In AoE2 you had patrol and Guard. Patrol is in, but Guard is not yet. Are they working on it? Because this would be a great QoL improvement. It still allows plenty of micro, but less aggravation. you can guard a treb while commanding ONLY it to attack a castle. Warships could guard trade boats. etc. It cannot be too hard to port this from AoE2?
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Patrol doesn’t work for me. I mean it does work, but I put a couple of warships to patrol the sea trade route. Ok, that seems to work nicely now. However, once an enemy ship got in range of my patrol, they started chasing him. I thought ok chase a little that’s normal, but no they were chasing the enemy ship back to its port, thus making patrol useless. I have not tried patrol with land units yet, but I suspect the same thing will happen. I just want my patrolling units to fight off enemies that come in range, then if they run away, for my patrol units to resume the patrol. Else all that happens is my patrol chasing an enemy across the map, getting killed in the process.
If there was a toggle for guard mode, then I suspect that will automatically fix patrol also. Just put units in guard mode on patrol then. But I think you mean to specifically target another unit to guard. I would actually like that also, then I’d basically play with artillery units and move forward while the army is guarding them against attack.
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I’m gonna assume that the reason for this is that they are trying to incentivize the moment-to-moment gameplay to focus less on constant micro, and more on sending in units to A, B, C and moving on to making new things happen in town or elsewhere.
This also means that battles are less likely to be decided purely on attrition. You’ll be conditioned to sending your forces decently far off, so they won’t accidentally run back in by themselves, meaning you’re slightly less likely to keep trampling your enemy say, a raid. Of course, you can brute force-micro by constantly checking in on your units, but this seems to be the point of this.
Alternatively, it could be out of incompetence. I’d say it is too big of an oversight for that to be the case.
I think my heart says, I’d love guard to be brought back, as it is so, so painful to lose an entire control group because one villager aggro’d them. A lot of things happen the longer a game lasts, and keeping track of units becomes harder. It just makes those bigger games that much more unwieldy to not have a firm grasp of your units.
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I am for AoE3 unit commands and stances to be added into AoE4
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I guess they want us to micro our units at all times. Maybe from a Company of Heroes point of view. But this is on a bigger scale compared to CoH. Yet, and to be fair, many players will say this is how it is meant to be.
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