You know how pretty much all realiable sources say that macro management is more important than micro in SC2. Do you think that should be changed to a more even level? I created this thread to see what you think. We could also come up with things that would promote micro. So obviously I would like to see more micro in SC2, otherwise I wouldn't have created this thread. As for ideas on how to do this, I was thinking more abilities for units. Not just active ones though, but rather a whole spectrum of things. For example a toggle between melee and ranged attack for a unit, with the melee doing more damage to compensate for having to walk up to the opponent's units. Another thing would be to buff currently underused abilities like psi storm. Moreover, cooldown abilities would be nice on some units that currently don't have abilities. And lastly, the map should have more effect on the battle by having, in addition to the current vision blockers, damaging areas (e.g., abandoned barrels that need to be shot to deal AoE damage), something that would spice up positioning and routes more. Maybe even make trees reduce ranged damage by 1 to units under it, something novel yet familiar (from SC).
speaking as a zerg player i find micro rather underused. I mean sure getting a surround, kiting and position are important. But what else? Really not much of our units have skills. Maps having certain effects buffs/debuffs would be nice.
I disagree. I feel like there is always more micro you could be doing. As Zerg, it is virtually impossible to keep creep spread as efficient as possible. Every single overlord is a potential creep-producer, but it's typically just too micro-intensive to manage them all. Also, what's most important in most battles (as a zerg) is to get a good surround. Ideally, a zerg player will never let an enemy's army reach his base. Splitting up units around the map in order to get good surrounds takes a lot of micro/awareness in order to be done correctly. As Terran, Medivac drops could/should be used constantly. The main reason they aren't used more often is because the micro it takes to manage them. If the Terran player loses focus of the medivac for very long, it can easily be sniped. Against Protoss, ghosts could/should be used in pretty much and battle. Their emp is devastating. It's just very micro-intensive. Against Zerg, keeping marines behind marauders (in an MMM) build can make a huge difference, as marauders take little damage from banelings - the counter to MMM. As Protoss, sentries are one of the greatest micro-units. Force field usage to split armies makes a huge difference in most battles. Using the sentries perfectly as wellas positioning the rest of your army around the force fields takes great micro skills. I very much disagree that more abilities are necessary in order to increase the importance of micro over macro. Neither micro nor macro is necessarily the most important in all circumstances.. For instance, it is impossible to out-macro an AI on the "Insane" setting, as they get free resources, but it is still very easy to beat them because they have virtually no micro. Edit: I didn't address the last part of your post - I agree that making the maps more dynamic would be awesome. The only issue is balance. I feel like most maps already strongly favor one race over the other(s), so adding more of that stuff could just make it worse.. (so it just needs to be done carefully, of course)
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds a lot more like macro than micro. My first thought was to disagree with kuvasz, but after taking a minute to really think about it, it seems like all three races need more macro than micro, even if comparatively one may need more micro than another. The best way I can think to show it is by rating micro/macro on a 1-5 scale (1 being least, 5 being greatest): Protoss - The least micro-intensive race for obvious reasons. Research and unit production can be sped up with Chrono Boost, but they by no means depend upon it. Macro: 3 Micro: 2-3 Terran - Early game it's pretty much mandatory to get an Orbital Command, though one can choose to get an economic boost with MULEs or save some scouting time with Scanner Sweep, though the latter becomes less important as the game goes on. Macro: 3-4 Micro: 3 Zerg - The only race where you really have to use both macro abilities; without Creep Tumors, you can't expand within your own territory. Without Spawn Larva, you can't keep up your all-important production capacity. Zerg have the weakest units for their cost, so if you're micro skills aren't up to snuff than keeping economy and larva numbers strong is is an absolute must. Macro: 5 Micro: 4
Eh I guess it's kind of borderline. It is unit control..but it's also more big picture "macro." I guess my issue with making more micro abilities is that it could reduce the importance of unit control (as in positioning and focus firing/etc).
I agree with zaner and strongly disagree with karaa on the 2 above posts... I made a very extensive post explaining my opinion but got logged off in the meantime, and lost it to some kind of malfunction of my browser. Anyway, some of the things I wrote about were the following, in random order and little detail: -Micro is still important, and you don't need more abilities to increase micro in the game, rather than less macro since when microing you lose time producing stuff you need, so you have to engage in micro when the benefit of it is greater than the time lost from macro. The better your multi-tasking the greater your ability to devote time and actions into micro without hurting your macro(much). -Starcraft 2 has more micro than sc:bw due to the fact that it has more tools for every race. The mechanics that ease micro like smart casting and huge control groups don't reduce it's significance. You can still do stuff like the dropship/tank trick, and even do it with protoss prism/immortal now, as well as have increased tricks with stuff like blink, roach burrow etc. -Macroing is not just using your race's new tool(chronoboost/queen/orbital command), it's keeping your whole base active. While the queen requires more attention to use effectively than the chrono boost or mule drop, due to the dual role of creep tumors and larva inject, having all the producing buildings in one key(hatcheries) and being able to produce both workers and all types of units by hiting your hatch hotkey, then s, and then anything you wanna make is way easier than for example having to select your ccs and make scvs, then select your rax and make bio units, select your starports and make air, and your factories and make mech while in the meantime keeping a good balance of what addons you need to have an army composition you like. Zerg just make a roach warren and a spire and make as many roaches as they want anytime in game. For terran to do that they have to have a huge amount of starports and barracks which is unrealistic, so keeping a balance there is a key part of terran(and protoss) macro. protoss on the other hand have to move to a pylon to warp in units while both other races don't need to visit any part of the map for it, and still suffer from the same thing that terran do(need to balance unit producing structures). What I wanna say is that macro is not just using your chrono boost or vomiting larvae, it also takes a plan to have on what you wish to build and keep a healthy balance there. SC:BW didn't have these tools, yet it was a macro-oriented game too due to the significance economy has in the game. -Quantifying micro and macro is imo a bad thing to do(based on Karaa's reply) since on what basis do you quantify them? if you were to do that though, the points karaa gave on the 3 races are deffinitely unrealistic for a few reasons: One I mentioned above: You only took the queen/chrono/mule parts into the equation. Another is the micro part: zerg units are mostly cannon fodder, in a sense that there aren't many specific units you need to keep alive other than roaches when upgraded(since you can greatly increase their effectiveness by microing them alive) and infestors(for obvious reasons). Protoss on the other hand benefits way more from keeping units alive since they are more expensive and their shields regen fast out of combat making saving their lives essential to any protoss player. Also protoss have many specialised units like sentries/HT/VRs/Immortals/Colossi that all need to be well microed to keep alive and target fire what they need to do. Race regen mechanics also play an important part into this: Saving a P unit will make it combat effective soon again through shield regen, saving a T unit will make it useful again through medvac heal or repair, but saving a zerg unit is less important(NOT unimportant though) since they are more cannon-fodderish in nature(other than more specific cases like roaches with upgrades and burrow or mutas, infestors, corruptors etc. Wasting clicks to save a zergling in the middle of a fight is just wasted clicks: just hit 5,s,zzzzzzzz and make 50 more..) There are 3 major changes from SC:BW to SC2 that, imo, create an illusion of a feeling that there's less micro included in sc2. These are: 1)Increased control groups 2)Smart cast 3)Building groups The first one, while providing an ease in moving your whole army together, makes many players use 1-2 groups for their whole army which is really sub-optimal as it sacrifices control. Using 5 groups would still be more effective and produce a greater feeling of "micro" but players just don't do that. There's no reason to have your whole army in one group if you can use more groups, it's just harder to use more than one. Army spreading and positioning are still as important as in SC:BW. The second one was actually needed since all those who played BW would have wasted at least once tons of storms or swarms or emps on the same area... Smart cast is a good thing, and while it does indeed make it less micro-intensive to cast correctly it does free up actions to micro other stuff or macro back in your base. Groupped buildings are also a good thing, imo, since they free up keybinds that were used only for macroing. it's much better to do something like 6-sssssss for stalkers than doing 8-d-7-d-6-d-5-d to make a handful of dragoons. those free keybinds could be used for better control groups to increase your army control or to increase your macro efficiency by groupping upgrade buildings in them, but players just don't use them... What also increases micro is aggressiveness: If you attack early and often or do multipronged attacks then you're streching your army and need to make good use of micro to increase its effectiveness. Getting more active abilities won't make you more agressive and also won't decrease the need to go back to your base and build stuff... more active abilities, imo, mean that you get to use less the current ones to make room for more(room measured in actions, that is) I did put a lot more effort into my previous attempt to reply, making it more coherent and explaining my thoughts better, but I'm not really up to putting the same amount of effort again, lol... If more discussion gets going i'll be happy to keep posting up on this one, since it's deffinitely an interresting thread. As for the suggestions on the OP: I like the idea of more map features, but I also think that it will mean even greater imbalance, like zaner said, but i'm not really a fan of adding more abilities, since the ones already in existence are not yet fully used by anyone. Maybe make some test maps to try out features in a non-tournament map style and see how it works... Map balance is a tough thing to do, and the more variables the more stuff you have to balance around. Just take a map like plains of snow and make a pvz or tvz there. The speedlings will be all over the P or T's mineral lines in no time, due to the openess of the base entrances.
I'm positive I could pay a lot more attention to micro with fairly positive results, but the fact that reinforcements are much better than having the edge in a battle dissuades me. Plus reputed commentators and professionals, who know the game better than the average person, also claim that macro is too important. The reason I suggested more abilities was what has been mentioned here - that changes to make maps more dynamic would be much harder to balance than abilities. I'd be fine with no abilities added if positioning and the map would play a bigger role in games. I feel sight is not utilised enough - in fact, small changes like putting the centre of the sight circle in front of the unit or abandoned structures with roofs would really shake up micro. Because right now I feel most of my games are just realising if they're on the back foot and send a continuous stream of units to overwhelm them.
Generally commentators shouldn't be that much trusted imo since they're just like the rest of us and only watch more reps than we do... Commentators like Day9, Tasteless and Artosis, and the occasional pro-gamer that does some game analysis(Like the seriously incredible casts by Idra for the EG series) are a different story though, they are or have been part of the pro-gaming scene and know the game at a different level. I saw for example quite a few videos demonstrating how useless the carrier upgrade is. I also did a couple of tests myself and quickly agreed to that but RushSecond clearly demonstrated that it is indeed a good upgrade for someone going carrier tech. Even day9 who's one of the commentators that have taught like half the starcraft community how to play, had also made a similar comment on the uselessness of the carrier upgrade. Thing is that macro is naturally more important due to the fact that starcraft is an economy-based game, so since you can get ahead economically and use that economy to build a greater or more upgraded army than your opponent, then that's the main way to win consistently. There are cases though where micro really shines. These are either on small-sized armies where individual unit value is greater, and the more you can get out of it than your opponent, the better, and when macro is at very high levels on both sides, where an advantage in that area is more marginal than gaining a tactical advantage in combat using micro. Korean pros don't have 250 apm, by building units and workers, they are obviously putting those actions to good use Changes like the ones you're suggesting sound cool, but for some of them at least there are some major obstacles to overcome in order to implement them, like for example putting the sight circle in front of the unit, would make positioning much more micro intensive since you'd have to consider unit orientation, but since units turn around to attack incoming enemies and there's no way to turn a unit to face a different direction other than moving it, it would cause too much fuss... Fights would lose the current feel in a big part and would evolve into something like this: Nvm, gonna edit that later, g2g for a drink and I'm late!!!
