Thats sentence i hate the most in this forum…
At some point i also had to run test map to memorize unit pirority list.
And when NEW player comes into this game, game itself do not offer any information about Unit Priority List in Control Groups.
Either that information should be posted somewhere in-game for new players to learn. Or Customizable Priority list should be added.
And better option will be to actually allow activation of skills from units which are not in top priority list if that unit’s ability buttons are not re-used in another unit. Even if other unit has same hotkeys, priority list still in play.
P.s. i would gladly put Mothership way below the line in unit priority. And Senty above High Templar. https://i.imgur.com/DxIwf15.png
Now you proposed the “Comfortability” option. Newcomers should have an information block about all the details, but as I said, some things may be gained with practice. Like I wasn’t really care about unit priority since I started to play properly. Let me explain (of course, this is my hotkey layout, for others it may be different):
All main base structures (Nexuses, CC, Hatcheries)
Barracks/Gates or Queens for only injections
Warfactory/Robogates or Queens for creep spreading
Starport/Stargates and for Zerg I am binding the whole army
The whole army and for Zerg I add Casters.
1-type of Casters and for Zerg air-units or lurkers.
2-type of Casters and for Zerg there are nothing than splitting the army if necessary.
Some things can be different, it all depends from the situation, before I’ve got casters for terran and I am dropping, I bind Medivacs or Warp Prism starting with 5-6 group and so on.
Let me give you an example of simplification:
How about we should have a button to split army by pressing-and-holding it? For example, in C&C3 if I want to split army to avoid AoE damage, you can press “Ctrl+X” combination and all units will scatter apart.
Or another one, instead of holding Ctrl-button and clicking twice on unit in order to pick all units of the same type, in the C&C3 you may just press “W” and you’ll pick up all units of the same type on the whole map.
Let me describe the situation, you have a flow of your units, like Marines and Marauders are coming from your base, and you want to split the flow of Marauders to the different direction. What’d you do in StarCraft? You press “F2”, then hold “Ctrl” button, and then left-mouse-click on Marauders icon.
This is difficult because you must find that, and don’t forget to change the rallypoint to the necessary position.
What this “W” button do? Well, you’re picking up the Marauders in your sight, press “W” and after picking up all the Marauders, order to go them to different location. Could you agree, that’s the simplification?
But I don’t want to see the same in StarCraft, because professionals are literally practice to automate these processes, and their skills will become useless because of those “low-players-friendly-changes”.
Creating your own control group priority list is also personal tactical decision unique for each player ( isn’t that whats makes this game a Strategy? ).
One control group priority list that works for you, will not work for someone else.
You did memorize original priority list, fine. Just do not change it. If some player feels that he will be better commander if, for example, Distruptor or Liberator will be in higher tier… well do it.
I am wondering how fast do you read my messages and immediately answer, anyway.
Your idea (as I see in the screenshot) is a genius one, and of course, I’d rather see that and add this to my first post, even if I wasn’t paying too much attention to that, but anyway might be handy in the future.
I was talking about the simplification like combining a 2-or-more type of units in the same command panel - this won’t happen, you know why? Because there are a lot of simplifications that will literally waste a numerous amount of skills that the pros were acquiring for a long time. Have you read about “Ctrl+X” for split and “W” for picking the same type of units? That’s an absurd, not comfortability, but simplification. That’s my point.
it’s been posted on TL a very while ago. But for my taste, simple priority list change that will work in all control groups will be enough. https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/536917-idea-redesigned-unit-priority-and-command-card
Ah, okay I see, anyway thanks for preposition. Let’s hope Blizzard won’t ignore this topic (at least we must not let it drop down by one-shot-whining-on-balance-threads).
This is called “Flow Control”, and it’s also skill-dependable process.
I’ll give you two situations why it doesn’t really necessary to add.
First of all, nearly all pro-gamers are leaving the part of the army on their base, just in case if there would be some kind of counter-attack. This may be Zerglings, Drop and so on. That’s why rally-points are by default on the base and it’s not necessary to put it on the base even if you are pushing forward pretty successfully.
What happen on low-mid levels? Well, nothing special, let’s pretend you are F2-clicker, and because of abusing the combination “F2” + “A-Click” - why on earth you need to change rally-point tactic order? Despite of the default rally-point tactic, the flow will automatically goes with attack-move because you are abusing the combination I wrote above.
So, yes, idea is interesting, but not really useful. These 2 situations are covering mostly 95% of the games, so maybe you would give us something non-standard situation why do you need such change?
seriously you would think this would have been added/fixed/enabled, considered. WTF who does that just removes the ready button>? Freakin wow still requires people to ready up for parties, but in a 1v1 you don’t get to chose your opponent? You also can’t ban people from your lobbies, so the same jerk can just join over and over and over and you just have to keep kicking him.
so dumb
You forgot to add those things in your 1st post: Make “Space” camera control button customizable on which alert it will react. Currently it will focus on any alert, thus it is completely useless since there are too many incoming alerts; For heaven sake remove or make it possible to turn of clickable alerts on bottom right of the screen (alerts that move your camera to where alert happened); Make supply number yellow when less than 8 free supply. Sound alert will also be nice.
They looks fine.
Except Protoss who have “select all warg gates” button and except Zerg who need to bind only one type of structure for production.
Its not that uncommon to not bind your new production buildings unbind your production buildings by mistake.
I don’t see the reason why the game should be about struggling with bad interface and not about choices, tactics and micro.
SC1 was about who struggles with pathfinding better, and SC2 should be who struggles with interface better?
I hold the rank of “senior software engineer” (working with C++ for the most part) and I would implement such feature by tying camera hotkey binds to start position.
Such feature is at worst half a day of work including code-review, approval, unit tests run and jira bureaucracy.
For Terran there are 2 “schools” of binding production units. First is to have all production (Barracks, Factories and Starports) one one hotkey and CC on the other. Such approach has 2 big drawbacks: first to order units not from barracks you need to press extra button(s) - tab and tab tab, and since you want to order gas expensive units from starport and factory first you need to divert some of your attention into unit ordering and you can’t do it completely on auto-pilot.
Plus as I said you can accidently unbind your production which happens even to the pros sometimes and if that happens you are screwed big time (unlike zerg and to some extent protoss Terran production doesn’t work in bursts on c/d, as a Terran you should have your production buildings running 100% of time especially considering how long it takes for terran unit to be built and how slow terran units are).
Second “school” is to have each production building on separate hotkey. The drawback is that you’ll have to waste too many hotkey and can bind some of your production to wrong “group”.
For player convenience.
Same goes for previous points.
Adding artificial difficulty - i.e. more struggle with interface - is just silly.
Especially since it affect different races differently.
Whenever I hear such statements, the only thought that comes to my mind is “What are you doing here?”. I know it’s kinda personal, but even I am a junior, I don’t have much time to play anymore - can you wonder what would happen if I progress in career and make a family, maybe I wouldn’t care about games whatsoever. But still, if you CAN do that, why you couldn’t directly contact the Blizzard staff and propose your service? Anyway, let’s get back to the topic.
What about automatic camera bindings, instead of making it wired directly to the game’s API, maybe you’ll write a simple script that will create camera positions in a split of a second? It’s prohibited to use scripts and macros on big tournaments, not for personal usage (anyway Blizzard doesn’t care even about huge violence such as BM and cheating, and these are a simple script that anyone can write).
As from my point of view, this is some kind of “signature” or skillful player, like “look how I am doing this”. Let’s be honest, you may not need a single location binding, even on 5k MMR (I’ve got a lot of friends that are holding such skill positions, and they don’t use them and feel good).
That’s what I am talking about, it’s personal, and I don’t see the necessity of implementing such a feature of automatic locations binding, and not only me.
Okay, what about mistakes, there are a couple of moves to help you restore groups. I had some students, and I taught them to acquire the necessary reflexes about what to do if you accidentally f’up with control groups. There are ALT+Number combination, SHIFT+Number, and ALT-SHIFT+Number. An hour practice and they understand how to do it without even thinking. Same for me, yeah, sometimes I am miss clicking, but because I know exactly what to do, I recover all the groups pretty fast.
Yes, actually, I am doing it, and I notice that sometimes if I have like more than 7-8 groups on my keyboard, it’s getting a little bit challenging to quickly respond to the battlefield situation. But it depends on the level you play, of course. Before 4k MMR you can do everything with F2 and maybe, sometimes, you perform drops. But if you’re aiming for professional gaming, well, yes, it may become an issue. And here comes a question again, does “Senior Software Engineer” literally have time to become a professional gamer? Come on, who are you, a machine? (No offense, I am just confused a lot).
I’m sorry, but I’d use another word - for players laziness. I don’t understand how can it be that hard to put your fingers to press “CTRL+F1” to make it necessary for creating a separate hotkey? Maybe I don’t know something, but I can agree only with one clause - this feature is wired, and you can’t change it (That’s a shame), but not for “convenience” for sure, because it’s not THAT hard as it looks.
I was answering earlier about hotkey for splitting units and the hotkey to pick up the same type of units within the whole map. What do you think about it?
UPD: Oh, actually, I see the purpose of you prepositions. But you must look at this from a complete different angle. All these simplifications are making low-level players to perform moves aside from “F2” abusing and ignoring control groups binding, and all their games will look progaming-like.
Yeah, perhaps, that would make the games more entertaining like “Oh look at those 3k MMR, how do they split armies, how do they control everything - so professional”. But anyway here comes another point as I told before - all these changes will also affect current pro-gaming arena, those guys spend thousand of hours to play like that, and after implementing the changes, everything they were practising for will be wasted.
So it’s crucial to think not only about newcomers, but about pro-gamers too.
You will have more free time when you’ll go up the career ladder.
Also you will treasure your free time more and hobbies that make you feel relaxed.
Video games have always been big part of my life (I play many of them; some of them I play for the most part because I can socialize with my friends that way; heck most of us live in the different cities now and we can see each other in person once a year at best).
Also, when you’ll age you just won’t be able to work as many hours as in your youth.
Other than video games I spend my free time in gym, in horse riding, reading books, watching movies and dining out, and occasionally meeting with some of my friends in person to play board games and drink beer.
If I could turn back time I would work much much less than I did because really, spending ~60+h per week working in retrospective was absolutely pointless…
I already worked in video game industry and I feel zero desire to work there again.
And even less so I want to work in California.
I doubt Blizzard can realistically make me an offer that I will find interesting.
If I’ll ever be working in video game industry it will be either my own project (which I’m already working on when I’m in the mood to do so) or in management position (and I’m not talking about team lead).
I’m absolutely not.
I’m playing SC2 to chill and to talk with my friend over Skype/Discord while we play with each other with others observing and friendly trolling.
I hear what you’re saying but I see no reason why that should be part of the game that is supposed to be a game about strategy and controlling units.
Definitely not as a Terran.
Why make players life more complicated?
Hotkey for splitting units will break the game because game balance is basically based around that splitting is hard.
Hotkey for picking units of the same type in the map - why not? However I don’t see it as very useful because I can’t think of such scenario out of my head… Maybe I’m missing something?
Yes, I’d love to see strategy and choices becoming relevant before middle of Diamond league.
For vast majority of players SC2 is not the strategy game but the game about who struggles with clumsy interface less.
Look at for example Heroes of Might and Magic 3. Should I mention how old it is? Yet it have BIGGER player base than StarCraft, both amateur and professional.
Why is that?
Because its more fun to play.
Almost every patch they add features that makes it more convenient to play, features that decrease your chance to make a mistake due to interface and thus increase impact of your strategic choices.
For example they added feature that displays order in which units do the move during the battle not too long ago.
Yeah, I understand, moreover, I want to add that if I’d have a high-end PC configuration (And I may assume, with more than 110k$/year salary you should have one), I wouldn’t care much about StarCraft 2. Yes, I love this game too, but as you said:
In that case, I don’t really get you, why do you even care about these changes? Because I am doing completely the same thing, chilling, doing some BS, and fun games and I don’t see the necessity of those changes. Because your list sounds like you want to impact 1vs1 games. Maybe I am not right, but still, the current layout is completely satisfying me for the purpose of having fun without aiming at the cybersport arena.
As I said, this combination is not that difficult to press. And moreover, I encounter this situation pretty rarely. And considering the fact, that you play for fun, let me give you an example of some friends of mine, who LITERALLY don’t press a single hotkey, using only a mouse, and they don’t look useless, especially in Co-op mode. I and my friend handled the hardest mutation ever, it was bugged, and there were campaign commanders that supporting all the incoming waves of shuttles. That’s that I am talking about, only goddam mouse.
Yeah, and I am not the best one at explaining things, but I came from the “Command & Conquer 3” game, and when I started playing StarCraft 2, I really missed that button - it makes the whole gaming process incredibly simple. Well, you may download and play that game, and see with your own eyes how it looks and its purpose.
