Unit control dillema

I am working on a map, which I will hopefully post a fuller description of in the future but for now I will give a brief one so you can understand the problem I have.

The map is I guess basically an AoS-type map. There are two opposing bases and you win by "destroying" the other base. It is actually inspired by Onslaught mode in Unreal Tournament where you have to take over power nodes that are linked together. Now I figure the map needs to have regular units in addition to just heroes so that things will be a little more interesting. Having only hero vs hero would make the game pretty simplistic unless you could control multiple heroes. However, I wanted to avoid the typical mindless creep waves that so many games like this have. I figure it is more interesting when you can control all the units. But here comes the dillema, it seems that when you can have an army to control in a game like this you could say it gets too interesting. You never have a moment to relax, no chance to do side-quests - supposing I had some. You never get many units to control but they do require at least as much attention as your hero, which I would like to try to avoid. I had developped a whole elaborate system where you brought reinforcements in to your hero in a drop ship, but I think I may have to just scrap it all and go with the traditional NPC creep waves approach.

What do you guys with game design/playing experience think? Is there a way to be different or are creep waves so popular beause they work?

How bout adding vehicles/ships and such things that you can jump into just like on Unreal Tournament?

Wouldn't that be grand. However that doesn't solve the dillema I speak of. I don't want it to be a total copy of UT Onslaught except with no physics, worse graphics and a top-down view, that would be dumb. I think the Onslaught mode is a good basic game design so I wanted to utilize that idea.

If onslaught is the original idea, then what need to you have for side quests?

One option to allow the players "relaxation" is to have rare reinforcements, making sure the players loose their troops before they get new ones, so they spend some time controling only their hero.

A better possibility would be to make troops AI controled, following the hero around, responding to simple commands, something like what I used in my Era of War map for the Field General hero.

The troops could also have a hero-independant AI, but that's more work, since the computer has to make some decissions a player otherwise would, and has to make good choices, since the course of the game depends on it a lot.

You could also compromise and use regular unit spawning as well as assigning just a few units (2 or 3) to the hero as his personal guard.

Thanks for the suggestions Anitarf. I think I may try a little bit of everything you said. I could have some auto-creeps roaming across the map but also allow the player to call in some specialized reinforcments for a price. I didn't have the patience to play your map by myself long enough to find out what you are talking about. Could you perhaps explain a little more about how you Field General works?

The Field General is one of the 5 command hero classes in my map. All these classes have one ability that works with controling allied troops. What the ability of the Field General does is, it rallies troops in a targeted area to follow the hero; they are simply given a right-click comman targeting the hero, making them follow him and engage the enemy when he does. That way, the hero can pull troops away from the towers when they're in a disatvantage, or call troops from one lane to another. I additionaly added that whenever the player gives a right-click command to the hero onto one of the units following him, that unit stops following and retreats, this was mainly done to allow players to avoid getting stuck by too many units rallied, but can also be used to save units that are close to dying in combat.

One of the other heroes had an ability that could be used to order ranged troops in the vicinity to focus fire on the target, mainly useful for ensuring that siege units were hitting the towers, another hero had the ability to take direct control over individual troops (allied unit targeting charm), and another spellcaster hero had a spell that caused any nearby magic units to cast advanced spells on the target (for example, when targeting a friendly unit, if a priest is nearby, inner fire was cast on that unit).