Lets Talk About Micro!

[don]

The ability to draw shapes with the mouse that will influence units in a certain way lends itself to a lot of possibilities as well.

How many times have you been playing sc or war3 and you have multiple control groups in battle but now a decent amount of these units are damaged so you pull them back. Now its time to issue new orders to the units on the front lines but not everything on the battlefront is as clean as you would like it to be, so dragging a rectangle over the units that you want to recreate your control group can sometimes be difficult. Imagine being able to select units by drawing a shape across the screen around the units you want. Don't want that group of badly damaged tanks in the middle of your army rushing in? Instead of dragging a box and then shift clicking down to just the units you want to pull back you could drag an outline around just the forces you want. Bam you're done. Also imagine the potential of ctrl + double click on a selected unit to invert the selection of on screen units.

Anyway thats just my 2 cents.

For those who have used Photoshop or Zbrush I would say what I'm thinking of would be something similar to the lasso tool. It very gives you a very large amount of control over your selection that is intuitive and easy to use. Im not entirely sure but it seems to fit into the category of easy to learn but hard to master. Since the more efficient you are with dragging your shapes the more precise control you can have over your units.

It seems that drawing on the battlefield is the better idea than command storage. I love the lasso idea.

It helps on the control of still images but what about moving targets that will eventually walk out or into the pattern?

Then the correct action to handle that is to draw the shape faster which translates into a good skill gradient in the game. The challenge would be to draw a squiggle faster than you can draw a rectangular selection.



Implementation of lasso select and draw path

The modifier would be the ~ or the ` button.

~ + left mouse drag would toggle lasso select instead of rectangular.
~ + right mouse drag when a unit/units is selected would then follow the path.

It seems easy enough to add to the game even in the stage of development the game is in now..

[The_Blade]

It seems that drawing on the battlefield is the better idea than command storage. I love the lasso idea.



Then the correct action to handle that is to draw the shape faster which translates into a good skill gradient in the game. The challenge would be to draw a squiggle faster than you can draw a rectangular selection.



Implementation of lasso select and draw path

The modifier would be the ~ or the ` button.

~ + left mouse drag would toggle lasso select instead of rectangular.
~ + right mouse drag when a unit/units is selected would then follow the path.

It seems easy enough to add to the game even in the stage of development the game is in now..

The problem with this "fast skill" is that at most you will have the time to laso a group of at most 5 units drawing the squiggle. Eventually you might master it with protoss or terran but it will be a pain with zerg and air units which tend to stack up.

A shift or a ctrl +click might work preaty good; but a ~, or any other character located in the third or second sector of a keyboard, will eventually result in a problem for many keyboards which need to hit another key first AND THEN CLICK.

As a result I should keep the shift or ctrl hitting units which will aditionally join your selection without going out of it, as a much better alternative for micro selecting your units.

[flabortast]

How about attack group like in Homeworld?? It's like Focus fire, but on several select units instead of one?