Map objectives experimentation We added seven special points on the map -- every few minutes a special "artifact" would be spawned at a random point, and the players would need to find which point had the artifact, harvest it, and score a point. The game would end when a team had achieved a certain number of points. We were certain that by adding an unpredicatable element that players would have to react to on the fly, the game would become more dynamic and more fun.
But, we were wrong. The artifact game mode led to all of the battles happening in one or two places on the map. We wanted to use the artifacts as a way to keep players from focusing too much on specific areas of the map. But it turned out that they consumed all of the players' attention, and the entire game took place at or near artifacts. Surprisingly, they soon began to ignore the objectives altogether, and simply battled near them, not for them! This made us realize that we should focus on making battles fun, not on artificially trying to make them happen in certain places.
Tech trees and structures Lots of real-time strategy games (RTSes) feature base-building as a core element of the game. In these games, structures define the upgrade path or tech tree. For example, you might need to build building A before you can build building B, and only once building B is complete will you be able to build unit X.
For a while, we were sure we'd have to create a structure-based tech tree in order for our game to have strategic depth. But before we got around to creating such a tech tree, we had only a single structure, the HQ. The HQ could build one unit at a time and queue five additional units to be built later. Each player started with one HQ and could build more of them using a worker. This allowed players to build more units closer to the enemy and get their armies to the front lines faster.
However, players began to use buildings to wall themselves in. These players clogged up choke points and "turtled," and the result was that games became boring because players weren't engaging. We tried to punish this behavior by making the HQ more expensive, but the real stroke of genius came later. What if factories built units instantly? Then there wouldn't be any incentive to build more of them. And then, why let the players build any structures at all? So we tried giving players a single base that built units instantly, and it was a hit. Now players concentrate on their armies and battling instead of building up a fortress and turtling themselves in.
But if there aren't any buildings, how is there a tech tree? Well, some of us have never liked the idea of needing to memorize a tech tree, so we decided to make it much simpler. We now have an "Upgrades" panel in the UI where players can upgrade their units by spending resources. There's no ambiguity or special relationships between buildings, and our players like the simplicity a lot. We're especially happy that we were able to solve this problem by side-stepping it, rather than by applying band-aids to a system that was causing us problems.
On July 11 2014 03:14 Hider wrote:As I see it, despite all the bad things about SC2, it's still the RTS with by far the best unit control.
Bollocks. Pure bollocks, who are you to even decide such a thing? There's no such thing as "best" RTS, some RTS are more popular, some are more mechanically demanding, but you can't take any single RTS (or game) and just say, "it's the best at this". It's cringeworthy and it's non-sensical. "fun" is very subjective; as such there isn't really a "best" game out there.
Had to get that off my chest.
I'm more concerned about getting an open beta so we can try Artillery's game before anything else.
Hm, can you name a modern rts with a more responsive engine? I havent played almost any other contemporary rts games, but DoW2 for example definitely didn't have anything close to the unit control possible as SC2 (I think most modern games aim for more realism over arcady absolute control).
On July 11 2014 03:14 Hider wrote:As I see it, despite all the bad things about SC2, it's still the RTS with by far the best unit control.
Bollocks. Pure bollocks, who are you to even decide such a thing? There's no such thing as "best" RTS, some RTS are more popular, some are more mechanically demanding, but you can't take any single RTS (or game) and just say, "it's the best at this". It's cringeworthy and it's non-sensical. "fun" is very subjective; as such there isn't really a "best" game out there.
Had to get that off my chest.
I'm more concerned about getting an open beta so we can try Artillery's game before anything else.
Hm, can you name a modern rts with a more responsive engine? I havent played almost any other contemporary rts games, but DoW2 for example definitely didn't have anything close to the unit control possible as SC2 (I think most modern games aim for more realism over arcady absolute control).
Is responsiveness the same as "unit control"? I thought he was talking about micro.
If he was referring to micro then there are tons of examples out there of RTS games that have excellent micro in them. Brood War with terribly dumb units had excellent micro in it, if we want to take a simple go-to example.
If it's actual unit control (e.g. good unit pathing etc), then I misunderstood, my bad. Off the top of my head, SC2 does indeed come out on top in terms of unit responsiveness, though it's poorly coded. The Source engine (Dota 2) and whatever engine is used by LoL also seems to be very fluid in the way units and pathing works, though those are MOBAs. I'm not sure that the engine / pathing is the issue when it comes to RTS anymore, it's game design. Regardless, it's true that units in SC2 are indeed very easy to use and move around, I'll certainly agree to that.
The myth that sc2 is poorly coded is impressive, and a little irritating. The fact that it even runs at all with all the decisions being made behind the scenes is impressive, that its done fluidly is incredible. There is no engine on the planet that has something remotely as impressive. Listing the source engine as a counter example to the sc2 engine is pretty hilarious in itself, given that a) it has no where near the amount of computations going on in the background, and b) that engine was laughable for such a long period of time.
The second any engine on the planet can run 400+ hd units with a 3d axis which is in perfect sync with at least two people, and all 400 of those units reacting and interacting smoothly and efficiently, with unit pathing done incredibly well (at least from a coding point of view, game design aside) and interracting with other units constantly, as well as or better then the sc2 engine can will be beyond impressive.
But of course the same people touting the same tired old lines like "why don't they optimize it" or "make it run on more then 2 threads" are the same people that have never coded anything in their lives.
On July 12 2014 22:33 bo1b wrote: The myth that sc2 is poorly coded is impressive, and a little irritating. The fact that it even runs at all with all the decisions being made behind the scenes is impressive, that its done fluidly is incredible. There is no engine on the planet that has something remotely as impressive. Listing the source engine as a counter example to the sc2 engine is pretty hilarious in itself, given that a) it has no where near the amount of computations going on in the background, and b) that engine was laughable for such a long period of time.
The second any engine on the planet can run 400+ hd units with a 3d axis which is in perfect sync with at least two people, and all 400 of those units reacting and interacting smoothly and efficiently, with unit pathing done incredibly well (at least from a coding point of view, game design aside) and interracting with other units constantly, as well as or better then the sc2 engine can will be beyond impressive.
But of course the same people touting the same tired old lines like "why don't they optimize it" or "make it run on more then 2 threads" are the same people that have never coded anything in their lives.
SupCom engine? Spring RTS engine?
Also it's pretty dumb to compare SC2 engine and source engine
First off, I said source engine and LoL engine (whatever it is) "seems" to be fluid; I also said that they were MOBAs. I'm guessing, not that I know any better, that coding creeps and whatnot can be done in a way that's pretty straightforward and easy on the CPU. I never really compared SC2's engine to Source, I just mentioned both of them in the same paragraph.
Either way, SC2, if not poorly coded (indeed unit movement is fluid and units are very responsive), remains poorly optimized. You get some pretty big performance hits, even in 1v1, in large fights. Indeed, I know jack-shit about coding. The performance hits are still there though. I did indeed word things poorly though, I should have said "optimized" and not "coded". Then again, it's semantics we're playing on here, something that's well optimized can be described as well coded, no?
I don't know, I don't believe in saying something and standing by what I've said to the death. I just post my thoughts and hope to learn more about things and discuss shit. I don't really care about being right or knowing more than the next person.
On July 11 2014 03:14 Hider wrote:As I see it, despite all the bad things about SC2, it's still the RTS with by far the best unit control.
Bollocks. Pure bollocks, who are you to even decide such a thing? There's no such thing as "best" RTS, some RTS are more popular, some are more mechanically demanding, but you can't take any single RTS (or game) and just say, "it's the best at this". It's cringeworthy and it's non-sensical. "fun" is very subjective; as such there isn't really a "best" game out there.
Had to get that off my chest.
I'm more concerned about getting an open beta so we can try Artillery's game before anything else.
Hm, can you name a modern rts with a more responsive engine? I havent played almost any other contemporary rts games, but DoW2 for example definitely didn't have anything close to the unit control possible as SC2 (I think most modern games aim for more realism over arcady absolute control).
Yeh, that seems to be the case. Why do all other RTS's prefer realism over "control"? Some of the most popular BW units could do fantastic moving shots and everyone loved that. Look at the Marine in Sc2. It just does exactly what you want to it to and reacts really fast to commands. In a recent interview with Innovation and Bomber, both of them said it was their favourite units. So in general, it seems that (comeptitive) players love high-responsive units.
So why hasn't other game-developers tried to replicate this? I firmly believe that it is not the long periods of nothing happening in Starcraft nor the high amount of repeitive tasks that makes the game fun to play and watch (for most of us). Rather, it's the case that controlling units are much more fun than in most other games.
My biggest worry for Artillery is that they will try to down-prioritize the part of unit-control or not opt for the Starcraft-route of responsiveness over realism. They spend so much time figuring out new overall concepts, and what is fun/not fun. While that's certainly important, I don't think it should take over a year. Day9 says he expect it to snowball at one point, but why would that be the case? To me that seems to be wish-thinking. Getting unit-design right is extremely challenging as well, and I do feel it's worrisome that they haven't touched this subject at all yet.
Supcom's engine doesn't do anywhere near the maths that the sc2 engine does.. I can't even believe this needs to be written tbh, but try and imagine what goes on in the background when 100 lings run through a chokepoint, because having played supcom the reactions of units aren't anywhere near as quick or efficient. Heres something though, roaches dont run 50% of the way through other roaches, move a pixel to the side and then keep going, they either push the roach and keep walking or they just completely move out of the way. There is a reason that an engine in development for years would come out the way it did, it's not because of some desire to annoy people playing the game, and in this case I seriously doubt it's incompetence.
I dunno shit about coding but out of all the RTS games I've ever played nothing comes close to Starcraft 2's level of fluidity and responsiveness and un-bugginess (if that were a thing?). Games like DoW2/company of heroes (games I admire a great deal) and Supcom (less so, admittedly) suffer because in trying to do something different and grander (squad based tactics/focus on extreme large scale conflict) they fail to provide something that works equally as well as smaller scale individual control schemes.
My concern about artillery is that in trying to make their game fun they lose sight of trying to give it the massive depth that a game needs for a vibrant long lasting proscene. It's absurd to suggest that by removing or simplifying elements of an RTS that the game you get afterwards will be a shallow experience. People tend to forget that Starcraft 1 was a massive step forward in terms of RTS UI at the time. As long as you have a game that doesn't get strategically and mechanically figured out in like a month then you're probably doing pretty good.
My concern about artillery is that in trying to make their game fun they lose sight of trying to give it the massive depth that a game needs for a vibrant long lasting proscene
I think all you need to give it a "massive" depht is really just dynamic microinteractions. Where one player does X, and enemy cant respond by doing Y with his untis, and the first responds to Y by doing Z.
If you have many of these interactions, then the game isn't gonna get figured out, but can bascially have an unlimited skillcap (as long as the pace of the game is fast enough).
On July 11 2014 03:14 Hider wrote:As I see it, despite all the bad things about SC2, it's still the RTS with by far the best unit control.
Bollocks. Pure bollocks, who are you to even decide such a thing? There's no such thing as "best" RTS, some RTS are more popular, some are more mechanically demanding, but you can't take any single RTS (or game) and just say, "it's the best at this". It's cringeworthy and it's non-sensical. "fun" is very subjective; as such there isn't really a "best" game out there.
Had to get that off my chest.
I'm more concerned about getting an open beta so we can try Artillery's game before anything else.
Hm, can you name a modern rts with a more responsive engine? I havent played almost any other contemporary rts games, but DoW2 for example definitely didn't have anything close to the unit control possible as SC2 (I think most modern games aim for more realism over arcady absolute control).
Is responsiveness the same as "unit control"? I thought he was talking about micro.
If he was referring to micro then there are tons of examples out there of RTS games that have excellent micro in them. Brood War with terribly dumb units had excellent micro in it, if we want to take a simple go-to example.
If it's actual unit control (e.g. good unit pathing etc), then I misunderstood, my bad. Off the top of my head, SC2 does indeed come out on top in terms of unit responsiveness, though it's poorly coded. The Source engine (Dota 2) and whatever engine is used by LoL also seems to be very fluid in the way units and pathing works, though those are MOBAs. I'm not sure that the engine / pathing is the issue when it comes to RTS anymore, it's game design. Regardless, it's true that units in SC2 are indeed very easy to use and move around, I'll certainly agree to that.
The term "responsiveness" generally implies the delay that occurs between issuing a command and the beginning of execution. The nature of this delay can be but isn't always technical, though. In many games the lack of responsiveness is caused by a long windup animation sequence that plays before the unit starts doing what it's specifically been commanded to do.
For example, a soldier will need some time to point a rifle at the target when issued an attack order; a spaceship will take some time to fire up its lights and engines when issued a move order. These animations can take anywhere from <0.1 to an extreme of 0.5 seconds in modern games, and although the values will usually vary for different units in the game, trending towards higher values on average will make the control feel very sluggish and laggy.
Ultimately, the importance of micro is imposed by design, not responsiveness. Specifically how much the players are rewarded for preserving and getting the most out of individual units and how much room there is to outplay the opponent through micro alone and acquire a meaningful advantage or claw back from a bad position that way.
Brood War was a nightmare to micro - units bumped into each other, walked the wrong way, and interacted in weird ways. No one would want to micro Brood War armies based on how the controls felt, but because the advantages of committing a lot of attention to it were so immense and game changing, players had to do it regardless.
Starcraft 2 has the smoothness and responsiveness of control that Brood War never had. Just moving units around on an empty map, boxing and splitting feels extremely satisfying to do in the SC2 engine, it's almost rewarding in and of itself. Yet the value of micro is very low and very situational in comparison to the point where it's rarely performed to anywhere near the full potential in a real game.
Animations are more in the realm of game design than engine design, no? So the SC2 engine wouldn't be that great, it's just that the game designers engineered units to be ultra responsive? Is that what you're saying? I would agree to that.
In age of empires 3 there was a unit called the Longbow, which was basically the english Longbowmen. These guys had insane dps since they fired twice as fast as standard ranged infantry. However they had terrible firing animation. So these guys were best used by attack moving once and then not moving around at all. they had average attack. It's their rate of fire that made them great. animation played a big role in that unit's usefulness. They were terrible at kiting but superb if left behind other friendly units and just raining down damage.
On the contrary, most ranged units in aoe3 had instant firing animation which meant that they were excellent at kiting.
So I just watched this VOD, and tbh, it seems like AOE has a much better structure in place for setting up a more back-and-fourth games with lots of battles.
But, the unit control is just so boring to watch. And that's kinda also why I belive it's not the overall structure that is most important part of creating an RTS, but the unit control. Starcraft's economy/overall game structure sucks. It's so much about turtling and 1-2 deathball battles into GG. But, the unit control alone makes it the most popular game.
That's why I really hope that Artillery has set time aside for focussing on making the microaspect of the game fun, because otherwise I don't believe it will succeed.
I could never get into Age of Empires II because the unit control was so difficult, despite liking the genre and all. Your army seems unresponsive, sluggish and unpredictable. If you compare it to Brood War the latter game wins hands down, and honestly I don't think that Brood War and Warcraft 3 are fundamentally less responsive than Starcraft II once you get used to the quirks of the pathfinding.
In the game Planetary Annihilation they've deliberately made units impossible to micro: slow movement and slow turning speeds, slow (de)acceleration, lengthy firing animations. This was in response to complaints by the community that the game might turn into a Starcraft-esque clickfest (obviously the most horrible thing that could happen). I didn't think I wanted to play that game, but it has some nice features to be honest, and it is basically about macro play taken to the limit: no supply limit, almost infinitely many resources, extremely large maps, strategic vision; larger scope and scale of gameplay. You could actually try to play it like Starcraft on a smaller map, but there is no point as the unit control prevents this from being fun. (I might still buy it after release though, it's still in beta)
Also, I think that you can get a lot of fun unit interactions by deliberately limiting turning speeds, deceleration and so on. It rewards players that can actually anticipate what their units should need to do, rather than playing purely on reflexes. And it can lead to more unique interactions and therefore gives you more leeway for design. I just don't think you should limit them all at once, and the standard should be units that are fast and responsive.
On July 11 2014 03:14 Hider wrote:As I see it, despite all the bad things about SC2, it's still the RTS with by far the best unit control.
Bollocks. Pure bollocks, who are you to even decide such a thing? There's no such thing as "best" RTS, some RTS are more popular, some are more mechanically demanding, but you can't take any single RTS (or game) and just say, "it's the best at this". It's cringeworthy and it's non-sensical. "fun" is very subjective; as such there isn't really a "best" game out there.
Had to get that off my chest.
I'm more concerned about getting an open beta so we can try Artillery's game before anything else.
Hm, can you name a modern rts with a more responsive engine? I havent played almost any other contemporary rts games, but DoW2 for example definitely didn't have anything close to the unit control possible as SC2 (I think most modern games aim for more realism over arcady absolute control).
Is responsiveness the same as "unit control"? I thought he was talking about micro.
If he was referring to micro then there are tons of examples out there of RTS games that have excellent micro in them. Brood War with terribly dumb units had excellent micro in it, if we want to take a simple go-to example.
If it's actual unit control (e.g. good unit pathing etc), then I misunderstood, my bad. Off the top of my head, SC2 does indeed come out on top in terms of unit responsiveness, though it's poorly coded. The Source engine (Dota 2) and whatever engine is used by LoL also seems to be very fluid in the way units and pathing works, though those are MOBAs. I'm not sure that the engine / pathing is the issue when it comes to RTS anymore, it's game design. Regardless, it's true that units in SC2 are indeed very easy to use and move around, I'll certainly agree to that.
The term "responsiveness" generally implies the delay that occurs between issuing a command and the beginning of execution. The nature of this delay can be but isn't always technical, though. In many games the lack of responsiveness is caused by a long windup animation sequence that plays before the unit starts doing what it's specifically been commanded to do.
For example, a soldier will need some time to point a rifle at the target when issued an attack order; a spaceship will take some time to fire up its lights and engines when issued a move order. These animations can take anywhere from <0.1 to an extreme of 0.5 seconds in modern games, and although the values will usually vary for different units in the game, trending towards higher values on average will make the control feel very sluggish and laggy.
Ultimately, the importance of micro is imposed by design, not responsiveness. Specifically how much the players are rewarded for preserving and getting the most out of individual units and how much room there is to outplay the opponent through micro alone and acquire a meaningful advantage or claw back from a bad position that way.
Brood War was a nightmare to micro - units bumped into each other, walked the wrong way, and interacted in weird ways. No one would want to micro Brood War armies based on how the controls felt, but because the advantages of committing a lot of attention to it were so immense and game changing, players had to do it regardless.
Starcraft 2 has the smoothness and responsiveness of control that Brood War never had. Just moving units around on an empty map, boxing and splitting feels extremely satisfying to do in the SC2 engine, it's almost rewarding in and of itself. Yet the value of micro is very low and very situational in comparison to the point where it's rarely performed to anywhere near the full potential in a real game.
Ehm Muta micro is much better/responsive in BW... which means the engine is capable of handling fast responses. It were designer choices to have non responsive units though. The only problem BW has is the bad pathfinding. Its much better in sc2 but they "cheated" by using clump mechanics and the ability that units can walk through own units (or the units step aside) which is not the case in BW.
On July 11 2014 03:14 Hider wrote:As I see it, despite all the bad things about SC2, it's still the RTS with by far the best unit control.
Bollocks. Pure bollocks, who are you to even decide such a thing? There's no such thing as "best" RTS, some RTS are more popular, some are more mechanically demanding, but you can't take any single RTS (or game) and just say, "it's the best at this". It's cringeworthy and it's non-sensical. "fun" is very subjective; as such there isn't really a "best" game out there.
Had to get that off my chest.
I'm more concerned about getting an open beta so we can try Artillery's game before anything else.
Hm, can you name a modern rts with a more responsive engine? I havent played almost any other contemporary rts games, but DoW2 for example definitely didn't have anything close to the unit control possible as SC2 (I think most modern games aim for more realism over arcady absolute control).
Is responsiveness the same as "unit control"? I thought he was talking about micro.
If he was referring to micro then there are tons of examples out there of RTS games that have excellent micro in them. Brood War with terribly dumb units had excellent micro in it, if we want to take a simple go-to example.
If it's actual unit control (e.g. good unit pathing etc), then I misunderstood, my bad. Off the top of my head, SC2 does indeed come out on top in terms of unit responsiveness, though it's poorly coded. The Source engine (Dota 2) and whatever engine is used by LoL also seems to be very fluid in the way units and pathing works, though those are MOBAs. I'm not sure that the engine / pathing is the issue when it comes to RTS anymore, it's game design. Regardless, it's true that units in SC2 are indeed very easy to use and move around, I'll certainly agree to that.
The term "responsiveness" generally implies the delay that occurs between issuing a command and the beginning of execution. The nature of this delay can be but isn't always technical, though. In many games the lack of responsiveness is caused by a long windup animation sequence that plays before the unit starts doing what it's specifically been commanded to do.
For example, a soldier will need some time to point a rifle at the target when issued an attack order; a spaceship will take some time to fire up its lights and engines when issued a move order. These animations can take anywhere from <0.1 to an extreme of 0.5 seconds in modern games, and although the values will usually vary for different units in the game, trending towards higher values on average will make the control feel very sluggish and laggy.
Ultimately, the importance of micro is imposed by design, not responsiveness. Specifically how much the players are rewarded for preserving and getting the most out of individual units and how much room there is to outplay the opponent through micro alone and acquire a meaningful advantage or claw back from a bad position that way.
Brood War was a nightmare to micro - units bumped into each other, walked the wrong way, and interacted in weird ways. No one would want to micro Brood War armies based on how the controls felt, but because the advantages of committing a lot of attention to it were so immense and game changing, players had to do it regardless.
Starcraft 2 has the smoothness and responsiveness of control that Brood War never had. Just moving units around on an empty map, boxing and splitting feels extremely satisfying to do in the SC2 engine, it's almost rewarding in and of itself. Yet the value of micro is very low and very situational in comparison to the point where it's rarely performed to anywhere near the full potential in a real game.
Ehm Muta micro is much better/responsive in BW... which means the engine is capable of handling fast responses. It were designer choices to have non responsive units though. The only problem BW has is the bad pathfinding. Its much better in sc2 but they "cheated" by using clump mechanics and the ability that units can walk through own units (or the units step aside) which is not the case in BW.
I don't think you can call that cheat. I just think the technology is much better than it was 10y prior.
On July 11 2014 03:14 Hider wrote:As I see it, despite all the bad things about SC2, it's still the RTS with by far the best unit control.
Bollocks. Pure bollocks, who are you to even decide such a thing? There's no such thing as "best" RTS, some RTS are more popular, some are more mechanically demanding, but you can't take any single RTS (or game) and just say, "it's the best at this". It's cringeworthy and it's non-sensical. "fun" is very subjective; as such there isn't really a "best" game out there.
Had to get that off my chest.
I'm more concerned about getting an open beta so we can try Artillery's game before anything else.
Hm, can you name a modern rts with a more responsive engine? I havent played almost any other contemporary rts games, but DoW2 for example definitely didn't have anything close to the unit control possible as SC2 (I think most modern games aim for more realism over arcady absolute control).
Is responsiveness the same as "unit control"? I thought he was talking about micro.
If he was referring to micro then there are tons of examples out there of RTS games that have excellent micro in them. Brood War with terribly dumb units had excellent micro in it, if we want to take a simple go-to example.
If it's actual unit control (e.g. good unit pathing etc), then I misunderstood, my bad. Off the top of my head, SC2 does indeed come out on top in terms of unit responsiveness, though it's poorly coded. The Source engine (Dota 2) and whatever engine is used by LoL also seems to be very fluid in the way units and pathing works, though those are MOBAs. I'm not sure that the engine / pathing is the issue when it comes to RTS anymore, it's game design. Regardless, it's true that units in SC2 are indeed very easy to use and move around, I'll certainly agree to that.
The term "responsiveness" generally implies the delay that occurs between issuing a command and the beginning of execution. The nature of this delay can be but isn't always technical, though. In many games the lack of responsiveness is caused by a long windup animation sequence that plays before the unit starts doing what it's specifically been commanded to do.
For example, a soldier will need some time to point a rifle at the target when issued an attack order; a spaceship will take some time to fire up its lights and engines when issued a move order. These animations can take anywhere from <0.1 to an extreme of 0.5 seconds in modern games, and although the values will usually vary for different units in the game, trending towards higher values on average will make the control feel very sluggish and laggy.
Ultimately, the importance of micro is imposed by design, not responsiveness. Specifically how much the players are rewarded for preserving and getting the most out of individual units and how much room there is to outplay the opponent through micro alone and acquire a meaningful advantage or claw back from a bad position that way.
Brood War was a nightmare to micro - units bumped into each other, walked the wrong way, and interacted in weird ways. No one would want to micro Brood War armies based on how the controls felt, but because the advantages of committing a lot of attention to it were so immense and game changing, players had to do it regardless.
Starcraft 2 has the smoothness and responsiveness of control that Brood War never had. Just moving units around on an empty map, boxing and splitting feels extremely satisfying to do in the SC2 engine, it's almost rewarding in and of itself. Yet the value of micro is very low and very situational in comparison to the point where it's rarely performed to anywhere near the full potential in a real game.
Ehm Muta micro is much better/responsive in BW... which means the engine is capable of handling fast responses. It were designer choices to have non responsive units though. The only problem BW has is the bad pathfinding. Its much better in sc2 but they "cheated" by using clump mechanics and the ability that units can walk through own units (or the units step aside) which is not the case in BW.
I don't think you can call that cheat. I just think the technology is much better than it was 10y prior.
Having units clump is superior technology? AoE had that already and Armies of Exigo had the step aside mechanic.
So I just watched this VOD, and tbh, it seems like AOE has a much better structure in place for setting up a more back-and-fourth games with lots of battles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr1N0w8rVuQ
But, the unit control is just so boring to watch. And that's kinda also why I belive it's not the overall structure that is most important part of creating an RTS, but the unit control. Starcraft's economy/overall game structure sucks. It's so much about turtling and 1-2 deathball battles into GG. But, the unit control alone makes it the most popular game.
That's why I really hope that Artillery has set time aside for focussing on making the microaspect of the game fun, because otherwise I don't believe it will succeed.
In an effort to not go off-topic, I will address Aoe3 in spoilers. Just want to throw out that what you have there isn't the real deal.
SC2's economy and game structure is actually pretty all right in my opinion. It's a game based around finesse and timings I would say, turtling and deathball is how foreigners play but not Koreans in the GSL.
I played Age of Empires 3 for a good 3+ years and played 70% of all my games against the same player; this player would be the equivalent of Code S. I lost almost every single game (scraped a few wins here and there). This is basically the equivalent of me playing 2000 games of SC2 against a Code S caliber player. You're not going to win, but you ARE going to improve. Would you refuse learning to TvZ with Soulkey or Maru? I wouldn't. That's almost all I did.
My grasp of the game is good enough to assure you that the VOD you linked isn't the pinnacle of Aoe3. Then again, back then the pinnacle was seen in replays, not VODs. Musket and Darwin are two decent players however they're a far cry for being true top-tier. The game in that VOD is played in Vanilla which is the lesser version of Aoe3. That map, New England, is also shit. It's got terrible hunts and in my opinion terrible map structure. Also noteworthy is that Vanilla has shittier unit system than TAD (the expansion).
The counter system in TAD is harder than in vanilla which makes it a lot better. Aoe3 has excellent unit micro in it. If you haven't played it, it's hard to appreciate good micro when you see it. You have to know which units counter which, if they're well positioned, if they're not well positioned. You have mercenaries which can turn the game on its head if they're timed correctly and/or catch an army out of position (mamelukes). This makes it difficult to watch for the layman, however a seasoned player will greatly enjoy what he's watching. This is why you may seem bored by what you're seeing, whereas unit control is actually one of Aoe3's strongest points.
The strategic depth that you have thanks to homecity shipments is also huge. The amount of viable strategies and build orders that every civilization has at their disposal is amazing, especially since the best strategy to use differs depending on match up. A French semi (quick tech to fortress units, into a timing attack) is viable against pretty much every civilization, however there are subtleties in terms of what you want to do in fortress depending on what civ you're facing. A French player might also be better off doing a dual-rax against Brits (fast two rax to pump out cheap archaic units in an attempt to do a lot of damage; however it isn't an all-in at all). Brits are best off manor booming regardless of the match up (brits get a free villager for every house they make, so the best brit strategies utilize this bonus by placing an emphasis on getting out a lot of villagers out early, which gives them a LOT of units in the mid-game), the depth you get playing brits is that you have to pull off the same strategy against a lot of different opposing strategies.
This is the tip of the iceberg, if I had the time or inclination to, I could write paragraphs on paragraphs about the game. My game knowledge isn't even on par with that of the higher level players.
Here is a tournament Bo7 played between two excellent players, something much better to watch if you're interested in watching aoe3, though there isn't a lot to watch these days:
Thanks for your post, and I can definitely see that there are lots of really good things about AOE3. I guess unlike SC2, where there are lots of pretty bad things. But I still think it's clear that battles doens't have the same intensity as in Sc2. You can just hear if by watching the commentary (in both VODS), the battles in itself doesn't "wow" me in any way really.
Maybe it's just theed of the game which is pretty slow. I don't know, but there is something about it, which just disinterest me even though it does seem better than Sc2 in mulitiple other ways.
Also, I think that you can get a lot of fun unit interactions by deliberately limiting turning speeds, deceleration and so on. It rewards players that can actually anticipate what their units should need to do, rather than playing purely on reflexes.
The issue with a lot of unreponsive units is that in the proces of trying to micro them, they take up too much time trying to walk away, where they don't attack, which means you rather just let them stand still. Then everything comes down to prebattlemicro which isn't particularly fun.
There are some situations where lower acceleration and turnrates makes sense as it can add unique microinteractions, though I think one needs to be quite careful of adding this into to many units.
EPT
