Games

Rise of Nations (originally released back in 2003) had/has some interesting ideas to reduce some of the busywork:

• Worker units will automatically try to gather/build nearby after a short (configurable) delay if they're not doing anything.
• Cities (the main worker-producing structure) has a rally point option that's essentially "all nearby empty resource gathering", so you can queue a dozen workers and they'll distribute themselves as they're created.
• Production buildings can be set to loop over their current queue, letting you build continually without intervention as long as you maintain enough resources each time the queue "restocks".
• Units that engage in combat without being given an explicit target will try (with modest success) to aim for nearby units which they counter.

For the most part, none of the implemented options are strictly better than micromanaging them yourself:

• You will always spend less time idling workers if you micromanage them yourself.
• The auto-rally-point doesn't always prioritize the resources that you would if you did it yourself.
• Queueing additional units is slightly less resource-efficient than only building one thing at a time.
• Total DPS is higher if you manually micro effectively.

But the options are there when you need them, which I think is a a nice design. It doesn't completely remove best-in-class players being rewarded for their speed as a player, but does raise the "speed floor", allowing slower players to get more bang for their buck APM-wise, and compete a bit more on the strategy/tactics side of the game instead.

I love this concept; I had a friend from school viscerally defend SC: BW as superior to SC2 because in his words SC2 removed skill because of not having the unit select cap that BW did. That’s just less, as you put it, busywork, and then the player is more free to consider army compositions and positioning rather than drawing tons of rectangles. Removing more busywork in favor of actual strategy would be amazing.

There’s no micro in Chess, just strategy.

Supreme commander was what you describe. You setup your factory to make a unit or a set of units and repeatedly build them until canceled or not enough resources. You could zoom out to view the whole map. it was very much a strategy game and not really tactics or micro.

You might like: https://www.beyondallreason.info/ (gratis and open-source)

Hell, I should be able to upload an economic playbook with hundreds of rules like the one you described, and load it on game start. Then all I have to do is the actual unit movements.

Yep, take some ideas from single player colony management games.

It's astounding how much you can "automate" when fully using the filters and rules options in vanilla Rimworld. Mods increase that exponentially. Granted, different genre, singleplayer, and pausable while you configure things.

I think the challenge is balancing that with the real time events you have to react to, so it doesn't further compress the meta to an even smaller set of "optimal" options.

Why can't you just set a standing order of "make unit x" or "make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them"? That's strategy. Having to tab back to a building and manually queue a couple of units every several seconds is just creating busywork for players

I agree completely. Related: have you considered turn based strategy games?

Because too much of SC2's design catered to the progamer crowd that liked that kind of stuff. They made some things easier from an APM standpoint but intentionally added more things to make the have not APM intense.

They really bet wrong on how popular that approach would be.

That is not true, at least in Age of Empires 2 which is the RTS I'm most familiar. Have a look at the limited viper series to see a good player destroy using only 60 APM. If you make good decisions, you don't need to click as much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7moDQK1Yng&list=PLrFe08sgKX493Gax5DFNkpEbgICGDc0YJ

Why can’t you just set a standing order of “make unit x” or “make unit x while we have gas until we get to 50 of them”?

Because while this will make casuals that will play the game for 3 hours and drop it happy, the typical RTS fans will not enjoy this. There is a trade off between queuing a lot of units and having more resources available for other techs. Having units auto produce without any disadvantage is just kind of boring. Then you are just watching the game, not really playing it.

Maybe you should try turn based strategy, if you don't like real time strategy. In the later, like the name implies, time is the most important resource. You don't need a lot of clicks, but you need to use it wisely.