Use quote function? I have no idea who the last 4 posters are referring to.

Anyways, what I said was that these starcraft-type qualities DO become valuable on small maps. I suppose when you scale the maps and # of players up by enough, that becomes irrelevant. But in 1v1's and 2v2's, and on small/medium maps, they're invaluable.

I think it is way off target from the original thread, but there are actually Starcraft-type players playing this game. I played SC back in the day, and in conversation with some other good players, have found that was true of them too.

... and when Starcrack 2 is released ... no way they're going to hang around this forum or ICO ...

Just out of morbid curiosity, is there any place in this genre for people who don't micro the daylights out of everything?

The less strategic option you have, the more critical micro becomes in any RTS.

Sins as advertised as a real time 4X game, but it has several orders of magnitude less strategic options than other "true" 4x games like the moo series or even Stars! (if any of you have played it). For example, in typical 4x games, you put population into colony ships - colony ships don't magically produce people. Because of that, population is another variable you need to keep track of. You also architect your various fleet designs so depending on teh situation, you can put more emphasis on ships that move quickly, or slow ships that have a lot of firepower. All these dynamics of the game come together to produce a multitude of possible strategies.

Sins only has a few strategies per race/map size. Because of that, most people end up using the same strats (lrm rush). The only way then to edge out your oponnent is micro, since you're basically mirroring each other in terms of what you're building/researching/etc.

Exactly . In this game rushing is even more critical- loss of all of your fleet +cap in the beginning usually means you are done. The resource accumulate way too slow so you wont have chance to rebuild. There is no comebacks in early game. I wouldn't have a problem with that ,except "early" in SoaSe is considered 1 hour or so.

i understand what you mean, but i disagree. there is a great variety of strategy in sins, and it is all about military. there aren't a lot of "strategies" in the most basic rts sense of "rush" "turtle" "tech" "econ", but there is more strategy in how combining those strategies affects the military aspects of the game.

lol. funny

otherwise, ignore me..... I should learn to read the whole thread before replying; post deleted/edited

Statistically speaking yes.
Actually speaking... no.
The problem is that there's "gaming", and there's "competitive gaming". The soon you play2win, you want to micro.

Even in TBS games you micro, only there everyone does it, automatically. You might click on auto-combat at times but tbh you only do that if you're 100% sure you'll win with no losses anyways.

The only way one can prevent micromanagement to be the A and O of winning fights is by disallowing it entirely, or making it ~impossible to pull off.
As an example see Majesty (the fantasy game). It has no micromanagement as you cannot control your units, they act on their own. You can set reward-flags but each type of unit only follows them "so" much.
Actual micro is impossible there, and yet the game is still incredibly strategic.

Micro is a lot in Sins but it's not the ONLY thing. If we took an example of one player who excels at the Starcraftesque micro skills versus another who has minimal micro but has a far better understanding of setting up phase lane feints and ambushes (do you think they made jumping eat antimatter for giggles? think about it), which planets on the map are valuable to him vs his opponent, uses logistics slots in the most efficient manner, plays the black market better, understands which units he can build more of or sacrifice in order to cost his opponent more replacing their losses.. etc.. then the outcome of that game is far from certain.

Lol at people thinking you don't need to heavily micro in this game.

Well you're right you don't HAVE to. But if you play2win, like the above, Carighan, says, you have to.

One reason is that the AI for autocasting simply isn't good enough. And with auto target it seems your units will sometimes be good and target the weakest units first, but sometimes wont, strangely. Plus there is positioning our units to abuse enemy ships turn rates, yada yada.

in general I would say micro matters a lot less than it did in say starcraft

If your apm was below a certain level in starcraft, you couldn't be a good player. Sins provides superior ability to quickly manage production and fleets, and there aren't as many things you need to click manually. In my experience you need to micro most (not all) capital ship abilities, some cruiser abilities, and then you need to move several large groups of ships. The battles last longer, so you don't have to be lightning fast, and simply the ability to group unlimited ships at once drastically reduces micromanagement from say starcraft.

Every decent player micros, but you don't need 200 apm to be a gosu sins player.

In terms of not needing to micro I wonder if it'd help if you could select explicitly how you want your fleet to act (ie: "aggressive","coward", etc.). Then at least you'd know how the fleet will behave and have it behave somewhat as you need. I guess an extension of this would be to allow users to write their own scripts that could control fleet auto-behavior. Well that and simply making the fleet AI better overall.

No a big reason you need to micro is that the ai's autocasting is usually bad, and the AI doesn't know how to position fleets.

AId oesn't knwo to put flaks int the middle so 2-3 or more guns fire.

They also need to make units auto-focus-fire on the weakest units(Taking into account their turn rate)