Micro/Macro

[Evalation]

im sorry if this was already explained but how are mircomaqnagment and macromanagment diferent.?

[Ichon]

I've not heard the term macromanagement applied to games very often but I'd guess something about how well work with allies in a multi game and control your production to the needs of the battles.

Micro is zooming to the right spot on the battle to control your units every move. For example to make the most use of your skirmishers slightly longer range (only +20 yards and smaller size) it is useless to build skirmishers if you don't bother to micro, might as well make a line unit. Also controlling cavalry usually requires the most micro in TW games as either they have devastating charge or in ETW and Shogun 2 they are powerful but also vulnerable so if you don't spend every 10th second checking on them you are risking loss. Even checking all your artillery angles and shot types could be micro though because they are a stationary unit I wouldn't really call that micro myself.

Playing multi without pause the difference in the majority of battles is the micro abilities of the player and understanding the game mechanics along with sometimes map position.

[Condottiere 40K]

Micro management is taking a personal interest in precisely what each unit is doing on the battlefield and directing them. So I suppose macro would be grouping them into a bunch and point them in the direction they are supposed to be going. Most encounters tend to be a combination of both.

On the campaign side, Shogun doesn't allow much fiddling, and you have to keep track of your various stacks; you could allow the game to auto manage taxes, so you don't have to check the civil unrest status of each province, as well as give each stack a destination that they will automatically navigate to.

[Steve Holt]

From my experiences playing RTSs such a Starcraft 2, micro is getting the most out of a unit, such as "kiting" with a ranged unit or attacking an enemy unit with units which do extra damage.

Whilst macro is using resources efficiently, for example building enough production facilities so that money or otter resources stay low with continuous production, but all facilities are being used. However, macro can get confusing when related to more complicated games infrastructure wise.

To put it in TW terms good micro would be attacking a unit of archers with cavalry instead of a front on charge against spearman, since the cavalry are going to kill more units. Good macro would be not having a surplus of gold at the end of the turn(unless saving up to improve infrasructure) so in the long run when it comes to a battle you will have more units

[Lord Baal]

Micromanagement means meddle with the smallest things, like for example the location of a certain unit in a battle, decide how much ammo other unit carries and things like that. Micro is meant to point the smallest details.

Macromanagement in the other side means making choices over things like the tax over all your empire or certain regions, and things like that.

However lately there's a trend in TW to go Macro, disregarding micro, as if the two where mutually exclusive when there's nothing farther from the true. Also there's a trend to label as micro to a lot of things that are not, as taxing your provinces individually (like if that meant that you had to manually collect the taxes from every house).

The truth is that both can coexist perfectly. Take for example this taxes thing. You can perfectly have a global option, that changes the taxes for every region on your empire, while having an individual option for everyone, to allow you to tweak the most sensible provinces. This not only gives an straight forward option, but also cares for the more perfectionist gamers.

Under the current system I can't put a heavy tax on my capital and a lax one in the new conquered ones. That's plain moronic. In the good ol' days of Medieval and Rome you where able to do exactly that if you wanted. Sure, a global, set and forget option facilitates the things, but does not let you be flexible with different provinces. So while you have a "medium" tax, you are losing a great opportunity of income in X province and have Y province with high unrest because it just has been conquered.... but as long is more streamlined I guess is fine? NO IS NOT.

The ideal thing to do is to expand towards both ends. Have as much micro as you can, but don't make it vital to play the game, how? By having good macro options.

Again in the case of taxes, having the option to select the taxes of individual citizen classes on individual provinces is neat, but for the people that don't like that you can always have the global taxes for a quick change empire wise, and even a third option in the form of auto-management, that keeps the taxes as high as is possible without making the population angry.

[zg0301zg]

I just hope and pray they dont implement too much things on which you will lose time and that basicly later on dont have any effect except that you have to put a time into it, and that in the end the whole gameplay and such have ridicoulous solutions...

example, to be able to train your generals, educate them, forging family pacts , training your troops, choosing type of production, viewing your city and on the far end, that you still have retarded dialougs via diplomat, incometent allies, or enemies and such....

[akkakk]

what i find rather hilarious is that CA talked about streamlining the campaign in Empire through to Shogun 2, even though they are turn based games, which have the inherent bonus of letting the player take as long as they want.


i have lost count of the number of times i've spent 30-60 minutes just looking over my empire, micromanaging things even though i didnt need to and 99% of what i did was not necessary at all.

In empire-Shogun 2, it just felt...empty.

Med 2 and Rome 1 i have played thousands of times, with and without mods.

Shogun got 40 hours out of me (roughly half way through the campaign) before i got fed up with it (i'd have liked to have gone back and played more but i upgraded my computer and got an AMD FX processor, and CA is yet to enable Shogun 2 to play on it (i have tried all 'solutions' and none worked)).

Played Empire for roughly 200 hours and Napoleon for 80-100. Thats nothing compared to well over 1000 Hours on Rome and over 1000 hours on Med 2.

[Evalation]

so youll no longer be able to command individual units on the battlefield? That was the fun part in rome 1 and medieval 2