Attack move/patrol could ignore enemy buildings?

I don’t know if this is a good suggestion or not as I haven’t really thought deeply about how it can be abused, but the amount of time I have an army in the enemy base, and want to send it back to defend an incoming army is quite high. I generally use Q or R to patrol them back, because that way they will fight any army they encounter along the way, then 3-5s later I return to that army only to see it hasn’t moved and is shooting some random houses because the patrolling acquired target on those first.

Maybe Patrol could only trigger with aggressive buildings (Castles, Towers) and army, what do you guys think?

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Personally I don’t understand why you use patrol over attack move (naturally running on the assumption that they don’t have any strange differences like they sometimes do), but I certainly agree with your suggestion.

It could be a difference between patrol and attack move.

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What, you think one should attack buildings and the other shouldn’t? I think that’s unreasonable, I’ll explain why. I didn’t really play during the time before attack move, and thus don’t have the habit of patrol. I then came to the logical conclusion later that patrol is typically inferior to attack move, over large distances in particular, because if you happen to forget the units for whatever reason, they then start walking back to where they started, which is usually counterproductive. Consequently, I personally don’t think it’s a good idea to give the two different functionality over what they already have different.

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Or based on the unit stance. Like it’s supposed to be.

Aggressive hunts units/threatening buildings. Defensive kills everything nearby.

I totally agree with this idea. Ram used to attack enemy building ONLY with attack move. But now they will also attack the Siege unit with attack move.

I think for raiding unit like Hussar Cavalry Archer Eagle Warrior Shrivamsha Rider, their default attack move should only target unit. So as the Arbalester and weak Halberdier which are not designed for destorying building.

For knight line, Militia line and even Trebuchet, their move attack should also target the building

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Yeah, also been very annoying for me, especially when there are units nearby and I task my Halberdiers that are fighting random buildings to attack the actual cavalry units nearby and… they decide to continue whacking the house. But tasking say 30 halberdiers to hit one Paladin that might’ve now been in the middle of the Paladin group will make them all try to hit that one Paladin instead of the one nearby, resulting in several Paladins getting free hits in my Halbs.

no, I would leave patrol as it is and attack enemy building if there are no units in it’s pathing. stop removing micro related stuff, this game already has so much to help players such as hotkeys, multi select, multi queue.

I would very much like to control my unit and if I use patrol I want them to attack any building in the pathing if there are any enemy buildings.

I agree with your argument that all unit including Siege Ram and Trebuchet attack move should attack any unit and buildings. However in DE, developer make Siege ram move attack as auto target both building and siegn unit. And also make Trebuchet right click will auto pack and move. I think the roadmap and direct of the development of this game will become less and less micro. I think we need to stand up and express this view otherwise this game will become another sims city or bistro

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that is a good thing imo. ram should building and siege class by default and I think its purposely designed that way.

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how does expecting a command to do its job “lower the micro potential”? I expect my units to you know, patrol when I ask them to. What’s next, they see a lion patrolling and they spend time attacking it too?

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I think micro should be tasking units to do specific movements in a normal development of a battle… no correcting undesire behaviours… Micro is mangonels dancing, archers splits, etc… No retasking a group of pikes attaking a random house in their path.

Using the logic for rams, units are made mainly to combat other units, so, is logic that attack move just work on units for units.

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This is the opposite of micro, you’re microing your units and they aren’t doing what they’re supposed to do. This thread asks to remove an anti-micro ‘feature’.

Or are you suggesting people should micro each individual unit in the game? Isn’t that extreme for even like, Starcraft/Warcraft standards as you’re dealing with army sizes way over what Warcraft/Starcraft has, no? Besides, in those games if you want to micro a select unit, you can more or less tell from the selected units which is which - good luck here.

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i think you’re putting words in my mouth. if you dont want your units to attack building then dont use patrol, its that simple.

let me guess, next we should implement villagers near a farm/tree to auto gather resources if theres lumber/mill near by. why not?

you got it backwards, but you are free to have your opinion.

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I totally agree with your statement. It is not the first time. Some player want to have the feature in AOE4 to AOE2 like auto farming. And see how much is the aoe4 player base current is.

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there are already so much QoL changes in AOE2DE vs HD and I think we honestly got enough. everything needs to have a balance, having too much of QoL game will just not be the same anymore. micro should be very part of the game and some definitely should not be removed, even if it does make it easier for a lot of players.

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Micro and stopping units walking into buildings are not quite the same in my opinion. Attacking buildings is an obviously stupid move, and having to click to correct it isn’t where micro should be allocated I don’t think. You should be able to attack move units into an enemy base and have them perform the expected behavior, rather than having to individually click and retask each unit, which is both a waste of time, and defeats the purpose of using attack move/patrol in the first place.

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Yes and also attack move just an slightly advantage on the defender since they will not attack their own building. And the attacker need to micro a bit in order to attack the unit

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yep this is how I see it also. There is a difference between micro and unintended behavior. Anyone who argues otherwise is being deliberately obtuse. Imo.

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This is such a dumb argument. A similar analogy would be that the devs shouldn’t fix pathing, because if you don’t want your units to get stuck, you shouldn’t use patrol / attack move either. Go micro them one by one.

Do you see how dumb that sounds? Or do you agree with that?

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