Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - General Too much micromanagement

Personally I'd love for mustard gas to have autocast, just for all the rage when a single cloak trooper wander into the midst of your army and your zeppelin drops the bomb.

I'm not going to go into flaming with you. You can take your self-righteousness and cuddle with it all you want.

I can be wrong, I can be downright stupid at times. Politely (or at least somewhat reasonably) tell me why I'm wrong and I'll think it over.
I also try not to belittle people unless they're being ostentatious for no good reason (likely due to poor character).

If I am that bad at trying to prove a point for you, then listen to Stabbey at least, as he generally makes good points.

All of them should be able to autocast. I want to take part of the fights as a dragon, and I won't have any time for micro-managing (which I don't like much anyway).

This. I am fine with the autocast being crappy. But if I have two fights at the same time to manage and warlocks with meet the beetles then I have to pick which fight I use that ability in (or sacrifice being a dragon to manage the abilities of two fight simultaneously and then probably do a worse job then the autocasts as my attention would be too split.)

Conversely if I have autocast I could leave one group on autocast while manually triggering the abilities in the fight that I want to participate. Sure the group on autocast would probably hit a couple of troopers and a hunter if they are lucky while ignoring the armor behind them but that's still better than the nothing that they do in the current build.

That example is only with one ability too. Once you reach late game when units have tons of targetable abilities I find I can't even go into the dragon at all. All of my time has to be spent managing unit abilities and if I ever get into two fights at once one of my groups is gonna die. Since the Dragon has a TON of abilities and the whole point of the game is to play as a dragon using your abilities to turn the tide, not being able to actually use dragon mode as you have to spend all of your time microing abilities is a real drag.

I get that some players are REALLY fast clickers who are used to games like SC2 and those players can manual target everything (autocast is usually toggle-able) but for those of us that prefer a more relaxing pace and don't have ungodly clicking skills the current setup is near impossible to keep up in late game. Abilites will still be better used by humans manual targeting but this will allow the less e-sports orientated crowd to actually play the game using autocast for some groups/abilites.

But if you don't like micromanaging, why even play the rts part in the first place?

The issue isn't really the micromanagement but rather that late in the game when you have multiple groups fighting at the same time and all of them have tons of target-able abilities there is too much micromanagement. I like a little of it but late game it gets a little too much.

I do enjoy microing most of the abilities most of the time, but sometimes it's late game with tons of abilities researched, you have the enemy advancing along 3 fronts and you need the dragon to be out and unless you can pull off a crapton of clicks per second you won't be able to keep up on the micro even without getting the dragon out. Then it would be nice to turn 2 groups on autocast real quick and micro the biggest battle while swooping in with the dragon.

I am a fairly regular RTS player and while the early-mid game doesn't really need an autocast, the late game could really benefit from one. Also autocast is almost always toggle-able. If you don't like it you don't have to use it (and you will have an advantage as you are probably better then the autcasting) but sometimes it's better for those of us that while I am a decent RTS player I can't compete at the high end SC2 levels. Most people can't as that is VERY hardcore.

I do like the microing, and don't beleive it should be taken out, but endgame is a bit too much at its most frentic and some help might be nice.

That is not even close to being an answer.

I guess you want all your units to fire off all their skills the instant an enemy comes into range, regardless of the threat level?

When should a mine be dropped? When should a zeppelin cast mustard gas? When should a transport cloak? When should a trooper go to Kamikaze mode? When should a unit be polymorphed? When should a hunter teleport? When should a Juggernaut launch an Imp Buster?

You want ALL skills to be autocast? That is non-sensical. Put some thought into your ideas if you want someone to consider them.

How about this. All very situational skills are not autocast, while more general skills that are going to get used every fight the unit anyway and don't consume resources is in should be autocast.

Example:

Meet the beetles - Autocast
Chemical warfare - Autocast
Immunity - Autocast
Short sharp stick - Maybe, that might need testing
Cripple - Autocast
Death from above - Autocast
Mustard Gas - Autocast
Charm - Autocast
Mine High club - Not autocast
For the Empire - Not Autocast
(forget the name but the hunter teleportation) - Not autocast
Imp Bunker Buster- Not Autocast

Now some of these are going to have crappy targeting if you put them on Autocast but it's still better then not having them use abilities that they are probably going to use every fight just because your attention is split. Sure sometimes they might screw it up (grendiers trigger chemical warfare when facing a lone scout hunter, all your warlocks target the same area with their AOEs, but hey, better than nothing because you are managing another large fight halfway across the map at the same time they are fighting.

Even aside from that the AI to intelligently use certain abilities is already there (the AI uses it) so you might not even have that crappy of targeting with AOE abilities. It all depends on how Larian decides to implement it if they do so.

See, that wasn't so hard. Now we have points for discussion.


Chemical Warfare would work as autocast. Short Sharp Stick is more situational, it's only really good if one does a suicidal charge at enemy units. Having it autocast as soon as any enemy steps withing minimum range is a "don't bother" level of useful. Mustard gas is a terrible skill to put on autocast because it affects your own units as well, and if it's autocasting, that means that the enemy has likely moved in range of your units so the zeppelin will be firing at close range. This could result in you gassing your own troops - rather counter productive. Fly my Pretties would work as a good zeppelin autocast, though.

A lot of the others would depend on how good the AI is at picking the right targets. Having Shamans cast Charm or Warlocks cast Polymorph onto the first Trooper who steps into range is not the best use, in my view, so I would probably turn most of the autocasts off.

I'd rather not rely

Remember that autocast is not something one can code in a couple of days for all skills... The implementation is also, per skill, subject to personal preference. "I want it to attack x instead of y". Can of worms. We've talked about it at Larian, but it seems dangerous at this point. We first need to do more important things still.

Ah there is that. I didn't think about how hard it would be to code/balance. I still think it would be nice to have at some point but if it's a tough one to code and there are higher priority things left to do I think it could wait. It's not 100% necessary just would be extremely nice to have.

I agree with Forktong, I recognize how tricky it could be to code.

The latest patch (or the one before) changed Chemical Warfare into a "stance", so hit the button, and their next shot will be a chemical warfare thing, no targeting required.)

With your list of examples, I agree that Chemical Warfare and Fly my pretties would work as autocast. Mustard Gas? Have you even read its description? You are going to annihilate your own army.

The situational abilities abilities like Beetles, Charm and Cripple would work best with a autocast toggle options. This way, if you have battles going on on several fronts at the rts map, you can toggle autocast on/off depending where your attention is.

I'm still rather strongly opposed to auto casting of any ability, because, IMHO, the game needs to be balanced for PvP first and foremost and then the AI difficulty levels tweaked to match the skill levels they pertain to.

With PvP at the forefront, auto casting is still a choice, true. My opinion is that it should not be included, as it would eliminate a strategic layer that adds greater dimension to the game.
All players are limited in the same way by the game, regardless of auto cast or not, but their own ability/skill has a greater opportunity to shine (or eclipse) the more strategic layers there are.

Not all real time strategy games are micro heavy. Starcraft is an example of a small scale RTS with heavy micro elements. This game is larger scale with the focus on a lot more units in play at once, with potentially hundreds of units on multiple fronts at the same time whilst in the meantime you have to manually assign each build queue (with no loop build functionality) and then having to go onto each individual group of units on each individual front to activate special abilities.

A lot of games on the larger scale in the RTS genre such as Supreme Commander, Total Annihilation, Warzone 2100, Submarine Titans, Planetary Annihilation, amongst others have minimal micromanagement (aside from the standard base-building and moving units around) The units in those games are often not "dumb" in the fact they are skilled in doing one thing and they do it well and autonomously and/or that they don't have manual abilities (or limited to a very small number of the units) to minimize intensive micromanagment.

Micromanagement does not scale well with larger battlefields and a larger amount of units under control at one time, especially given that most units can have an insanely short lifetime either. Sure it works well in smaller games (because then you are controlling a fairly small amount of units on maybe one frontline, whereby individual units can make a decisive difference to the course of battle but I have yet to see a large scale RTS pull that off well without making the game more demanding than it may be fun to play.

Dragon + Fireball. Is there really a need to say more ?
And there is all the buildings to capture, the strategy to put in place, Z like.


From what I've read, The AI uses those skills, and I don't think they fire off all their skills the instant an enemy comes into range. Why not have my own units using them as well/bad as the AI does ?

Providing it's not a coding nightmare (which it could be, reading ForkTong answer).

I wouldnt be so in favor of auto-casting if it weren't for the fact its tedious and difficult to select individual unit types to make them cast their abilities. It would be excellent if there isnt an auto cast feature that there would be an abilities tab where the abilities of all your selected units would appear for easier use of said abilities.

edit: I'm talking about a tab that appears when you select your entire army and the abilities of all units in said army appear to select to use.

Now this would be useless frankly for certain abilties like warlock's cloaking but for abilites like Devestator Siege mode, Juggernaught imp buster for navies, Zepplin's attack abilities to name a few examples it would be very useful.

I would love that, but would they all fit on one screen? Not feeling like totaling it all up (I'm lazy, I know) but I think there are more abilities than spots on the ability tab if you selected tons of different types of units. Maybe if there was a new tab on the UI that appeared somewhere. Not sure how to make that work well though, or if it could work well.

If you have multiple types of units selected, you can hit Tab to cycle through their abilities (or double click one of the desired type to select all of that type currently on screen, or assign different control groups to different unit types).

I had some spare time, so I looked at my spreadsheet of skills to see which of the 39 possible skills could be done as Autocast.

There are only 9 possibile abilities for which autocast could reasonably be done. A lot of the others are passives, and many are situational-use only which make no sense to be autocast.

Grenadier – Chemical Warfare.
Shaman – Cripple
Shaman – Charm
Shaman – Immunity
Warlock – Meet the Beetles
Warlock – Death from Above
Armour – Short Sharp Shock
Ironclads – On Guard
Zeppelin – Fly my Flaming Pretties

That said, I’m not sure that just because those COULD be done, doesn’t mean they all should get autocast.

Death from Above is a devastating AoE spell that can also shread groups pretty well. I don’t think letting this one be autocast is a good idea. That is rewarding players who are NOT microing, and that shouldn’t be encouraged. Skills that powerful should not be autocast.


Short-Sharp Shock is possibly suited for autocast, but it’s not recommended because the only times it’s worth using are against large numbers of weak enemies, and the small radius requires the armour to enter melee range, which tends to be suicidal against groups large enough to make it worth using on. You could do autocast, but it’s more likely to hinder than to help.

On Guard is another dubious case. It could go on autocast, but that could risk it being activated for a minor attack, and the long cooldown means it might not be available when you REALLY need it. This could hurt more than it helps on autocast, but if it doesn’t, it again, rewards not-microing over microing.


Charm - On second thought, I think that this is too powerful to use as an autocast. It lasts a really, really long time. If you nerf it, that changes the balance for not only auto-cast users, but those who do not want to use autocast.

Meet the Beetles - This may also be too powerful to use as an autocast. It lasts a long time. If you nerf it, that changes the balance for not only auto-cast users, but those who do not want to use autocast.



The remaining possibly good auto-cast skills are:

Cripple
Immunity

Fly my Flaming Pretties. This is probably a perfect autocast candidate. The cooldown makes it only good for one air target anyway, and if there’s more than one anti-air air target, the Zeppelin is doomed anyway.


Chemical Warfare is a DoT spell that spreads, and can cause quite a bit of damage if there aren’t shamans around. Like Death from Above putting it on autocast is rewarding players who don’t micro over those who do, although it’s not as dangerous as Death from Above.


EDIT: I moved Chemical Warfare to "maybe", and "Charm" and "Meet the beetles" to "not a good idea"