But the choices here are not to make another villager, and another, and another. The decision you’re making is when to start production, and when to stop it. Auto-queue is at least in some ways a closer approximation of that thought process then the current multi-queue approach or the old single-queue. (Sure, sometimes you just want three militia, but you can still do that provided auto-queue is an add on to the existing system.)
Auto-queue wouldn’t be a perfect solution. It runs into problems similar to the ones seen at the population limit. If I have three town centers, two stables and an archery range producing and I don’t quite have enough resources for a while, which units don’t get made? But there is definitely a case for it from this point of view.
AoE II is a RTS in which only picking a strategy matters. Also executing is part of the game. In real life not everyone is a prof. Look at the Olympics. Not everyone can just play at that level. So playing at a lower level isnt something bad.
If you add auto-production, AoE is no RTS anymore, it becomes something like a tower defense game/MOBA. If you say RTS is only about tactics, I think TBS is much better for that, as you can take your time to plan any movement ahead and there is little dexterity skill behind. But RTS combines strategy on a broad basis and rquires the execution to cast that plan into reality in eco and on the battle field. People call COH Real time tactic games, because of the lack of own production I think ? There is so much destinction, but the core of AoE is that you have a lot of freedom and need to be active and many fronts at the same time and still having the plan in mind to connect all those threads together to one coherent succesful strategy.
The short answer is No.
You have to create workers manually in almost all the famous RTS games such as SC, SC2, War3, AOE1.
It’s accepted by players and players consider it as a part of marco.
Image that if you dont have to create villagers, what would you do in dark age ? The gameplay might gonna be totally changed.
Lure boars, push deers, build houses, build barracks, build resource gathering points (lumber camp, mill, etc).
Train Militia and Drush, scout around, wall if you need.
Are you saying that in dark age you spend all your time with TC selected and pressing the vill button?
Maybe I’m missing all the fun, but I just press H (or group number) and Q as many times as I have food for, then set the waypoint where I need vills. Is what you do with villagers that consumes your time in dark age, not making them.
In fact I’m not against this proposed auto-queue button because I honestly think that it would hardly make a big difference, auto farm reseed is much bigger imho, expecially when you have 40-50+ farms/fish traps.
My message was referred to the OP, I don’t know why the quote don’t shows up in my message.
By the way, the challenge in RTS games is taking decisions while you’re busy managing your eco and military. If you reduce the amount of focus and actions needed to manage eco, then you reduce the challenge of taking decisions since you can focus more on that.
On the other hand, if you want a game where you can put all your focus on decision making, then turn based games are probably what you’re searching for. Pressing H and Q constantly it’s not meant to be funny by itself, it’s meant to make other aspects of the game more challenging and definitely funnier
I might be a total idiot, but I don’t see where the supposed challenge of pressing a couple of hotkeys would be.
It seems more artificial obstacle than anything else.
Why are there hotkeys then? Why are there icons on the top of the screen? Remove them all and you’ll have even more challenge, remove attack sound, remove units creation sound.
Super challenge that way.
In RTS the difference between good and less good players should be in the strategy, the decision making, in how to react to a rush, or to perform one, not how many buttons you can press in a second.
For that there are shooter games. My humble opinion obviously.
since there are allready automation in the game i wouldt mind like auto vill since its still restricted to your food outcome how much you spend on farms and obviously the pop cap
also it would help people who have problem with their apm to get one thing and maybe they dont need it later anymore
Which is what currently makes the difference between a good and a bad player.
But if you implement auto everything into the game, then everyone can permorm good rushes and defend from them, since the harder part of rushing or defending from rushes is keeping everything running behind while taking decisions and microing on the front. It’s not hard at all to take good decision if you can focus only on that, aoe is not rocket science, but it becomes very hard when you need to split attention between multiple things.
The choice where to put your focus is also a strategic decision itself, since it’s sometimes not possible to keep TC running while trying to squeeze the most possible value out of military units on the front. Just watch any DauT game and his idle TC stat to understand that, he is the best player in the world at keeping his TC running because is an absolute monster in decision making and always knows when it’s not worthy anymore to keep your focus on armies and it’s better to focus on macro. All of this without being maybe even a top 200 player in term of sheer speed and apm. In the end, if you remove this decision making layer from the game, I wouldn’t be surprised if micro oriented players would be the ones benefitting the most from the change.
The hotkeys part makes no sense to me, I think you (and a lot of people in this thread) are mistaking speed and multitasking, which are different skills. Queueing up villagers and units doesn’t take a lot of time/actions, but can take away a lot of attention and it’s definitely a taxing operation on the multitasking part. On the other hand, hotkeys improves the speed you can complete operations with, but have not too much impact on the multitasking side since you still need to focus on performing the task.
Houses plays a similar role. It doesn’t take much time to place a house, but it’s something definitely very easy to forget when you’re doing a lot of things at once. Following your logic, game would be better with an autohouse function or directly starting at 200 pop just like huns.
Auto-villagers was implemented in AOE3 (one of the civs, Ottomans) and it was a horrible idea. Because you couldn’t control when to stop and also even if you could, you’d get all your military pop filled (yes, there was a limit on max villagers, but still)
Even if they implement a toggle, it would still be hard to control.
To my knowledge rushing is not just a matter of clicking scouts/archers and clicking to attack the enemy villager.
You have to scout, to consider the map, the matchup, the enemy strength and weaknesses, to know when to pursue the villager, when to retreat, when is ideal to make more scouts/archers, when it’s not worth it, when to stop making them and transition to something else or just turtle and FC to get more powerful units.
Otherwise since we already have well established build orders should be easy for everyone to just rush and defend from them. Doesn’t seem the case.
Auto filling the queue would do nothing in that regard, even worse, if you forgot to turn it off it could burn your food preventing yourself from building more troops or research some important upgrade.
Hotkeys are quality of life upgrades, for months I queued all the military unit one by one, imagine how much time costed me (expecially with multiple military buildings), then I discovered the SHIFT+hotkey to queue 5 at a time, such a beauty!
Auto-queue for me would be the similar, not forgetting that you can create 200 villagers, but if you don’t task them to do anything you’ll end with 200 woodchoppers that bump on eachother.
You can’t really compare hotkeys and queue filling to building houses, building houses is game mechanic, like mining gold or stone, like building barracks to train infantry. It’s not like auto-queue would allow to train villagers without food or without a TC/pop space.
And this is the core of the matter.
Almost everyone who disagrees on putting this auto-queue function seems to think that it would dumb down the game or allow unskilled players to better compete, when the reality, imho, would be exactly what you said: it would benefit more better players, expecially those with already high APM and micro skills.
Oh well, to each his own.
I personally don’t recall at any point that you should ever increase your scout/archer count, instead you should keep harassing the enemy and get to Castle
You’re saying that everyone just makes 4 scouts and 8 archers (random numbers) and never increase them?
Maybe YOU don’t, but I’ve seen plenty of people doing that, expecially when we talk about archers (for obvious reasons) which can quickly snowball a game if the opponent doesn’t make loads of skirms or manages to go to castle for mangonels. I’ve seen games closed in feudal age/early castle for that reason alone.
However, anything else to add, or wanted only to say that? I’m all ears.
I’m not exactly a good player, I’m pretty moderate with a lean to low elo legend, but at the same time, this isn’t something I said out of nowhere. Pretty sure it’s a known thing not to do when rushing
Now I’m confused, I thought you said that you shouldn’t increase the number of scouts/archers, now it’s okay after you click age up?
So why did you say that I was wrong in the first place?
And where’s the relevancy to the topic?
Just an idea - what about having an auto-queue button but there’s like a 5 sec delay between adding each new villager? That way it would be useful for newer players but not really impact the competitive game at all. Just a thought.
I think in Dawn of War 1 there are auto build or certainly auto reinforce buttons. And those reinforcements arrive MID BATTLE not at barracks at the base. So I agree, being an RTS isn’t opposed to this. Whether it’s good for aoe2 is another question, I think a lot of people enjoy being able to work on their skills and see the gradual improvement and feel a sense of achievement. And so would be opposed to a feature like this.
However I see the point of the poster that they had a physical issue with their hands I can see why they would want a feature like this. My suggestion would be more like this:
If a new villager is Idle for ‘x’ minutes/seconds they are sent to work on the nearest resource.
It’s still better to manually task villagers but it’s helping those with difficulties. Only for newly created vills and not all idle vills imo. Could be interesting for lower elo players.
