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.
Last edited by CheeseThief; 30/07/13 02:14 AM.
