And the ability to select all your units is just that you aren’t fighting the controls when grouping 13 Footman in a group.
We alredy have so few units, why bother capping those modest numbers at all?
1 Like
No thanks.
Let’s use better UI and control interface currently available.
If you are adding a “feature” just to make user experience worse for the sake of some l33t points then clearly you are doing something wrong.
It’s not. Actually, putting everything in one control group would be a rookie mistake. You want to separate units based on their role, can you imagine how disastrous would it be if you attacked a specific unit with a group of melee and ranged unit? The ranged units could be fine if they don’t need repositioning, but melee units will just run around like headless chickens and youll waste a lot of potential damage.
With or without unlimited selection, i’ll be sticking to 3 control groups for the vast majority of my play. Only sometimes I’ll wish to have 13-14 units in one control group, or maybe if i meme and make 24 archers somehow.
Wc3 is so micro intensive, you can’t get away without proper unit control, and unlimited selection will never do anything to deter from that.
5 Likes
Any competitive system can be divided into skill and luck. (running races = 100% skill, snakes & ladders = 100% luck). As long as you don’t have too much of a luck component, you will always have skill-based competitiveness as long as there are players.
If the luck component of competitiveness stays the same then any reduction in importance of one type of skill simply amplifies the importance of the others.
Here, less focus on mechanical skill (fingerskills) simply amplifies the importance of the other required skills, basically strategy and tactics. IMHO this is a good thing. Fingerskills aren’t what an RTS is meant to be about.
Also, for spectators, mechanical skill is invisible while strategy is visible. It feels annoying when a player with a visibly better strategy loses to another simply because of unseen fingerskills. Or when you see two players meet for the first time and one has slightly more army due to macro, viewers don’t really get a sense of why. It’s basically like watching a game where one player’s units have an invisible handicap.
Lastly, focusing on fingerskills reduces the potential competitive player pool as APM drops off sharply after teenage years, while strategic thinking decays far slower (and probably peaks a bit later).
1 Like
No, mechanical skill reflects in the gamplay just as much as strategy does.
I mean invisible in the sense that spectators (live or replay) don’t directly see APM. They don’t notice that you left your peon idle for 200ms instead of 25ms. Those small differences add up, but they’re not visible to the spectators, only the end result is (eg: spectator sees a player lose, but doesn’t know why).
1 Like
The big easy example for me that comes to mind specifically for Warcraft is stuff like controlling a Blademaster for harass or just when an engagement happens, controlling individual units in the mess. Like if I had, on paper, a winning unit composition as an Orc player against a Night Elf player. I have the strategic advantage. If I’m not microing at all (refocusing units, moving them, using abilities or spells, controlling my hero seperately or in sync with my army) then it’s entirely possible to lose. And that’s the easy, visible answer. APM isn’t exactly mechanical skill and mechanical skill strictly isn’t APM.
I understand that it’s kind of ‘who cares if you have 300 APM but what are you actually doing with it’ on one hand, though. APM isn’t a super strict 100% indicator of skill or capability. Also I understand that APM/micro isn’t super strictly what’s being talked about, so -
In my experience, I’ve never really needed or felt the need for larger groups. My control group tendency winds up being primary/first/highest level hero and melee or ‘vital’ (a few casters) units in 1.
Secondary/ranged/support hero and ranged units and/or casters in 2. Occasional siege units.
Otherwise control group 3 is if I have a more split force like if I have a fair amount of ground taking up all of 1 & most/all of 2. I’ll use 3 for siege only or flying units. Up until high upkeep games, I usually leave 3 for unit production.
Control group 4 is my tech stuff.
Control group 5 is my town hall.
Granted not everyone plays exactly like me but going past 12 units hasn’t super crossed my mind in all my time playing whether it was casually or giving melee a good, earnest try. If Blizzard slips something into the map editor for custom maps or fanmade melee maps to allow for expanded selection, there’s no problem I can see in that at all. 12 is a tight, clean, but allowing number.
Stutter stepping seems to be the best example of a balance advantage of UUS.
But, couldn’t we consider stutter-stepping as an exploit/bug. It’s not intentional, non-strategic, and is a huge APM-waster.
Instead, you can just make ranged units auto-stutterstep (maybe with a toggle for whether to keep moving when in range but cooling down). This would also reduce the difference between balancing for pros (relatively weaker ranged because they stutterstep) vs balancing for all.
An unintended mechanic that isn’t an exploit or does active damage to the state of the game is fine. Animation cancelling has been a thing in Warcraft 3, character action games, fighting games, and even FPS games. It just adds depth to the gameplay.
I could understand this for someone that has accessibility issues. I can’t understand is as an outright substitute for player input if/when the player is perfectly able to do it themselves, they just don’t want to. To be a little crisper in my phrasing, if you don’t want to put in the effort to get familiar and practiced and versed to use advantage in a competitive setting (games VS friends, casually in melee, or going for prestige on the ladder) then that’s kind of on you.
Players (pro or otherwise) feeling it’s not necessary isn’t really an argument against it.
The arguments for it are many: that it doesn’t put off new players and non-pro old players, that it’s more user-friendly, that it has valid uses (even if they’re rare in pro play), that it increases focus on strategy, that it’s only there as a now-irrelevant legacy compromise, and many more.
The wishes of the bottom 99% of players are important.
1 Like
You’re only perfectly able to do it yourself if you’re not doing other things, like coordinating other armies or workers or whatever (ie, less parallelism), which leads to linear, more boring games.
Just because something exists doesn’t mean it’s good. Especially if it’s an unintentional oversight. Having units that basically get a buff from being selected reduces the strategicness of the game.
It’s basically like QTEs. A brainless non-strategic “press keys at the right frequency” mechanism. Not something that improves RTS.
I’d argue it does do active damage (less parallelism, above).
That’s been a big part of the game forever. What? Micro and macro both. That’s part of the game, xaxazak. Base, unit, and resource management. That’s not even a high level concept. That’s the basics besides - what - tech trees, damage types, and armour types? Race and unit knowledge? No matter what skill level you are in the game you are doing both. Attacking a creep camp is micro. Bringing your camera back to your base to build another farm and train another Footman is macro. Bringing your camera back to your creeping units once you’re done that and then picking up the dropped item from the creep camp with your hero before moving your units to another location is micro. That’s the mechanical skill you’re talking about and it’s not even advanced stuff.
This is the straw that broke this camel’s back. I surrender, you’ve baffled me. Pressing a key at the right frequency or time could be as quaint as ‘okay I’m watching my gold count so I can upgrade my Tree of Life to get to the next tier in the tech tree’. So I guess 320 gold and 80 lumber is the prompt for the QTE and if you fail it (protip: Press U to upgrade your Tree of Life), you lose the game because you couldn’t get Dryads or Druids of the Talon or whatever.
I’m tapping out now.
xhttps://i.imgur.com/tJ8smuY.jpg
Blizzard said that they MIGHT change the limit of units, and if they changes it will most likely be 2 separate leagues, with the old limit and the new one, so everyone will be satisfied.
2 Likes
I’m probably at the very extreme edge of my point of view on these issues.
(some of) my RTS design principles would be:
- If you can say what you want faster than you can do it in the UI, there’s room for improvement.
- If it’s completely obvious you’d want to do something (like shoot when cooldown is off, or cancel an incomplete building just before it gets killed), you shouldn’t have to manually do it.
Basically, all that remains is pure strategic thinking and no fighting the UI.
For example:
I’d like to be able to queue this up (and basically everything else that needs resources).
Sounds great - do you have a link?
I lied I’m at least coming back to this thread one more time because xaxazak, you are a gold mine for strange and clumsy armchair dev talk.
That’s not fighting the UI, that’s fighting stuff like animation damage points, animation backswings, animation cooldowns, turn rates, movement speeds, etc.
And if I play an FPS, I’d like my character to move and aim perfectly at all times while I just hold down left click.
Of course I have a link:
Xhttps://youtu.be/nI10a1GR_jM?t=1201
Remove X on begining. If link not work type in YouTube
Warcraft 3 REFORGED: Interview w. Pete Stilwell, Senior Producer - New Feature Revealed!
20:02
2 Likes
I wasn’t only talking about stutterstep. Control group limits is fighting the UI.
FPS is meant to be about mechanical skill. That’s 100% intentional.
RTS is meant to be about strategy. The mechanical skill is only there by accident, and RTSes have been steadily removing mechanical skill since the genre’s inception.
what about the ‘real time’ element, like controlling your units in real time in optimal ways to better increase their effectiveness lmao
EDIT: it’s almost like the ‘real time’ is about your units and the ‘strategy’ part is about your overall game plan each match and tuning your base’s construction for best coverage in unit production, research, and tech tree pathing
In my view, real time is simply a limitation on how long you have to decide how to react. If you’ve told your units what to do, they should do precisely what they’re told, but optimally. Fire as soon as ready, train as soon as possible, etc.
Of course, you often need to react at tiny intervals, sub-second. But that’s ok as long as you’re “reacting” to a new event. There’s a ton of grey around what counts as “reacting” though.