That would be the only way I could even live with auto queue. If it had clear cut drawbacks that make manual queue still superior. Even then I don’t like it.
The only thing you have argued here is the villager autoqueue would be MORE beneficial to have than farm autoreseed. Your very arguments are exactly the justification of farm autoreseed - that after a certain point individual reseeding is an uninteresting, obvious decision of no strategic importance.
1 Like
And maintaining villager production is of utmost importance .
Therefore what better way to cement that by maintaining manual production and letting those that fall behind learn from it instead of throwing a handicap on it.
You want auto queue?
Here’s what I offer.
Any unit produced with auto queue costs 20% more and takes 20% longer to produce. Seems fair to me. Your villagers now cost 60 food instead of 50.
Yes, so is having created units go somewhere after creation. But we don’t insist people get good and learn the skill of tasking units away from production buildings. We use an automated system for that called gathering points, because there is nothing interesting or strategic about manually tasking units from buildings.
Learn what? How to do meaningless, uninteresting repetitive tasks? Look at AOE1. So many of the improvements from AOE1 are eliminating these pointless, uninteresting “skills” so that more interesting economy and military management can occur. Shall we remove villagers going to wood after a lumber camp build. There is skill involved in consistently tasking villagers to trees, that people can be “left behind” at to learn.
Actually yes, I didn’t think I did but OPs suggestion was actually a good one and people who reject improvements on the sole reason that they are new and make things easier forget about the pile of improvements they stand on that do the exact same thing.
This is a crutch and a noob trap that would only hurt those it may most help.
Now before anyone calls what OP suggests a crutch, let them remember what makes a crutch distinctive. A crutch only aids the injured and hinders the healthy. An improvement, aids all and raises the level of achievement across the board.
4 Likes
LOL. What? “Your argument is distracting” and “crutch and a noob trap”… Is this how you are going to steer this argument into?
While I have noted that you counter argue to my claims and that of MatCautthon3’s in a reasonable manner, there are parts of your dialogue where you seem to be trying to insult me and Mat just because we disagree with you.
You weaken your own argument by resorting to such bully-tactics, @Strategerist112 . Keep the argument civil, mate.
This counterargument of yours you are making is does not make sense. How are training wheels “a hinderance to riding”? They support riding a bicycle, either because the person riding the bike cannot ride the bike on two wheels, or because the rider is trying to learn how to be a better bike rider.
As I see it, introducing auto villager training would be akin to training wheels, because it would be “training” the player to practice on other things in the economy, like assigning villagers to wood, food, stone, and gold, constructing buildings, and preparing military all the while having the TC be producing villagers. That is training the player.
I oppose such an idea, because new players–even old players who are not skilled at eco-management yet-- I think need to just deal with it. Queuing up Villagers anyway is NOT VERY HARD TO DO. They are even the easiest hotkeys to memorize too:
Press H to go to Town Center, and Press Q to the number of Villagers you want produced. Press H again to cycle to the next Town Center and repeat.
I do not intend to insult nor do I intend to insinuate malintent on either of your parts. Someone honestly engaging in debate can produce distracting arguments which I believe a non-fitting analogy is. I am sure I have made some myself.
I am not referring to y’alls argument as a crutch or noob trap, but rather that implementing the extra time/cost thing would be a crutch that would ultimately hurt new players. This is commonly called a “noob trap”.
I am sorry that my words came across as insulting. It was not my intent.
2 Likes
It is true that training wheels support a rider, especially when new, but they also hinder a rider by preventing leaning. Leaning is important for turning at higher speeds and not being able to increases the danger of wiping out opposite the turn direction. This, for an experienced rider, is a hindrance that outweighs the benefit of increased straightway stability, as the latter is of little significance to an experienced rider. A better analogy might be pedal assist which nearly universally assists all riders. But even this is not true if riders value exercise/environmental reasons higher.
This is true, but I don’t think it proves anything. It is of some small difficulty (more to do it perfectly) and it adds nothing to the game. Also, this argument could be said of nearly every QOL feature. It is not that hard to set my TC to a control group, but the H you mention is better. It is not that hard to click 5 times, but shift click is better. It is not that hard to cycle production buildings, but multiqueue and global queue is better. It is not that hard to task vills to the next sheep, but improved waypoints is better.
2 Likes
This is training, true, but I don’t see the hindrance that it introduces that would make it bad like keeping training wheels would be.
Instead, all of those things you mentioned sound like more interesting, more strategic, and less mindless activities than queueing villagers.
Also, accustoming people to something is only bad if the thing itself is bad or if it would have some danger of being taken away. I don’t see either of those in this case.
I was for it but your argument is spot on, there are other modes if you don’t like to deal with economy, I shall be trying out the other modes tonight
I came into this thread against the idea but after reading all the posts I am now massively pro the idea. That being said I doubt the developers would ever implement it, but I think they should.
I find @Strategerist112 's arguments pretty convincing. Villager queueing is fundamentally a mundane boring repetitive task that you have to be able to do to be competitive but doesn’t add anything in terms of fun / critical decision making. Even from a spectators point of view there’s nothing interesting about watching pros perfectly build vils, it’s a skill that just acts as a barrier to entry without offering anything in return. So yer, I support the idea because it frees you up mentally a little bit more to focus on the more engaging/fun parts of the game. I also agree with the idea that such a change could even improve the pro scene as again it just gives them a little bit more headspace to focus on other more interesting issues (eco balance, unit micro, etc).
In short, I think the game would be more fun if people could spend their mental energy on deciding things like what their eco balance should be rather than monitoring to see if a vil is in the queue or not.
4 Likes
But proper use of way points is important and who do we blame when a players units are just thrown away because they are way pointed into a death trap?
The entire nature of rts is repetitive tasks man, how many noobs stink because they don’t keep making villagers?
Yeah because aoe1 is SO POPULAR.
You call maintaining villager production uninteresting and repetitive but hype this? Come on man.
Because the nature of rts is balancing decision making and tasks. You can’t split yourself so thin that you forget to produce unit’s orc you’re going to be punished.
Except how does auto queue help pros? Thry already know how to maintain production.
Furthermore the problem I have with auto queue as I proposed is that there is no downside. Which means the person using it is at a fundamental advantage over the one who uses manual queue. Which is why I proposed the downside.
Auto scout is fundamentally inferior to manual scouting. So should auto queue.
1 Like
It’s a good idea for simpler RTS’s like the new(ish) Cossacks game where they have implemented this (and even “auto build”) but in a heavy macro oriented game like AoE 2, feels totally wrong and very unAge-like.
What next auto queue military, techs… Let just AI play it lol.
I don’t think auto-queue is really a thing… yes, it is a skill, but just in low ELO this could help to define a match result. Is not really dificult to learn and in my experience, rewatching my games and discover that I won a game because my opoponent just forgot to train vils is really disappointing…
I don’t think it needs higher costs or longer training time. A simple delay between creating each villager. Even 15secs would be good enough to save people who forget about the economy but bad enough at higher level you’re better off doing it yourself.
While
I am not against this idea in it’s entirety, one thing I think that has gone unmentioned is the MEME
In all seriousness though, I think it is a great part of aoe 2 that even if you’re being smashed there’s still a chance to come back because maybe your opponent hasn’t been creating vills or managing idles.
Also I think it should be noted a change like this will make the average player more aggressive. Since you can just auto create vills on a gather point and spend all your time microing your army. Which, even as someone who loves DM, I don’t want aoe2 to just be about being aggressive.
1 Like
It would be interesting to see a small tournament with a mod where auto-queue for villagers is allowed. Playing an RTS game to perfection can require over 1,000 APM, so I am highly skeptical that noobs would be winning tournaments thanks to this feature.
To be honest, many people dislike the idea just because it removes a crutch to defeat lesser skilled opponents…
However, helping people to avoid a repetitive spam of hotkeys is beneficial to improve the overall gaming experience. And in the end, this is useful to increase the total number of active players.
Everyone would benefit from a larger community.
As a programmer, I feel deeply annoyed when I have to spam repetitive hotkeys to do something that is extremely obvious (like farm reseeding or queueing villagers). Why is that old wisdom so out-of-place in Age 2?
7 Likes
I think @Strategerist112 argues really well in favor of autoqueue. I have not seen a convincing argument from someone opposed to autoqueue; sentimental arguments and appeals to how something is ‘supposed’ to be do not sound convincing to me.
@MatCauthon3 in his latest post, and I don’t say this to be mean, does not seem to be understanding what Strategerist112 writes (which I don’t understand, as I thought Strategerist112 was pretty clear and hard to misinterpret) and frankly is making zero sense.
I saw one argument that MatCauthon3 made that I could and will respond to, though:
If you really believe this, why are you spending time on it? The way you describe ‘the entire nature of rts’ does not make rts sound appealing to me.
3 Likes
What if you can able auto-queue but if run out of food it disable and you need to turn on again manually? You still should to pay attention to queue production but without the repetitive key pressing. Plus, in early game that food stock is really restrictive AQ maybe could be a problem more than a solution
1 Like
I’m sorry but relegating villagers to auto queue actually hurts overall.
As was said earlier, if your opponent is being so aggressive he isn’t focusing on his eco and fails to keep producing villagers HE SHOULD BE PUNISHED FOR THAT.
but with yout change you take all the thought out of it and just encourage brain dumping it.
I’m just stating facts. I love the rts genre but it is absolutely repetitive tasks. Video games in general are.
Repeatedly make villagers (or units)
Repeatedly make buildings or farms.
Repeatedly micro units to take the best fight you can
Etc.