Area Commands

[AdmiralZeech]

I've said this before, the only limited resource in SupCom is the player's attention. (Well, that and unit cap.)

When designing a game like SupCom, you have to be conscious of what things take up player attention, how much, and what benefits it brings.

So on the one hand, incentivising manual reclaim is a good thing, for competitive/strategy reasons - you make the player spend attention in order to gain an advantage.

However, when you think about designing a cool and fun game, manual reclaim is a very poor idea, especially since most manually reclaimed items do not appear until you zoom in to a certain level.

So yes, you want the game to require players to spend attention to gain an advantage. This means players who know how and where to focus their attention, and who can spend their attention on many things at once, will be more effective. (this is a more general understanding of the "higher apm = more skill" thing.)

However! To make a fun and cool game, that's fun to play and spectate, you want to make all the attention-focusing things cool and fun, and you want all the boring things to be automatically managed. So the sorts of things you should force players to micro to gain an advantage should generally be combat focused:

- Overcharge
- Unit micro, unit tactics.
- TMLs, Nukes
- Activated powers
- Retreating damaged units for repair
etc.

When we think of a game of SupCom, we want the screen to be zoomed into awesome combat as much as possible. We don't want the combat to be completely manageable at strategic zoom, and then have players zoomed in only for clicking rocks, or placing their structures in the perfect layout etc.


So yeah, if you want to have micro in the game, to give an avenue to mechanical skill, then add activated powers, units that perform better when microed, tactical advantages due to unit formation / positioning, etc. Don't spend players' precious attention on boring mechanics like structure adjacency and manual reclaim.

[This_Guy]

But this is also very opinionated. I like the way the game is now, that if you want to focus your attention on reclaim for mass then you should get rewarded for it. Why should everyone have the same ability to collect mass. Then all it becomes is who is better at spending the mass. You are basically taking away a whole aspect of the game. If you would rather micro tanks than reclaim, then you will win the battle, but have less mass, or vice versa. I understand you might not like that aspect and thats okay, but it isnt fair to take it away from other who enjoy this aspect either, the orignal game designers obviously wanted the game to turn out this way. I just am not sure what your issue with it is. Its a completely optional part of the game, i played for a year without manual reclaiming anything. If you dont want to, dont. spend your apm somewhere else. But imo taking it away will take alot of the chalenge away. The game will be much simpler if you only need to work on base building and unit micro. But again this is my opinion, i know it is different to yours. Im not saying your wrong or im right, just thats how i feel, and probably a few others, so it wouldnt be fair to them to take this aspect away.

[AdmiralZeech]

Yes, it's an opinion, but it's also a fairly common sense opinion. If you were a developer of this game, and you cared about its overall success, then making the game fun to play and spectate for as many people as possible would be a priority.

You personally might like the manual reclaim mechanic, but I'm pretty sure you'd agree that it's not very exciting for spectators and most players.

It's incorrect when you say that manual reclaim is the only way that skill can influence your economy. Even with area commands, there is still attention required - you have to know the reclaim is there, you have to task engineers to get it, you have to defend your engineers and keep control over the reclaim. That's in addition to the other skills required for the economy, such as balancing production / consumption / investment, and keeping territorial control.

The difference is, the things I mentioned all involve actual combat, or are manageable from the fully zoomed out view.

Like I said, when you care about the overall success of the game, and not just your own likes and dislikes, then you have to think about, "What would a newcomer think when he hears about this feature for the first time?"

If it's ghetto gunships and ferry routes, people would generally think it's very cool. If it's hoverbombing and manual reclaim, nonplayers would generally think it's a big turn-off.

The way to go is to add area commands (and thus kill manual reclaim) and then evaluate the impact on gameplay depth. If it turns out that there's not enough depth after losing manual reclaim, then we make a new mechanic to add depth, one that isn't boring and tedious.

For me, the philosophy of TA/SupCom is to have the best UI possible. Nothing in gameplay can justify having bad UI.
This is just my opinion. There are people with the opposite opinion, who think that being only able to select 12 units at a time in StarCraft 1 makes the game deeper and more skillful.

[JaggedAppliance]

1. What is the intended purpose of implementing area reclaim specifically?
2. How does area reclaim achieve this?

[biass]

the only way i see this working is if you place it beside manual reclaim, either way you kill off a reclaim mechanic, and dumbing the game down is not in our "best interests"

i treat this thread as a troll until later

(if you think vanilla supcom ui was good, i dont know what to say)

[AdmiralZeech]

1. What is the intended purpose of implementing area reclaim specifically?
2. How does area reclaim achieve this?

First of all, the general feature of area commands is an improvement to the UI. Area reclaim is just one of the things it can be used for. As per my statement above, I don't agree that any gameplay reason can justify having bad UI. So if there's an opportunity to improve the UI, you take it. You can deal with the fallout in gameplay with fixes in gameplay.

Secondly, as stated in my above posts, incentivising manual reclaim means that a proportion of the players attention is spent zoomed in to an empty field, clicking on rocks. From an overall game design perspective, you want as much time as possible for the player to be focusing on fun and cool things. Not empty fields clicking on rocks. This is bad for players in general and spectators especially. It makes the game seem less attractive and interesting to potential players. Removing manual reclaim might remove a skillful aspect of the game. But the solution is to replace it with another skillful aspect (that fulfills the additional criteria of being fun and cool), not retain this boring mechanic.

Lastly, a thought experiment i like to use when considering any change. Imagine if area commands were already in the game from the start. And manual reclaim wasn't. Then someone comes along and says, "hey, let's get rid of this area command feature, so we can click on rocks manually! It will be more skillful and higher apm players will be able to demonstrate their abilities!". I believe the reaction you would get is similar to someone saying right now, "hey, let's get rid of waypoints so you have to micro every movement manually! It will be more skillful and higher apm players will be able to demonstrate their abilities!"

[Exotic_Retard]

we can also look at where we went in the past, if our development is consistent i guess we wont just switch direction randomly:

1. we integrated hotbuild which lets you order buildings with 1 less keypress or without moving your mouse
2. we integrated gazui with lots and lots of improvements that decrease keypresses needed and things like reordering buildqueues ect
3. we made a feature to autobuild storages. everyone loves that, it removes micro from the game, and needs 1 less keypress to execute, or more if you dont have hotbuild setup
4. cybran aa units have had their toggle removed in favour of auto toggling, which makes the game play that part for you, removing micro
5. split attack was implemented which removes a LOT of keypresses and command ordering if you want to replicate its effects. direct removal of micro there.


and thats official development, off the top of my head.

now lets look at ui mods:
so notify - everyone uses that, it lets you queue up acu upgrades, that removes micro and you dont need to think about when your acu upgrade is done, also it literally types in the chat for you
ecomanager - well nuff said right? this one was also quite dubious and had a very similar discussion
supreme scoreboard - that lets you send mass/energy in one click rather than 2 + slider! direct removal of apm, and like notify it can literally type in chat for you.

so those are some pretty popular ui mods.

this shows that apm micro isnt as important as adding ui changes to the game, so lets see where this will go.

in the end, its always shady what does what and what doesnt, and it all comes down to opinion, if we feel that clicking on rocks is what supcom is about, then i guess we should keep that, is a perfectly valid opinion and if thats where the community wants to go then it should be the end of this discussion.

however since this has been brought up for the second time now, and we have divided opinions on this, it looks like it isnt the case.

finally lets look what this mod offers and if it seems to fit in with where we were going before:
split attack (improved)
split assist
split repair
split reclaim and area reclaim

so most people here are complaining about the reclaim part of it. if we decide to do so, we can implement only some of these parts of the mod, its a pretty trivial change.
again, lets see if we hear some statement from our cancerlors on this, not much point in voicing our extremely important opinions otherwise

Spoiler: show

lastly, lets look at the dumbing down of game play that this does, apparently.

ok so if removing clicking on rocks makes the game play dumber, why? is it that extremely delicate balance of where to spend your apm on? afaik most players dont bother, all the way up to the highest skill levels, so its not necessary to click rocks to be good, putting that reason under a lot of doubt.
whats more is that since theres always a ton of things to micro in supcom apm will always go somewhere.

the process of clicking rocks is so intellectual that some lua script can do it better than us? remember that pcs are pretty dumb.
compare that with making a decision on whether to go for snipe or for t3 or w.e.

dunno im just not buying this argument, it sounds too close to "you are gonna ruin the game if you do this!" with kinda no reason given

how about we clever the game up and say to reclaim a rock you need to click it twice! twice the clicking, twice the clever right? right?
or even better lets say you have to type how much mass you wanna reclaim from it! its clever because if you have a big wreck you can choose to reclaim only some of it! clever!

[tatsu]

the only way i see this working is if you place it beside manual reclaim, either way you kill off a reclaim mechanic, and dumbing the game down is not in our "best interests"

i treat this thread as a troll until later

(if you think vanilla supcom ui was good, i dont know what to say)

god DAMN you're making me happy you didn't get elected

[biass]

have no counterpoint, feelings hurt, proceeds to make snarky comment, ok

if you really think ecomanager and auto manual reclaim are in the same boat i continue to not know what to say xD

[tatsu]

have no counterpoint, feelings hurt, proceeds to make snarky comment, ok

if you really think ecomanager and auto manual reclaim are in the same boat i continue to not know what to say xD

are you kidding me?? the counterpoints were made before I got here but whatever i'll re-iterate :

• thinking APM is a measure of skill in this game is wrong
• thiking focused rock clicking is what sets the pros from the joes appart is wrong
• finding a difference between that and other quality of life elements of FA is questionable at best

my feelings are hurt? What is that? some reddit 4chan talk I don't speak? that has no power here. also grow up.

my comment isn't snarky I genuinely feel you're making a poor show here.

talking about "treating this thread as a troll"...

the points made in this thread were well laid out and argumented and this is what you have to say?