Understand, I love Starcraft. But I finally got to the point where I can’t play it anymore and have fun. I’m a low-level “Gold” league player. And the problem (for me) is that at a certain point, it’s really about the micro of the units. I managed to get to the level I was at because I’m pretty good at macro – I play as a virus that is always trying to spread across the map and unless you counter me consistently, it’ll eventually all be mine.
But at a certain point – below diamond and platinum apparently – the difference in skill stops being about macro. That’s a given. It’s about how good you are – how fast you are – at micro managing the units. And I’m old. My 6 year old constantly reminds me of this. “you smell like an old man.” And I just am not competitive at micro managing.
That’s why I so miss Total Annihilation and am hopeful that Planetary Annihilation will solve this for me. I’d like a game that really rewards the macro skill. That isn’t to say that people who are good at micro should be left out. But at least with Starcraft, the higher level players are about the micro. It doesn’t matter that I attacked on 3 different sides at once because the guy with good micro (and speed) and wipe out one of them totally while the other two edge my way because I outnumber them which leaves me with a net loss.
You should play some competitive PVP games in Sins frogboy, us Sinners can't seem to agree if it is closer to Starcraft or Supreme Commander on the macro/micro focus.
I've never been able to figure out why high speed micromanaging in RTSes was considered fun by any carbon-based lifeform. But I'm old too.
Wargame is an RTS mostly focused entirely on the macro and logistics of fighting on a battlefield.
Heh. Well when we were making it I liked to think of it as Total Annihilation in space.
Yeah, I didn't even try to play SC2 for this reason. I can micro reasonably well if I force myself, but my hands can't take it for too long, and I don't feel like crippling myself. This is why I loved to play Sins when it came out, it is a nice balance of micro and macro style play. I just don't feel the need to compete with all the kids giving themselves carpal tunnel.
I bought the game and did not like it one bit. 50 EUROs well spent
Planetary Annihilation isn't going to solve this "problem" because it is so fundamental to what an RTS is about. And by the way, if you visit the forums you'll find the same idea - PA won't be micro intensive, you don't have to worry about mechanics as much as you would in sc2.
Frankly, I find the whole argument a bit delusional. At the competitive level, micro will always be a factor because it is a real time strategy game. At best, you will simply have micro that appears to be at a higher level of the game - but you'll still be microing. Maybe you'll micro asteroids instead of SCBs, but the more you can push your control downwards in the hierarchy of decisions, the better off you'll be.
I'm not in any way telling you how to or what to enjoy, but I personally enjoy turn-based games precisely because we can be rid of the curse of the micro. When time is infinite, at your own leisure, then micro simply ceases to be competitively useful.
Well I think it will solve throwing asteroids into planets and blowing everything up. Can't wait for alpha.
I love SC2 but I can't give 40 hours a week to it and become crazy fast at micro, so I'll just stick to campaign, unranked and mods once in a great while.
I was the top ranked Total Annihilation player on Boneyards.net for awhile and played in the PGL. No, micro isn't the defining factor in all RTSs.
I can't say I blame you. I was turned off RTS a while ago and even competitive TBS isn't very palatable. I'd rather have a gaming experience which lasts a while and that I'm happy with, than one which lasts scant minutes and that I'm angry about.
Trouble is, it's hard to get some people excited about games which naturally take a bit longer and have protracted periods without much 'action' when actually, to the player playing the game, the strategy is fulfilling and fun on several different levels.
As an example, I run single-player Minecraft with a number of mods such as Railcraft, Weather and Tornadoes, and Better Trades. This almost turns it into a bit of a RTS empire-building game with the excitement of exploring to find villages, trading for stuff I need to build up a railway network to help cut down on the time needed to make trades and protecting my assets against destructive tornadoes, zombies and creepers. The thing which is missing? Another player to keep it from getting lonely.
Differing levels of macro are actually distinct at basically every level of SC2 and probably the defining advantage at everything below diamond or plat. Arguably everything below masters.
http://imgur.com/jmMNR
The phenomenon you observe is actually a perception problem. Silvers and golds actually have almost exactly the same macro, so it feels very much like you hit a wall because there's actually a large hurdle to overcome there. The gap between plat and gold macro is similar in scope between bronze and gold macro past two bases on a log scale.
I'm low diamond/high plat (MMR gets really confused if you have two 70-80% matchups and a 20% matchup). I have what I'd classify as poor control. I'll generally a-move in and then pull back important units if they're being targetted or everything if I'm losing and that's about it. I'll mix in storm very late when I feel my opponents are too overwhelmed to micro out of it. If I do warp prism harass it's generally fly in the prism somewhere, forget about it for a bit, go into warp mode, warp in some zealots and rally them to the nearest mineral line. A lot of my wins are because I still see some VERY questionable decision making from my opponents. Like in PvP "I scouted 4 gate that's turning into warp gates, I'm going to cancel a gateway in response" questionable. (fyi I went 4 gate b/c his cybernetics core was late so I thought he had ninja'd an expansion somewhere)
For the record, I play around 100-150 APM. Some benchmarks: I type at 40 WPM. That's around 200 APM (however, that's with two hands). If my previous osu! experience is any baseline to go with, one-handed 200 APM is managable for me for me, 300 APM tires out my hand in less than two minutes, and as far as I can tell I cannot phystically do 400 APM in any meaningful context, though those are only using two fingers.
While I'm not really a Starcraft, or RTS in general fan, there was one Starcraft mod back in the day I really enjoyed. Essentially, you had a 'party of characters' that had a dungeon-type/wild west kinda setting that your characters had to battle through. No reinforcements/buildings to construct. This was actually a very fun mod.
Unfortunately, I was playing on a roommate's computer, so I do not have a copy of the original Starcraft, let alone this one mod I was playing...
Not sure if this was the exact mod in question, but it looks familiar...
http://www.campaigncreations.org/starcraft/life_of_a_marine/story
What about games like Dawn of War or Empire at War? I like those games because you can just focus on economy and map control. There is a small unit cap so you don't have to worry about micro so much, mostly just reinforcing squads and occasionally activating an ability. Also, I am pretty sure there are custom maps like "Macro Wars" that purport to alleviate this problem... maybe you could check some of those out.
I am sadly in the same boat as Frogboy on this. Even when I was younger, I just didn't have a good quick reaction response. I think this is a big reason why I continue to prefer TBSes to RTSes. I hope this means Stardock will continue to give us good TBSes and substitute eye candy battles over fights in which the highest APM wins.
Sins is okay ... but TBH its too un-micromanageable. Probably my biggest thorn with it is the fact that ships can slow down and stop, or even just stop dead in their tracks (inertia be damned) if they cast certain abilities, but they are never allowed to turn around while stopped, so you can't quickly assess "oh $#!t, this planet has too many defenders, I need to get my fleet outta here" ... instead your ships have to basically drive a long-looped track. All around, I much prefer the "real-time" tactical battles of Sword of the Stars ... no, I can't insta-stop and turn around, but at least ships don't insta-stop anyway and physics is a bit more realistic instead of both frustrating and unrealistic the way I rate SOASE physics. Yes, there is a great advantage to manually playing out a battle in SOTS versus auto-resolving or not touching the controls and letting the computer fight, but with the realistic "glacial" physics, there's no real advantage to high-APM-micromanaging. I also like the simplicity of the three-stage combat of Endless Space as well.
Oh, I am curious about one thing, Brad ... did you ever play Interplay's 1996 MS-DOS-based turn-based strategy game, M.A.X. (Mechanized Assault & eXploration)? Of every "ground tile"-based turn based strategy game (such as Civilization, WoM/FE/LH, etc., versus Master of Orion which is a TBS but not ground tile-based), M.A.X. is very close to the top ... but, sadly, I know a lot of gamers never tried it. It did, unfortunately, suffer a sequel that was an even worse disgrace to the original than Master of Orion III was to its series -- the biggest reason being they completely dumped the strategy aspect and made it a turn-based tactics game; no resource gathering, no research, no building. Two things I really liked about M.A.X., and what inspires me to keep playing it now and then despite being so dated, was how every faction more or less had the same set of units, but you could research upgrades to quite a variety of individual characteristics of units such as improving the range, firepower, speed or armor ... and the second thing I really liked about it was the logistics modelling. You could not build a base in one corner of a vast map, build a second base in the opposite corner and both bases would have instant access to resources (minerals, fuel, gold or power) ... to transfer resources, you would either need to build and use a transport (truck, cargo plane or cargo boat) or build conduit between the bases (which, stretched out over vast distances, is of course easily assailable if you don't have it properly defended with units or fixed gun turrets, artillery stations, missile launchers and/or anti-aircraft batteries).
Not sure why you say Sins is "un-micromanageable". Some micro in Sins is quite important to avoid things like you describe, the big looping turns. If you give a move order directly behind a ship or small fleet, the ships will indeed almost spin in place before accelerating, at which point you can give them a general move order to cross or leave a gravwell. Breaking up your fleet into groups so that some ships like HC's take the brunt of damage while softer ships stay in back, or managing special abilities manually, can have a huge impact on fleet battles. It isn't so much about APM like Starcraft, but knowing when to do the right thing at the right time, though on large maps you can certainly get overwhelmed by all the things to do if you have multiple fights going on. If you don't want to do micro, you CAN give simple orders and let the ships largely do what they want and pick their own targets, but that is up to you. Those of us who play or played Sins competitively do quite a lot of micro, but it is still nowhere on the order of what some players churn out with Starcraft2.
This has actually been made much better in the newest expansion, Rebellion. It's not super fast, but when your ships need to do 180 degree turns, they will now stop, turn and accelerate away rather than doing those wide turns that would send them closer to the danger you where trying to get them to retreat from.
Starcraft is to RTS's as SF4 is to fighting games.
As a casual level, both are fun. At high level, micro takes over in Starcraft and option selects/plinking 1f links/FADC/safe jump combinations (which are all very execution-intensive) take some stuff out of the game. You can't take the execution entirely out of either genre, because it is fundamental to each genre, but you can minimize the impact, or make thinks work in a less awkward way (and much like SF4, Starcraft has controls that are intentionally clunky)
This is a big reason why I suggested the Stardock team get the Kohan IP (which should be avaliable soon), or make a Kohan-type game. It was less execution heavy than other RTS's, but its flaw was in some of the AI for companies (led to exploits like townstealing), which is an area I think Stardock could fix. It's not just because it's developer I like + game I like, it's because I really do see you guys being able to do a game like this well.
execution isn't fundamental to RTS though
it's just a major part of the games in the marketplace, all of which are real-time mass micromanagement games
"macro" just means micromanaging production instead of units
the core concept of strategy in real-time has nothing to do with micro/speed
the only reason to play RTS games (in terms of strategy) is the resource-management decisions (and the tactical ones to a certain degree)
the challenge is finding opponents who are equally (in)competent at the mechanics surrounding those decisions
it's easy to dismiss Starcraft because of the APM, but it at least has resource-management and tactical decisions some of the time
many other games in the genre usually have no balance and completely overpowered strategies where you don't have to make any decisions at all, but rather optimize something or manage something quickly (neither of which are actual decisions)
the genre basically stopped making progress after rise of nations. even though optimizing your empire required speed, there were actual decisions involved extremely often
Did you ever play Kohan? That game really stripped down the micromanagement of production/unit control into a much simpler form, yet even with the simpler form, speed still matters. It mattered less than in other games, but it was a factor when other things were equal. This is fine.
Execution is always going to be a part of a real-time game. The problem with Starcraft is that they made the game about the execution at high-level which makes the value of strategy less important. That annoys some folks. Games with two different learning curves are typically frustrating, and competitive games with this lead to mad salt.
This is something I've dealt with as a fighter fan for years (and why I love VF, it's kinda like the Kohan of fighting games)
Timegate filing for bankruptcy makes me sad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAMgu3j3AZY
Starcraft is the perfect blend of action and strategy. You need the twitch of an FPS player(probably more) and the brains of TBS to get really good. I have respect for anyone who approaches SC2 with a competitive drive, even gold league isn't easy to accomplish. I drift in and out of diamond these days, I used to look at the higher leagues like something of mythic proportion, but its just like riding a bike, once you got it you got it. No shame in the lower leagues. After all, this is the most competitive video game in the world.
Also, Plat/Diamond macro is definitely a lot different than gold. But its like The_Biz said, macro in SC2 requires micro. You're definitely right about unit control becoming more important as you increase in skill level but its not just about control. Building, production and tech timings plus overall strategy are important in SC2. Its just that it all happens really fast which makes it micro intensive.
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