Annoying behaviour of repair villagers

I have not ever seen anyone discuss this or complain about this on the forums but its something that always bugs me and I wonder if others feel the same. You know how when you set a villager or a group of villagers to repair something like a trebuchet in a treb war and they repair it to full health and then stop and if the treb takes another hit you have to then manually command them to repair it again? Why does this happen? I mean I get the literal reason of why it happens, its because vils repair the treb faster than the enemy treb can dish out damage so the vilager assumes his job is finished when the treb returns to full health and then he proceeds to stare at it subsequently get hit and destroyed in front of him if you don’t tell him to fix it again after the hit. But what I mean is why does this HAVE TO be this way?

Even though I get this “logic”, It seems like a very unnecessarily and artificially micro intensive process that takes your attention away from other more important things and I can’t imagine anyone actually liking the way repairing works currently in the context of battles and sieges.

It makes much more sense that a villager assigned to repairing an item continues to repair that item until told to do something else, even if he has already repaired to full health once. I am not sure if its doable but it would be great if the devs could work this feature into the game. I mean auto scouting was added into the game and even though I am not complaining I don’t think anyone was really asking for that feature. I think something like an auto repair function (even if its a feature that can be switched on and off) would be much more appreciated and it would be much more thematically consistant with things like automatic farm reseeds and fish trap reseeds (re-netting?) that have already been introduced into the game.

And if people think that this would just make things like treb wars drag out for way too long, or make it impossible to kill trebs, I think it just adds another element of skill into it, where you are forced to actually kill any repair villagers before being able to take care of the treb.

Interested to know what you all think.

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Hmm, this would create a problem of repairers not becoming idle (being marked as idle is needed for knowing to send them to other tasks) when finishing repairs.

Also it is often preferred, that villager goes and repairs other item after finishing repairing current item (especially in case of walls).

Hmm ok, but I am not convinced that there isn’t an intelligent way of incporporating this to make it work. Firstly, the villagers that are sent into the thick of battle for repair duties are usually either far away from the economy where they won’t be going back to doing anything else for a while, or are needed to stay near what they are repairing anyway so as to repair it again when it becomes damaged as is often the case of trebs. I mean if you send a treb repairing villager away, you’re obviously not going to have enoug time to bring it back in to repair the treb again before that treb goes down. Buildings are a different issue becuase they have more HP so I think this is something that might be only a good idea to apply to repairing siege and maybe ships.

Also there is no reason why vils can’t become “idle” in between the time they stop repairing and when they start repairing again, so if you for some reason do want to send that villager somewhere else you should still be able to.

And eitherway, this can be a feature that can be turned on and off. like auto farm reseeding, so that if you don’t like it you can retain the classic behaviour.

I am not sure what relevance this has. As far as I know villagers already don’t automatically go on to repairing something else when they finish repairing one thing do they? So not sure how this change would impact how villagers move from repairing one thing to another.

Another idea that can be considered a bit more ‘out-of-the-box’ which just occured to me, is that what if the militia line infantry was given the ability to repair siege weapons as well? This would definitely give an interesting role to infantry (like how monks heal units and can also pick up relics, militia line could fight and repair siege) and actually give a reason to build infantry.

Although this is merely wishful thinking on my part, as I doubt anyone is going to go out of their way to create all the different repair animations for all the militia line units lol.

Big no for AUTO repair, if I remember correctly it has been already discussed on this forum. We already have AUTO scout (and auto pack-unpack trebs), please dont simplify the game more.

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I hate when i go to repair a packed treb or ram, it starts driving away from the villagers! And rams start moving away when I try to load it up w/ infantry >:O

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How can you hate auto unpack trebs? They just make using trebs so much smoother? Do u also hate auto gathering after building a drop off building?

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While it would definitely be appreciated, i don’t know if there’s more pressing matters. Now that they’ve fixed the pathing. Maybe fix the performance issues. Then move onto qol like this
? I don’t think it makes such a big issue in most games as much as i would like to see it with

Yea sure by all means fix the more pressing issues first
 I am not somehow saying this should take precedence over all the other stuff
 but I want this to be addressed by devs at some point. It just doesn’t make sense from a logic perspective that someone you sent to repair a siege weapon would just stand and stare at it get destroyed right in front of them just because they fixed it once and it got subsequently attacked again in a short space of time while thinking to himself “oh well, I did my job, its not my fault it got hit again
” It’s the same logic that would make a farmer stare at his expired farm after harvesting it and waiting for an order to reseed.

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This is a good suggestion. We don’t have to call this “auto repair” or compare it to “auto scouting”; we’re just removing the condition that makes villagers stop repairing. We can simply call it “continuous repairing” – once tasked to repair, a villager never stops repairing a building, siege weapon, or ship, even if it’s at full health. During a repair process, if the building is not at full health, then the repair costs resources and the building slowly regains HP; otherwise, if the building is at full health, the repair simply does not drain any resources or change the HP. All we’re doing is removing the requirement that a villager stops repairing when a building reaches full health.

This isn’t like auto farm reseeding or auto scout, because in order for those actions to continue, new commands are continuously issued (build farm, or move). For this feature, we’re simply removing a condition (full building health) that stops an existing command (repairing).

We can even make this a feature that is enabled or disabled for each circumstance – ctrl+left-click after hitting repair (or ctrl+right-click a damaged building) in order to use the old behavior, and normal left click (or normal right click) for the new behavior. This is similar to the villager force-drop change – you can ctrl+right-click to get the old behavior.

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I don’t think this would be the best way to implement it, because you still might want to find your villagers with the idle villager button after they have finished repairing something in case you don’t want them to repair it again or you want them to do something else. That is why I think it would be more flexible if somehow the villager could go to its idle state when it finishes repairing something back to full HP but RESUME repairing again IF its not tasked to do anything else by the player.

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Hate? wait wait hold your horses, I dont even hate AUTO repair villagers which I was talking about, I just think its not good for the game for the mentioned reason. Dont use your propaganda and demagogia against me mate.

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Ah ok so you don’t hate the idea, you just don’t want it in the game
 gotcha! :thinking:

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Absolutely not.

It would take away a large part of the effort in treb wars which are crucial moments that require continuous attention. We’re not AGAIN gonna reduce the skillcurve.

And yes auto treb pack sucks from a gamedesign perspective. The only unit in the game that needed to be operated in 2 states and they took it away. Very sad.

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That’s a good point. Vills sometimes idle momentarily when in between gathering different sheep, or chopping different trees, and this could apply to repairing too — mark them idle when the building or ship is temporarily full health

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I don’t think it actually takes the skill level down
 AOE is always about where your skill and attention can be better spent. By freeing up your attention from having to baby sit villagers, you can actually use your skills in more rewarding ways, like manuevering your army.

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Vote for an auto repair option just like auto reseed. That’s also how Warcraft 3 does it, one of the few things war3 does better than aoe2.

Saying such things lower the skill curve is BS. If you think so you are basically against all the Quality of Life features the game has introduced, like shift queueing. Not to mention that auto scouting has a negligible impact in the game so far.

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i know right
 the only reason anyone would want manual control over repair functions is due to resource management, if you don’t want to waste wood/gold/stone repairing something for example
 and that is easily addressed by making this function switchable. And in fact this will introduce an additional skill of knowing when to turn this on or off.

I see why you would suggest something like this, but AoE II is an RTS, you have to make decisions under pressure and so you will have to increase your APM if you want to be good. I am not saying all the strategy and complexity of the game is concentrated in repairing trebuchets, but it still is a part of the game, a micro intensive task which requires a certain level of skill to be performed effectively.

So, introducing auto-repair will lower the skill curve, because that will become a micro intensive task that you can simply forget about. I understand auto-farm, since it basically transforms the behaviour of farmers in the like of miners, foragers, etc.(still idk really if it was good for the game?), but unlike gathering resources, which is a task you always have to perform during the game and would seriously hinder gameplay if not a little bit automated (spreading of villagers when a source tile is depleted), repairing something in the middle of a fight is a task to be performed (shock of shocks :joy: jk) during fights, so not always but in moments that are decisive for the course of the game. It’s your ability to micro that concurs to overcome fights, to overcome climatic moments in RTSs. I will repeat that of course all the strategy and complexity of AoE II is not concentrated in repairing trebuchets, but it’s an element of the micro management of the game nonetheless. You should not automate it, but improve to master it.

You already are forced to target villagers which are repairing siege unless you can easily kill siege itself, it wouldn’t add skill, it would just over automate where it’s not needed.

By the way, don’t use other auto-things to justify another auto-thing, look at the auto-thing itself you want to propose. The mere automation of one thing isn’t enough to justifty automating other things which are completely different in terms of context

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Yes this is all true but only part of the picture
 you can add an infinite amounts of “manual tasks” into the game in order to make it artificially more complex and difficult. Why not make all archers reloading their bows a manual task that the player has to perform? Why not make it so that you have to click a drop off site everytime you collect enough resources before the villager drops it off? Why not make it so that castles and towers only shoot things you tell them to shoot rather than the nearest object? Why not make it so you have to reload mangonels manually by another unit before firing it again?

The answer of course is that it makes so ridiculously micro intensive that it completely removes the fun factor, but one could still argue it increases the skill curve because technically if someone could pull all that off they would still be better than someone who couldn’t. So this whole skill curve argument is not really that interesting To me. Repairing is just a boring monotonous task that just takes attention away from other things which you could spend your attention on and which you could improve. There is so much going on in AOE that simply automating some small thingS here and there Is not going to impact gameplay negatively, it just allows us to hone our skills in other ways.

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