Phew, this has been a hot topic. I've been trying to stay out of the kitchen, but now that things have cooled off a bit I'd like to talk more about my thoughts, about the playtest and the discussions surrounding it.
Happy isn't great at communicating his ideas, so I sat down with him on Discord and ironed some things out. I think this discussion is too one way or another. There are some good things about the stance system, and some bad, and we should talk about those aspects separately.
Right at the start I want to clear up this "stop micro" business. Stop micro will work regardless of the stance you're in. It was useful in the release, and it will be useful when this playtest is merged as well. There are two uses for stop micro, which have to do with targeting. If a tank goes in for crushes, you'll want your rocket infantry to retarget to the closet enemy, which would be the tank, rather than wasting shots on infantry. If an aircraft goes for an attack, there's an attack priority on aircraft, so rockets will retarget to the aircraft. This behavior will not be changed by the playtest at all so I don't know why it's part of the discussion.
Now, Aggressive Stance. Attaching the old behavior to aggressive stance is a great idea to keep old players happy who don't want to adapt. However, and I believe this is the core issue Happy has and I agree, units should not chase in aggressive stance. There is no advantage to using aggressive stance. Attacking only the enemies that fire back is an advantage in any situation, and once that is done it is fairly easy to then remove the enemy infrastructure. It's a matter of convenience, and players should not be additionally punished for using the less optimal stance. There is also no advantage to units chasing. I have never seen anyone use an aggressive stance in any RTS, and most professional players go a step further and change their stances to hold position. Your armies will always be less effective chasing unless you have an APM of 5.
Now, the actual issue I thought we would be discussing which we've been dancing around but not actually talking about is what the default stance should be. Defense stance gives you an advantage. If the default stance is aggressive and you're new, it's unlikely you'll be practicing with defense stance, which increases the barrier of entry to the competitive scene. There's also the problem of how tedious it will be to switch stances. If defensive stance gives you an advantage, you have to make sure every one of your units has the stance. However, on the other hand, if we make defense stance the default there's going to be a lot of confused casual players, and more importantly it makes the game more difficult for them (While a competitive player is perfectly ok expending some APM to destroy enemy infrastructure, this makes the game less "casual").
I think being able to choose the stance for each production tab is a fine solution to part of the problem, but we still have to decide which is default. As long as the UI for it is good I'm leaning on defense, since ultimately it resembles the original game play.
Now that that's out of the way, I want to talk about two things that were changed that haven't been talked about.
1. Civilian Vision Change
You may be unaware, but there's been a meta developing recently involving using the civilians you get from selling the 2nd refinery to scout. You force fire them and get them into panic mode, which makes them really fast scouts. Now, personally I don't like this meta because it looks dumb, and this change will make it a lot more popular.
2. Camo pillbox cost reduction
Given the ghost bug with Camos I disagree with this change. You can't target camo ghosts with artillery which means I expect once people catch on, at this price, people will start making only camo pillboxes. You grab camos for the damage output and stealth potential anyway, not their HP values.
And finally, a suggestion. To help bridge this whole "disconnect" issue I believe pchote should be making these playtest discussion threads. This gives a nod to the players that, hey, the devs will be looking at this thread, and it gives the devs an opportunity to hone in their focus on the forums.
Phew, that was a lot. For anyone who actually read the whole thing, thanks!