Real-time strategic thinking - if you go squorgs and you scout your opponent massing anti-squorgs, you need to rapidly decide what to do, and every second you donât adapt is a gain for your opponent.
You can do that without sacrificing anything. Splitting your focus to attend to macro does not inhibit your ability to scout unless you are intentionally tunnel visioning yourself. What happens when you attack the enemy base while your own base is being attacked? You will need to split your attention, and that is a part of the strategy element of all RTS games. This is all a part of army and base management, something integral to the design of WC3.
It only increases it indirectly, by reducing everything else. You could say skill always adds up to 1. If you reduce mechanical skill from 0.3 to 0.2, you gain 0.1 somewhere else - which is intellectual skill.
Not necessarily. Look at MOBAs where all macro-oriented mechanical skill has been (effectively) removed. At the base level, this is still an RTS, simply refined to an extreme where your hero represents an entire armyâs worth of offensive capability. Where is your strategy? Itâs all about the ganking, the jungling, soaking/last-hitting, buying items and scouting the enemy. These are all the same things you would be doing if you arenât focusing on macro in WC3.
Yet you now lack the ability to disrupt your opponentâs attention towards any type of macro. You lack the complexity that is involved with attack timings, expanding or having enough resources to buy necessary items. You gained more intellectual skill while limiting options to play mind games with your opponent. Weâre simply talking about a different cost, and effectively this changes the underlying complexity of the game.
Clicking on a building just when resources are ready is a macro reflex. A player could beat one with superior strategy because theyâre better at that skill - all else being equal - because they have their units just a bit earlier. Remove the importance of that skill and the player with superior strategy wins.
Unpaid queue is most beneficial only a few moments before resources are available (or training is finished). Iâd actually prefer have unpaid without queue (and even without autocast train) to queue without unpaid (even with autocast train).
The reason queues are paid is to give a player an option, but at a cost. The design is similar to upkeep, where if you want a larger army, then you will get less mining income. Queues are an advantage. In a situation where queues are no longer an advantage and are baked into a standard way of play, you can equate it to removing upkeep or diminishing it; or adding unlimited selection to make it easier to macro select units. This effectively changes how WC3 plays no matter how you look at it. It is not just quality of life, it is changing how the game is approached entirely. Without upkeep, you will make larger armies. Without selection limits, you would always group your army in a death ball. This is not how Warcraft 3 is played. You may as well be playing a SC2 mod of WC3 instead.
If the intellectual skill fraction is increased it will increase the average intellectual skill (good and rapid planning) of players, increasing adaptive gameplay. Adaptive gameplay almost certainly means more varied units.
There is nothing preventing adaptive gameplay or varied units in any level of the game. I see this as an excuse for not learning how to play the game properly.
Mechanical UI macro and strategic thinking arenât mutually exclusive.
You arenât diminishing any ability to strategize by having to click on buildings to make units. That would be like saying driving automatic allows for more intellectual skill vs driving manual; itâs an unfounded statement.
If muscle memory is reduced, the downsides to choosing less-practiced units will be smaller - hence more unit variation.
There is no basis to this statement. Muscle memory is a part of learning how to play any game. Muscle memory is a large part of Micro, and clicking buildings (or more efficiently, hitting a series of hotkeys) to create units is a part of that micro. You would actually be diminishing âintellectual skillâ by pre-planning which units to create and committing them to a queue. You arenât increasing variety if you are queuing up unit production from the same building; unit variety is based on having many buildings and building from each which an unpaid queue would not resolve.
When thereâs less need to split your focus between macro and micro, you free up time (focus) to engage in more complex strategies like split attacks, scouting, expanding, faking, etc.
Untrue. Pros show that it can all be achieved with enough practice and skill to execute. Watch some Day9 videos breaking down how top SC/2 players are able to macro while attacking AND micro at the same time. Splitting marines to avoid baneling splash while using hotkeys to continue production of marines. That is all a part of strategy, and setting things to a queue would not resolve any of the perceived macro issues that you have brought up. You gain no significant Strategic/Intellectual skill advantage by having queues be unpaid. The ability to queue already exists, and an unpaid queue would not be QoL for anyone who macros efficiently.
Itâs like suggesting that making unlimited selection would help micro by decreasing the amount of hotkey groups required. It has the opposite effect because good micro involves separating small groups of units or focusing on individual unit actions. In this case, good macro is about creating units when necessary to make the most of resource management. Queues have the opposite effect and their existence is already a handicap towards low-macro players. The cost of queuing is reflective of a lower skill cap for those who depend on its use. It is inefficient yet effective, and any player who wants to become better at macro would have to focus on good macro play rather than rely more on a system that promotes a âset-and-forgetâ style of play.