Idea: Scatter button

[The_Blade]

Let's do it oldstyle and scatter units through selecting goups of 12 units at a time.

[PhanttoM]

Meh, the lack of scatter (or formation commands for example) are some of those things that turn me away from RTS games in general.
Sometimes like in this case, the concept of "you must order each unit individually" make me feel like I'm playing an RPG (controlling a new single unit every quarter of a second), rather than a strategy game where I'm controlling entire armies of 'trained' soldiers.

And the whole "it totally ruins micro" is vastly exaggerated IMO - The result of scattering, leads some units away from the 'frontline' and you'll have to micro them in the right direction.

Anyway, where are they going to scatter? The directions would be completely random and uncontrollabe.

It's not random. I can't remember which game, but in one game I've played, it's based on the center of your selected units, which then makes them move away from that center.

[Triceron]

Which means units in the front move forward, units in the back move back.

That's a bit random when some units are going to move closer to the enemy, perhaps within range of their ranged units. There's no control on how far or how long they will move away either. It's sort of a dangerous maneuver since the center of your unit group doesn't equal the target of the ability you want to scatter from.

It's not an effective ability due to so many factors. It's a good 'oh shit!' button, but there aren't a lot of 'oh shit!' abilities in the game that would really make good use of Scatter.

[Norfindel]

The mechanic is fairly simply, if you use it badly it's your fault. I mean, if you're very near your enemy, don't want to be attacked, and you press scatter on your group of units, you suck, it's not meant for surgical precision.

[Pandonetho]

The mechanic is fairly simply, if you use it badly it's your fault. I mean, if you're very near your enemy, don't want to be attacked, and you press scatter on your group of units, you suck, it's not meant for surgical precision.

Which is why not everyone should be able to split so easily. Meaning, bad idea, let's keep things manual.

[sandwich_bird]

I totally disapprove of this idea. If you want to scatter your units, do it manually. You shouldn't butcher the entire idea of micro.

I disagree. I would be fine with this if your units would actually be smart enough to keep their manually given formation. Instead, when you move them around, they immediately lose the position in which you moved them around and go back into giant ball mode. This makes spell like psi storm and HSM way too deadly at lower level of play where player don't really have the multi-tasking skill to micro their forces everywhere at the same time as doing everything else. This in return can cause imbalance.

I also don't think this destroys micro because obviously there are a lot of other way to micro your units and so micro clearly doesn't only involve spreading out manually your units. I don't believe either that the major part of what we called micro involve spreading out your forces (I'd say hit and run is the most used micro).

[ArcherofAiur]

wheres all my "decision-making-not-reflex-clicking" buddies

[Triceron]

One way I see it working is if you were dropping a 'fear bomb' on a location. You get an AoE template, you slap it down on a location, and units will bee-line it to the edge of that template. All of your controllable units in that area would run away at a distance relative to the center point, meaning units close to the edge of the template move a bit further to let untis behind get through.

If you're talking about grabbing a group of units and hitting Scatter, then it gets messy. What if you grab a group of 7 units, and the 7th is back in base? How would it scatter that? What if you grabbed 3 units and hit scatter? How far away would they run and in which directions? Would they run far enough to avoid a psis torm? HSM? A Nuke? Different spells offer different splash distances, and in each case it's just as easy to select group and rightclick a location. Group-scatter results in awkward pathing.

Overall though, I just see it as a bad idea.

[SoFool]

Ppl would complain that it would be too c&c-ish.

So I disagree with the idea, nuff said.

[pure.Wasted]

wheres all my "decision-making-not-reflex-clicking" buddies

Guess what kind of reflex clicking we like. I'll give you a hint: it has something to do with being based on decisions made.


A Scatter button wouldn't be bad "because it's context-less clicking" -- it indeed requires the same context to use as scattering units manually. From this angle, it's fine. I'm not against the thing on principle; we create shortcuts for macro all the time, there's no reason we can't do the same for micro.

But the thing is, a macro shortcut affects nothing but macro as a whole. Adding 5 more queue buttons to every single production building wouldn't make Marines better than Siege Tanks. The effect is self-contained. A micro shortcut, on the other hand, can have very wide-ranging effects. From the looks of things, the Lurker is already endangered, we don't need it extinct.