AI War:Minimizing Micromanagement
How Do I Minimize Micromanagement?
Q: One of the main features touted on the game marketing blurbs is the lack of "painful micromanagement." From what I have seen with my early experiences with the game, there seems to be a ton going on that I have to keep track of. Can you explain what the marketing stuff is talking about?
A: Perhaps the term that would best describe AI War is "facilitated micromanagement." In other words, the game is set up in such a way that you can micromanage to your heart's content, as much or more so than any other RTS game. There is more to do in AI War than most RTS titles (similar to most 4X games), so if you just leap into AI War and try to play it like any other RTS, you could indeed spend as much or more time than normal micromanaging all the various aspects of your empire.
The key thing to realize, however, is that this is too much for any one person to manage -- you have to start delegating. In many recent RTS games, this means simply taking out entire subsystems (the economy, for instance) and providing a simpler overall experience. This works for mainstream titles catering to people new to RTS or just looking for a lightweight experience, but grognards gravitate toward AI War for a reason: we provide all the complexity of an RTS married to a 4X game, but also give a huge array of tools for delegation of those complexities. For example:
- If you want to fine-tune your economy, you can do so, but the game does not require you to.
- If you want to focus on fleet composition and positioning to maximize every possible benefit, you certainly can (and the game, especially the most recent versions, has some tools to help you do so), but most people just use automated construction loops and then quickly divide up their forces (using easy tools for that also) before battle.
- If you want to enact super complex tactical management, you can do that too, but many 4X fans focus more on fleet composition and just let the battles play out largely on their own. Most players, if anything, use some simple tactics (part II here) when they can, during particularly important battles, and otherwise set things up to be automated. In AI War, unlike most strategy games, there are a huge number of battles that play out in a very automated system based on what players previously told their units to do (and telling your ships what to do is also a pretty simple affair).
What does micromanagement even mean, really? In our definition, it means the stupid, boring, repetitive tasks that you must undertake in nearly all strategy games, but which don't have anything to do with strategy. It can also mean the stuff that requires you to hand-hold all of your units in battle to make sure they actually get the job done in a manner that is all satisfactory (thus giving players who click fast a significant advantage over those who don't, as seen in the majority of RTS titles).
What we have not cut out is the complexity, as this is a complex game for very good reasons. When you get rid of all the micromanagement and boring, repetitive tasks, this complexity seems a lot less so because that is the game, that's what you are spending your time thinking about and acting on. When the above link was published, a lot of the AI War playerbase wrote in on the forums to protest that they didn't really think the game was that particularly complex, not in the negative way that a few reviewers have implied it was. Clearly they are part of the most central demographic for enjoying the game, so their idea of complexity be a bit different from the overall norm, but you could say the same of any 4X game fans.
How Does The Game Automatically Cut Out Micromanagement For You?
This section is a list of many of the things that the game automatically does for you -- that you don't even have to think about -- in order to minimize micromanagement:
- Metal/Crystal harvesters are automatically built on planets you take over when there are no hostile enemies present, and are automatically rebuilt in the same fashion if they are destroyed.
- When you start a new game, you start with a huge bunch of resources, in addition to your automatically-placed harvesters, as well as a lot of knowledge. So the first actions you actually take are typically to unlock some specific first technologies, to do a bit of scouting of the nearby area, and then get on with the attack. It's not uncommon for players to take their first planet in the first 10 minutes (during the same interval in many RTS games, many won't even have started building military units yet, as they are still focusing on their economy buildup -- online rushers aside, obviously, we're talking about standard players).
- Engineers automatically work in a given area, keeping themselves busy. Putting them into FRD mode (see below) lets them cover an entire planet. We also made all engineers teleporting to cut down on time you might need to spend waiting for them to do stuff.
- Ships automatically attack anything that comes into their range. Given that the vast majority of ships are ranged, the default behavior for them is to simply sit where you told them and fire, which keeps things organized but which keeps you from having to oversee every skirmish to tell ships to attack. The few melee ships are automated rather like engineers, in that they will automatically chase down enemies rather than requiring you to manually oversee them.
- Ship auto-targeting is extremely, extremely good. Normally in a battle, your ships will automatically handle things just fine. You are responsible for ship positioning and fleet composition, but that's it. You can take more fine-tuned control, and you can give ships overriding target-type preferences, but you don't have to. The game lets you express yourself in an appropriate scale, letting thoughtful design and instructions override the need to tell each specific unit what to fire at.
- The entire economy is flow-based, meaning that you never have to spend up-front resources to build even the most expensive units. This means that you can start construction on any unit when you feel like it, rather than having to wait around until you hit some resource threshold.
- In-game tooltips give you the rankings for which ships are strongest and weakest against which other ships in the current game. This eliminates the need for players to have to memorize stats, which we view as a form of micromanagement.
- The various toolbars and icon displays in the game tell you what is going on with your empire, as well as your local fleet, at a glance with the ability to drill down to get more information in most cases. This prevents another form of micromanagement common to most strategy games, namely the need to keep manually checking key locations for enemy invaders. In AI War, if the numbers in the upper right of your HUD are good, you know there's nothing to worry about. No more obsessive checking to see what's going on, you can spend your mental energy on something more productive to your strategy.
What Tools Are There For Players To Otherwise Eliminate Micromanagement?
This section is about the various features that help players express their will to the game in the most concise way possible, cutting out tedious or repetitive steps found in many strategy games. Some of these are unique to AI War, others are found in various other recent strategy games but are (sadly) not yet genre standards.
