Useful in-game micro tricks

[raynor]

Hello,

I am not posting much here but I read the forum from times to times,  and you may have seen me in TGs lately . I simply wanted to share some tricks that I use every game, hoping it can help other players . I am going to assume people already use controls groups (grouping units with ctrl + 1/2/3).

- Shift + select unit -> add unit to selection group, useful when creating control groups.

- Ctrl + left click on unit group  -> remove from unit group from current selection, useful when creating control groups.

- Shift + right click/order -> queue order, that's surely the basics of any RTS, but never hurts to remind. Use cases: to queue buildings constructions (e.g houses), make a unit scout the map by shift right clicking several locations.

- Alt + right click -> very useful to dispatch workers/units. Use cases: dispatch workers on wood line (easily alt right click multiple trees to dispatch them), send one soldier to scout.

- Alt + left click + ctrl  -> Advanced use case use to snipe enemy ranged units. Select own ranged units and make them focus enemy ranged units (using alt and clicking different enemy units obviously ).

Please share other useful tricks, cheers!

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

22 hours ago, raynor said:

Alt + right click -> very useful to dispatch workers/units. Use cases: dispatch workers on wood line (easily alt right click multiple trees to dispatch them), send one soldier to scout.

use this to prioritize killing enemy ranged units. This is known as sniping, and I think it uses left click instead of right. Due to the way melee and ranged units are balanced, this is the best micro to do during a fight.

[Grautvornix]

Here are a few noob micro tactics for more casual players like myself. Might still be useful at least against AI, although possibly quite obvious.
(Certainly this is not a full strategy that wins the game on its own. You need to build up strong economy, significant population and develop technology.)

• use fast cavalry to
  • chase and eliminate adversary traders. You reduce economic power  of your enemy and win resources. Hit and run towards your nearest tower or fortress or group of ranged units
  • kill/capture (in DE) enemy women (not nice but impairs resource gathering).
  • attract single warriors and welcome them with a number of ranged units and/or towers.
• conquer and destroy enemy markets.
• in naval maps conquer and destroy enemy harbours to remove their ship building capability and let you "rule the waves"
• when you have sufficient forces try conquering and manning one or two enemy towers. Note that a damaged tower is more easy to capture. Captured towers in enemy territory automatically reduces adversary population. If the tower is heavily attacked, destroy it before it falls back into enemy hands.
• conquer and garrison enemy stables (cavalry only) and barracks (infantry only). This automatically increases experience of the  garrisonned and allows "local production" of more forces. Initially stay away from fortresses and Civil Centres as they are well defended and harder to capture.
• conquer and populate temples (heals your forces) and keeps them fresh and available in country.

[seeh]

2 hours ago, gulshan212 said:

F2 -> select idle worker units

thats wrong. not the default settings.

[Lion.Kanzen]

2 hours ago, gulshan212 said:

Hello this is Gulshan Negi

Well, I did search it on Google and I found something that can be useful for you. 

Here are a few more that I find helpful:

Double-tap control group hotkey -> quickly centers camera on the control group

Tab -> cycle through selected units or buildings

Shift + tab -> cycle through selected units or buildings in reverse order

Ctrl + shift + click -> quickly queue up multiple units or buildings to be produced

Ctrl + click -> select all units or buildings of the same type on screen

Alt + click -> deselect units or buildings from current selection

F2 -> select idle worker units

F3 -> select idle military units

F4 -> select all units of the same type on screen

I hope these are helpful to other players as well!

Thanks

None of these keys are useful for 0AD in the way you describe.

[raynor]

 

On 02/05/2023 at 11:37 PM, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

use this to prioritize killing enemy ranged units. This is known as sniping, and I think it uses left click instead of right. Due to the way melee and ranged units are balanced, this is the best micro to do during a fight.

eheh that might be connected to the advance technique section :D. Another useful one I forgot: Select units then "Shift + 1" to add current units selection to control group 1

[Vantha]

On 09/05/2023 at 2:07 PM, gulshan212 said:

Double-tap control group hotkey -> quickly centers camera on the control group

Tab -> cycle through selected units or buildings

Shift + tab -> cycle through selected units or buildings in reverse order

Ctrl + shift + click -> quickly queue up multiple units or buildings to be produced

Ctrl + click -> select all units or buildings of the same type on screen

Alt + click -> deselect units or buildings from current selection

F2 -> select idle worker units

F3 -> select idle military units

F4 -> select all units of the same type on screen

sounds a lot like ChatGPT to be honest

[real_tabasco_sauce]

33 minutes ago, Dizaka said:

15 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Well, it should exist, it just shouldn't be the only worthwhile micro. Instead, it should be a tool in one's skillset that depends on the conditions of a given fight. Balance is the way to fix this.

To an extent.  However, having too much of a micro creates a huge barrier of entry for new players to be competitive.   Do we want to discourage or encourage new players?  I think if something can be automated for an unfair advantage it should be considered for a feature included in the game - especially if it can be "silent" and not take away from the experience.  Clicking like a madman, imho, takes away from the experience.

5 hours ago, alre said:

what? why?

Lets take the discussion here @alre, @Dizaka.

@alre Currently sniping is useful in roughly 80% of large battles. With balance changes, I can make this number about 5% to 10%, allowing for other ways for players to make their battles more fruitful (aka micro). This is a far better solution that removing the ability to control one unit of a selection at a time.

@Dizaka it is not important "how much" micro there is, but instead how impactful the micro that is. Basically the core "skill pyramid" might look something like this:

1. Economy: the ability to control your economy and maintain production is a player's bread and butter. This is the most fundamental skill, and just about all middle-tier players should be quite good at this. Very good players still improve here with damage control.
2. Military Composition and Game knowledge: This is where your knowledge of civ strengths and weakness comes in, as well as unit roles, strengths, and weaknesses. If you know the capabilities of the enemy and you have scouted to see what units they are getting, you have a chance to use game knowledge to counter their move.
3. Timing and positioning: Making choices on the 'when' to attack and the 'where' to attack are pretty important, just as the 'when' and 'where' to build a fort or when to age up. Do you charge straight into a very defensible position? do you look for a weaker spot to attack? Do you wait to mass your units, or dive right into a fight?
4. Micro: When in a fight, you want to control units based on unit characteristics. Flanking, retreating wounded units, targeting the weaker enemy units, protecting vulnerable units, encircling units, spreading units out, and formation control are all means for one's micro skills to take effect in a fight. This is the top of the pyramid, as it is the hardest to learn and makes the least difference.

@Dizaka in no way is micro a barrier for entry for new players. Getting a feel for the economy and basic strategy is the skill gap for new players. The fact of the matter is it takes a long time to learn how to play 0ad very well, to get all the levels of the pyramid. If a player that has all of these tools at their disposal beats a new player, how is that a barrier for entry? The only way that discourages new players is if those new players think they should expect to win.

if you start to remove (aka automate) layers of this pyramid, you have essentially less content. Less decisions to make, less choices, and less tools at your disposal to beat the enemy, no matter how small. In other words the game would be more formulaic and less fun, with the impact of random chance becoming more impactful.

I think the area that 0ad stands the most to gain here is level 2. I think more upgrades, civs, and units, we could see more interesting strategy.

[Atrik]

If you play a little with newer or less experienced players, sniping is perceived as a hack, exploit, or might think it require a external tool to be executed, by seemingly, a majority (in my experience).
I remember when learning it, that I thought it was clearly a weird unintended 'gameplay'. Now I got use to it, so it feels less weird, but still think it's unintended?

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

Maybe make health and healing more important and also heavily incentivize spread out your attacks to as many enemy soldiers as possible by making attack values have an inverse relationship with health. 

-10% health = -5% attack; -20% health = -10% attack; and so on. Kind of doesn't make sense for soldiers who are on their last leg (5% health or something) to be able to inflict full attack damage. This "realism" is actually a byproduct of incentivizing the player to form long lines and attack as many of the enemy troops as possible instead of sniping or focus-firing.

 

Just a random thought exercise. I have no concrete proposal here. 

Edited October 18, 2023 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[alre]

15 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

Lets take the discussion here @alre, @Dizaka.

@alre Currently sniping is useful in roughly 80% of large battles. With balance changes, I can make this number about 5% to 10%, allowing for other ways for players to make their battles more fruitful (aka micro). This is a far better solution that removing the ability to control one unit of a selection at a time.

@Dizaka it is not important "how much" micro there is, but instead how impactful the micro that is. Basically the core "skill pyramid" might look something like this:

1. Economy: the ability to control your economy and maintain production is a player's bread and butter. This is the most fundamental skill, and just about all middle-tier players should be quite good at this. Very good players still improve here with damage control.
2. Military Composition and Game knowledge: This is where your knowledge of civ strengths and weakness comes in, as well as unit roles, strengths, and weaknesses. If you know the capabilities of the enemy and you have scouted to see what units they are getting, you have a chance to use game knowledge to counter their move.
3. Timing and positioning: Making choices on the 'when' to attack and the 'where' to attack are pretty important, just as the 'when' and 'where' to build a fort or when to age up. Do you charge straight into a very defensible position? do you look for a weaker spot to attack? Do you wait to mass your units, or dive right into a fight?
4. Micro: When in a fight, you want to control units based on unit characteristics. Flanking, retreating wounded units, targeting the weaker enemy units, protecting vulnerable units, encircling units, spreading units out, and formation control are all means for one's micro skills to take effect in a fight. This is the top of the pyramid, as it is the hardest to learn and makes the least difference.

@Dizaka in no way is micro a barrier for entry for new players. Getting a feel for the economy and basic strategy is the skill gap for new players. The fact of the matter is it takes a long time to learn how to play 0ad very well, to get all the levels of the pyramid. If a player that has all of these tools at their disposal beats a new player, how is that a barrier for entry? The only way that discourages new players is if those new players think they should expect to win.

if you start to remove (aka automate) layers of this pyramid, you have essentially less content. Less decisions to make, less choices, and less tools at your disposal to beat the enemy, no matter how small. In other words the game would be more formulaic and less fun, with the impact of random chance becoming more impactful.

I think the area that 0ad stands the most to gain here is level 2. I think more upgrades, civs, and units, we could see more interesting strategy.

I like how ranged melee rebalance would make sniping less important.

but maybe 5% to 10% is not ideal? maybe 0% is ideal. On the other hand, I know that if sniping only becomes uselful at higher competitive level, those players will be more ready to accept this kind of micro, provided that is not allways good, but there is a choice involved.

[chrstgtr]

On 18/10/2023 at 3:14 PM, alre said:

I like how ranged melee rebalance would make sniping less important.

but maybe 5% to 10% is not ideal? maybe 0% is ideal. On the other hand, I know that if sniping only becomes uselful at higher competitive level, those players will be more ready to accept this kind of micro, provided that is not allways good, but there is a choice involved.

For me, sniping is ok when it’s small fights that are like 15v 15 units. That is also where sniping is least determinative.
 

But when you have two armies of 100+ units and great sniping can lead to one player losing an entire army and one person losing 20 units and leveling up their entire army. Then that is a problem.  It truly takes a lot of fun out of the game 

[vinme]

what is the rebalance @real_tabasco_sauce ?

cellphones explanation didnt make sense to me as a counter to sniping. but i do find the damage/health correlation idea cool. def would incentivize healing more. boost building dmg relevance.  

[real_tabasco_sauce]

So @vinme basically the damage for ranged units is much higher across the board, while to balance this high damage, melee units currently just have a lot of armor so they last longer. The reason they rarely rank up is because they do so little damage. Basically my rebalance patch is as follows:

melee units +50% damage 

ranged units -25% damage

melee units less armor (ex 3h 3p instead of 5h 5p for spearman)

melee units +.5 m/s walk speed

overall, this will push melee units into a more exciting damage-dealing role rather than being more of a damage sponge.

[man_s_our]

On 18/10/2023 at 4:09 AM, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

Maybe make health and healing more important and also heavily incentivize spread out your attacks to as many enemy soldiers as possible by making attack values have an inverse relationship with health. 

-10% health = -5% attack; -20% health = -10% attack; and so on. Kind of doesn't make sense for soldiers who are on their last leg (5% health or something) to be able to inflict full attack damage. This "realism" is actually a byproduct of incentivizing the player to form long lines and attack as many of the enemy troops as possible instead of sniping or focus-firing.

 

Just a random thought exercise. I have no concrete proposal here. 

I thought about something similar today (but for now my priority is patching UnitAI to handle separation of horse/rider entities)

my idea was that at 50%+ health the units aren't healable  but have some positive health change.

at 50%-25% they're healable, have no health change and are weaker (especially movement speed).

at 25% or less the template change to dead looking template and have negative health change which makes them need aids or otherwise they die.

maybe even make them capturable as captives in that state?

edit:

if you want a more realistic strategic effects from injuries, you can make the injured and captured soldiers keep consuming population to force players do captives exchanges.

Edited October 20, 2023 by man_s_our

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

I've had the notion that soldiers could look grislier as their health goes down, but then I realized that it would cause hundreds of texture swaps per minute of combat time, which would greatly tax the graphic card and affect performance. The stats changes would be taken care of by the simulation code, which is computed on the processor, so that is much easier on performance.

Edited October 20, 2023 by wowgetoffyourcellphone

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

13 hours ago, vinme said:

cellphones explanation didnt make sense to me as a counter to sniping

I was just brainstorming a way to encourage spreading out one's attacks instead of constantly focus-firing. 

[alre]

sniping involves spreading fire among enemy ranged units (damage dealers/glass cannons), so relating damage to health would actually buff sniping, not nerf it. 

[real_tabasco_sauce]

1 hour ago, alre said:

so relating damage to health would actually buff sniping

I would be more concerned with losing a lot of consistency and predictability in fights if %HP affected damage. I feel like its one of those details that need not be simulated in a game.

To be honest, I think this will not be an issue at all after when melee/range damage is balanced.

[alre]

I just realised "cellphones" means @wowgetoffyourcellphone lol.

[chrstgtr]

4 hours ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I was just brainstorming a way to encourage spreading out one's attacks instead of constantly focus-firing. 

Healing just isn’t very effective while in a fight. It certainly isn’t effective when your enemy is basically one-shotting your men by using 20 archers to simultaneously volley arrows on one specific unit at a time. Buffing healers would have the effect of buffing sniping because a good sniper will level up his units and then be able to return them to full health more quickly after a fight

Spreading out units to avoid “overkill” is like a poor man’s sniping. 
 

I agree with @real_tabasco_sauce that changing unit stats would make things unnecessarily more complicated. 
 

Along those lines, though, I’ve always thought it would be cool if you could temporarily force units to run until they get tired. It could function kind of like how sprinting works in the EA sports games. That would introduce charging like a lot of players want. But it wouldn’t create the imbalanced mess that happened when charging was accidentally implemented during one of the RCs. 

Edited October 20, 2023 by chrstgtr

[real_tabasco_sauce]

22 minutes ago, chrstgtr said:

But it wouldn’t create the imbalanced mess that happened when charging was accidentally implemented during one of the RCs. 

I wish I was there for that lol

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

4 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

Healing just isn’t very effective while in a fight. It certainly isn’t effective when your enemy is basically one-shotting your men by using 20 archers to simultaneously volley arrows on one specific unit at a time. Buffing healers would have the effect of buffing sniping because a good sniper will level up his units and then be able to return them to full health more quickly after a fight

Well this is a bit more complicated. It depends on which method your enemy is using to snipe. The best method for sniping in most cases involves using alt to rapidly task all 80-100 or so of your ranged units on your enemies' ranged units. I think buffing healers would have the effect of nerfing this kind of sniping because spam clicking usually means that damage gets spread out more among enemy units. 

 

4 hours ago, chrstgtr said:

But it wouldn’t create the imbalanced mess that happened when charging was accidentally implemented during one of the RCs. 

lol that was so fun for a little bit. I think the main thing that made it problematic was that there was no way for the charging units to ever slow down or run out of "charge".

[chrstgtr]

19 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

Well this is a bit more complicated. It depends on which method your enemy is using to snipe. The best method for sniping in most cases involves using alt to rapidly task all 80-100 or so of your ranged units on your enemies' ranged units. I think buffing healers would have the effect of nerfing this kind of sniping because spam clicking usually means that damage gets spread out more among enemy units. 

Unless they click on the same enemy multiple times. Even still, a healer could only keep 1 or maybe 2 units alive for a little longer than normal? So you have to use 2 units (one of which can’t deal dmg) to fight 1 enemy? That isn’t a winning formula

Anyways, buffing healers can lead to some pretty terrible snowball effects with armies leveling up at full health

[chrstgtr]

4 hours ago, real_tabasco_sauce said:

I wish I was there for that lol

One of the many times people got exactly what they asked for and then immediately wanted it reverted 

31 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

lol that was so fun for a little bit. I think the main thing that made it problematic was that there was no way for the charging units to ever slow down or run out of "charge".

I think that’s right. That’s why I think each unit would need to a “energy” meter that would need to recharge once depleted. So you can force a unit to run for up to 3 seconds but after 3 seconds you have to let their energy recharge, which would take like a minute, before the unit could move quicker than it’s normal walk pace again