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Comment by avar | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was something like StarCraft, but where you can actually focus on command. A real general wouldn't be ordering individual units around, and it's silly that most strategy games implement things at that level.

You should just be able to give high-level commands like "build a base there", "focus on Air-to-Ground development" etc.

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The higher-level the commands, the fewer of them you give, and the more the game becomes random and no fun.

The stuff that real generals do is, no doubt, impossible to simulate, because it's all staff management and delegation. You don't pick the location of the base, but you do try to pick the right officer to head up the team that's in charge of surveying possible sites for the base. You pick appropriate subordinates and make sure they have the resources they need, and then get yourself driven around from base to base, meeting with the troops and keeping them motivated. Decisions like "actually I think Colonel Smith would be better than Colonel Jones for this particular task" wouldn't make much of a game.

The amount of time a general spends making specific warfighting decisions like "Let's attack the enemy at point A at time T with forces F" must be pretty damn minimal.

I don't mean quite at that level, I think "Commander" is more accurate than "General" in this context.

I just mean that there's a large amount of manual drudgery to playing games like StarCraft, and it would be nice if the game wasn't unfairly balanced in the favor of people who are really good at said drudgery.

For example, early in any StarCraft 1 game (I haven't played SC2) you have to do an exact amount of tasks in some exact order to get an early game Zealot or Zergling rush.

It'd be nice if you could just command that instead of manually mining a set amount of resources, construct a Gateway just as your nth Probe gets constructed etc.

Another example is unit production. If you have resources being mined you have to constantly switch between that and telling the computer again that you want X marines and Y Battle-cruisers or something. It'd be nice if you could just leave that on some production preset so that you could focus on warfare.

Brood-War API. Write your own DLL to do the dirty work for you.

You may want to check out something from the Total Annihilation lineage. repeat build-queues dumping to a predefined rally point or patrol are standard. Supreme Commander 2 if you're looking for something commercial, or anything running on the Spring RTS engine if open source.

You're kinda asking for a game that implements the DWIM instruction, but there are indeed higher-level RTSes (eg Hearts of Iron). That's not really the point of Starcraft - you might as well ask for an FPS where you order the guy around with vocal commands rather than having to aim yourself. SC2 does remove some of the busywork clicking though, which is nice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Spectrum_Warrior

Play Rise of Nations and its expansion.

You go from Stone Age to Information Age in about 45-50 minutes with awesome multiplayer. It is my 2nd favorite RTS behind Starcraft. Still can be very competitive and requires decent APM and multitasking, but its on a much more Macro strategic scale.

That was the idea behind Supreme Commander.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_(video_game)#...

Supcom isn't really significantly higher-level than any other RTS (ie you can still control individual units), there's just more of everything.

Master Of Orion 3 goes in that direction.

Civilization?

It's a strategy game, but it's not in the "compete with someone for 20-60 mins" followed by the game being reset category.

Are you kidding ? Civ is the king of micromanagement.

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