Micromanagers Anonymous - First Meeting

What you can do to make battles faster is to pick only one ship to control manually as its Captain. Try to play along in real time without stops - that will cut down your combat time greatly.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

I also micromanage, trying for nigh-optimal planet builds, ship movements, and tactical combats every turn. This goes fairly smoothly for about 50-60 turns, but around then my boarding ships steal the other two colony tech types, and the colonization/research part of my turn goes through the roof -- easily 1 hour per turn just to assign the build queues. I might play the first 30-40 turns in 5 hours total, but I'm now on turn 80, and each turn takes about 2 hours. Every game goes like this. I've started 1 game each from every Balance build back to 1.05, and I haven't finished any of them. (Come to think of it, I might not bother to resume this game, either.)

SEV needs a Gantt chart view, where you can see multiple planets' entire build queues with one sweep of your gaze. (Yes, I realize that leads down the path of the Embedded Spreadsheet. I think it'd be an infinitely more playable UI.) The other awful part of SEV's interface is that some info and commands are disjoint: you cannot issue the command exactly where you see the data. (Example: sometimes you can best determine a planet's ideal colony type from the Queues window, but you cannot issue that order from there, nor jump directly to the planet. So what should be a quick operation, e.g. right-click + type, is instead 4-5 mouse operations, 2-3 complete screen repaints, and you lose your place in the Queues list.)

When you find yourself making repeated 'wild weasel' runs (you know, flying S-curves at the edge of the enemy planet's CSM range so that your one ship with no shields left can still ding it for one beam salvo every 10 seconds, just because you don't want to End Turn and wait for your fleet to catch up while this ship still has movement points left), it's time to go jog two miles or something. Wish I had a big dog that I could chase around.

So far, my ultimate solution has been to just stop playing. I'm not interested in dumbing down my style as a way of handicapping myself to the AI's level. Better to just save up the time for the next 4X.
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Eric / Gilmoy

Why don't you just play on a very small map. THen you will have much less to micromanage.

This is merely a question of how you define 'efficient' and 'waste'. So far, you have prioritised min/max'ing on gains/losses with no regard for time. Try to min/max on time/progress instead.

It's something I've had to do several months ago. Learning to play with absolutely no Tactical Combat (you can't use it when in multiplayer anyway) meant thinking of how to get the dumb Strategies and Formations to work for you.

Indeed, writing my own custom formations had the best yield for me - most of the time you'd be busy micromanaging so that all your ships are in a good position to shoot from. Formations can force your ships to virtually stack on top of each other, making them far more effective than any real micromanagement can achieve.

Also, because the game calculates ranges in 2D yet seekers/projectiles have to travel in 3D, it suddenly means Beam weapons with insta-travel make seekers rather unattractive (you try seeing a seeker have to travel an extra 50 range all while being insta-shot by PD) but we're getting off-topic here...

Around mid-game (turn 50~100 maybe) I no longer bother with trying to get all my planets to micromanage construction. I have entire fleets of space yard ships, tagged in their name field (e.g. "[A] Builder I 0003", that run around and mass-produce ships where they are needed. Indeed, I cannot afford (resource issues) to have all my planets constructing something all the time because I have that many construction ships/bases (it takes 2 turns to produce a stripped down base space yard from a space yard ship in BM at high level - 15 ships result in 45 construction yards after 4 turns).

Taking ship losses? Is fine because the next batch is right behind you, ready to be destroyed in a dumb but effective "stacked rush" attack - the fleet only needs to survive maybe 3~6 turns and replacements are ready (actually, do EXP bonuses actually work these days? They didn't a year ago and I don't recall seeing any updates on this). With an appropriate strategy, ships individually start retreating after taking some damage, so repair ships keep them alive for the horde later.

Having said all this, it still takes me an hour to get a turn churned out - is a consequence of playing a Team AI game where I've got 3 frontiers of war at once. Well, it's a 2 player comp-stomp so I can only get 1 turn done per day given my partner's in a very different timezone.

Perhaps playing Simultaneous turns would also help ease the micromanagement itch - it's that much harder to coordinate everything so you're forced to make compromises.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

"Height" is not supposed to count in distance calculations, at least according to MM.

Experience bonuses have been working for almost the last year.

Space Empires Depot | SE:V Balance Mod

My name is Vince and I'm a micromanager.

"Hi, Vince!"

I have been micromanaging every aspect of every game I ever played since I was 5 years old. I've even micromanaged my way through entire games of MOO3, a game known to break hardened micromanagers like a turtle on a rock. In Space Empires, I still control every aspect of every unit, ship, and planet from the beginning. Ministers? I fire them all on turn one. This all would make me too slow to play multiplayer.

I'd say my chances of recovery are nil. Any suggestions to help?

My tip for micro managers wanting to break the micro managing habit.
Play to time constraints. Aim to have a game won in 1 day, it's doable. But you have to be quick (and have a good computer to handle AI turn processing)

Your lord and master (below Foamy) LordHavoc

Hmm, I guess the way to check this would be to have some seeker ships all fire at one target and see if all the seekers hit at the same time or not... Might take a few days to get those circumstances in my 2-player game...

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Ah and EXP works... I'll have to look up how much the EXP bonuses are in BM~ *goes to Data\ folder* Ahhh yesssss now I recall those ancient feelings of "I gotta re-write this EXP table..." that I had over a year ago which died out when EXP wasn't working.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

It doesn't, but I understand what he means.
Because of ships having height, the missile take far longer to travel sometimes than they should.

Thus, 2 ships side by side.
ship 1 fires a missile which auto-hits (because the instant it fires it hits the shields) Should there be no shields, then it's still an auto-hit because the PD doesn't get the chance to shoot the missile.

Ships stacked however:
Ship 1 fires a missile. Because they're stacked, the missile has to travel longer than if side by side, and so the missile gets shot down.

I've even tested this. Repeatedly.

Back to the real topic:

Yes, I too have long turns, though this is mostly from double checking everything.

That said, I do use two of the suggestions here.
I choose 1 or 2 ships to captain, and let the others hold their own.
And I write up personal "Strategies".
EX: Small, Medium, and Large versions of the existing strategies (each re-set to shoot at Drones, seekers on us, seekers on other, fighters, and then ships)
A few special strategies (generally, like a normal strategy, but set to not auto-launch fighters, etc)
two Fighter strategies. One for regular fighters (Allso called Interceptors) and another for Bombers. Accordingly targeted and ranged.
And so does combat go by in minutes, even with only running at quarter speed, because my ships are no-longer dumb as a box of rocks.
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I'll make one later.

I have the same problem (if you can call it a problem. I call it an intrinsic advantage). It's called Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

It actually affects my empire style. I don't go into special racial tech much. I prefer industrialist and enhanced ship yard rates. You can talk of special ships with advantages, I always go for a rigidly maintained industrial and research system and outnumber the enemy.

Ha ha. outnumbering is good.
as for cutting off combat time. play simultaneous all the time. even single player. you don't have the option to play combats you can watch them though. which is pretty fun. Setting strategies becomes pretty important. With the more recent patches you can actually set TF and Fleets to do exactly what you want them too... generally... without any input. Kind of like picking a General and saying.. hey you. go fight these guys and then wait for him to report back. Sometimes he doesn't come back.... oops?
I also prefer a rigid empire. Every system is set up the same... Every planet a preplanned set of buildings. and ships. i use frigates and a hell of alot of em. sheer numbers. course it slows the game down pretty bad...... but playing on pbw it ends up not even mattering. Woot.

PBW games typically have turn deadlines of 2-3 days. I've even seen games run at only 1 turn/week, but it's hard to get players willing to take that slow a pace.

capnq
PBW admin

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"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

Capnq, that kind of pace is only for hardcore masochists like us Play By Committee people. Heh.

WTB PBC for SEV

In the meantime, I have some questions I bet you micromanagers have found answers for.

1) There are some custom reports I have designed that I find immensely valuable for organizing and executing my turns in a time efficient fashion. However, I get annoyed recreating those reports every game - is there a way to save those reports so they are part of my empire, or part of my default game setup?

2) Highly related - I haven't really dug into custom ship/fleet strategies and formations yet, but if I had them setup and working as I wanted, I know I'd really be annoyed if I had to recreate them every game - can those custom strategies and formations be saved into your empire file and/or game setup?

3) How do construction queue templates work? I'm looking for some pretty detailed instruction. I found the button in the interface to create these things, but I've been unable to figure out how to add items to one, or how to save one successfully, or how to populate a planets construction queue from a template.

For me at least, all of these come under the heading of micro managing for time efficiency; something I find myself doing more and more of when I see my putting 30+ minutes into a turn with no combat operations. I'd like to be able to dip into the game for an hour here and there and feel like I've accomplished something, but when that means 1 turn.

I like the idea of playing my single player games in Simultaneous mode; I think my current game is about to get flushed, much as I'm enjoying how its going, and a new game is about to start with Simultaneous enabled.

http://home.spaceempires.net/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&p=28947

-edit- doh, Bahzeel, I just noticed you had already replied in that thread, lol, oh well

OCD is VERY different from micromanagment.

Your lord and master (below Foamy) LordHavoc

#1: I have yet to find a way.

#2: I have not heard of a method like you describe, but there is a DEfault Strategies file that you can alter to give all emopires the same set of strategies. Just add in the strategies you want, the AI is too stupid to use them anyway.

#3: I've been wondering the same thing.
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I'll make one later.

#1 they get saved with your empire, so start a game, design your layouts, save your empire,
quit the game, edit your empire to 0 starting techs ( you get at least your colonisation tech, which will result in your empire having more then zero tech points )

#2 dunno, I have not used them yet, but try the above, and tell me if it works too

#3 fill a construction queue, save it under a name, use it on another planet,
the game is pretty stupid about the number and order of facilities, if you fill a planet with less facility space then the planet you filled your queue on you will get the not enough space error message.
so as personal advice put the single facilities first ( space yard, computers .. ) and the mass facilities to fill up ( research facil, mining facil )

Remember : Pillage! then burn.
- Cpt. Kaff Tagon

I have been thinking of giving it a shot someday soon. How long do the typical games normally last?

#2 At least for custom formations, you add them to the data files directly - bastardly to write them (though there is a neat Python program that does it for you now) but after doing it once, you don't ever need to do them again - just copy/paste your Formations_TaskForces.txt to new versions of mods.

Advice: keep a backup of your Formations_TaskForces.txt so it doesn't get lost if over-written when a new SE V patch comes out.

I think numerous 1v1 games in small maps on PBW take several weeks to a couple months to complete. Seek more data from other people.

---Sig---
Playing Touhou games (Go to this Wiki if interested. No, nobody else is that good/insane as that replay). No rush for SE

I'm only in one PBW game right now; it started at the end of October with six players, and is now up to turn 86. I think the longest PBW game I've ever played ran about two years.

I get very frustrated with the changes to the way saved construction lists work in SEV. Selecting a saved list clears whatever is currently in the queue, rather than appending it to the end the way SEIV did. I haven't figured out how to delete an obsolete list, and trying to overwrite an old list with a revised version doesn't seem to work.

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"Good morning, Pooh Bear," said Eeyore gloomily. "If it /is/ a good morning," he said. "Which I doubt," said he.

Sounds like the ez-mode approach to formations and strategies is skip formations (use what is provided) and design my own named strategies, and then add them to the Default_Strategies file. (I presume for the moment that this will be obvious to me when I dig into it )

In a multiplayer game, does that Default_Strategies file need to be provided to the other players or uploaded to the server to be used?

Thanks!

Thanks for the PBW advice. I think I may jump in soon (I have a family emergency and an election to manage right now ).