'Micro', balance, design, direction - lets chat

[ytimk]

(This is from an outsider, a spectator, who cannot micro ergo play humans but loves the game and mod.)

This is a bit of a collection of thoughts so I apologise if this comes across as poorly informed and organised.

Watching so many casts and reading these forums will never come close to the experience of playing this great game itself, but a theme has come across to me that I would like to hear from everyone on:

'Micro' - skill/awareness/experience/response time/memory/knowledge/judgement/tactics ?? What is it to you? Do you even care? Is it what draws you to this game, makes you enjoy it, gives you the challenge? Apart from the fictional universe it is set in, a great part of the game is that the mechanics stike me as designed to be about this aggressive/fast/tactical micro play style. Not a traditional RTS, not a single hero MMO/Moba etc, just a sweet spot it has made for itself.

Invest in units and heroes, use specialties, counters, abilites, wargear, upgrades. Jump on a mistake, capitalise on a lucky break to bounce back. From this comes a diversity in play styles/surprises/tactics and opportunities for, well, pretty entertaining action.

Point: when it comes to things such as balance, direction of the mod/game, and what you all enjoy and want out of it, where does micro fit or come in?

Eg, many units 'enable' others - such as heroes, hero wargears, librarians -with abilities. These can turn the tide of engagements depending on use. Same with globals. Unit abilities themselves and when to deploy them are themselves a big part. But keeping track of all these things: units,health, energy, map, enemy location etc makes the mental energy/micro skill required a big determinant in deciding engagements/matches.

Doing it well is easy on paper, hard in practice. Eg an example of employing GK AV against a tank: using GK Librarian to use Shrouding on the VA who has equiped the correct rounds, popped Target Acquired, and maybe had Mind Blades global used on him. This might be extreme (or a dumb scenario), but it takes a lot of steps to achieve this outcome.

Xzy is OP/UP - and many responses to such statements we read here highlight the tools the player has at their disposal in whatever faction/roster to counter/manage said thing. But its not as simple as build X, move near it, click attack, and it NEVER should be, yet....

I guess what I'm trying to talk about is how can we judge reasonable balance given the complexity of making use of the myriad of tools we have in this cool, fast paced game?

[Swift]

What you are saying is essentially what I said about any guide or tip when I was a proper noob; "That's really cool that I know X counters Y, but I can't use it because I can't execute the strategy as well" which is what a lot of the game comes down to. None of it is noticable until you play against people miles better and see how they make what might seem weak perform in the greatest possible way, because getting a Dreadnough to counter mass Ork melee works on paper, but when he dances your Dreadnought it's down to skill in positioning and micro.

Micro, not how fast, but how employed very key in this game to execution of the strategy. You build may be better, but if you can't handle it you get swept aside, and it's why new players have struggles when countering something despite having the counter.

To answer your question on what brought you to the game, well it's this exact micro management style DoW II has. Initially, years and years back I shunned the game, it was quite pretty when I played it and fun to troll people, but it wasn't DoW I with big battles and Tau. But I started watching DoW II casts almost three years ago and thought "You know maybe I was unfair, I like the way this plays around tactical combat and the individual actually making a difference", unlike DoW I and Starcraft's blobby battles of attrition.

[DandyFrontline]

Actually most of the REAL TIME strategies is about micro. If you want to play a strategy without it - play turn-based strategies like... i dont know.. Armageddon, civilization, heroes etc

[Toilailee]

Actually most of the REAL TIME strategies is about micro. If you want to play a strategy without it - play turn-based strategies like... i dont know.. Armageddon, civilization, heroes etc

qft

or chess

[Atlas]

You wouldn't believe my Chess APM

[Swift]

You wouldn't believe my Chess APM

+40,000

[Lichtbringer]

I guess what I'm trying to talk about is how can we judge reasonable balance given the complexity of making use of the myriad of tools we have in this cool, fast paced game?

I really like the niche DoW2 (and CoH) have.
I hear many people complaining about it, for example like Swiftsabre said with people who played DoW1 (it was more like Starcraft).
Many people who play RTS look down on it, because it has not that many units on the field, and if they play Starcraft 2 because it has no basebuilding...or microintensive macro.
BULLSHIT I say. While I like Starcraft 2, DoW2 is all about tactical positioning around the map. Tactics in general.

Also those 2 games have a really nice Aesthetic (if you found CoH1 when it was released, your mind was blown away about how good it looked).
While in DoW2 I like the Theme, in CoH2 there are nice explosions and Tank battles.

So what I want to say is: I really think DoW2 and CoH are underappreciated from many people.


For the part I quoted:
There are several ways to go about it. The traditional way is to assume everyone micros perfectly and balance the game around that. Or to balance it about the current best Players. The advantage of that is, that you can literally always improve your own game. You think something is unbalanced? Get better. The tools are there, you are the only one to blame if you don't use them.

This is always mixed with "how can we balance it for lower Skilllevels without distrubing the balance at the top level". Because there is a real problem: How easy are things to use. If there is a strategy that requires really low amounts of Skill/micro, but gives great results compared to the strategys of other factions, you have to make those strategys still effective, but harder to use.
So you don't balance the power of something, but rather the difficulty to use it. Lets say Lower level players say that Tactical Spacemarines are too strong, but top level players say they are fine. Then you could take half of the tacticals damage away, and give it back to them when you activate an ability with theoretical 5 seconds duration AND Cooldown. If you always press the button after 5 seconds, their performance is exactly the same (so for really good players), but when not so good players use them they are drastically less effective. This example is overblown, and no one would be happy with such a blatant "microtax", but it shows the theory.

[Codex]

Something I have always appreciated about DOW2 and COH is that micro is very important to maximise the value of your troops. But, micro comes in different forms: by-and-large micro in RTSs has boiled down to:

1. Making sure your troops are in the right place at the right time (making it to fights, general positioning, minimising friendly troops' exposure to their counters while maximising vice versa)
2. Making a perfect crescent to maximise dps
3. Rotating wounded and fresh troops to spread out damage as best as possible in order to slow down attrition and maximise dps that way as well
4. Withdrawing weakened troops that need to be preserved
(5. And in games where cover is a mechanic, maximising use of cover when it is wise to do so i.e. not against a flamer)

However, Relic moved their RTSs to emphasise squad-play, which deemphasises micro in one way: no longer do you have to move dozens of individual units and micro them one at a time, which in my opinion is a kind of false micro. I see it as similar to XCOM Long War or Total War: if it were just a spam of units the elegant tactics you could go for simply devolves into following the above principles and being SUPER fast at it (SC2)...

DOW2 is, by APM measures, a low micro game. But their use of squad play, cover and abilities that rely on energy and cooldown make it a hugely dynamic micro game where timing and positioning are really key.

So how do we consider balance? By and large, experience and debates. A huge amount of balance discussion could be repackaged and sent to the strategy subsection, but otherwise there are two main cases of imbalance to consider:

1. A strategy requires much fewer resources to implement than any counter does: this case is obvious and needs little explanation. If any strat cannot be countered without a much larger investment in resources, most players can snowball this advantage into a crushing one since they can use that time when they're uncountered to storm the map, bash gens and take everything. Similarly, any unit that takes many more resources than the investment to take down, including opportunity costs (CAUTION: DO NOT TAKE HIGHER TIER UNITS AT THEIR FACE VALUE, IT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY).

E.g. Somebody might rush a BANEBLADE straight into T3, and that's hard to counter with a largely T2 composition. The total investment (including opportunity cost) is much higher than the face value of the BB, because the IG player would have needed to go T3, float resources for ages (likely while having a significant amount of upkeep) and hold the line for many minutes without adding another unit to the field, exposing himself to power bashes. Thus, if he does manage to fast tech out a BB, he deserves it to be a strong and impactful unit that can swing the game.

2. A strategy requires much less effort to implement than it does to counter. This is a more subtle point, and is probably better demonstrated with an example. One that springs to mind is when I championed the 1-1-1-1 build for Eldar, which was very effective against Space Marines in general: Rangers are excellent against everything that SM has in T1 so long as they remain unharried, and the shuriken+ banshee combo is very hard for ASM to break through, considering that the guardians weapons team has a higher movespeed than ASM do and can just resetup after a jump. Furthermore, a natural choice to counter this setup is to go double ASM, but then the Eldar can just go for an extremely economical choice of getting a second weapons team. All in all, the setup for Eldar is much easier to execute than the Space Marine's assault strat, so one could argue that the Eldar setup is unbalanced.