Micromanagement and how to handle it is going to be a Big issue as the development of Elemental continues and I can already see debates over it are going to be heated and well balanced on both sides of the issue. The thing we have to keep in mind here is that Elemental is at it's heart a "4X" Strategy Game. With that in mind most of those who are wanting to play a Fantasy Strategy game of this scale have certain expectations, especially where Stardock, a company known for it's depth of game play and it's impressive range of options, is concerned. We expect and by all means want a "realistic" and in depth strategy simulation. Of course when we say "realistic" we understand we're talking about game concepts and play mechanics. I think we can all agree that none of us want a dumbed down boring game that is too simplistic to be challenging.
With that said, there are certain ways Micromanagement can be done that can actually hide the fact that the player is staring at a screen full of choices and numbers. Proper UI (User Interface) handling can turn a daunting screen full of sliders on numerous statistics into a fun, interactive, interface that affects game play decisions. A fun and intuitive UI can present options to the player on the most boring facts and if it's done right the player will have fun even doing something as mundane as choosing what tax level to set on sold wheat.
Imagine a UI for the allocation of workers in a city. Show a picture of a city, icons showing what buildings are in that city that the player built, and a line of people underneath the city representing the population. You have icons for a Blacksmith, a Farm, and a Horse Breeder because you built those in that city. Now you select the population units and drop them in the associated buildings to allocate workers thus producing things from those buildings faster. This kind of Graphical and Interactive UI can be fun while at the same time conveying a Lot of information. This is Micromanagement done Right.
Micromanagement done Wrong is simply to show a page with a bunch of numbers and sliders. This is plain and with too many numbers and sliders without Graphical representation for what they stand for becomes very daunting and overwhelming to the average game player. Too drab of a interface can even scare away Hard Core players that play games such as "Hearts of Iron" which has almost no strategic battle system to speak of. What that game does have though is walls of pages that display tons of useful information Without a Fun way to interact with that information. This can be fun for a few Hard Core gamers but to the over-all gaming population this kind of game lacks in delivering graphical and epic battles. It also lacks in a UI that is easy to understand for the novice strategy game player. As fun a game as Civilization is it can also fall into this category though it is argued that what it lacks in graphical battles it makes up for in options and a well done game play and diplomacy model.
The main point of this post is to show that it is Highly Possible to have Micromanagement that is Fun and Interesting while still conveying many options and choices for depth of control to the player. Layer upon layer of strategic depth can be added to this and as long as it has a intuitive UI that's fun to interact with the player won't even realize they are Micromanaging a ton of normally boring options.
If we leave out the depth and options and layers of choices then No Matter how pretty and fun you make the UI, with a limited and simplistic amount of choices people are going to get bored fast. Also keep in mind that no matter how "Moddable" you make a game, the "average" game player doesn't have the knowledge or desire to add things in. The average person who buys Elemental won't ever edit or Mod anything that can't be done from within the game engine. They won't be able to code in Python or make new models with 3DsMax. They'll use the in game editors because that's what they learned in Gal Civ 2, but they won't edit any text in files. The average life of the game will live or die to many gamers by how strategically strong the Vanilla game is.
Even 'fun' micromanagment get's boring when you're doing it for 50 cities, units, resources, ect. There simply isn't a way to remove micomanagment from a game when you enable players to have large empires with complex choices. And I'm actually, well, not a fan, but enjoy the complexity more then I dislike the extra monotonous clicking.
I actually think Stardock is going in the right direction by limiting KD expansion rather then trying to dumb down the complexity(even though I was dissapointed in the economic model selection, but hopefully that can be changed a bit).
Templates are a must ... Instead of putting each citizen in their working area one by one, you just create a template that says something like "half the manpower in the farm and the rest evenly distributed". You get things done in one click instead of 20 clicks if you have 20 manpower ....
As you can see from my quote below yours I said almost the exact same thing here. ( I quoted myself from another thread actually) I can also see from the rest of your post you do indeed understand some of the "necessary evils" in a game like this. I'm also glad you can admit that you're not much of a fan. A lot of people wouldn't say that on a forum for a strategy game. It truly shows your want to commitment to helping make Elemental be the best game it can be.
Yes, and build queues are another big one. You should be able to create many different build queues and save them in a list and then apply any queue from the list to any city you like. The queues should also be "smart" in that they automatically adjust to different races with missing buildings as well as cities that may already have some of the buildings listed in the queue.
Another big one is the total elimination of waste. All excess production/food/research/whatever should carry over when the current project has completed. There should be absolutely no need to constantly adjust things to try and avoid excesses/waste - it adds no strategic value to the game, just mindless busywork.
The last big micromanagement-reducing feature I'd like to see is a super-robust empire management screen where all cities are listed and can be sorted in many different ways (name, population, production, research, gold output, happiness etc.) and can have their build queues and templates changed without leaving the screen.
I just like to remind everyone clamoring for a complex system that the economic system of Master of Orion was pretty simplistic yet the game itself was not "too simplistic to be challenging". The need of micromanagement was very low because unused resources were converted into money.
Also it should be considered that the more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to have a non-cheating but challenging AI.
I agree with Myles that a city-management system like Colonization is not fun when the number of cities increases unless you had very competent govenours.
It would be interesting to play around with the idea of being able to group cities into mega-cities or regions so that they could be managed as a block - essentially showing their combined resources and handling them like a single unit with several build centers.
I can see this handled in two major ways:
1. The cities stay as individual units except for the purposes of management. Essentially you just link a few cities together and they all take you to the same management page.
2. There could be a set of rules to actually convert several nearby cities into a 'mega-city' to be actually combined in some way in game terms. In this way, you could run your cities individually when you only have a 5 city empire but start grouping cities up when you have 30 cities.
I think some of you are missing the point of the post a little bit. The idea's are good too, don't get me wrong, but the main theme behind this post was just to point out that even mundane things can be made fun with proper UI application. I know I give a small example of a system there but it's more of a metaphor then a actual idea for a interface. We all know that certain aspects, indeed every aspect, of a game can get boring and repetitive to some people. The main thing to take away from this is that any aspect of a game can be made into a fun and interesting chance to interact with the game without seeming like micromanagement. All you need is the application of a little imagination.
Or really, anything that brings the game closer to Master of Orion II.
The problem with micromanagement is that it takes time. At first not much time but later on it takes longer and longer to complete a turn. I played a Civ 4 game the other day where I conquered a technologically inferior enemy empire around the 1800's. He had around 15 cities and none of them had the basic structures built like granaries or aqueducts. My sprawling empire already had about 30 cities to manage (spread across 3 continents as well) and I just could not be arsed to manage 15 more. Not to mention the huge undertaking of building the farms, windmills, workshops, railroads ETC ETC it's too much crap to manage when it gets to late game. I put everything on auto-build and completely abandoned the continent to manage itself, focusing on the 3 continents I had already planned out. This is an example of how not to handle micromanagement.
I read a thread the other day here on the Elemental forums about map sizes and frogboy was talking about how Elemental will be able to have maps 3-4 times larger than Civ 4. My first feeling was a cold shiver going down my spine at the thought of having to manage 50+ cities the way Civ 4 handles it.
Now, obviously we don't want the game to be dumb. There should be complexity to managing cities and armies. But frankly, having played Galactic Civilizations and it's successor many times, I have no faith in a governor system. The governors there can handle building fleets and such in a decent manner but they are rubbish for building a proper economy. You need to do all that crap yourself if you want it done properly. Having played Civ 4 a lot, I have no faith in automation either. The computer cannot read your mind and does not know what your plan is for that city or region. Once again, you want it done right you do it yourself.
My hope for elemental is that it will be complex enough to entertain yet simple enough to handle huge empires without eroding my sanity. The game being in such an early beta stage, I think it's too soon to think about specific solutions to specific problems. These problems should be discussed at a later date when we have more details on how Stardock wants to handle things. Right now they're really just experimenting with different ideas, as evidenced by the forum threads asking the community on input. I have faith in Stardock that they will design a game that won't make me give up on entire regions because the micromanagement was too much to bear.
In the Rise of Mankind mod ... later versions of settlers, aka colonists and pioneers, would build a new city with some basic buildings already in place.
The mod adds many more buildings and units ... so its just basic infrastructure, although getting a city automatically to that point makes it immediately useful to a degree ... instead of being a useless stretch of land with a flag on top.
One other thing I will mention however, is that large empires naturally have corruption ... I would like to think a player's refusal to continue maximization micromanagement is a nice portrayal.
If someone has only a few cities vs someone with Many, Many cities ... the advantage of having less micro goes to the smaller, more hardy nation ... rather than the gargantua of Population-stan. Or muchoLandistan.
Sure turns could take longer, would take longer in SP if someone really felt the need, but thats what turn timers are for in MP. by the way, I would like a clock turn timer option for multiplayer (its usually a must have) ... Civ 4 has a good turn timer model for it to be based upon. especially how turn 0 is quite long (you see where you start) and then turn 1-50 are fairly fast (early boring-ness) and then the turn timer slowly grows by a few seconds each decade, or something, so by turn 150 or so your at a full minute or something.
Having options for how fast the timer is ... is another good option. Civ 4 has these timers, although imo slow timers aren't needed as much, just normal, fast, and blazing ... but yea. Timers ... are a good thing. (if you have too much micro you are usually winning anyways)
now back on topic, I do think that more fun, graphical, interfaces are a must. As well as a way to respectfully automate the process. For instance, if I have a huge empire and want *stuff* but don't care in what order, I can have auto governors do stuff with at least 50% efficiency of what I would normally be able.
Also, think about this ... Sovereigns (and possibly nobles) will be able to vastly speed up the infrastructuring processes of a city, so all you really need to focus on is where the sovereign is (if your doing a builder style, for instance).
now back off topic-> its really nice how Sovereign Death leads to defeat ... on multiplayer at least, because theoretically its that "final decisive battle" mentality where people would use their sovereign, and if you lose that your kind of out of the game anyways.
Although ... I would like an OBSERVE option after you are defeated ... which enables vision of EVERYTHING all the players are doing, but disables chat. IDK ... im sure hosts can use disgression about kicking Observers which are used to cheat, although I think it would be really nice if player x was defeated, to be able to see the war unfold between y and z if he so desired.
I am going to have to reserve comment for now on micro. I believe a good UI can alleviate alot of what made some TBS games drag especcially late game. We also do not know yet the level of comlexity Stardock is planning on going with like number of resources, number of buildings, ect.
But I agree, It is one of those things that is a precarious balance. However, I think most of the playerbase would agree that it is better to err on the side of deep, intricate micro that some watered down system. Fans of this genre are pretty adamant about this kind of thing. Its just sometimes the endgame when building that inn in some city 5 continents away just doesnt seem as exciting when you have 25 cities and you have much bigger fish to fry. Other than that, deep micro is fine.
agreed
You got that right. I rank MOO II on my top three list.
1. CIV IV
2. MOO II / Total Annihilation (shared second place - I just cant deciede)
1. Civ IV 1. Morrowind
2. Rome: Total War/ Medieval2: Total War 2. Mass Effect
3. Assasin's Creed 3. Galactic Civ II
a list of bests along parallel lines of thought. From an aesthetic perspective. No article from one list of 3 is meant to be less important than an article from the other list of 3. As in they are non-convergent trains of thought, even if there is no inherent pattern.
"main theme behind this post was just to point out that even mundane things can be made fun with proper UI application"
I cannot help but DISAGREE with this idea. No matter how fun you made an UI, doing mundane task (with a fun UI) is NO fun when you've to repeat it 500 times.
I've written something rgds to reducing micromanagement a while back. Maybe I should necro-post it, if I find it.
I think as long as Micromanagement is intuitive, its fine. Any micromanagement, more than likely, will devolve into the same basic steps, along several possible strategies, a billion times over.
A good micro system makes it fun for a beginning player, the first time around. If I feel like im reading an instruction manual, with all wall-of-text in-game, of course it will be boring and make the micro even more of a problem. If it is intuitive, graphical, (possibly slider based), and FUN, then the micro will become FAR less of a problem simply for the merit of not being a chore, at least on a good day. If something is a chore even when Im really into the details of a game, then something is wrong. This is why the micro should look fun/cool, and be entertaining to an extent.
Well, I can agree with your disagreement, funny enough, but only in the logic that doing anything at all enough times will become monotonous. Even if you're doing something "fun", it will get boring if you do it enough times, regardless of how the UI is. Even something like playing battles in the Total War games, though they seriously kick ass when you first play them, can get boring and you'll start auto-calculating them. This applies to anything really.
Maybe management of cities can be done in 3 development stages. 1st stage detail out Soverign city(say have 3 cities with lots of details) 2nd stage your city structures, units, etc become templates for other cities which become automated for growth. So you still increase your holdings, tax base, whatever comes next. You don't need a settler unit. Cities grow over time scale slider. This would allow for grabbing useful stuff off a menu, with time delays for units, magic, etc that can be accessed empire control page. 3rd stage could have various effects, options(random or not)for cities. City gets-Assassins Guild which spawns special assassin units, Famine % of population within city drops along with attendant production capabilities, Tech breakthrough, etc. So basically at beginning of game you micromanage every aspect, with mid to end game being less about micromanaging cities and more about strategy involving magic, troop movements, trying to control areas of map that are important, quest and dungeon exploration etc.
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