Too Many Clicks

**Tamur** · 09-12-2006, 05:13

hi all,

Late last month there was an article posted on Gamasutra by a fellow named Philip Goetz regarding the UI (user interface) of strategy games. The fellow starts out with a click count for a single turn of Civ 3 in late game, and reports 422 mouse clicks, 352 mouse movements, 290 key presses, 23 wheel scrolls, and 18 screen pans, using all the keyboard shortcuts available.

He then goes on to talk about current problems with strategy game design, saying that the number of units to control and the speed at which clicks are required make the player experience of many current strategy games not one of strategy, but one of mouse movements and clicks. As he says:

Games that require a click per second are arcade games, regardless of their complexity.

Possibly a few people here will agree with this.

Anyway, the main reason I bring this article up here is Philip's statement about halfway through the article:

Providing two user interfaces – one to be used off-line to provide rules of engagement, and another to be used on-line – could reduce the stress of handling individual units.

At first glance, and even at fifth and sixth glance, it seems like this idea of rules of engagement, or previously-trained units, would very nicely fill the tactical gap in the TW battle interface. It would, I believe, also create some tremendous possibilities for the AI.

Rules of engagement would allow a user (or AI) to give high-level commands to a group of units like, "Run around the enemy's left flank after most of their units are engaged, wipe out any cavalry and archers, avoid contact with infantry, and pick off any routers" --- simply because four of five parts in this command were handled by setting rules of engagement before the battle even started.

Philip gets into some formal UI definitions toward the end which may/may not be interesting to folks here. But I would highly recommended it. This article can be found here on Gamasutra.

Happy reading!

**sunsmountain** · 09-12-2006, 12:38

For 20 units, I would rather group and click them myself. Go around their flanks, meh, I'll never trust any AI enough for that. For 40 settlements however, I'd love to give more top level commands.

**SpencerH** · 09-12-2006, 13:14

I like this idea very much, especially since I'm not a micromanager at heart (I very much doubt my mouse click numbers for CIV3 approached those cited). The problem is that one hasto micromanage in order to stop each moving unit from doing totally stupid actions/maneuvers ie the AI is rubbish. As it stands now, I wont let the AI command my reinforcements. There is no way I would trust it to perform a flanking maneuver as described (but I would like to).

**Biggus Diccus** · 09-12-2006, 16:13

The developers of Master of Orion 3 tried to implement something like this. It was a total disaster! That game was the worst sequel ever, buried the MOO series afaik.

**Satyr** · 09-12-2006, 19:03

Well, Civ3 wasn't very good so I didn't play it much, but in Civ4 a late game turn has many fewer clicks, etc. than that. According to that study, doing an action per second, a turn would take over 15 minutes without any thinking time added. I can honestly say that most turns take only a couple minutes and some turns are just 'hit the turn button again'.