Micromanagement

"Micromanagement" can best be described as all of the little commands you give your units to cause them to work more efficiently than they would normally work on their own. This is mostly significant in managing your military units, but also comes into play a little on the economic side of things. The game tracks some statistics on how often you click or use hotkeys and computes a Player Speed based on those values. While it's an interesting statistic to track down, don't mistake a high Player Speed for high efficiency in commands. Players who are able to accurately give their armies simple, precise orders will easily win over a player who clicks frantically without knowing exactly what his strategy is.

Micromanagement Preventers

Rise of Nations was designed so that the 'boring' aspects of micromanagement are kept to a minimum and the player can concentrate on managing more interesting things like armies, unit choices, and overlying strategy. Here are a few features that you should be aware of:

Waypointing gather buildings: Probably the most important way to get your economy automated is to set the rally point from your City directly onto a gather building such as a Farm, Woodcutter's Camp, or Mine. When Citizens are created from this City, they will immediately walk to the gather building and begin harvesting resources. Note that you can waypoint multiple gather buildings in a row using Shift-Right-click and Citizens will fill up each gather building in order. Also try out the Rally on Resource Buildings button, which automatically sets a rally point on each of the economic buildings in that City's radius!

Auto-Citizens: In the options menu, you can set up Auto-Citizens, which causes your Citizens to automatically look for jobs to do. By default, this is set to Gather, which means Citizens will seek out empty gather buildings like Farms and automatically get to work at them. As you can imagine, this saves a lot of time tasking each Citizen to get to work.

Resources don't run dry: In other RTS games resources will eventually run dry or perhaps force you to build a new Woodpit closer to the trees every so often. This micromanagement isn't necessary in RON because the resources don't dry up and disappear. Instead, economical advantages are gained over your opponent through territorial control and buildings such as Granaries, which develop more efficient methods of harvesting those resources.

Economy

Queuing buildings: While placing the foundation for a new building, hold Shift to have that Citizen proceed to that building and construct it when the first building(s) are completed. For example, place a Farm normally, then while the Citizen moves to construct it hit the hotkey for another Farm (hit “B” then “F”). Hold shift when you left-click to choose the location for this second Farm and the Citizen will finish those buildings in order.

Hotkeys: While not literally micromanagement, hotkeys are something you can use to issue commands more efficiently. The less time you spend issuing each order to your units, the more time you can spend thinking of what strategies you wish to employ, so learn the hotkeys for common things like Create Citizen (V), Select Library (L), and select Barracks (K) or Stables (S). Using B to access the build menu and then memorizing the hotkey for the building type you wish to make also saves time clicking buttons, since your mouse doesn't have to leave the main screen.

Combat

Basic Micromanagement: At the most basic level of micromanagement, you'll want to have the correct types of units attacking the units they do best against. For example, Joe's army is composed of Heavy Cavalry and Archers and is attacking Steve's army of Pikemen and Light Cavalry. Joe lets his army simply attack-move into Steve's army, but Steve double-clicks a Light Cavalry unit (to select all of the Light Cavalry onscreen) and commands them to circle around and attack the Archers. Joe's Cavalry end up being hurt badly by the Pikemen and his Archers get soundly defeated by the Light Cavalry.

Attack-move: It's a good idea whenever you move your army around to use Attack-Move to move it. This is done by selecting the army, pressing "A", and then clicking the destination for that army. Instead of simply walking past enemy units, your army will attack any enemy unit they encounter along the way. Units moving to waypoints from Barracks automatically use Attack-Move so they won't be easy prey for an enemy force trying to intercept them.

Rotate and Heal: A more advanced form of micromanagement is to rotate out damaged units to heal them back at a Barracks or Stable. This saves you the cost of creating a new unit, since healing/repairing units is entirely free. Simply have your entire army selected during a battle and watch the health bars of your army. Select those units that are 40% or lower health and command them to garrison in a nearby Barracks or Stables to heal up. This works much better when a Barracks or Stables is close by and isn't worth it if you have to travel a long distance just to begin healing. For this reason, many players construct these buildings close to where the fighting is happening (remember you can also raze existing Barracks/Stables that are too far behind the lines of combat, so that you pay less reconstructing new forward Barracks).

Micromanaging Massed ranged units: In Rise of Nations, having multiple ranged units attack a single target results in negative damage penalties. This is to simulate that real life armies would never focus on single enemy soldier. Because of this, you'll want to avoid giving your entire army an attack order against a single target if possible. Attack-move is fairly effective at spreading out your fire and maximizing your damage, but you can go a step further if you want and micromanage each ranged unit to attack a different target. It requires a lot of micromanagement and has limited benefits, but sometimes that extra efficiency is what's necessary to win the game.

Also take into consideration that the more you spread your damage out, the longer each enemy unit will be alive to do damage back to you in return. This means that to some extent it truly is worthwhile to focus fire - and in situations where your Archer-only army finds itself fighting a Knight and a bunch of Pikemen, you'll certainly want to attack that Knight first to get rid of it before it devastates your Archers.

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