Could we add a toggle to auto-queue villagers when a town center goes idle?
Before you suspect that I’m trolling, hear me out.
Auto-reseeding of farms/fish-traps has been well received and appreciated by the community. Wood remains available until it is needed, and fewer farms go idle. Experts can still choose to not opt-in, which allows them to micro their economy.
Auto-scouting, while initially controversial, has been helpful to beginners. Even experts, like Viper, enable auto-scouting situationally.
Permitting beginners to enable auto production of villagers will help them focus on aggression, planning, strategy, scouting, and perhaps focusing on preventing that villager from getting killed the boar (yet again). This also keeps their food available for impromptu military production, should a sudden raid appear. In the dark age, experts will still micro their six villagers to drop off food sooner, but beginners eventually get the next villager queued automatically when the sheep is exhausted – without having to fixate on it.
I believe this would make the game more fun as people could watch and participate more in the battles without falling behind in villager production.
I welcome your pitchforks and old-man comments (“back in my day, we learned to group our town centers and use hot keys to keep up production, and that’s the way we liked it!”)
I just wish for an optional idle TC icon/sound like for villagers or some mod alerting you with an exclamation mark like there is one for villagers. I got just, “look at the top left constantly.”
It definitely would make it beginner friendly/less stressful but there’s way too much backlash for it to ever happen.
Auto-queue Vills in game with limited population will simply drain eco, because sometimes you want save food for upgrades or for military. It will also fast pop-cap player living him with massive unbalanced Eco and with no military and no space for it.
Unlike farms, what you need have farmers and build farms and auto-reseed just help them going, and unlike aut-scout wich can be usefull after player manual scout everything, this auto-play will make more harm than good.
I don’t see anything wrong with the idea, but I wouldn’t compare it with auto-reseeding and auto-scouting.
The reason is that there is already a mean to keep up villager production very fast without going back to your base. Use key “Select all town centers” and spam the create villager hotkey a few times (Q by default).
There you go, you just made all of your TCs active in a split second while still keeping eye on your army screen for micro.
On the other hand, re-seeding manually every single farm sucks, you have to go back to the base. And queuing farms in the mill as was possible before isn’t really a good option. That’s why auto-reseed was actually needed, kind of, while auto villager isn’t really needed, in my opinion.
I wouldn’t be shocked if there was such a button though.
Real Time Strategy games. Easy to play, hard to master. You have a limited time (limited as humans, actions per minut), you have to choose what is more urgent, what can win you the game; if you have to sacrifice a villager production because you see you need to micro a battle, kill army and snowball, yeah, auto scouting and auto reseed is a thing, I dont think unit production (all) should be touched, over simplifiying too much, so no thanks.
I mostly used auto farm until now but i really need to stop using it because if you are trying to follow build orders tightly it can really mess up timings. if you are just playing freestyle on low elo it can help though.
I agree. It really is not too bad of a habit to get used to. Using control groups and hotkeys, even if it is just for that shouldn’t be too much to ask for in comp RTS
My view is this would make the game too easy, and reduce performance differentiation for the early game. Most people could probably complete the Early Economy Art of War challenge in bang on 7:30 with auto villager creation, as that is the main source of the time extending beyond that. Yes it’s easy to hit the TC hotkey then Q, but that changes what is selected to the TC, so if you’re luring a boar, you now have to switch back to that villager, and the time it takes you might mean they take a hit from the boar, and that might make you lose the villager with the final hit on the way back. Being able to rapidly switch back and forth at crucial moments like that is what separates players at the moment. Yes, there would be other opportunities for differentiation later on, but I think it would let most people pull off a nigh on perfect rehearsed build order, right up to e.g. fast castle or fast imp.
I think most high level players keep it off in the early game, until the build order is done and until you’ve no more risk of being wood-deprived for important buildings. It seems most put it on once they reach mid-late game though, when wood isn’t really an issue anymore and you have like 25+ farms, sometimes up to 60-70 :D. Manually re-seeding all those in imp while managing big fights everywhere, raids, etc… is kinda tedious and not particularly interesting in terms of gameplay. So overall, I think that functionnality is very welcome.
Sure. How about auto upgrade in queue asap you get the Ressource. Auto building in queue or auto military production.
Ah we have machine learning. How about macro everything for a specific build order for dark and feudal age? Then you can fully concentrate to scout your enemy?
Beginners have the option of using Lithuanians, which allows the TC queue to contain 3 more villagers than normal, due to the 150 extra food at the start. If you think about it, if you’d otherwise have 25 seconds of TC idle time by the time you reach Feudal, you’re a villager up, and that 150 food bonus turns into the resources that one extra villager will collect throughout the entire game.
To answer your question very quick: No, there should not be an auto-queue for villagers. If you want to get better at this game just keep playing and improving. Functions like this won’t help you (or anyone else) to get better. Of course it would be easier then, but does it really help in the end? The only thing which would really get damaged/moved closer together by that is the narrow ridge between “noob” and “pro”.
Oh, by the way: if we are talking about singleplayer-mode --> go for it, I don’t care, but not in competetive AoE.
I see where you’re coming from but I don’t like it. It’s something I sometimes struggle with too but I think when to focus on eco (mental time or resources) and when to focus on military is a real decision making part of the game. Reseeding farms was something you’d do anyways and pre-buying them is a wastle of resources and a haste. Getting rid of it was good. Auto vil production would eat into tactical decision making. I like the eco and military balance of aoe2.
But if that change was made I could get used to it and I wouldn’t complain, I just think that making too many things auto might not be good, especially with control grouping and multi-que. But honestly, not a bad idea. Maybe idle TC alert like ideal vil would be a softer/better change
I’d prefer the option to click on anything and queue it even If I have no resources, to start as soon as i do. Be it villagers, or castle upgrades as you upgrade to Castle and so on.
If you’re new to the game and watch some pro streaming, is heavily annoying the button spam for 5 seconds waiting for it 1 villager to drop 10 food to light up.
If you do this, there will be alot of peoplego back to voobpy, especially experts. We did this in Age of Mythology and it was never as good or popular. Do. Not. Do. This. The truly best games do not cater to the noobs.
For me, there’s already the right amount of automated stuff at this point. I feel the game has struck a good balance between micro- and macro-management, and more automation would be detrimental in a few ways.
I know auto-scouting was too much for some, but I liked it. Now, auto-villagering or any further automations I can think of, really, is my automation breaking point
I would prefer this infinite queue feature on military buildings only. It will help prevent lategame clickfest when strategically using units should be a bigger priority.
Maintaining the town center producing constantly producing villagers is a fundamental element of learning aoe2. It shouldn’t be automated with auto-queue.
