I’ve read a bunch of threads lately saying that for the sake of new players the 12 unit selection cap should be removed.
My question is let’s say the cap is simply raised to a 16 unit cap which would make a 33% increase in selection.
Would this be enough to satisfy these new players asking for this, and is this a fair compromise to people who are used to the 12 unit limit? It’s still a cap and new players will have to deal with it and not be able to select literally every unit they have at once.
Personally I think this would be pretty fair, and would be better than an unlimited unit selection if we are saying this applies to all game modes universally.
In the long run having more units on 1 control group its a bad habit, so I don’t think it will be good for new players. I almost never get to the point of using 12 units on the same control group, so I don’t really care. But I really don’t agree with the premise that having 14, 16, 18 or even uncapped will be “good” for new players.
Not good as in encouraging good habits, good as in making it easier and allowing some “laziness” or easing the new players into microing.
I’m on the side leaning more towards keeping the cap but I’ve heard discussion from people who are not War3 veterans saying that the cap is too much trouble or too annoying for them to handle.
I’m definitely against dumbing down the game but I could see a small bump in selection being an ok compromise.
’ve heard discussion from people who are not War3 veterans saying that the cap is too much trouble or too annoying for them to handle.
I mostly agree if that is the case, but I think they should know beforehand that it’s not a good thing to hardcode into your brain, if new players get really used to select all units in 1 ctrl group that will be painful to re-learn. I prefer they have that frustration at first, when they are learning than when they are decent and have basic knowledge but they have to waste their time trying to learn to ctrl group correctly. And lets be honest, if that thing makes a new player quit from the game, maybe it wasn’t a game for them to begin with.
Are we going to open one of these every 4 days? There are quite a few post to comment about it on, I don’t want to type the same thing over and pver again every time.
But since we are here, what is the difference between raising the cap to 16 and removing it completely? Touching the cap at all defeats half of the purist best defense points.
While having too many units in the same control group can be a beginner mistake, it’s not a big deal. Keeping selection to 12 to be “noob friendly” is not really a great suggestion.
Selecting 13-14+ units in the rare cases where it makes sense is worth it to me. I’d be fine with a 16 unit selection, I doubt i’d use more than 16 unit in a control group except maybe for mass necromancer and obscene amounts of flying machines.
In my view, no. They will get annoyed with it as an arbitrary pointless cap that modern RTSes don’t have, and it might remove enough fun for them to look elsewhere. Even many (most AFAICT) oldschool players would like to see it gone.
Arguments that it’s better to use smaller groups should be seen as in favor or unlimited selection. Adding the ability to play worse never harms the balance, instead it actually raises the skill differential.
The only arguments in favor of keeping restricted selection are that it adds interface (UI) difficulty - and that’s only if you consider navigating an unoptimal UI as part of the core skillset (which I doubt many people would want - especially spectators who can’t see the difference and often won’t understand why a better strategy lost to better fingerskills).
by removing the unit limit in general is better for new players and other returning player that want that modern touch!
pros will micro unit anyways and the food limit and upkeep will make sure that they understand some of the micro!
other games with unit limit removed like story mode the story mode already teaches you to micro unit like starcraft 2 and C&C and others even warcraft 3 teaches you how to micro! so no i dont think there is a problem with 12 unit limit to be removed in general that just feels like nostalgia talking to not have any changes for the new player
and if we were to keep 12 unit competitive wont really get many new players
becus most of them go to play single unit/hero games in custom games becus the 12 unit limit does not feel fun!
removal of 12 unit limit just increase how much you can do in the game
and the competitive player and pro players are pretty split on the removal of 12 unit limit i think i seen more for removal!
Yes, I would love to be able to select more units! A 16 unit cap sounds great, casual players will have a less frustrating and more fun time with more selected units. I really would prefer unit selection similar to SC2.
In my opinion, just raising the limit feels rather clunky trial for compromise (though yes, it would still be better, if removing the limit in total is out of the question). But the question really is, why does there need to be a limit at all? Blizz has said themselves, that it was always just a way to reduce the amount of units on the screen, and that’s not an issue nowadays. And unlike the upkeep system, the unit selection limit doesn’t really bring anything to the gameplay itself, it’s just annoying.
So the biggest issue with the unlimited selection is that unit icons won’t fit on the UI. Creating the real unoptimal UI that you mention.
Players need to be able to select individual units from their control groups, this becomes an issue when there could be 50 tiny icons spread throughout 3 pages of units that have all been selected.
So to avoid the paging issue and the icon size issue there has to be a limit.
Given that Warcraft III doesn’t often have huge amounts of units to select at a time, a small increase to the cap may be enough to cause players not to deal with selection issues for the vast majority of the time.
So the reason for an increase instead of a removal is to preserve the UI’s functionality, preserve the functionality of the original game, and still make the selection issues few and far between.
Each page could be 12 units, no need to make tiny icons, and how are you selecting differently from now? The only difference is that if you box select your entire army, instead of getting 12 of them (random or higher priority?) you get all of them.
Any problem reaching a specific unit due to paging is inherently worse without it, because your only option is to attempt selection a second time, which is still possible with unlimited.
This is in itself is an argument in favor of removing the limit.
New players supposedly will clump 20+ units in one selection, if it isnt practical to select one single unit due to icon size or paging, then it forces them to use more control groups.
Which is perfect, the reason for unit limitation was to force players to make control groups, paging or small icons do the exact same thing without restricting group sizes.
I wrote this on another forum and some people agreed. I’m to lazy to rewrite it so il post it here too
Looks like most people want more than 12 unit selection. The thing is sometimes you want to use some spells on the icons of the units (paladin heal for example). If you can select all your units…lets say 50 units…you will have 50 portraits on the screen…i don’t know how comfortable it would be.
But since a lot of people want to have more than 12 units selected there could be an option that allows you to customize:
Number of units selected
Size of the portraits
How many columns/rows of portraits
That way those who want less units selected will have less…those who want more will have more.
![:expressionless:](https://dou48tnq0ocoa.cloudfront.net/en/warcraft3/images/emoji/twitter/expressionless.png?v=6" ":expressionless:")