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Comment by hypertele-Xii | Hacker News Reader

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 ?

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

The starcraft parlance is Micro vs Macro.

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