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Comment by chii | Hacker News Reader

One of the reason starcraft has such a high skill ceiling is that you do need to individually control the pathing of the units so as not to bottleneck.

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All I want is for there to be a Starcraft 3 that doesn't have most of the micro in it, so that games can hinge more on tactics and strategy than rapid clicking. It's such a pain ... I feel like microing was fun in the 2000s but now it's just annoying.

In war, everything is simple but the simplest things are hard.

I feel that Brood War embodies this part of Clausewitz quite well.

There will always be marginal advantages to be had in micro-managing units I think.

Of course, but the game is more fun for the vast majority of players if it's not required for the vast majority of the skill population. Pro matches focus heavily on micro-heavier caster units and that's fine if it's still fun for the players that don't want to focus on that.

you don't have to micro in starcraft to get fun out of it - but you won't win in a multiplayer match against someone who does. Whether losing due to lack of skill is fun or not will depend on the person.

The single player mode (and custom maps mode) all do not really require micro'ing to be very fun.

I loved the original Brood War. But The Fun™ for me was always in the macro side of things. I wanted to give units large-scale orders, and have them figure it out.

The rest of the RTS world relentlessly pursued micro, of course. And the MOBAs that came of that are fine for what they are, but what they aren't is something I personally want to play.

It always surprised me that parts of the tech research tree in any RTS didn't seem to include smarter unit behavior as part of the stack. Paying in-game resources to off-load cognitive load is an interesting loop!

Partial credit is due to Majesty, which is the only indirect-control RTS I've come across. Old game, but still fun for what it was. I liked the idea.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/25990/Majesty_Gold_HD/

A focus on operations rather tactics is more something found in the Total Annihilation family of games : TA, Supreme Comnander (1) (Forged Alliance Forever), Planetary Annihilation, Zero-K/Spring, BAR/Spring...

And shout out to Achron which managed to weave freaking *time travel* into the gameplay !!

Thanks for the recommendation. I've never tried any of that series. Any in particular you suggest to start with?

Well, my personal preference is for Zero-K/Spring, because I actually like micro :

http://zero-k.info/

(It also has a single-player campaign where you slowly get to learn the more than 100 units and features.)

But BAR/Spring seems like it would fit you better (it's also the closest of them to TA, which is otherwise a bit old these days) :

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

(BAR used to stand for Balanced Annihilation Reloaded, while Zero-K used to be called Complete Annihilation.)

Thanks, I'll check them out!

I've never even looked at Starcraft 2 with it's "micro" reputation. I favour Supreme Commander. To be fair it is: Supreme Commander + Forged Alliance + FAF online community.

Persistent between games: Configurable building templates - one building command queues whatever you set in whatever arrangement, rotatable on placement.

Factory infinite repeating queues with waypointing including automated airlift ferrying for ground units if required.

Adjustable waypoints. Move, insert, remove waypoints without having to redo the whole set from scratch.

Plus I like the storage aspect of resource management and the titanic units. Not so sure I care much for nukes though...

And the skill in question ain't strategy.

RTS games (at least most of them) are always like that tho. The ability to micro-manage your units is the most foundamental skill for a competitive player.

I believe that's one of the reason LoL and Dota became more popular than any RTS.

Not necessary, you can dance all the micro you want, but if you play BAR against SA pushing that exponential eco curve, you will loose. Human skill and attention are linear.

A master of click work, will loose against the onslought of material of the Big E, in the long run.

I can get the point of your post in the broadest sense, however, it feel a little like trying to read a foreign language. So, just because I am trying to kill some time before my Motion Hearing starts, can you give me a breakdown of what you are actually referencing?

There are artifical strategy games limitations, by the User Interface, by technology and by the players themselves. Some games do not adhere to those limtations - like Beyond All Reason or Supreme Commander. It allows a experienced player, to grow a exponential economy and marshal the produced armys without a taxation on the limited, linear attention of the player or the Input Rate of some players. Meaning, the micro management gained tactial advantages, get swept away by a ever larger exponentially growing economy.

Its mostly visible in the pros vs joes matches of BAR Players, in which well managed exponential eco allows a recovery from impossible situations, marshalling exponential growth against several weaker, though elo strong players at the same time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuAPHw3DwMY

Its like watching BIG O N^2 beating Big O lin N to pulp, but in a rts. Blink and you miss it though. Its the infrastructure bootstrapping itself, in the back of the base.

Can't help but point out that, in SC2 specifically, micro is not really a fundamental skill at all. Macro-ing efficiently will win you the vast majority of fights until you reach the 90th percentile of players. It's only in these high level games that micro skills become the determining factors.

Though starcraft macro has a high ratio of fiddly clicking to strategy. Less so in SC2 but still significant. Good macro involves a lot of clicking buttons in many different places as soon as they become available, because you can't queue them.

But "Macro" is not Strategy either : Strategy is all about the "why" of declaring war in the first place.

You inevitably end up with strategic considerations in games with more than 2 teams (especially if the teams are not locked), but most RT"S" matches are not played in these conditions (probably because they are too fast for diplomacy, which is itself a huge chunk of strategy).

I guess "Macro" is Operations ?

The starcraft parlance is Micro vs Macro.

Logistical tactics? The Russian military was really hurt by the lack of this skill in the first week of the Ukraine invasion, lots of pathing problems.

How you administer your own actions/APM bandwidth as a player is itself a resource over which the player needs to strategize accordingly

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