#"Slowmode" per unit APM cap?

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

weary ridge
#

Just spitballing an idea...I feel like it might be interesting if units could have a cap for how often a player could give them orders. It would severely limit micro-ing, acting sort of as "communication time" before you could change the orders of a given unit.

I'm only using "apm" as the shorthand here. Obviously, it wouldn't be X actions per minute, but rather a "once an order is given, another order can't be given for X seconds" or something. I feel like playing with what units and how long the slowmode runs could make for some really interesting restrictions that force folks to focus on other areas of tactics/strategy beyond micro-ing.

It's a thing I've thought about as an RTS feature for a while now. Thoughts?

twilit berry
#

Stratergiy is the big picture, where are you going to strike your enemy, how much, where are your forces going to be.

#

However strategy cannot change the game state through thoughts alone, it needs actors, (Units) to complete those tasks, to destroy deffences and so on. If you cripple your actors ability to do things, they cannot complete tasks to fulfil your stratergy.

twilit berry
#

Your main actors in BAR (mobile units) require a lot of micro to function, limiting their order rate would just cripple them and make the game feel bad to play.

#

There have to be many design choices to make a game play a certain way, changing one thing in a game as complex as BAR will not transform it into another game.

#

I also don't know %100 what I am talking about, because I forgot to set an aim before writting this, but I hope this helps explain why this wouldn't work.

fluid river
#

Generally speaking, having units be unresponsive is not a fun mechanic. I think if you were going to go this route you would need to make it more like a turn based game. Instead of limiting how many orders you could give and then having a force cooldown, which would probably feel unpleasant, there would be lots of little windows for everyone where only one command could be issued and you'd have to wait for the next window to issue another command and everyone would have the same windows. Although I don't really think that would work well for this game, as it depends on a lot of small movements at times, like this would severely hamper your ability to Dgun a few times in quick succession, which happens often, and be a massive change to how the game is played.

Even with those restrictions, I think you'd still have to babysit/micro units a lot unless you just massively limit control, so I wouldn't expect it to have any grander impact on what you do, it would just potentially create a lot of smaller tactical windows where someone cannot correct their movements as readily and give you little opportunities to exploit that potentially.

You say as an 'RTS' feature, but it's against the real time nature of 'real time strategy' and would move it back towards turn based.

fickle fable
sharp pebble
#

I think the issue with this idea is that when you are on the offence you can give your group of raiders a long path from one mex to another and your opponent doesn't know where they will go. But if the you want to defend you have to react to each change of direction and you cannot predict. This would give massive advantage to attacker and all your frontlines would leak like crazy.

weary ridge
#

I don't disagree with any of the gameplay points above, and yeah I can see it potentially feeling bad removing some control from the player. That said, I think if the restriction was minor, it wouldn't be removing the "real-time" aspect of the RTS, just forcing more reliance on the AI of individual units.

In a lot of ways it seems like BAR's "set it and forget it" options are pretty top notch, in terms of when the player is fine allowing the units to essentially act un-assisted.

I wonder if continuing to build out more detailed "mirco-orders" would either allow the restriction to feel better, or maybe just be enough that the general need to micro all the time (obvs except at the highest levels) would be reduced to so little it's essentially the same thing? Like, a specific order for a unit to engage and kite, or to patrol but then when engaged kite back while defending, that sort of thing.