Auto-queue villagers in idle town centers?

In case you didn’t know, you can use shift to queue 5 units at once. For example, if you select all your stables at once in late game (with the “select all stables” bind, or if you have put them all on one control group), shift+Q will add 5 light cav, so if you hold shift and push Q 5 times, that’s 25 light cav in queue in a split second.

So it actually doesn’t take a lot of time/actions to fill all your military buildings with queued units.
Therefore, I don’t think auto-military units is necessary, because the means to do it relatively easily are already there (same as for villager production).

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and this is a problem? you are happy beating someone purely on the fact that they left their tc idle for periods of a time?

a lot of you guys contradict yourselves, so which is it? it will be easier or you wont get better? if the player has an easier time managing their tc they will of course be better at other things sicne they dotn have to concentrate on that aspect…

and finally… just wanna remind everyone about the auto scout… all the pros rage quit? everyone stopped playing? hows that working out extremists and knee jerkers?

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this, like auto scout, applies to everyone… as much as these knee jerkers complain, it could become like the auto scout where low skill almost always use it, but ultimately everyone uses it at some point… it lowers the entry point to an already starved community, most of these extremists happily forget that RTS is one of the least played genres, even if aoe is one of the most popular in that genre…

so there should definitely be a focus on reducing the entry level while maintaining a similar game

It’s never efficient to stack up resources for 15 units in buildings. If you check the AI behaviour by selecting yourself as AI in standard games you will see that it always trains one or two units at a time saving up the extra resources for other things. Infinite Farm Queue also has this effect. But if you want to efficiently train units saving yourself from stacking resources then there is no choice than to clickfest which is just annoying.

Right.

If auto-queue becomes a thing, I might straight up stop playing for a while. Managing unit production and hotkeys are a core part of the high level game. I know this and I’ve only been playing since December. Automate that, and you’re throwing out a huge element of skill for most players that takes practice and dedication to master. Micro and production are skills, not grind.

If noobs want it so badly, I hate to say it: but get gud. Literally. Practice and learn. It isn’t a “clickfest”, it’s managing both your in-game and mental resources to get done what you have to to win. Everyone else had to do this. Don’t expect hand-holding for everything in this game, it’s a strategy game and it takes time and practice to get good and learn these things.

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You showed your real face. Do you really think you should call others noobs?

Yeah. I’m one of them.

If I can understand it, then it should be fairly simple concept. It’s a skill. A skill I realize is an important part of the game and shouldn’t be changed.

I’m confident I can openly say that the majority agree with this statement after the landslide opinions stated on the other auto-villager thread that’s been around for a lot longer than this one.

Speed is important, being able to multitask and task switch. Keep a mental cadence going. This is a part of the game. I don’t particularly like auto scout either, but I use it occasionally. It’s acceptable imo. But this, it takes it a step further into constant resource management and it just messes with the flow of the game. I don’t like that one bit.

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Hmm I do respect your opinion.

I just think that in late-game when there are so many other things to manage since there are already so many units, it is just one of the unnecessary clickfest elements of the game which can be fixed with infinite queue… Pro players would never use infinite queue since recruiting mixed types of units is better and infinite queue won’t help and may waste resources if accidentally forgotten to be turned off. The gap between a practiced player and a player using this feature mindlessly won’t be closed. In my opinion there is no harm in having only military buildings with this option.

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I don’t think it would be that useful. Reseeding is always necessary and auto-scouting won’t hurt your economy. But auto villager production can. Especially for new player who might forget to turn it off when they should conserve with food for various other gains. Or end up in situation where they might need to kill new villagers to make population room. Yes, economy needs a lot of villagers, but there is potential waste of food that didn’t need to get spent or didn’t pay back for itself.

But other than that, I am not completely against this option. I just don’t think it would work as universally well as others it is compared to.

If somebody think he is not enough good at the game, he may play Single- player games and put the Computer( AI ) to play in stead of him/ her versus other computers.

But at Multiplayer, we measure your skills at the game. We do NOT measure the skills of different computers ( computer bots). So, it is always INTERESTING to see how a player DELETE his important units because of a mistake.

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What I think could be interesting is if the game allowed more widespread queuing of units or actions that cannot be implemented at the time. It already does this when you are housed. You can still add units to production queues, even though they cannot be produced at the time of adding them, and it automatically starts producing them once housing capacity is present. This feature is out of necessity, of course, as you might lose housing capacity during production. But it could be implemented in a more general sense, for example, a lumber camp could allow you to queue double bit axe while advancing to Feudal, and it starts researching when you get there. Or if you are building a University, it could allow you to queue Ballistics while the building is still being built, and it starts researching as soon as the building is finished. Being able to queue villagers at a TC when you don’t have enough food would then just be a logical part of this coherent overall general principle of being able to queue things in advance of them being able to be executed. You would also be able to e.g. queue archers at an archery range when you don’t have enough wood or gold. The game could show you as having a negative resource value when you are in this state. The ability to do this couldn’t be used without consequence, as you’d have an ambiguity of what to produce when a resource becomes available. If you had both villagers and scout cavalry queued, then I guess villagers would take priority , as you’d reach 50 food before 80 food. The player would generally be better off taking full control of the process to avoid unexpected choices being made on their behalf like this. And if a building were destroyed with things in the queue, you should lose all the resources, so people who make use of the feature would be worse off in that scenario than people who are more skilled and can queue things “just in time”. So if someone wanted to queue up 30 villagers right at the start of the game, they could do, but if a Persian opponent drops a TC next to their TC and destroys their TC, they lose 1500 food. Ouch. This would, of course, make it a different game, but I think it would at least represent a coherent overall concept.

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See, THIS sounds far more reasonable. It’s a conscious decision, that way.

Automation tools, no. I’ll never go for that. Giving the player more direct control over the game? Yes, that’s okay with me. Still iffy in some scenarios…but I far prefer it to straight up automation. It also places the onus on the player to fix it - queue up 50 archers then realize you have to tech switch? The clicking/pressing to fix that is on you.

I don’t think it’s necessary by any means, but I wouldn’t fight this the same way as an auto production switch.

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This doesn’t make any sense. When building with normally queued units gets destroyed, then spent resources are refunded. I see no reason to add exception (and confusion) for pre-queued units to not refund resources (reduce negative resource count) on building destruction.

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This is not even a get good problem, managing your economy and military at the same time is the basic foundation of competitive RTS games.

If someone can do more efficient actions than you in real time, you will likely lose unless they have a weak implemented strategy. It is not an unnecessary click fest but the core of the game whereby there is tension between all actions.
That is what makes the game so beautiful.

This is probably the main reason why RTS games are niche these days and league of legends (one character clicking) is one of the most popular games for example.

Whether it is understood or not, these requests will only serve to reduce the skill ceiling of the game, the bedrock of the genre.

Efforts have already been made to make the game more newbie friendly with art of war scenarios. Competitive RTS are niche because of complexity and if you wish for these functions then you are placing yourself on the casual end of the scale whether admitting it or not.

Nothing wrong with that but, if so, you are playing the wrong game. Turn based games etc exist go play them.

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Do i really need to explain why this is a bad idea?

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I beg to differ.
Stacking 15 Light cav on one stable is not optimal, indeed.
However, if you have 15 stables, that’s 1 Light cav per stable. If you have 7 stables, that’s 2 Light cav per stable. So it is indeed optimal. And it doesn’t need a “click fest” to be achieved. Just 3 clicks using the Shift+Q I mentioned above. Actually 4 clicks, since you have to push “select all stables” before the 3 x Q. I think you can manage 4 clicks without needing auto-military?

On the other hand, try re-seeding 15 farms manually and see how many clicks that is.

That’s why auto-reseed is actually interesting and needed, while auto-military isn’t needed, since it’s doable with minimal actions. You just have to learn to do it properly and practice it until mastered. Doesn’t take long!

And by the way, selecting all your stables and going a few Shift+Q will queue as many Light cav as you have ressources, so you get the optimal number of light cav for the food you currently have. You don’t actually have to wait to have food for 15 light cav to do this.

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I do agree with that general idea. However, it isn’t as black and white as this. Some level of automation can actually be a good thing. It’s just that there are limits that shouldn’t be crossed.

For example, auto-reseed is a tolerable level of automation, with the argument that manually re-seeding farms in mid-late game is VERY tedious, while not being very interesting either.
Auto-queuing villagers and military isn’t a tolerable level of automation, because 1 it’s not that tedious, and 2, as you say, it’s actually an interesting aspect of the strategical macrogestion of a RTS.

We have to strike a balance between automation and manual.

There is actually a lot of automation in AoE that could be not there if we are against automation at all cost, and which would make the game VERY hard to play, not to mention master. If you think the macrogestion of current AoE II is difficult, well you probably have never played Starcraft Broodwar before.

SC BW is even less automated, for example :

  1. workers don’t automatically go from the Town center to the ressource. You have to manually select each worker that comes out and manually put it on ressources. In mid game when you have a lot of town centers (nexus, cc, or hatch), it becomes very tedious.

  2. you can’t select more that one building at a time, so you have to actually select buildings one by one to define rally points and create units. If you need to change the rally point of all your barracks, you have to manually select them one by one and put the new rally point one by one. That’s extremely tedious when you have for example 5 to 10 barracks.

You can see that 1) and 2) are already automated in AoE. If it was the same as SC BW, it would be very tedious and not particularly interesting in terms of gameplay. That’s an example of welcome automation. Even though the game would require more skill in the case of zero automation, that is not necessarily a good thing.
A balance has to be found between automated and manual actions.

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In this case, those are aspects of automation that require manual input. Which is good, IMO! Great points and examples all around, too. I wanted to comment on a few.

The rally points in AoE2 require the input of you creating villagers, and also exactly setting where you want them to go. There’s a unique, specific decision involved in that choice.

The multiple building selection in AoE2 also requires manual input. It just skips the tedium of pressing a bunch of buttons; there’s no automation of any strategic decision-making or any time-management.

Auto scout does not have any of these. It is automatic strategic decision making. I don’t particularly like it, even though I now use it on maps like Arena.

Auto production is now managing your resources for you. It uses your resources automatically, and does so on an ongoing basis without requiring player input. This is an a) time management, b) resource management, and c) army automation feature. To combine all three is a very bad thing, objectively speaking, for an RTS. I do not like it one bit.

Farm reseeding is okay in my mind because it’s a rare occurrence that already tends to break the cadence of the game, so it isn’t really a time management feature; not even remotely on the same level as automated production. Also, turning it on in some cases can actually cause problems for your economy.

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Presumably what you mean by strategic decision making is the choice of where to scout at any given point in time. I’d agree this could be seen as a strategic activity, but auto scouting does it so badly that I’m not sure just how low ELO has to be before it becomes useful. You have to be quite lucky for it to find all your livestock in Arena, and after that, it’s unlikely to be in the right place at the right time. Even in the bottom 10% of players you see manual scouting. But if the scout is just scouting according to a predefined algorithm, then I think it’s valid to see the execution of that algorithm as not being a strategic activity, and only the turning of it on or off as the strategic activity. The game could offer multiple scouting algorithms that the player can choose from, just like it offers multiple formations for groups of military. Choosing one of those algorithms to apply at a particular point in time would be a strategic decision, the execution of it would not be.

The proposal in the OP is, IMO, also not automating strategic decision making, in that the strategic decision would be turning it on, and the execution of that decision is not a strategic activity. I think it would be bad for the game, but not because it would automate strategic decision making, as I don’t think it would be doing that. The game is mostly about being able to micro-manage as fast as possible rather than strategic decision making, so to differentiate between players, it needs to ensure that players cannot perform as many actions as they’d like to, at all stages of the game, and I think requiring manual micro-management of villager production from TCs is a significant element of achieving that in the early game.

I think the main advantage of auto-scout is not to find sheep and boars, but to explore the whole map and find the extra gold mines, stone, and wood lines. Which is extremely tedious to do manually, especially in mid game when you’re doing all other kinds of stuff already.

It’s still way more efficient to do the initial scouting (finding sheep, boars, and scouting your main base area) manually.

A good time to turn auto-scout on is after you’re done exploring your own base and done scouting the opponent’s base. After that you let your scout find all the extra mines on the map which will be useful later in mid-late game.
That’s of course if you don’t need your scout for a rush or to defend against a rush. But I find trying to keep him alive even through a rush, in order to turn him to auto-scout after that, is always worth it, for mid-late game.

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