Do you think they will make improvements on building farms in game?

@Amphiprion said:
There are infinite farms on Upatch?

It does not. He said he played a mod.

@Raw1812 said:
I just can’t get on board with the religious fervor of the purists who demand all vanilla mechanics :lol:

I get that. And to some extent I agree. But are the mechanics bad or is the implementation bad? Consider this: What makes good micromanagement gameplay so engaging is the idea of obtaining order and effectiveness in the face of potential chaos and inefficiency. And with farms in AoE there is a lot of things that can go wrong:

  • Farms can deplete when you’re busy with something else
  • Farms can deplete when you don’t have enough wood for reseeding
  • Farms can deplete when you need your wood for something else
  • Farms take up space and that can make your town a big mess
  • Farms take up space and there’s no good place they could fit
  • Farms can be ineffective because villagers have to go too far
  • Etc etc

All of this will be gone if you implement infinite farms. But remember that it’s because of all this that having a perfect farm setup, timed to your wood income, in pristine order around your granary, in a way which adds to base defense without interrupting workflow, feels so incredibly good. Because you made order out of chaos. It’s the exact same thing that makes dealing with the famous traffic in Cities Skylines so fun. And what’s so great about this is that, unlike the main game itself, this is not a zero sum game. You’re not winning or loosing at farm gameplay, but you can try every game to make it as good as possible. This means everyone gets to participate and gets to improve. Note that, by comparison, nobody is proud of their farm setup in AoM/AoE3/AoEO, because there’s nothing to care about there. There is no chaos to manage into order, it’s just ‘plop down a building’ and be done with it.

A personal example is my, at the time pretty casual, gf. She wasn’t that into AoE to begin with but during a LAN she became completely obsessed with managing those farms into perfect order and efficiency. She didn’t care about the overall game or winning or loosing, she just focused on managing those farms into perfection at the expense of almost everything else (except managing wood cutters, thats also fun). Now of course she is completely into AoE multiplayer and cavalry rush like the evil barbarian she is - but it all started with those farms. That’s what a hook is.

But I agree with your overall point: farms in aoe1 feel very clunky. This is for two main reasons. The first is that decisions are more annoying to execute than necessary; reseeding many farms is a chore with all that B+F+LMB - particularly if you can’t place the farm where you want it to just because a rogue villager or gazelle is in the way. The second is that they often create chaos that is out of your control, thus removing player agency, for example because villagers insist on running around like idiots and start working on other farms when their own is done, or because of bad path finding in general which makes traversing soldiers around your farms a chore. All of this can be fixed though. And that’s my point. It’s the implementation that is the problem and not the mechanic itself. Let us reseed farms with RMB, let us build farms even if a gazelle grassing there, let villagers sit down nicely and wait if they need a reseed, let path finding in general be much improved so complex building placements don’t create a problem for units, etc etc. It’s all about making it less clunky and more intuitive without removing the potential inefficiency that is so fun to micromanage away.

Yes, casuals need something to do…but imagine Stardew valley if you could never upgrade your tools…you just keep your crummy hoe and crummy watering can from day 1 all the way into year 3. That is my equivalent of keeping RoR farms.

Sure. But imagine Stardew Valley if you never needed to care about plants after planting them, imagine they were infinite plants. No watering. No harvesting. No reseeding and spending money on replacements. It would just add resources to your inventory at every interval and that’s it. You wouldn’t give that game even 20 minutes. That is my equivalent of infinite farms :tongue:

@GepardenKalle said:

Sure. But imagine Stardew Valley if you never needed to care about plants after planting them, imagine they were infinite plants. No watering. No harvesting. No reseeding and spending money on replacements. It would just add resources to your inventory at every interval and that’s it. You wouldn’t give that game even 20 minutes. That is my equivalent of infinite farms :tongue:

Well, you have made some impassioned arguments and I read your post carefully, making a mental tick of each of your points, so I think we will have to agree to disagree because we’ve reached the point where our debate is more philosophical than pragmatic :lol:

I’ve really enjoyed the discussion thus far! And I’m glad we both agree that the villager behavior (running around like idiots as you put it hahaha) is the greatest of the evils we’ve discussed.

I highlighted your comment on Stardew Valley because it is a fine example of reductio ad absurdum and I really enjoy that about this discussion because we have done it a few times :lol:

@Raw1812 said:
Well, you have made some impassioned arguments and I read your post carefully, making a mental tick of each of your points, so I think we will have to agree to disagree because we’ve reached the point where our debate is more philosophical than pragmatic :lol:

I appreciate that! And yes I’ve enjoyed this discussion and our reductio ad absurdums too :smile: To be clear my rant was meant to highlight the importance of farm gameplay and economy micromanagement in general, as it fits into the aoe franchise and it’s broad appeal. I’m not a purist and wouldn’t be unhappy with aoe2 style walkable farms either, which also has a lot of micromanagement value. I would even be open to entirely new takes on farm gameplay - provided they were good ideas (that’s not gonna be relevant to DE though). I’m just very much against removing farm gameplay entirely by implementing infinite farms.

Rebuilding farms was the most annoying thing in vanilla AOE. I am satisfied with AOK-style. However I don’t care about ‘walkability’ of farms. But manual replanting is definitely for masochists