Hmm... what is left after that? Doesn't that cover just about everything?

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Original post by Daniel Miller What's micro-management in a TBS?

Often this comes down to production / resource efficiency. When you play normally, resources are almost always wasted. One of the most longstanding complaints about TBS games is that you can always do better than the (almost always cheating) AI if you balance resource consumption and production using the game's rules in each piece of property you own.

For instance: In Civ2, each town has X number of people representing the population, and you can click on them and set them to either work in the fields and mines around the town, collect taxes in the town, work as researchers, or work as entertainers.

I once knew someone who could get to space travel and win the entire game in the 16-17th century (nearly 3-400 turns before it should be possible) because she would make sure that EVERY SINGLE POINT was used, and nothing was ever lost. It would take her months to play a single game, and while she drove her boyfriend batty playing this way (no multiplayer, for sure!), she loved to micromanage.

A thought about late game drag:

If you compare early to late game actions, especially with units, notice that in most TBS games you're doing the EXACT same thing you did in the beginning game phase, only more. The reason I think these late games drag on is that you simply end up taking many moves to accomplish the same thing you were able to with just a few in the early and mid game phases.

For instance, in Civ lets say the move I want is "conquer my neighbor." I might have a few horseman and one or two catapults (because it's all that I can afford) against an equal number of enemies. Because there are only about 5 or 6 walled towns at this phase, it's fun. But when it gets to be 50 or 60 towns, it's often a chore.

The paradox is that one of the X's in 4X empire game is eXpand (along with eXploit, eXplore and eXterminate). So we like to grow big, and have everybody else grow big, but we don't want to manage the headache.

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Here's a possible solution, stolen from Civ3: In Civ3, there are "colonies" that sit on top of vital resources. They're towns that you don't have to manage, you only have to make sure that they're connected via a road and dont' get attacked.

What if the whole game were more like this? Let's say that I expand from Earth to Alpha Centauri. Both are places I can manage, but only if I build a "Government House" or "Imperial Palace" or whatever. Then the location becomes an "Imperial Capital." The game rules say I can only build N capitals, which means that I'm only going to ever have to micromanage a few locations even as my empire gets huge (as precendent, I think South Africa has/had 3 capitals, btw, and China once had two).

As the game gets to late phase, colonies become easy to plop down. Every colony must connect to a capital. I don't want to lose colonies or capitals. However, losing a colony means that I'm out resources until I can send and defend another colony ship. But if I lose a capital, I lose all the colonies attached to it.

So now, you've got a game where the AI is trained to either nip and peck at you (but will likely not win), or go for your throat. If some colonies are strategic (say one is your vital thorium mine, another is your breadbasket, etc.) then it gets even better. You have an even more fun game of first trying to weaken a capital by annexing its critical colonies, and then fighting the critical turning battle to capture (or lose!) one of an empires limited number of capitals.

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But this won't work unless you get rid of the problem of extra late game units. I say make them irrelevant. The reason why you have so many units is that territory can't abstractly defend itself, which the people should be able to do. I'd make it such that as time passes (and you get into the late game), it gets harder and harder for a lone unit to go near colonies without getting blasted. So fleets become required.

But like capitals, I'd put in a logical limit for having X command ships, or admirals, or jump carriers, or whatever. So as the game gets bigger, it also gets smaller, and you're mainly concerned with fleet engagements at critical locations.


Ooops! Sorry this is so long! Uh, obviously I have waaaaay too many ideas for this topic. (Love TBS games, pardon the enthusiasm!)

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Original post by Wavinator A thought about late game drag: ... But this won't work unless you get rid of the problem of extra late game units. I say make them irrelevant. The reason why you have so many units is that territory can't abstractly defend itself, which the people should be able to do. I'd make it such that as time passes (and you get into the late game), it gets harder and harder for a lone unit to go near colonies without getting blasted. So fleets become required. But like capitals, I'd put in a logical limit for having X command ships, or admirals, or jump carriers, or whatever. So as the game gets bigger, it also gets smaller, and you're mainly concerned with fleet engagements at critical locations.

First I just want to say that I agree with your analysis. Late games always drag as the number of crap you have to keep track of multiplies beyond reason.
Some things that I would like to see...
Combine units, this is stolen from civ 3 but I feel should be done on a much larger scale. (I think even RTS could benifite for this sort of stacking option.)
More upgrading of units so you don't need to manage a bunch of spearmen when you have tanks rolling around. Barracks should auto upgrade any infantry unit for instance.
Sentry and forget units: get them to the right spot, sentry them, and they do auto damage to incoming troops.

One idea I had for my current project was to make in game technological innovations [and town infrastructure to a degree] alleviate micromanagement.

Take for example, the standard Civilization granary. What do you do before the granary exists? People would have to cart the food from the fields to the towns. Inefficient, since you're then using units to ferry the stuff. Building a granary would auto-collect the food, allowing the units to do other, more useful tasks. But it requires the infrastructure to be built.

That way, as your technology progresses, your units change their tasks. The end game is no longer the early game x50.

Okay. Whew. Very responsive audience and I love it but also overwhelming (I left my computer for seven hours and appearantly that was a mistake. :-D )

The main thing I want to address (and possibly the only one because I'm being me and steering the conversation [or desperatly trying to]) (and now a comment about the comment..)

:-D Sorry. Anyways,I kind of like where you're going with that but what about those people that want to micromanage? And what about complaints about how horribly the computer is running the AI? What if I want ten colonies producing only ships? I played an e-mail RPG that let you specify the typeof colony you were building, War Colony, Agro Colony, Research Colony, etc. That way you could essentially queue up a few things (you could only build a few things per colony because they were specially built colonys obviously) and then perhaps make it so that colonies auto upgrade buildings so essentially we have a fire and forget system while still allowing players to micromanage if they really want too. And we get the added benefit of being able to have specialized colonies. The only gripe I might see about this is "what if I want to change the colony type?" Then perhaps for a fee (monetary, to represent bringing in new personell, equipment, etc.) we could let them switch the focus so later on in the game you can switch to all war colonies or something like that. Hmm. These are just works in progress... Feedback please!!

I also agree that I'll make a game for me but hey, sometimes we don't know what we need! :-D

I like the colony types idea, but as for micromanagment I'd centralize all the details of running the war fleet and colonies themselves into the control nodes (command ships or capitals) (if you go with that idea).

For instance, let's say that you combine the idea of tech upgrades to abolish micromanaging (for a maintenence fee) or allow players to do it themselves. You've now made my two split personalities, and a lot of other gamers in both camps, possibly very happy.

The capital, for instance, could have several buildings associated with it, or maybe you even do a planet and allow cities to be placed with infrastructure and material (dunno, maybe wrong direction). Maybe in the capital, you appoint advisors, administrators, technicians and specialists. The capital becomes a supercity. You could, if you wanted, make it so that every time you add X number of a colonies, you have to add a wing or building to your capital (I'm seeing ending up with Coruscant in Star Wars).

As for controlling production per colony, I say go for it! But make the colony be no more than what they were in Master of Orion 1: It has X defenses, and can produce either Y trade goods / resources or Y ships per turn (which you should be able to marshal to one location).

Same for fleets. Make the command ship like a mothership. It's the center of micromanagment gravity, with lots of options for controlling the fleet (FTL comms, long range gravitic sensors, dancing girls for R&R [grin])

Okay, I build a military colony and set it to AI control. I can choose the units it should build if I micromanage or I can choose to let the AI choose the units. How is this different (in regards to micromanagement) from having all purpose colonies where I can make the choice of what is built or allow the AI to choose?

The obvious answer is that it limits the choices that the AI can make. . . It hardwires them in fact by not allowing other units to be built in that area.

So this is more of a strategy element than a micromanagement one. If you choose to do this, look at how it effects strategy and game balance. Personally, I would go with doing this by setting the AI's "personality" instead of hardwiring the town to only produce certain unit types as one of the things I like is the changing nature of my towns in TBS games. What used to be a military outpost grows (in time) to be a major scientific research base, or the center of resource production, etc.