In the olden days when the main two land trees were kbots and vehicles there was a large distinction in playstyle between them. In this time there were no layers of AI in controlling your own units, if you sent them somewhere they would go there in a dumb blob, and if you wanted them in a line you had to move them one-by-one. The vehicle factory was largely fine with the dumb blob formation and playing vehicles took the pressure off the plaeyrs micro and they could focus more broadly around the map. Kbots on the other hand had units that either benefited from tight micro or were useless without it. By choosing kbots you were taking on a higher burden of micromanagement with the expectation it would pay off if properly executed.
Shifting the micro to AI, and letting the player do even more macro is the logical path for a TA-based game. If theres battles of 1000s of units its silly to expect people to manually dodge shots for all those units, and extremely frustrating if you lose a battle just because you werent there to fiddle with it.
HOWEVER, there are a few types of fun that no longer exist in this game:
- Rocko micro. 1v1s on MoonQ or similar kbot maps were all about managing your formations of rocket bots to not shoot eachother, keep at max range, and dodge enemy rockets. With no skirmish AI, or line formation, this needed constant attention and the game came down to who could micro the most rockos at once. The rocko bot still exists much the same as the Ronin, but skirmish AI means that manually controlling your ronins wont create any great advantage even if your opponent is afk.
- Maverick missions. The maverick was T2 Kbot with fast movement, dual riot cannon-type weapons and call of duty style health regen. It died in a few hits but could always just get out of combat and regen extremely quickly. The playstyle for this unit was to get one airdropped in the enemies area and to devote all attention to its micro. The scythe is definitely a successor to the maverick but its cloak makes its use a bit less urgent, as it can attack and then recloak to evade destruction. The maverick needed constant micro to avoid destruction and once in combat needed the players full attention. The gain for this trade off is with precise execution it could win the game solo.
I don't think its possible to reconcile these things back into the game as they are the result of some fairly logical design choices that overall make things much better. But im wondering what would be the most practical way to replicate some of the older micro-heavy gameplay.
- No Skirmish AI option?
- Rocko DOTA map?
- Rocko mod?
- Rocko-K?
