I’ve already made a bit of a rant about this, but some units are incredibly hard to see or select when they’re grouped together. The amount of visual clutter makes quick micro unnecessarily difficult, especially in high-APM situations.
What I’m talking about isn’t removing mechanics — it’s removing visual friction. For example, when units get knocked into the air, the CC effect itself is fine. The problem is that physically lifting models off the ground makes them much harder to click or box-select when everything is clumped together. A mod could preserve the knock-up effect while keeping the unit’s selectable footprint grounded or otherwise visually clearer.
Some possible solutions would be visibility-focused mods or tweaks:
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Slightly increasing the size of key units
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Adding high-contrast outlines or clearer color separation
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Improving how affected units are highlighted so they’re easier to identify and interact with in the middle of chaos
This reminds me a lot of the World of Warcraft addon discussion around raiding, where addons didn’t start as cheats — they started as solutions to poor information delivery:
“Add-ons didn’t start as cheats — they started as solutions to poor information delivery. Players were already doing this manually, and add-ons simply made that information clearer. The real problem began when the game had to be designed around them.”
(WoW addon history discussion — ~0:28 in the video)
What I’m connecting this to:
Just like early WoW addons, this isn’t about automation or lowering difficulty — it’s about improving information clarity so skill expression (micro and decision-making) isn’t buried under visual noise. That’s why I find playing against Japan particularly frustrating: the combination of frequent knock-ups, visual effects, and small, hard-to-distinguish heroes makes fights harder to read than they need to be.
Here’s a more concrete reference from the same video for anyone curious:
“…they figured out using the addon radar to automatically draw lines and show players where to stand, so they barely had to move at all. It turned a very simple spatial mechanic into something trivial because the addon removed the need to interpret or react.”
(~11:02–12:26 in the video)
The point isn’t skill — it’s what happens when the visual/UI layer of a game makes mechanics hard to read, and tools end up “solving” that problem for you. I’m talking about the clarity problem, not automation.
I’d love to either get into modding myself or connect with a mod developer who could explore this kind of solution, because right now the game often feels harder than it needs to be purely due to visual clarity issues — not decision-making or execution.
And this is where the frustration really sets in: why is it acceptable for one faction to repeatedly launch units into the air and flood the screen with effects, while the player on the receiving end gets criticized for “lack of skill”? If roles were reversed and Greek units had the same level of knock-ups and visual disruption, the conversation around skill would look very different.