Add all military units command button, just like in AoE III

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

AoE III has (another…) cool option AoE II unfortunately hasn’t, but should have in my opinion to make the game „as good as it can possibly be“ (cf. BBQTurkman, in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGxarUwdxe0&feature=youtu.be&t=18): a button with which you can order all your military units to go to a certain place on the map. :slight_smile:

This come’s in handy especially in two, potentially three circumstances:

  1. You’ve lost track of some units somewhere on the map. That’s basically lost pop space, just like stuck units in a converted transport ship. There’s too much fighting going on and you’ve forgotten about them (see for instance Hera’s feudal archer with literally 1 HP left he found back in post-imp. 1 hour into the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPJWQmphmes&feature=youtu.be&t=2122). There sure is the idle military hotkey, but you may need to press it dozens of times to eventually get to the unit you didn’t know anymore existed, whereas in AoE III you just need to press once. :wink:

  2. You use more than 60 of the same unit, ie one control group isn’t sufficient anymore: this can happen especially with the Goth spam (there’s a nice meme on reddit right now about it, see https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/ixk9p9/i_always_wondered_whats_in_those_cans/); if you enjoy the hilariously overpowered leitis (with just a minority of two relics, the leitis defeats any paladin or paladin-like heavy unit better than a boyar, as well as three-shotting a halberdier like a cataphract or two-shotting an arbalest like a huskarl, both units « supposed » to be his weaknesses ; seriously, the « mangudaï walks into a bar… » joke is quite outdated by now, especially because of the Berber team bonus – not to mention their UU –, and should imo now be updated to include the leitis instead) ; or if you do a troll strat (like 200 of the same unit, see for instance : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5r4PTMDfpA). Viper for instance said he had to use four control groups to control his 200 kipchaks (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMBH6DFaJw8&feature=youtu.be&t=476)… That’s weird for AoE III player’s ears.

  3. I suppose this command button could be useful in DM as well, although I don’t know for sure, as it isn’t my favourite gamemode and I therefore don’t know it well enough.

6 Likes
2

There’s a “Select All Land Units” hotkey and an equivalent one for water units, however they are limited by the 60 unit selection cap, I’ve replaced my idle military hotkey with the “select all” variation, it works perfectly fine in 95% of cases.

In the cases where I have more than 60 units all over the map I usually toggle military view on the minimap to find them.

2 Likes
3

Yeah I’ve found it very useful as well. Would be even more useful in aoe2 where there’s more units

1 Like
4

If unit selection limit would get increased to large enough size, then player could simply use existing hotkeys for selecting all land/water military units and then do what he wants with them, including deselecting some of them and sending rest to some destination. This is better than blindly ordering all military units to go to certain place, because gives player more overview and control over his units.

It is easier to have them immediately selected though.

3 Likes
5

I don’t disagree, was just sharing my workaround, though it’s been noted in the past that the reason the limit is what it is is because of performance issues related to calculating pathfinding routes for all selected units at once, not sure if that’s gotten better over time.

Regardless, this is probably a bit down on the priority list for devs, since it is very rare to be handling that many units at once in the course of a normal game.

1 Like
6

Same

I really wishe this feature came into AOE2 DE

Actually AOE3’s pathfinding is supremely worse. It would work better on AOE2, if anything