How long do you think it will be until the game gets automatic Villager training?

First there was auto farming. Then there was auto scouting. Then there was building range indicators. And now there is auto auto farming by auto farming being a default setting. With how much effort is going into improving new player accessibility, I wonder how long it will be until auto Villagers become a thing? Unless there’s some technical issue from the AGE engine preventing this, I’d be surprised if auto Villagers do not eventually happen. Maybe auto auto scouting would come before auto Villagers.

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Auto villager training should never be a thing

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if they add that i would definitely stop playing the game :face_vomiting:

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A great addition to the 2030 version.

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No. Just no. Auto vil training removes a level of skill from the game, because it takes skill to be able to fight and keep your eco running at once. It also helps differentiate player skill levels, as well as giving opportunities for things like low elo legends and 2.6 k elo players to exist in the same game.

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probably with the next graphics update, if there ever is one. (2030?)

I say include the feature but have a toggle in game settings on the multiple player menu. Have it permanently off in ranked games but an option everywhere else. Keeps everyone happy that way.

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I don’t think it would ever be a thing.

Automatic farming is here because, except some very rare cases, you want your farms to be reseeded as soon as exhausted to keep the food supply going, assuming you have enough wood. Automatic scouting is also a standard expected behaviour for the scout, you expect him to keep exploring the map since after some educated guesses (where the sheeps, boars and enemies are) the rest is quite random, if you’re not using your starting scout in combat.

But automatic villager training forgets the fact that the number of trained villagers depends on your strategy. The computer does not know if you want to click the feudal age button at 22 or 27 villagers, nor if you want 50% or 60% of your population as your economy. Let alone when to get loom and wheelbarrow, and trade units further complicate that. Clicking this button then forgetting about it could be devastating for your game, which is not the case when tasking your farmers to keep the economy running provided you have enough wood (who was not annoyed by that farm expired sound when the 40 farms you queued up in the mill are gone, while you’re managing your army at a critical moment ?)

The 2 current automated buttons simply replace tasks that are the only meaningful choice 99% of the time.

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If it was made worse than actual vill queuing it would be just fine.

For example, auto scouting is not as good as actual scouting.

I’m happy without it and wouldn’t push for it, but then I’ve learnt to do it so I want it to remain. But honestly before some update you had to manually build farms when they expired, then they added the mill queue system and then the auto reseed. I think we can all agree that reseeding farms in imperial age is not what we want to be doing.

I like a lot of the new hotkeys too ‘select all X building’ hotkeys are amazing and let you focus on playing the game instead of a blur of all your barracks.

But again I don’t think auto vill training should be particularly good, just a boost for players who need it.

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Unpopular opinion: I think auto Villager training (and auto anything training, for that matter,) would be good for the game.

Thinking about constantly queuing your Villagers/units is very important for improving at this strategy game, but it has nothing to do with strategy or decision making, nor do I think anyone finds the activity of ‘Villager queuing’ fun, in contrast to some forms of micro. If it is important but does not involve decisions and does not contribute to the enjoyment of the game, I see no reason why it should not be automated. I think it’s better than autoscout, as autoscout does allow the AI to make decisions for you and manual scouting can be fun, or at least more so than queuing units.

There are many different aspects of this game that aquire skill. I would argue that if we take the skill of queuing Villagers away as important, then a larger fractions of the skills needed for the game are actually interesting. Also, I don’t understand your comment about ‘this giving opportunities for things like low elo legends and 2.6 k elo players to exist in the same game’. Autoqueue Villagers would only make it slightly easier for the low elo legend to compete.

If you forget about creating Villagers, this is even more devestating for your game. Fact is that the option to autoqueu Villagers does not take away any more agency from the player than currently, since they would be able to choose to toggle the button on or off when they want, and forgetting to click things would be a problem either way.

In higher Elos the rest is not ‘quite random’, and even in lower Elos, players without autoscout would need to decide where to send the scout. If you want to produce Villagers, on the other hand, constantly pressing a button to do so is not a decision.

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Basically, 2k and above player, and probably below that as well, are able to keep their TC running and control other things at once. Low elo legends on the other hand sometimes forget to make villagers for up to the first couple of minutes, which is rather entertaining. Auto queueing anything is a really bad idea imho, because it removes the skill of managing a lot of stuff at once. It would also make the game feel kind of empty. Considering no one has done so so far, I think it is time to post this.

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Making vills (and military units, or basically econ in general) takes away your concentration, which is a (mental) resources and can be demanding and considered a skill (even for 2k2 players, sometimes they just cannot afford to switch to make vills when they micro archers)

With the global queue, you always know whether your TC is working or not. It helps a lot to optimise your economic growth

Hmm, it probably will never happen and initially sounds awkward to use and out of character with the game. But the more I think about it, the more I like it. If integrated into multiqueue, it could be a rather smooth experience. TC upgrades is an obvious question, but they would most likely queue behind the next villager (or in front if pop capped).

The obvious concern would be the question of whether it is a bridge too far that would hurt the competetive aspect of the game?
A few years ago I would have said definitely, but many QOL changes have come and gone with many of them “killing the skill of the game” or “making it too easy” or “auto everything”. Nearly without fail, they not only fail to kill the skill of the game, but instead they make it more pleasant to play, redirect skill to more interesting parts of the game, and increase the level of play even at the highest level of the game.

Take global queue for example. Global queue is a change perhaps of greater significance than the one proposed here. Not only does it allow for the entirely new feature of globally seeing and unqueueing accidental units or any extra units to free up resources, but it gives a constant update of villager queues drastically improving TC idle time and giving real time visualization on overall queue resource investment.

You would think a change of this magnitude which was neither in the original game, nor part of many years of gameplay would cause the same sort of “competetive diminishment” but instead it is broadly embraced and well loved to the extent that one of the major complaints about AOE4 beta is the lack of this key feature that aoe2 has.

Or ask yourself whether any of these changes (which all diminish some skill aspect of the game) are generally disliked or even disliked by more than a small minority:
Farm/fish trap autoreseed
Improved waypoints
Wall foundation L - shape change
Wall shift-queue flags on each segment
Technology queueing
Multiqueue
Improve trade cart market selection
Select all hotkeys

Even the one that I feel is most out place, autoscout, is of relatively low effect, and I would argue is more in the spirit of the game than the removed foundation scouting which was with the game from day 1.

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No. Not even in lobbies

You can put cobra cars in single player if you want. But this kind, of, things should never maje it to multi-player

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The thing about auto-villager training would make it annoying if you do a Scout rush or Knight rush, or any unit that requires a lot of food, because if the game is trying to train new villagers, but you would like to use the food that you have banked up for immediate military production and/or the upgrades at the Blacksmith to improve them, then you can be screwed.

However, why I fundamentally do not like the idea of auto villager training is that it is like putting on training wheels on an adult bicycle: if you are an adult, you should be able to ride the bike as it is intended.

Same with Age of Empires 2: you should be able to manage your economy as the game has intended since the days of AOE1: Rise of Rome and AOE2: Age of Kings. Balancing your attention towards economy AND military is what is fun about this videogame in the first place. If it was just all attention to military, the game would be quite stale.

If you really want to play AOE2 without wanting to deal with economy management, there is always Death Match (albeit only in the early stage of that game mode) or Infinite Resources in the game match settings.

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I always keep in my mind one thing: that if AOE2 DE ever gets crazy and weird, that I will stop playing it and go back to playing AOE2 HD.

I think both queueing can live togheter and is fine they do, but auto-queue should work a little slow than manual. This way, auto-queue could give a smooth experience for casual players and skill keep being a thing for harcore players

This is no different from auto farm reseed which can cause a very similar issue. The simple solution would be the same: wait to activate it until such concerns are no longer an issue. I know at high levels, farm requeue is not activated until a bit later for this reason. I see little substantial difference along that dimension.

This analogy is poor (and therefore distracting) since a bicyclist does not leave training wheels because he can do the harder thing, but rather because they are no longer useful and even a hindrance and danger to riding. In contrast, this proposed change would be useful even to the highest level of play, and I would argue push the top level of play even higher.

This equivocates the most mindless, mechanical, and least interesting aspect of economy management to the whole of economy management. Economy management involves choice of resource balance and build order, gather rate improvement research choices, seizing, protecting, and pressuring key resources, tc number, age up timing, decision on final villager limit, and many more aspects.
As a testament to the mindless, mechanical aspect of it, I estimate it would take an autohotkey script of ~10 lines of code to toggleably keep perfect villager production going. The other aspects I mentioned, are continually being improved upon by AI scripters over countless hours and will probably never be perfected.

I completely agree about the balancing economy being a critical aspect of the fun part of AOE2. That is one of the aspects I like of it over Starcraft. However, villager queueing is not economy management. It is playing the don’t-stab-yourself knife finger game alongside economy management.

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There is huge differences.

With farms there are times when you don’t want them to continue farming because you’d rather those resources go elsewhere.

With villagers this is rarely the case where you want to stop villager production.

Furthermore reseeding farms isn’t something you worry about nearly as often as keeping villagers (or units) queued.

Auto queue is good for games that rely on such a thing (supcom comes to mind) but traditional rts games it does not.

1 Like