When villagers are under the tc (and the walking distance is 0) villagers should drop off their food continuously. This could help lower the skill ceiling, making the dark age and force dropping off food ‘easier’. This will also help put chinese in a better spot for lower levels, without changing chinese at higher levels.
I honestly think this is a great idea, it happens for units like khmer farmers, pole stone miners and others. Force dropping is a lot of effort
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I think if you can’t macro dark age, you shouldn’t bother with AoE. Try getting good instead of “auto everything” in the game.
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I can stand behind this argument when it comes to things that impact decision making and strategy, ie. scouting. But in this particular case I would argue you are just trying to gate-keep newer players. I cannot find another reason why this wouldn’t be a thing.
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Dark Age has also always been a “warm up phase”. You stretch your hands and learn to click a specific vill over another. This stuff helps you later in tower rushes, MAA micro etc.
If you struggle with Dark Age, you struggle with APM in general. The solution is learning to be faster and not making the game easier.
Just to give you some examples of why “force dropping” is there, it’s to potentially stretch your APM should you face a scout war/laming etc. If force dropping, making houses etc. wasn’t there, there would be no potential for skill expression in Dark Age at 1700+ elo where vill rush, laming etc. are possible strats. At that point there would be no difference between 1k and 2k Dark age so you might remove it altogether.
So another auto everything meme here
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Or at least he could play AoE 3 and not have to think about dropoffs xd…
Selecting your villagers to force drop food takes basically no skill, it’s just cumbersome.
If this is your opinion how do you feel about the Pole’s stone miners generating gold? Should that be a thing or should they have to drop of the stone to receive gold instead of “auto” generating it? You don’t have to remember to drop of the stone to get the gold as it’s auto generated and received instantly, that lowers the skill cap for retasking Pole vils, and is about as complex as selecting your only dark age units and clicking the TC and clicking the boar again (i.e., basically none).
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it is 1 extra click that low elo players can’t do (so they get idle TC), mid elo players can sometimes mess up, and high elo players always get right. It creates small advantages such as giving one player 3s idle TC, and the other player 0, which can matter in a Scout vs Scout fight, for example.
probably they couldn’t code a villager transporting 2 resources at once, which is why it’s like that. Regardless less click =/= good, there needs to be a micro burden on most activities, that’s the whole point of a RTS.
Also nice red herring comparing a feudal age activity with a dark age one, if you can’t ##### #ark age, get good stop asking to change the game to please your low APM.
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It’s not gatekeeping newer players.
Much of the challenge and appeal in this game comes from coping with things being hard, fiddly and generally overwhelming.
And doing your best, to make it so for the opponent (whilst they do it to you).
Newer players will struggle with the forcedropping and other fiddly Dark Age aspects more, but that is fine.
We have skill-based matchmaking. No one is being gatekept out.
A smooth Dark Age is not expected from beginners and not necessary to have fun. But getting better at it, is very much fun.
And it also trains a lot of the fiddly clicking skills, that are relevant at later stages of the game.
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You’re the second person on this forum to incorrectly call me out on a logically fallacy. You can mine stone in the dark age, and it’s even part of known Trush build orders. Therefore it’s not a red herring. I see the auto collection of food under the TC as a QoL improvement because (as I stated) it’s not hard to do it’s cumbersome. Another way of putting it, is there is no (R)eal (T)ime (S)trategy in drag selecting your vils, clicking the TC and clicking the carcass again. Adding unnecessary “micro burden” to the game takes APM away from the (s)trategy the player could be implementing in (r)eal (t)ime.
Also I didn’t ask why you think it’s coded that way. I asked you to clearly state your position on auto accumulation of gold by pole villagers and whether or not you are fine with it. Is it fine or should an additional micro burden be added where in they have to drop the gold manually in the event that they are retasked (eg. to lumber without build a lumber camp) or raided?
@ImpliedNine8738 and likers of his comment;
I really can’t get behind it as a skill issue or a way to make the game more fun. It’s so insignificant and it fits the game mechanics of being able to work inside the TC boundary really well.
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macroing farms takes no skill either, by your reasoning, we should have an “auto-farm” in Castle Age.
Imperial macro where you seek safe woodlines and replace farms takes no skill either, by your reasoning, you should just input the number of vills you want on each resource and vills should automatically seek those resources to give you the perfect balance.
If this sounds ridiculous, it’s because it is. These little acts that you call “burden” and “unstrategic” are there to, again, separate lesser players from good ones. Learning Dark Age is part of becoming a good AoE player, even 1900+ elos mess it up sometimes by having a few seconds idle TC or similar.
The Poles stone mining, in contrast, would detract from the fun of most players and thus villagers drop off the gold automatically because in Feudal the main goal and fun of the game becomes microing army while dropping farms and walling, so such an act would indeed be, as you put it, “burdensome”.
In fact let’s bring this argument even further and hire “TheViper” to be your executor of any strat, after all APM and clicks are beneath us, all that should matter is high-level decisions… so let’s hire TheViper and tell him what strats we want him to execute in each age.
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But then it becomes a question of who can micro their TheViper better, so we’ll need an auto TheViper to automatically tell him which strats are best.
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true 11
20 characters.
micro burden was literally your term and now you’re putting it in quote marks… 
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your posts are just a series of wild leaps. ‘It’s like that because the devs can’t code a vil to hold two resources’, ‘the poles are fine because the devs designed it that way to put a focus on army micro in fedual’
i still think it makes sense from a game mechanic sense and the i don’t care about the decrease in skill cap. let’s agree to disagree.
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I wonder if the huge new april patch will include something like this as well
I hope it doesn’t. core game mechanic should stay the way they are.
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I really hate the changes to chinese, surely this is a better idea
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I really really like your idea! It’s a great quality of life change
When we used to have no multi building queue, global queue, vils auto go to resources after building camps etc, there are way more extra clicks of this kind. Do you think they are all necessary skills? Do you think even TheViper would want to go back?
Plus, force drop is like what, 3% of dark age macro? Maybe 30% for Chinese. When you have free APM you can always scout better. It’s not like your dark age would become auto age at all.
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