A Topic of Dumb Ideas!

I actually don't think this is dumb, but I imagine its the kind of idea that people will just hate.

I think that reclaim micro needs a nerf, particularly in the case of map based reclaim.

So... what is the purpose of putting reclaim on a map? Its there to give players busy work. I'm not so much talking about large reclaim points or wrecks... those aren't so bad. I'm talking about small rocks and trees.

Small rocks and trees are an APM sink. If you're good and you have the APM you can sink a portion of it into collecting tons of little rocks and little trees to gain an eco advantage. If you're bad at it you can lose matches because fuck you, reclaiming little rocks mindlessly is hard baked into the very core of the game.

And its a significant enough eco advantage that your opponent must try to match you in order to have a chance at winning.

And you can do attack move or set up a circular path if you want, but you'll be at a significant disadvantage if you do against the clicky high APM types. The higher you go in ladder, the more critical clicking those little rocks become.

So now you have this APM race to the bottom set up where both players are forced to repetitively click rocks... forever... or at least through the early game.

Its a dumb idea, a dumb thing to do.

Rocks and trees should not be reclaimable. If you want to add reclaim to a map, add wrecks. Lets not add something that is repetitive, boring and gives you an artificial advantage that's not based upon the choices a player makes, but is instead based on the speed with which they can repetitively click the ground.

I haven't brought this up, because its so fundamental a part of the game, and because the ladder folk will balk (they've invested a lot of time raising their APM so they can be the clickiest players of all).

But its a bad mechanic. A terrible mechanic, and maybe if people started to see how stupid it is, we'd slowly be able to pull ourselves away from it.

Clicking tiny rocks really fast doesn't decide ladder games, even when you're 2200. It matters in the first 5 minutes when you're doing some refined BO on a map. Beyond that, there are vastly more important things to take your attention. Like really, would I rather be microing my tanks for mass efficient trades while attack moving reclaim or attack move my tanks into the fow while microing my engies?

In fact, it's actually teamgames where such "boring" things matter due to the lack of actual gameplay elements to focus on in most popular teamgames maps. Take it away, and now I can treat FAF like an idle game in teamgames. Some maps have already done it!

By the way, your suggestion would destroy the ability to convert bp into e. This is a fundamental relation in the game and losing this interaction would do nothing but harm the complexity of the game.

@FtXCommando said in A Topic of Dumb Ideas!:

Clicking tiny rocks really fast doesn't decide ladder games, even when you're 2200.

Oh.. then why the fuck does everyone do it?

In fact, it's actually teamgames where such "boring" things matter due to the lack of actual gameplay elements to focus on in most popular teamgames maps.

Do you really think people that read through these posts are going to buy that?

By the way, your suggestion would destroy the ability to convert bp into e. This is a fundamental relation in the game and losing this interaction would do nothing but harm the complexity of the game.

You could just replace current reclaim with smaller amounts of reclaim with higher energy values. Remove the mindless click spam, and if the map is intended to provide an early exchange of BP for e, get it from a source that doesn't require spamming.

The spamming itself is lame, it is something of an APM sink on some maps.

Another solution would be to make trees only passively reclaimable. You can set up an attack move or patrol and reclaim trees and tiny rocks that way, but not through click spam. Then it would be worth it to pick it up, while not incentivizing microing a million little precise clicks.

I expected this to be a controversial opinion - something that wouldn't be taken seriously - which is why I posted it here. That said, I think I'm also correct, its a lame mechanic.

I also think its worth it to point out...

@FtXCommando said in A Topic of Dumb Ideas!:

Clicking tiny rocks really fast doesn't decide ladder games, even when you're 2200.

...

By the way, your suggestion would destroy the ability to convert bp into e. This is a fundamental relation in the game and losing this interaction would do nothing but harm the complexity of the game.

Admittedly these statements aren't exactly contradictory, but one minimizes the importance of manually clicking little rocks and one claims its a "fundamental relation in the game".

And I think its important to bring this up, and even warrants a second post, because if it really is so important that its a "fundamental relation in the game"... then should it be?

Should such a fundamental part of the game be dependent on individually clicking dozens or hundreds of little things? Is that good gameplay?

I think its clearly a bad mechanic. Is it worth changing? Is it worth pissing off lots of players to change? Perhaps not, but its still a shitty mechanic.

To me the main mechanic of Supreme Commander is where you put your attention at. Whether that is a micro in a fight, queueing buildings and / or expansions or manually clicking to speed up the reclaim process - it is all part of the game. Changing it would mean changing the game. And that would be a waste of such a good game since this is, among other mechanics, what makes Supreme Commander what it is.

There is zero contradiction between saying a broad relation of the game (which can be handled manually or automated) is imperative to the depth of the game and saying manual rock clicking isn’t impactful at min 15 in high level competitive games.

You thinking these two are at a tension makes me think you have no idea what you’re talking about. And yes, this aspect of the game is good for the game. If you think it’s clearly bad, feel free to make your own sim mod to dumb down the game.

@Jip said in A Topic of Dumb Ideas!:

  To me the main mechanic of Supreme Commander is where you put your attention at. Whether that is a micro in a fight, queueing buildings and / or expansions or manually clicking to speed up the reclaim process - it is all part of the game. Changing it would mean changing the game. And that would be a waste of such a good game since this is, among other mechanics, what makes Supreme Commander what it is.

I'd argue that the main thing that separates FAF from other RTS games is the degree to which the importance of high APM is minimized.

FAF is the RTS where its your decisions that matter, not your ability to spam out 300 APM.

Compare FAF to starcraft, and the main difference in my view is the quality of life improvements that FAF has that Starcraft does not. Its been a while since I played Starcraft, does it even have paths, or do you have to guide each unit along its route if you don't want the AI to solve the problem of getting the unit where you want it to go?

The economy of FAF allows you to queue things up indefinitely. You can set up your first factory at the 1 minute mark and have it still producing at the 25 minute mark. May not be a good idea in all cases, but you can do it.

The reclaim of tiny objects, it goes against this central theme of Supcom. Supcom is about automating minor tasks to the extent possible to free the player to focus on more important things. Other RTSes make the minor tasks a central part of the game.

In short, there is no change that is more aligned with the heart of this game series than removing mindless repetitive busywork for the player.

@FtXCommando said in A Topic of Dumb Ideas!:

. If you think it’s clearly bad, feel free to make your own sim mod to dumb down the game.

I cannot express how amused I am to hear that you think removing mindless repetitive tasks from the game dumbs the game down.

Why aren't you playing Starcraft? I'm not sure this is the game for you.

Think about all the depth you're missing out on in a game that doesn't require 500 APM to play at a high level?

Maybe you should go with broodwar so you can enjoy the depth of instructing each worker to mine individually. Don't want to play something that's been dumbed down right?

Competitively this is not true and happens throughout the game.

• ASF that fight on high-rated games are part of some micro
• Land battles that fight on high-rated games are part of some micro (shields up front, move them back when they are about to fall, try to bump into the other ACU, use overcharge carefully)
• Navy battles are full of micro, especially when you are Aeon or fighting against Aeon. Managing the hover shields and moving your ships manually to evade enemy fire is crucial.
• Manually placing your engineers between reclaim (props, wrecks) and then queuing reclaim commands is more efficient, regardless of whether the reclaim are props or wreckages.
• Up to an extent, you can even micro your economy.

To me being able to do things manually is the difference between a casual match and a competitive match. In a casual match I'll just let an engineer reclaim through attack move and / or patrol. But if the match is competitive then hell yes - give me all the manual control when applicable and let's go.

Removing this, and other elements of micro, is in my opinion the same as removing the capability for the game to be competitive. Speaking of, some micro has been removed from the game through UI mods. Such as Eco Manager and Advanced Attack Priorities. If used properly these mods will allow a player to play the game more casually while achieving (roughly) the same, with less clicks.

Also, if you use a code block as text make sure that you add 'text' right after the first three '`' , like so:

Then it won't try and highlight the text that is inside. 

@Jip said in A Topic of Dumb Ideas!:

Competitively this is not true and happens throughout the game.

ASF that fight on high-rated games are part of some micro
Land battles that fight on high-rated games are part of some micro (shields up front, move them back when they are about to fall, try to bump into the other ACU, use overcharge carefully)
Navy battles are full of micro, especially when you are Aeon or fighting against Aeon. Managing the hover shields and moving your ships manually to evade enemy fire is crucial.
Manually placing your engineers between reclaim (props, wrecks) and then queuing reclaim commands is more efficient, regardless of whether the reclaim are props or wreckages.
Up to an extent, you can even micro your economy.

To me being able to do things manually is the difference between a casual match and a competitive match. In a casual match I'll just let an engineer reclaim through attack move and / or patrol. But if the match is competitive then hell yes - give me all the manual control when applicable and let's go.
Removing this, and other elements of micro, is in my opinion the same as removing the capability for the game to be competitive. Speaking off, some micro has been removed from the game through UI mods. Such as Eco Manager and Advanced Attack Priorities. If used properly these mods will allow a player to play the game more casually while achieving (roughly) the same, with less clicks.

I'm not saying that the game should have no micro, I'm saying that to the extent possible your micro should reflect a conscious decision that you've made about how to defeat your adversary.

Mindlessly clicking individual trees is not that. If you replaced that with an attack-move order, the decision to put an engineer on reclaim is still captured, still meaningful.

Having to execute dozens of little actions to convey your intent to the game - that goes against the spirit of this game series.

The devs ruthlessly removed silly bullshit micro from this game with a powerful UI and AI system that allows the players to convey their intent in just a few clicks.

Reclaim of minor map objects is just one instance that they missed.

At the very least, attack move should reclaim rocks and trees as efficiently as manual micro when not factoring in things like keeping the engineer from moving. If people want to select whether they micro a rock or a tree - if they want to expend their attention on that, I think that's fair, but the race to the bottom should be removed by making attack-move and patrol more efficient at reclaim collection.

I understand that making those approaches more efficient would be nice - sadly I don't think we can because as far as I know the exact behavior is defined beyond the c-boundary of the game. The part that we just can not access.

With that in mind, I don't see it as often as you mention. Yes, manually reclaiming is great but it takes a lot of time to accomplish. Take this replay from two high-rated players: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_sgg5NNEag. Yes, he spends some time on manual reclaim commands at the start, but I don't see the issue of it.

@Jip said in A Topic of Dumb Ideas!:

I understand that making those approaches more efficient would be nice - sadly I don't think we can because as far as I know the exact behavior is defined beyond the c-boundary of the game. The part that we just can not access.

With that in mind, I don't see it as often as you mention. Yes, manually reclaiming is great but it takes a lot of time to accomplish. Take this replay from two high-rated players: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_sgg5NNEag. Yes, he spends some time on manual reclaim commands at the start, but I don't see the issue of it.

That's fair, but just removing minor objects from the list of things that can be manually reclaimed would fix this issue.

You can fix attack move, or you can remove the ability to manually reclaim. Either way you remove the mindless click spam, and maybe you lose the ability to select rock or tree... but is that really so great a loss that its worth it to force everyone to engage in mindless click spam game after game after game?

EDIT: Re-reading this, what I meant to say was not clear.

If this cannot be fixed, well... that sucks.

Best fix is to just make the attack-move and patrol reclaim mechanics more efficient so that they're competitive with manual reclaim. This removes the incentive to race to the bottom for the most part, but if people really want to manually click rocks out of a mixed reclaim type environment, they're free to do so. Generally though, this would reduce the impact of the mindless clicking which would hopefully make doing it unnecessary in most cases.

If that's not possible then maybe it is possible to differentiate what's manually reclaimable by mass or energy value, I think that's better than leaving things as they are. If its got less than say 12 mass value, it only gets reclaimed via passive methods like attack-move.

And if nothing can be done, then I guess nothing can be done.

In starcraft I lose the game because I didn’t maintain proper focus on unit micro for 4 seconds. This does not interest me.

And anyway I’m basically entirely attracted to FAF for the economy aspect of it. Optimizing it is fun for me and reclaim is what makes that optimization possible.

Also about advanced target priority, that has introduced micro rather than taken it away. It allows you more control over your units which gives you the ability to micro them a lot more and make them way more efficient.

Why is it when high rated players tell you that manual reclaim of tiny rocks doesn’t matter at high level you just ignore it and keep arguing the same wrong theory. I can even get a quote of jagged saying the same thing several years ago for you.

https://forums.faforever.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13632&p=140840&hilit=apm#p140840

Maybe stop baseless solutions when you don’t even know the problem.

The less you have going on that isn’t manual reclaim, the more your ability to manual reclaim matters. Why is that? Because the tradeoff for spending time on units or base management or literally anything else vs manual reclaim is so out of favor for reclaim it isn’t even funny. It is so far down your list of priorities when you can simply attack move and accomplish the same thing at like 80% efficiency. If there is nothing else to do in ur faf game, then that efficiency difference matters.

Take it away and most teamgames are still t3 mex ras boy simulators. Except now I have nothing to click and will instead be looking at how quality the grass looks on the map to pass the time.

I think I've kept up with where the topic has went for discussion.
Yes, a point ive tried to make clear, from whatever directions in things in FAF would seem best no to take away to say a better game because it most likely wont happen. But that is just with a good percentage of any games.

Reclaim I think is fine, if there should be a priority of it should be either be info about in-game or more choices surrounding what reclaim could amount of.
Engine Stations just for reclaim makes sense but at a tome should have an option to gain more energy also.
Reclaim is Mass and Energy, as the eco. Not metal and power.

Also, Without teams games I fail to see where say Supcom or FA is within FAF for a better worth.
Teams in themselves should just be more variant then what is already offered.

@FtXCommando said in A Topic of Dumb Ideas!:

Why is it when high rated players tell you that manual reclaim of tiny rocks doesn’t matter at high level you just ignore it and keep arguing the same wrong theory. I can even get a quote of jagged saying the same thing several years ago for you.

Because you're clearly fucking liars? You tell me it doesn't matter but wind up with a mass advantage doing it in every game? You want to prove me wrong, its easy, Get some high rated ladder player to stop doing it, play 50 games and see if you can stop your rating from tanking. If it doesn't fall by a a significant amount I'll concede the point.

Don't tell me it doesn't matter while you click click click away at every reclaim point you can in a frenzied bout of index-finger injuring spam. Stop doing it, and we'll see if it doesn't matter.

The less you have going on that isn’t manual reclaim, the more your ability to manual reclaim matters. Why is that? Because the tradeoff for spending time on units or base management or literally anything else vs manual reclaim is so out of favor for reclaim it isn’t even funny. It is so far down your list of priorities when you can simply attack move and accomplish the same thing at like 80% efficiency. If there is nothing else to do in ur faf game, then that efficiency difference matters.

Oh, you think I'm such an idiot that I don't understand that you can only click click click mindlessly after you've taken care of other things? I understand that that's how it works. I just don't think mindless repetitive bullshit should be part of the game just to separate the high APM from from the rest of us. If you're really skilled, you'll still win the game, you don't need the free high APM reclaim crutch to help you do it.

Take it away and most teamgames are still t3 mex ras boy simulators. Except now I have nothing to click and will instead be looking at how quality the grass looks on the map to pass the time.

Maybe you could spend the time... I don't know... communicating a plan with your team or launching an early attack. I'm sure you'll be able to find something to do with yourself.

Whatever you do though, I imagine it will be better for the game than performing mindless repetition - even if it doesn't give you a safe easy to acquire advantage.

tfw chad top player beats beta noobs and doesn’t even know why

You’re delusional dude.

@moses_the_red said in A Topic of Dumb Ideas!:

@FtXCommando said in A Topic of Dumb Ideas!:

Why is it when high rated players tell you that manual reclaim of tiny rocks doesn’t matter at high level you just ignore it and keep arguing the same wrong theory. I can even get a quote of jagged saying the same thing several years ago for you.

Because you're clearly fucking liars? You tell me it doesn't matter but wind up with a mass advantage doing it in every game? You want to prove me wrong, its easy, Get some high rated ladder player to stop doing it, play 50 games and see if you can stop your rating from tanking. If it doesn't fall by a a significant amount I'll concede the point.

Don't tell me it doesn't matter while you click click click away at every reclaim point you can in a frenzied bout of index-finger injuring spam. Stop doing it, and we'll see if it doesn't matter.

The less you have going on that isn’t manual reclaim, the more your ability to manual reclaim matters. Why is that? Because the tradeoff for spending time on units or base management or literally anything else vs manual reclaim is so out of favor for reclaim it isn’t even funny. It is so far down your list of priorities when you can simply attack move and accomplish the same thing at like 80% efficiency. If there is nothing else to do in ur faf game, then that efficiency difference matters.

Oh, you think I'm such an idiot that I don't understand that you can only click click click mindlessly after you've taken care of other things? I understand that that's how it works. I just don't think mindless repetitive bullshit should be part of the game just to separate the high APM from from the rest of us. If you're really skilled, you'll still win the game, you don't need the free high APM reclaim crutch to help you do it.

Take it away and most teamgames are still t3 mex ras boy simulators. Except now I have nothing to click and will instead be looking at how quality the grass looks on the map to pass the time.

Maybe you could spend the time... I don't know... communicating a plan with your team or launching an early attack. I'm sure you'll be able to find something to do with yourself.

Whatever you do though, I imagine it will be better for the game than performing mindless repetition - even if it doesn't give you a safe easy to acquire advantage.

I like how you were upset with people in the other thread "Tips for making team games" for not providing any valid arguments and doing a "pissing contest" but when you are presented with constructive criticism and arguments from a high rated players that are contradictive to your opinions you call them "fucking liars" and continue to rant about how we all know nothing and you, the 1k have the full understanding of the game but it's this pesky system that requires insanely high levels of APM averaging to 50 APM and peeking at 90 APM during air fights that holds you back clearly.
But sure, I know nothing right? As a lowly TOP 4 player on FAF I can not possibly understand the game better then you.

Manual reclaim is necessary only during first the opening BO ( up to around 3 min game time) when there is legit nothing else happening and if you wouldn't do that you would be staring at your factory that is slowly making engineers.
After that manual reclaim is only worth it if there is nothing else going on or there is some extremely high value reclaim eg. first t2 wrecks, t3 wrecks, t4 wrecks.

BTW This guy got 100 ladder rating in 1 day! Amazing! How did he do it!? It's simple, you can learn it too! STOP CLICKING TINY 10 MASS ROCKS AND START MICROING YOUR UNITS! YOU CAN KILL ENEMY ENGIES WITH THEM, YOU CAN TRADE BETTER IN FIGHTS.

Arguing with you is like arguing with entitled child, you know little, you think you know better and when someone else has other opinions and you can't beat their arguments you call it bullshit or the person a liar. Just grow up, admit that your knowledge of the game is limited, ask for advice and improve. Also maybe stop wasting 1h a day on forums writing walls of text that nobody except few can be bothered to read and start actually improving at the game.

Idk, doing some trial runs of say the further micro for eco does seem to yield a greater gain but seems marginal for the trade off but makes sense why can be a captivation.

Reclaim, Reclaim, Reclaim, Reclaim, Reclaim, Alt-RMB...etc. Makes a noticeable difference rather reasonable or not.

I've moaned about this before, but give Wagners the ability to surface and use their guns; it'll go some way to allow kibran to get back in the water. Cybran is the only faction that has zero practical tools for fighting off ships on your shores. UEF can spam Riptides, Aeon can spam Blazes, Sera can spam zthueys, Nomads can spam... well god knows what they can spam but they probably have something, amirite? (ETA: Quelle surprise )

"Give engie" is not a solution. Jesters are not a solution. Torps are not a solution. Nanite torp is NOT a solution except situationally.

The fact that Cybran engies don't hover and are at the mercy of subs just adds insult to injury.

@LittleMissMurder