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

This game seems to be a very interesting blend of the Supreme Commander / Total Annihilation branch of RTS combined with the Starcraft branch of the same genre. A big problem with trying to incorporate elements of the latter into the scale of the former is that with so many units on screen (and the need to replace vast quantities of units) it becomes enormously difficult to activate individual type of units abilities, especially since a lot of units do have them.

Another difficulty is that in queuing units and seeing what units you have selected; the point being that it uses the Warcraft/Starcraft selection mechanic which means each individual unit is depicted as a square, meaning any selection of units beyond a certain count wont work as you can't see what has been selected. I'd recommend having a box containing the unit's portrait and a number count of how many is in the selection near it at the bottom.

The current unit selection goes by the tab system. You may notice that in that mess of portraits, on the left, numbers start appearing, the more units you have selected. A new page for whenever the current page of portraits fills. Starcraft 2 does the same, although it generally deals with fewer units. Grouping units the way you suggest might work better given the amount of units that can add up.

Micromanagement is not that complicated when you can tab though the different unit types in the selected group. It is a limited kind of micromanagement, true, since telling you warlock group to cast fire storm may make that one warlock that's in the back and needs eons to try to shift through your army to get close enough to cast.

The issue with selecting individual units is present by the fact that they are pretty small.

But really, I have trouble seeing what could even be changed to "fix" this? It could also be a factor that intentionally adds to game play difficulty.

As far as I see it units should just use their abilities automatically, or there should at least be one army that acts like this.

Manual abilities work better if the units last a fair bit longer in combat than they do now. In other games with units that have multiple abilities, it is generally done on a smaller scale, with fewer amounts of units and in combat they can last up to 10 seconds. In this amount of time it is usually easier to select the individual units (or groups) and fire the relevant abilities. with larger amounts of units it gets a lot clustered and very time consuming to try and quick fire certain abilities when most individual units last only a few seconds at best.

Dawn of War / Company of Heroes has certain units in squads of multiple individuals. Each individual can be killed independently but allows for an easier time using abilities (using this system the game allows for a relatively large amount of individuals to make up for scale but ease in being able select the relevant units.

Auto-casting could be another way to help with some things, especially with some of the support units such as shamans as having to move through several groups of units to cast each ability one group at a time is tedious and often takes far longer to do on average than how long either some battles last or how long the specific units last.

A lot of the more complicated work can be made easier to carry out with an improved UI and command and control system; features such as auto-casting would make support roles easier, hot keys to quickfire all of the selected units 1st offensive ability at a target (or to seek nearest target if the order is issued on the ground etc.) could alleviate combat casting.

In my own opinion I tend to prefer to spend most of my time employing strategy; setting up build orders, destinations and general troop movement, but in quick combat like this it does become challenging to have to activate individual groups of units' abilities in order to increase combat efficiency because as combat can draw itself out if there are large streams heading towards each other in a lot of cases and use of abilities can be a large factor, doing so limits my abilities to go back onto each factory and set more things to get built to replace a completed build order and to replace fallen units. Doing the latter requires valuable combat time in the first place and so makes the game a lot harder than it needs to be, especially against an AI who can do both simultaneously.

In short I am thoroughly enjoying this game, an interesting RTS experience to say the least and I do hope the game to get polished up before release

What I do is having my units which needs extra care in different groups (f1 for all, f2 for shamans, f3 for warlocks, f4 for zeppelins etc). This way I can quickly cycle through and reposition my supporter units and let them support efficiently.

For some abilities, autocasting is an absolute no go. Imagine your zeppelin drops a mustard bomb on top of your army because of a silly little trooper went into the middle of it.

That's why I caveated it should be a specific army, so that the army designed for ease of use wouldn't have abilities you wouldn't use.

So far, I find that of the current abilities that can be activated, an auto-cast would be overpowered.

"Auto-cast storms are pretty good." Starcraft 2 pro player quote (Grubby)

I actually support this idea. You can easily toggle unit type and effectively use the skills of the squad.

Yeah, that does make some sense. The interface has room for 15 units, so even if you use all 13 units in a group, you can probably find room. It makes sense for a game with as many masses of units as this one.

The downside to that is that you won't be able to see which units are losing health and micro those. Perhaps a button to toggle between numbers and all units modes?


I'm not completely sure about this, but perhaps you shouldn't be able to select buildings and units at the same time. It's really easy to accidentally click to send units somewhere you meant to place a building rally point or vice versa.

The only unit with single unit healing capability are the shamans correct me if I'm wrong (and I haven't played for three days), and they automatically heal units unless otherwise commanded (?). The rest are dragon skills that heals AoE. IMO micromanaging for health is not effective as compared w/ the medic for Starcraft.



I haven't tried it out. If that can happen, they should remove that feature.

That's a good point, but I was thinking of telling a wounded unit to pull back, not telling a unit to heal the wounded one.



Yes, it happens all the time.

If you have everybody selected, Tab sub selects unit types so you can cast their special skills. Alternatively double clicking a unit on the map selects all units of his type.

Given that the AI controlling it's units is effectively the same as our units having auto-cast, why would making things even be overpowered?

I agree. An autocast would be nice. I tend to avoid non passive abilities because the game is at its best when you are struggling on multiple fronts. Autocast would make activated abilities useful again while if there is only one front going on you can manually target them for probably a bit better of an effect.

For one, player versus player must be considered, as it's an integral part of the game (and arguably one that will strongly influence the game's longevity).

Secondly, the AI auto-casts, but it's still just an AI. It's highly limited compared to a player's adaptability, not to mention that its auto-casts are not always used intelligently and therefor mostly wasted.

Knowing WHEN and WHERE to use an ability is part of becoming skilled at the game. One less hurdle to worry means one less reason to feel superficial joy at accomplishing something in the game and one less factor that differentiates players of varied skill levels.

Hi, i am the commander of this army, why do i have to micromanage the daily work routine of my units? i have more important stuff to do.



A dumb sentiment when yo uare makign a game that features so much for the player to do.
Build stuff, capture stuff, fly around and kill stuff. Then you also want to saddle us with "oh and yes please go micromanage all units on the whole map. thx.



Players that are into micro play company of heroes and starcraft, games that FOCUS on these tasks. Just because yo uelevate it to integral part by flat out denying all other options does not make your decision right. In fact you are going full burn Microsoft here....



Do you know why the command and conquer games failed in their later iterations? Devs added micro past "build your base, build units, go kill oppoennt".


Do you know why Art of war failed, a game that in many aspects was superior to its peers? Mass micro with a game not totally optimized fo that.


You are setting yoruself up for fail here.

Oh and you also are making a boring ground war rts instead of fleet vs fleet air war dragon combat extravaganza.

But hey, stay the course. i have seen MS grosly misread everythign this year and im prepared to watch a few more things burn.


oh and btw:



No. You actively scare away people who wanted a niche game about say... air fleet battles with an action part in order to catch the crowd that is already mnarried to games that are specifically designed to excell in this kind of rts micro gameplay.




Hey, ask microsoft, perhaps they have some foot left that you can stuff in your mouth when you make these kind of announcements. ^^ I feel yours is not yet grown enough for the task at hand.

What skills do you think should be auto-cast? It seems to me that essentially all them are best left in the hands of the player. Please explain, in detail, exactly which skills should be autocast, and why that would be better than doing it yourself.




Funny, a lot of the complaints I've been seeing from the press previews are that "blob pushing and simple attack-move gameplay is boring." Here too, people have complained that just having a bunch of units attack-move isn't that great.

I've seen the gameplay change, and now in the current build, the longer durations and skills are more useful. Skills are more powerful, making them more useful and also last for longer, making it easier to manage. Before, Cloak and Shield didn't last long enough, you needed intense micro. Now they last longer, making them more attractive to use AND requiring less micro.




They changed it because IT WASN'T WORKING. It was not fun.

One option Larian could take is give an option to allow auto casts. I, personally, wouldn't use it as it takes some of the fun out of the RTS battles but that's me. On the other hand I do see that there would be some players that is likely to use it though, but I also believe that Larian should only add it if it's feasable to do. I would rather them feel comfortable about adding something like that in rather than feeling obliged to do so, maybe something like this could be done with the modding community that will likely show up after the game's release.

LordReynolds would you kindly stop flame baiting some of the other people on the forums who have a differing opinion to yours. We've heard a lot about the reasons why you hate the direction Dragon Commander has taken and that is your personal view, just as EinTroll has his or her own ideas on the RTS not needing auto casts.