Additional ideas for quality of life improvements

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Let me just say I really liked the QoL improvement regarding the new alt click mechanic, which solved two great issues: Moving/attacking behind buildings and maneuvering onagers around the map without attacking trees. Great job from the devs. I have some more ideas for QoL improvements, although some of them might be a double edged blade and could be a toggle option:

  1. However, this does not yet solve the problem of selecting buildings behind buildings. So I would still suggest to reduce the hitbox of buildings to only the size of the foundation. This would make it much easier to select for example palisades behind a castle/stable etc. to delete them.

  2. Trebuchets should pack with move command. They pack and unpack with an attack command. Why not the same with a move command?

  3. Double clicking a villager should not select all villagers on the current FoV. I think there is literally never a situation where you actually would want to do that and one misclick like this can â– â– â– â–  up your eco more than an enemy raid. This could be a toggle option in the menu, in case anyone wants to actually keep this mechanic. Alternatively one could reduce the size of that double click to a certain range. I.e. 5 tiles in each direction around the selected villager, or the center 10x10 square of the screen. It would be perfect if you could make the size of this square user adjustable.

  4. I often have the problem, that when I am raided, and want to garrison my villagers in the TC i also select any spearmen, or archers I have in the vicinity to garrison them, and then in case I notice need to painstakingly click the little icons between all the villagers to ungarrison them again.
    This could be either solved by suggestion 3, so I can double click instead of drag select my villagers in a more meaningful way, or it could be solved by being able to ungarrison units with a movement command. I.e. if I have my spearmen on control group 1, I can select them and if I give them a movement command they will ungarrison. This would also very much streamline the use of infantry inside of rams.

  5. Clickable production queue. The multiqueue is great, but sometimes you queue a technology, or a militia by mistake and then cannot find the production building to cancel it. This could be solved by making the production queue in the top left corner clickable. You see the portrait of the militia, you click on it, and it selects the barracks it is trained in. Alternatively you could just see the full production queue in the normal window of the selected buildings, even when you have multiple ones selected.

4 Likes
2

1-3 are great - especially 3. It is sooo annoying to accidently double click your villagers and do more damage to your eco than a normal raid could ever do.

Not sure about 4. Seems a bit too situational, as you would need to have control grouped the units before…I think there are more important things.

5 is already a thing as far as I know (or I didnt understand what you mean). You can click a tech in the global que and select the building it is qued in.

3

Good to know, I thought about testing this again before posting, but then I forgot about it.

Yeah, 4 would be situational, sure there are definitely more important things to do, but I think it actually happens quite frequently, that either by accident, or by choice you garrison multiple unit types in a building, and only ungarrisoning a specific subset can be quite a pain. This is the easiest solution I could come up with, and I think would be really nice for infantry in rams too. Alternatively a “ungarrison all military units” hotkey would be an option, too.

4

  1. From the last patch notes, “Holding ALT and right-clicking with a selected unit will prioritize attacks on enemy units. ALT + right-clicking a building or resource will result in a move command instead of another action” <— I still did not have enough time to properly test this.

  2. They do! just click a little bit further, i believe this was tweeked to prevent unwanted pack move when target was out of range by just some tiles.

  3. Use selection boxes modifiers (ALT, CTRL) to select only villlagers or only military. Or maybe change easy drag military on?

Dudeeee… play more 11

5
  1. Is what ive said as well. Its a great feature and as i said works well. It does not solve the problem of buildings being blocked by other buildings
6

Not really a qol feature, but I’m missing a hotkey option that was present in the UP version of the game: Gate rotation taking precedence over villager build hotkeys. Right now it is impossible for me to rotate gates with mousewheel.

2 Likes
7
  1. Would indirectly fix a very annoying problem with trebuchets not auto attacking units.
8

For #3, as SorcerousBoat7 said, ALT or CTRL modifiers should help you a lot there.

I think it is also needed, though, to be able to SHIFT, CTRL, or ALT+double-click on an idle villager to select all idles in the vicinity like I want to do 9 times out of 10 when I double-click an idle villager, which would also avoid the situation you mention.

I almost never want to grab working villagers when I double-click an idle villager.

If I want to grab every single villager on the screen (idles AND working ones), I’d just drag-select them all.

SHIFT-doubleclick adds units to a selected group, so SHIFT probably can’t be used. But some modifier would work. I’m not picky on which one, I just wish it were possible.

9

Yeah i did not know about the alg and control select for military and villagers. Im glad i did this post, that information is a real gamechanger.

1 Like