--but having to jump back and forth across the map is still a little bit too much trouble when you have to monitor a town and three or four battles.

--



All hail the Technoweenie!

quote: Original post by draqza
(snip)
For anyone who read my MMORTS idea (http://www.geocities.com/draqza.rm/sidea.htm)
I covered not having to deal with MM of your entire territory by just calculating (in code) how much of each type of resource you can gather in a certain time period, and have that automatically added to your totals at each interval. Of course, you could go back to any of those territories and MM during your free time between battles and exploration, but you don't have to.

draqza,
Nice document. I'm reading it for the second time... I have a question concerning teritory. Can a player move outside of his teritory? Maybe I mis-read something.

All in all, it appears to be a great start! I especially like the ideal of a large continent and having battles waged in sections of the continent, I dont think I've seen this approach before.


Edited by - Dak Lozar on August 15, 2000 8:39:01 PM

quote: Original post by Paul Cunningham

Well here''s an interesting thing, starcraft was so successful but yet it''s unit management was pretty crap in comparision to what people appear to be saying about other games like Age of Empires and the like. Can someone help me out here, because there''s got to be more to the story than that?!

As with Presidents and girlfriends, I can only speculate that it was a case of flaws being outweighed by virtues...


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Just waiting for the mothership...

Hey, maybe there''s a design opportunity here: Different micromanagement levels for the different sides!!!

Let''s say you mixed Total Annihilation''s resource philosophy with Starcraft''s. So one side needs to micromanage with peons, and another just puts a big building next to resources that automatically harvests them.

The guy who doesn''t MM has to deal with a set resource rate but gets a bonus in terms of time. The guy who does MM gets a resource bonus (for efficient management), but loses out in terms of time....

Same for units and abilities. TA side gets lots of units that are each pretty specialized. Starcraft side gets fewer units that are multifunctional and have things like mana or energy or whatever.

... course, balance would be a b*tch!!!! Maybe the idea of different levels of MM for different games is better...

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Just waiting for the mothership...

quote: Original post by Ratsia

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.

I think this is so cool. Many a time have I played Starcraft and wished that I could turn my victorious base into a full fledged city.

I''m striving to make the town building segment of my RPG something like this. Where you settle determines what you need to build. Build on the frontier, and you''ll need a town that can handle war and survival. But build in the heart of civilization, and you''ll need a complex town that can survive social and economic pressures.


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Just waiting for the mothership...