4X Do you love/hate micromanagement in 4X?

[Chris Koźmik]

Just out of curiousity, what is your, absolutely personal, opinion about micromanagement in 4X?


Also feel free to post why if you desire (especially if you have selected "Depends").

 

[Kane]

How can 4X without micromanagement even exist?

 

[Marobug]

It depends on the game. In most turn based games, any option to let the AI handle anything (meaning excessive micromanagement) is a massive turn off for me but in most real time and more complex space 4x games I like to have the option to let the AI handle a couple of things.
As in, governors type AI in colonies (and maybe trade in some cases) for example are fine as long as I have the option to micromanage these if I want to, but I want to decide everything else and the game should be designed with this in mind without me ever feeling the need to let the AI handle it.
Basically, I don't like it when the game can pretty much play itself (ie Distant worlds) or feel like micromanagement is a chore/chaotic/unmanageable (ie MOO2 in late game).

 

[Chris Koźmik]

How can 4X without micromanagement even exist?

I'm making one right now
OK, you are partially right, many space 4X are a feast of micromanagement in later stages of the game... Still, all of them being about micromanagement is an exaggeration (take for example Civilization 4).

 

[torpid]

I wouldn't play strategy games if it wasn't for the micromanagement. Still, the game with the best combo of micromanagement on every turn without things getting totally out of hand in the late game is Imperialism II, imo (didn't play I). While placing mines, farms and other resource buildings has to be done on the map with workers like in the Civ games, all resource allocation and troop recruitment is done in your capital, thus keeping a big part of production centralized throughout the game. You won't have cases of "town A you forgot existed produced unit B, town C has completed building D, what are you orders?"

 

[Kane]

How can 4X without micromanagement even exist?

I'm making one right now
OK, you are partially right, many space 4X are a feast of micromanagement in later stages of the game... Still, all of them being about micromanagement is an exaggeration (take for example Civilization 4).

There is nothing wrong with micromanagement.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I like it in principle, but in practice it gets retarded fast.

The problem is that the ratio of micro to macro management changes over time in a 4x. Using Civ as an example, early on you might make a decision about what to build and what you want your scout/worker/soldier to do once or twice a turn, or sometimes even as infrequently as once every few turns. But later on, you need to make dozens of decisions about what to build, which tiles to use, which improvements to make, where to move a dozen different units, etc.

At the beginning of the game, the ratio of minor to major shit (major shit being like whether or not to invade, or which technology to research or which civics to use) is like 10 to 1 or so. Lategame it becomes 1000 to 1 and it sucks balls.

 

[muds_animal_friend]

My recurring problem with 4x games is that they scale poorly. The early game often suffers from a lack of meaningful decisions to make, while the late game becomes bogged down in a morass of inconsequential decisions. This is because the range of available decisions never actually changes to reflect the scale of the player's empire.

Edit: Wut Damned Registrations said. Beat me to it.

 

[Norfleet]

I hate micromanagement, but for some reason any assistance AI is always terribad and never does what I wish it to do, so I end up micromanaging anyway. It is fortunate that I do not expect games to be fun, since I hate fun.

 

[tripedal]

I think the Distant Worlds approach is the best. If you want to be autistic about it and micromanage every tiny little detail, you can. But it's not necessary and can just be automated if you're more interested in the big picture.

 

[Raapys]

I liked the way MoO3 handled it. The UI/feedback and implementation wasn't always clear in presenting the system, but the idea behind it was sound.

In short, you could micromanage everything personally, or you could activate governors who would act according to your specified large-scale policies and plans(this being the default setting). I think it might have lacked a capability for governors to modify existing infrastructure though.

As always with automated systems, the AI often doesn't do what you want it to in every case, so it still made sense to personally oversee the most important production colonies. But I think it's the only game that's made handling hundreds of colonies manageable while still having the player able to influence their development to a great extent.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I think AI Wars does shit exceptionally well. Early on you've got a lot of importance to the micro shit; having the right kinds of ships, targeting specific enemy units/structures in battles, etc. Later on the kind of micro you do change (now you're moving fleets to stop warp invasions or moving entire fleets around at once) but the overall amount of meaningful shit to do stays the same. The build queue stops mattering but in it's place you get other shit to worry about.

The problem with Civ4 is that the micro shit never really stops mattering. Set those workers to automate and suddenly you have towns rioting because some fucker demolished your only gold mine to build a fort. Or better yet, a war is started because you were trading that gold away to your neighbour. Every last tedious fucking detail is vital to success.

 

[Torrasque01]

The problem with Civ4 is that the micro shit never really stops mattering. Set those workers to automate and suddenly you have towns rioting because some fucker demolished your only gold mine to build a fort. Or better yet, a war is started because you were trading that gold away to your neighbour. Every last tedious fucking detail is vital to success.

... You could always prevent workers from altering existing improvements in the options menu.

 

[Riso]

When your idea of micromanagement is to make me build every single building in every colony/city every single time, go fuck yourself.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The problem with Civ4 is that the micro shit never really stops mattering. Set those workers to automate and suddenly you have towns rioting because some fucker demolished your only gold mine to build a fort. Or better yet, a war is started because you were trading that gold away to your neighbour. Every last tedious fucking detail is vital to success.

... You could always prevent workers from altering existing improvements in the options menu.

I could, but then they never build shit like windmills because the fuckers have covered everything in farms or cottages already. You're screwed either way. All I really want is a very obvious sanity check to not alter improvements if that alteration would deprive me of a resource, which is clearly the most valuable thing a tile can give.

 

[Chris Koźmik]

Still, the game with the best combo of micromanagement on every turn without things getting totally out of hand in the late game is Imperialism II, imo (didn't play I). While placing mines, farms and other resource buildings has to be done on the map with workers like in the Civ games, all resource allocation and troop recruitment is done in your capital, thus keeping a big part of production centralized throughout the game. You won't have cases of "town A you forgot existed produced unit B, town C has completed building D, what are you orders?"

Yes, the key there was one management center ("production queue").

Imperialism I was quite similar althrough it had more complex production system (buildings+workers, not just workers). While it was great for immersion and gave more strategic choices it was quite annoying after a while since in practice you had to adjust workers every single turn (optimize to both use resources well and not waste factory capacity).

 

[Executr]

Micromanagement is one of the reasons I tend to play only on smaller scale maps. I like to make the decisions myself, but when the number of cities/planets start to increase it isn't fun anymore. It helps if the game allows you to set building queues (like Endless Space) or has governors that let you set the type of development you want on the planets (Star Ruler) but then you're mostly left with army management.

 

[Norfleet]

I could, but then they never build shit like windmills because the fuckers have covered everything in farms or cottages already. You're screwed either way. All I really want is a very obvious sanity check to not alter improvements if that alteration would deprive me of a resource, which is clearly the most valuable thing a tile can give.

That exists, "never bulldoze my improvements". The problem is that they are stupid: They do not remain in workgroups that are capable of completing a task in a timely manner (read: yesterday). In 1UPT, they get hopelessly lost in traffic jams and fail to build improvements in the right order to prevent a clog. The list goes on.

 

[belowmecoldhands]

I see it as a very hard balance to keep, so inevitably games fail somehow, unless they go out of their way to remove it which I think makes it stale. Removing something just for the sake of removing it's usually not a good thing to do, unless it's something like murder.

Master of Orion 2 is a good example of the love/hate. You could control many aspects of your colonies and even individual ships in tactical mode. This level of control really allows you to play it deeply, enacting all your tactics and/or strategies. However, it was my experience it collapsed as the game progressed. There were just too many colonies and too many ships to manage. You could rely somewhat on the AI, but it was crude. Yet if I played MOO2 again, I'd want to rely on the AI moreso.

That fine level of control is also in Jagged Alliance 2, another game I love. You can control all your mercenaries. There's just something very rewarding when a plan or idea springs into mind and aids you to victory. For some people it might have felt like micromanagement, but it never grew to be as bad as MOO2. My playstyle in JA2 was to make a new game if the main died. JA2 is really not the same game as MOO2. I also played with the iron man mode on (canot save in fights) and on expert difficulty.

When MOO3 came out one of the things they did was move the player from the role of a micromanager to the role of a m̶i̶c̶r̶o̶manager. In essence, this was no different from MOO2 because MOO2 also had AI to manage your colonies, but the interface and quality of it all was unsatisfactory. So in MOO3 (and MOO2 for that mater) you're supposed to be the decider. Teh game had many dozens of settings added to determine how the AI would do what you want it to do. So you go from managing a colony to telling the leaders how to manage the colony. The battles went from turn-based tactical to real-time tactical. And instead of controlling individual ships, like in MOO2, you control groups of them. Now, these ideas aren't inherently wrong, but somehow it didn't work in MOO3. It recieved widespread dislike. Some blame the spreadsheet GUI. Still, it's said by some with patches and mods MOO3 is a 4x dream.

I voted Depends.

 

[Marobug]

MOO3 was a disaster at release, it was buggy, crashed every so minutes and the AI was basically braindead. It's not exactly a 4x dream now, but it's decent.
It has really interesting stuff and it's rather enjoyable, I think it's biggest problem was that it had the MOO name. Truth is it has little to do with MOO2, and even less with MOO1.

 

[Zero Credibility]

Personally I don't mind micromanagement at all and I didn't find MoO2 to be too micro-heavy even in the late game. Colonise a new planet? Just put that colony ship down, buy a first industry building and let the auto-build continue building the colony for you. Maybe send some colonists to the new colony if you wish to speed things up. That's it. Once the planet is developed reallocate population as you see fit and start building ships if you need them. I also liked detailed turn-based tactical combat and if the battle was a foregone conclusion I just turn on fast resolution and it's over in seconds.

MoO3 on the other hand was and still is a mess, and I tried playing this game unmoded and moded several times, each time convincing myself it can't be as bad as I remember it, it's a MoO game after all. Each time I was disappointed bitterly.

In MoO3 your people will colonise every fucking planet they can even without your input. If you leave things to the AI colonies keep wasting resources and time building obsolete ships and troops you don't need, but as the number of colonies grows out of control trying to micromanage things quickly grows too painful, in no small part because of the clusterfuck that is the game interface. And instead of turn based combat you have really, really shitty real time battles. You might as well leave them on auto-play and go do something else until it's finally over. Or just auto-resolve it all, even though you are likely to take more casualties that way than letting computer just play things on screen (fuck if I know why). After all, it's not as if one (or a hundred) ship(s) actually mean shit in this game.

Add to that the completely broken diplomacy (how the hell does tech trading actually work?). Oh, and you can't refit your ships because fuck you, that's why. And instead of choosing things to research what you get is now always random. And the leaders are now useless. And the espionage is overcomplicated as well as basically useless. And the less said of task-group system the better.

Call me old-fashioned, but if the goal was moving the player away from micromanagement to macro-management of the empire, maybe doing that by making the game such a fucking mess that trying to micromanage it makes you want to kill yourself wasn't the best course of action.

 

[Johannes]

Looking at the small things and optimising them is kinda the whole point of singleplayer strategy games. It's the details that make an empire come alive. A more abstract, higher-level management game needs actual challenge to be interesting.

 

[Galdred]

I like it in principle, but in practice it gets retarded fast.

The problem is that the ratio of micro to macro management changes over time in a 4x. Using Civ as an example, early on you might make a decision about what to build and what you want your scout/worker/soldier to do once or twice a turn, or sometimes even as infrequently as once every few turns. But later on, you need to make dozens of decisions about what to build, which tiles to use, which improvements to make, where to move a dozen different units, etc.

At the beginning of the game, the ratio of minor to major shit (major shit being like whether or not to invade, or which technology to research or which civics to use) is like 10 to 1 or so. Lategame it becomes 1000 to 1 and it sucks balls.

I totally agree with this. That is why the number of entities to macro should not change too much. Hence why I would prefer a fixed number of production queues that would not depend on resource centers (Many WW2 wargames, like World in Flames, or World at War : A world divided have a global build queue/country, and don't make you play Sim City in each of your city). I think one of the problem is that the 4X has been dominated by the Civ wannabes (which themselves seem to have been heavily influenced by Empire).

How can 4X without micromanagement even exist?

MOO1 more or less did this, which is why it remains my preferred 4X.

 

[Chris Koźmik]

I think MMO3 is a bad example of "no micromanagement" game. What they did was automation instead of abstracting things. They gave tools to both micromanage every single thing and tons of AI helpers to automate the process...

What's the point of first detaily simulating something and then automating it? Why implement something the player can't use (unless the player accepts micromanagement hell)? It should be abstracted in my opinion.
Take a look at Majesty for example, you don't have an option to "manually move around a hero", no they move on themselves. What you as the player do is working on a higher level (giving incentives to the AI heroes and building infrastructure).

Don't give the player tools to automate boring parts of the game, don't implement these boring parts in the first place

 

[Norfleet]

What's the point of first detaily simulating something and then automating it?

Because if you can't automate it, then AI doesn't know how to play your game. Automating something is an extremely good way to see if your AI is any good, because if you keep watching it do the wrong things, then the AI definitely sucks.