@snagglefox said in Ban EcoManager & Similar Mods:
Why don't we just let AI play for us?
This argument is used quite often when anything related to automation comes into play. With it, we should remove:
- the extractor capping feature (we are letting the game place storage / fabriactors / power gens for us)
- the attack priority feature (we are letting the game determine what units my units should attack for us)
- the spread attack feature (we are letting the game manages our commands for us)
- the ability to see your allies resources (we are letting the game estimate our allies economy for us, even their storage!)
- (1) the ability to repeat-apply the queue of your factories (we are letting the game requeue units for us)
- (1) the ability to auto pickup and drop off units with transports (we are letting the game automate unit transportation for us)
And we should also ban:
- Additional camera stuff (we are letting the game gauge the engineer reclaim radius for us)
- Disperse move (not sure what this does, but the game manages our commands for us)
- Better reclaim view (we are letting the game highlight relevant wrecks for us)
- Advanced target priorities (we are letting the game determine what units my units should attack for us, at great precision)
- Any strategic icon mod, especially that of Eternal as it also highlights the tech level of the engineer.
This list is not exhaustive. All of these automate parts of the game. I'm quite confident that everyone that opposes these changes use some of these features and some of these mods. After all, the mods are recommended by Blackheart in his UI mods topic.
Back to mass fabricator automation. At the moment fabricators are extremely unfriendly to a casual player - they are very volatile to your economy. I'd even argue that new players see no purpose for the unit the moment they understand that you can also upgrade extractors. With that, in the average game they have no real meaning. And that is what eco manager brings to the table - a reason for you to have fabricators without you having to worry about crashing your economy because of them. But it takes it to the extreme, where even the performance of the game can take a hit.
In my opinion a good game feature is friendly to a casual player, but it allows you to have a competitive edge when you take manual control. Fabricators are, without eco manager, not friendly to the casual player. With the change I am suggestion they become friendly to the casual player. They react slow: only one mass fabricator can be turned off or on each tick. It would take 10 seconds to turn off 100 fabricators. Meaning, if you have a low reclaim burst and some storage then you will likely not stall. But if you have no storage and a high reclaim burst or a sudden burst of energy usage in general then it won't respond fast enough and a casual player will stall. A competitive player can use their hotkeys to turn them all off before they stall - that is where the competitive advantage is.
That makes it a 'easy to use, difficult to master' feature. Exactly the type of features that are interesting to a game as it allows casual players to play the game and it allows competitive players to have distinct advantage over casual players.
Another example is the rotation of the weaponry of units. Take for example a Mantis. If you move the unit to the left while the target is moving to its right then the Mantis won't fire: the rotational momentum of the turret is roughly equal to that if the unit rotating as a whole. This is a tiny detail that, on the average fight, is irrelevant. But competitive players can make use of this to have an advantage over their opponents. Another 'easy to use, difficult to master' feature that I am quite fond of.
(1) This was a feature that were well received by critics and reviews during the launch of Supreme Commander:
Paragraph of a review from IGN: https://www.ign.com/articles/2007/02/16/supreme-commander-review-2
Effectively controlling the battlefield is achieved chiefly through the all-powerful Shift key. By pressing and holding, players can queue up unit movements, build orders, patrol waypoints, and combine move and attack orders. Should you decide to change movement patterns or build locations while the action is already underway, hitting shift again brings up an interface where you can drag around the waypoints as you see fit. Every unit construction factory can be given build order while it's still being built. Even after telling it to upgrade to the next technology level, you'll be presented with the next set of build options so you don't have to keep checking back in. Different types and amounts of units can be queued in the same construction facility, and a repeat build order function lets you move on to something else once you're happy with a factory's production pattern. Since you'll find a significant amount of water and hilly terrain across the game's many maps, there's an unusual emphasis on air transports. Thankfully these units can be set along ferry routes, where they'll automatically scoop up waiting units and drop them off wherever you so designate. If you set a factory waypoint to the starting point of the ferry route, units will automatically be ferried as soon as they roll or crawl off the production line.
The entire paragraph (and the article) is a good read, as all these features were magical in the 2006 / 2007 era. The game was praised because it took away a lot of manual bullshit that you don't really want to think about. We want to think about the grand scheme, the bigger picture. And automating the mass fabricators in such a manner that the average player can forget about them seems to fit right into that if you ask me.
And for those that do not read the article, it ends with:
The strategic zoom and base automation are so intuitive and helpful, it makes many other RTS games seem confining and simplistic.