In case people aren’t aware every time you click your vills it stops them for a brief moment. Here’s a little video just showing the effect it can have. I have two groups of 4 villagers building a castle. I spam click one group. You can see that the spammed groups castle is only at ~70% when the untouched group complete theirs.
It’s my opinion that if you’re vills are building a castle and are under attack, they will run away, so you want to click them back to building, but if you do it too much you’ll actually just stop them working.
Processing: 2021-10-17 22-51-28.mov…
Processing: 2021-10-17 22-51-28.mov…
Disclaimer:
This is a direct response to a youtube comment from Vipers latest short: The DauTest Castle Of All Time
I commented that if he hadn’t spam clicked the castle would’ve gone up. Someone replied saying I was wrong. So this video is just my reasoning.
12 Likes
It’s a dramatic difference! Amazing.
This means pretty much as if you were Spanish losing your Builders bonus.
2 Likes
huge eye roll…
now please run the same test while the vils are under attack…
5 Likes
So moderately spam click, not rapid fire speed.
3 Likes
OP isn’t saying this is always bad, just that you shouldn’t do it too much, even under attack, you should try to select the vills that are actually being attacked or just not spam the click and do it slower
4 Likes
no he isnt saying that because he shows a completely “in vacuum scenario”
1 Like
I do actually mean that and I wrote that:
“too much” being the operative words here.
The example shown is mostly because I don’t have the map editor skills to set up ‘lab test conditions’ for building a castle under attack. So I did what I can to emphasis my point. I can give it a go I suppose
1 Like
His mistake was meant to born a meme 
Alright, this was actually fun to do. Seeing as we’re all working on hunches. I set up a simple scenario to have 4 Xbows on No Attack stance until the castle foundation is placed, then they attack. After all the Vills are dead they are removed from the game (to stop them from shooting HP off the castle). If you want more Xbows or vills to see the effects I can try that out, but you’re also more than welcome to do these tests yourself.
I tested 12 times in total, 6 spam clicking 6 moderate clicking. These are my results:
Spam Clicking HP:
608
669
726
671
697
625
Average HP Built: 666
Moderate HP:
811
717
653
665
759
762
Average HP Built 728
I think that’s a reasonable difference, I was thinking of recording and stitching together all the recorded clips but I got bored faffing and stopped after the first two. Note the first two are the best results for me, and to not be accused of bias that is why I ended up doing 12 total. Anyway here are the first two.
Moderate Clicking:
Spam Clicking:
NB There are extra vills and Xbows because I wanted to do the test in just one scenario but for some reason Xbows just wandered off and attacking, must have done something wrong with the triggers. Like I said, I’m not good at map editing.
3 Likes
The first test has already proven that spam-clicking is slower than letting the vils do their stuff on their own. So, it is optimal to tell each vil just once to work on the construction (if we ignore delays that may appear due to strange pathfinding in case the vil is not yet near the construction site). This implies that an attacked vil that runs away should only be ordered once to go back to work, because otherwise you might still be spam-clicking when he already continues to build the construction, which in turns slows him down.
I have the feeling that OP and PlumpDucklin are talking at cross purposes. IMO OP is talking about the theoretical aspect, while PlumpDucklin has concerns about the practical relevance. In practice, you would have to react and select each vil running away and reordering the vil to finish the building. Since we are only human this could introduce delays that might be worse than spam-clicking. So I see, why one would not want to agree to this absolut statement:
Nevertheless, what I take away from this discussion: As compromise one could keep all vils selected and as soon as one vil (or a certain percentage of all working vills) runs away one orders them again to finish the building, even if then the still working vils might be interrupted for a short period of time.
@Leshanni I guess spam-clicking does not only affect working on constructions but also repairing buildings?
Yes absolutely, I would not endorse trying to single target vills that are running away. Have them all selected and click moderately on autopilot or click when you see a vill run is my suggestion.
I think that several things are at play and no two scenarios are identical. Spam click does more damage to the ones still working, so for example if only one vill is being shot then spam clicking is probably worse than Not clicking at all, same with if vills are being targeted and one shorted. Since you’re stopping the unaffected vills from working. I suspect the more vills you have working the worse the spam clicking is.
EDIT: another factor can be the vills walking sway acts a little bit like micro/distraction. If your opponent doesn’t have ballistics or needs to chase then your other vills have more time to work. Whereas if you spam click they are a stationary target getting hit each time.
It’s why I chose to have each vill opposite a Xbow so all the vills we’re being shot, again to try and weight against my own bias.
I believe it’s anything you want them to do, I imagine you’ll gather food from sheep slower if you spam clicked them.
Well I’m sad you have nothing more to say on this subject. I enjoyed testing out the theory more and was interested in what you’d make of it.