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

I rather like on guard, chemical warfare, and death from above for autocast. As for short sharp stick I think an autocast would not really work for it after all as you need to couple it with smart movement otherwise it's useless. I don't think some of them are more powerful on autocast as the autocast AI will probably not target as smartly as the player. Aside from that I agree greatly with your comments. While it's not the most important thing to do, something to help when you have large multi-unit forces and need to trigger abilities of tons of different units would be really nice and these are the abilities that I find I use (almost) every fight anyway (often with randomish targeting because so they can influence the fight before it's over as units tend to die quickly on normal or above speed).

Death from Above would work as an autocast, but it can do up to 2190 damage. That's per Warlock. Warlocks are pretty cheap. I think that is far, far too much to let a player be able to inflict with literally zero effort.

I am strongly in favour of auto-cast in games, this one especially because I can fly around as a dragon with it's own hoard of skills. Also I feel the overly large amount of unit skills that need my attention ultimately detracts from using the dragon form because my army suffers a massive power drop when I'm not baby sitting it.

I feel that unless an ability has a recruit cost attached to it, I should be able to set any ability to autocast with a right click. Since it's up to the player to decide what units and abilities to put on autocast then it's their own fault if they drop Mustard Gas on their own army or waste a Death from Above on a single trooper.


Further more I feel that there are more than a couple of abilities that shouldn't need to be cast at all, Chemical Warfare for example I feel would be much better as a passive with a 5-10% activation chance and a 15 second cooldown. Likewise Immunity, there is a fairly good chance that I'm going to want to shield a unit that's taking damage so the active ability could be quite easily bundled with the shamans heal, anything being healed by the Shaman takes reduced damage.

The Zeppelins Fog of War has 100% uptime, so long as you remember to keep casting it, so this could easily be changed to a stance. Active the stance and the Zeppelin will cloak friendly units within 600m instead of detecting or buffing the range of friendly units, deactivate the stance and the zeppelin goes back to buffing and detecting.

The Shaman could also have it's abilities turned into stances, it could have a healing stance where it flies around healing and shielding friendlies, a cripple stance where instead of healing it debuffs the enemies, and of course the conversion stance where it does nothing by fly around casting charm. Cooldowns would need to be balanced accordingly.

The Ironclad's On-Guard could also be changed to a passive, an 18% chance for an ironclad to shoot down an incoming projective instead of an 18 second shield of invulnerability.



The dragon has up to 9 abilities of it's own to play with and while it's active the only RTS tactic available is to ball up all your units and throw then at the enemy. Sure I can drop out and order my units to put the toilet seat down and brush their teeth before battle, but I could also just stay as the dragon because that's actually fun.


Using balance as an excuse for not cutting down on the players work load is also a pretty foolish venture. Abilities should be balanced around the notion that they will be cast, not justifying their overpowered nature by the fact that they are tedious to cast.

You can now use the ability of any unit you have in a control group when in Dragon form.



Don't generalize. There are many active abilities that should not and cannot be reasonably made autocast at all. Cloaking, mines, kamikaze, Teleport.

Autocast's potential problems are not just a matter of them being inefficient, picking poor targets. Autocast can be a problem when it is TOO efficient. I think that there should be a place for player skill to go. If you make Death from Above autocast in an effective way, that takes skill away from using it.




That could actually work. That's a pretty interesting idea.




No f'ing way! Have you tried that skill? Without enemy detection, it is already an "I win" button. And you want to make it a one-click always on thing? That is crazy!



In theory that sounds good (except for the autocast charm lunacy - I've changed my mind about that working as autocast), but in actual battle, that would require MORE micromanagement of Shamans and Shamans would be LESS effective, because in battle, some Shamans will get killed, and you're not likely to know which are which, which means more fumbling and more confusion. If you stop some Shamans from healing, that'll probably end up getting more forces killed compared to someone who has them set on healing.




Ugggghhhhhhh no. Terrible idea. Terrible terrible.

It's finally GOOD now that the duration has been increased to 14/18 seconds. making it only affect 18% of incoming fire would make it garbage in comparison.



Wrong. It was changed a while ago. Put your units into a control group and hit Alt+number and you can control your units skills now.




Sure, make all the abilities weak and watered down to accommodate autocast. Why not.

I would rather the game actually require some skill to do well in normal play. What's the point otherwise? The idea is that when you start out, you will be not very good. Everyone starts out not very good, but you learn, and you practice and you can use your abilities better.

If you set everything to autocast and stances, you'll never get better, all the encounters will play out the same way because the units will automatically do everything.

Sure, they could possibly make a deliberately terrible autocast, but that's not what people want, is it. They want a great autocast that is smart and fast.

This.
People moan for an autocast, if one is implemented in the game and it doesn't live up to people's expectations of an easy "I win" solution, it'll do more harm than good.

Those RTS games I've played which supported autocast has only been for very specific abilities (like priest heal or sorceress slow in wc3) because the other abilities are far too situational to be used as an autocast and a healthy amount of skill should be required of the player.

No, you don't want "lesser skilled" players to have fun at the game. That's it. You are just another "elite player" that thinks pressing a button in a game is "skill".

You also deliberately ignore physical limitations like slower reaction time, bad memory etc. or just the amount of playing time. So let's add an "Requires good reaction times, memory and at least 6 hours a day of playing to beat it" sticker to it because otherwise Mister "Elite Player" will break down and cry.

How good can you become at a heavy micro management game when you can only play an hour every other day?

You also ignore the valid critic that this is a RTS on LARGE scales. While you micro manage a hard encounter, the rest of your army on the other side of the map gets destroyed because you can't be at two places at the same time. But that is probably just "bad skill" for you.

Why don't you play the game on "impossible" and leave the normal people have fun with normal play?

Sorry, but this "skill" bullshit always rubs me the wrong way.

There's a pretty big difference between changing difficulty settings and adding autocast.

There is, but it takes some nuance for changing difficulty settings to be an effective stand in for autocast and the only game that really does this kind of thing at all is AI War and that's its whole shtick.

At this juncture though autocast is off the table, differing armies is off the table and the easy difficulty isn't really satisfying. The only real option for now is to drop the game speed down. That's far from ideal so hopefully there will be some access to mod tools. If I can put together something that increases the research cost of abilities like Death from Above, Charm, Mustard Gas and so on (that affects the AI as well) it will make the single player a lot more manageable for those of us with mediocre mouse skills.

What helps for multiplayer is increasing the recruit costs through the advanced options, so something like this might work in sp as well. It has of be added, of course and there's the danger of upsetting the sp-campaign balance.

Re autocast, I think it might make sense for a few abilities, but not all.
E.g. the poisonous rounds of the bazooka troops could be autocast, with some other abilities I'm not so sure, since I'd like to have some control over which unit is targeted.