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.
RTS are also about building forward bases, making aggressive pushes, defending your booming eco, or doing micro with archers, cavalry, demo ships, galleys, etc. These are the things that make people feel good about the game.
Auto-queueing villagers is very tedious, does somebody play the game because of it?
A player who is only focused on aggression can still be punished in other ways, like forgetting his/her berries/hunt run out, or ignoring a counter-attack. It would be great to see how the auto-queueing feels in a tournament with a mod, or an optional beta version. I am pretty sure people would still be out-of-breath with all the action
And chess is just taking a piece of wood and releasing it further away repeatedly?..
Imo RTS is about decisions, not repetitiveness. Repetitiveness is not the essence, is a consecuense of logical thought…
That’s because they’re more RT micro management games than RT strategy games.
A strategic decision is the kind of instruction a CEO might give their subordinates in a company. “Just keep recruiting people till I tell you to stop” would be an instruction they could reasonably give, if they wanted to, and expect it to be actioned for them.
I think this quite concisely covers it for me. The skill should be making the correct decisions, i.e. the decision to have 0,1,2 or 3 TCs constantly making vils, the decision on where to put those vils. The act of having to remember to go back to the TC every 30 seconds is not a decision its a mundane repetitive hassle. As someone else said, winning because your opponent forgot to make vils just feels a bit hollow and doesn’t really feel like a “strategic” victory.
On a more personal level, my carpal tunnel would appreciate having to do less spammy repetitive keyboard clicks
I dont see the problem lots of RTS have an auto queue function. It’s still something the player needs to consider if they should have on or not as leaving it on thoughtlessly may impact their age up or other plans.
If you really think some newbie is going to unfairly reach your level because both of your TC’s are auto queuing villagers you may need to reconsider how good you think you are…
Most of the ELO range is separated by ability to execute. If we made it truly about strategy, then you’d tell the game, for example, “Follow a scouts into knights build order for me”, and it would perfectly execute it every time. If both players chose the same strategy with the same civ, their equal numbers of knights would meet in the middle of the map, and the game would be decided by micromanagement of the resulting fight, so even making it about strategy to that extent would still leave micromanagement as the differentiator.
AI contests are perhaps the logical conclusion of this - they perfectly execute the strategy that their code embodies. But in the recent contest won by rehoboam, the most obvious difference was its ability to micro archers and fire the exact numbers of arrows at specific targets needed to avoid overkill. Then there will come a point where the decision that archers should function that way will be in everyone’s code, and the differentiator will move on to be something else. Eventually, I guess, when perfect play is in everyone’s code, and nobody can think of any new ways to be better, the result would be determined by who gets the best random map.
On the other hand it could give you a way back into a game because despite your opponent idling your eco for a bit because he went full agro, he also forgot to to muster his own eco.
And forgetting to make workers while you were full agro was a decision you made. And you should be punished for, instead of rhe game making that something you don’t have to think about.
Forgetting is not a decision, maybe a forced mistake. In this point is a personal taste about how is a good victory for you.
A decision would be stop vils creation in order to spend the food in army, or some crucial upgrade, or stocking for get first the next age…
The same you could say in reverse, just focus in defense because a good push should be punished by forgeting to train vils
Even pro-players in tournaments can fall behind because they were doing an agressive push, and didn’t have enough time to spam (tedious) hotkeys to queue Villagers.
Meanwhile, the boring boomer sitting at home with Skirmishers is getting a “free comeback” without any particular skill. Why is that a better game?
PS. I know auto-queueing Villagers is a massive change, but the arguments against it aren’t that solid.
No. I think decision making is a good thing. And this change takes away decision making.
You can’t forget to make villagers with auto queue while you’re busy doing other things. Which is not always a positive. It enables full agro players to inflate their skill level because they no longer have to worry about economy back home, while enabling less chance for a come back on the other side.
Basically your change is GOOD FOR SOME and bad for others.
Call it what you will, it still should be punished. The same way losing an army because you weren’t paying attention and move commanded scouts into spears would be punished.
Call it tedious all you want doesn’t change the fact that forgetting to make villagers because you were too busy microing or doing other things should bd punished.
Furthermore why shouldn’t that be punished? You were do busy focusing on one thing that you forgot something else? Shouldn’t that be punished? Should we make units that are move commanding automatically move away from danger or split if they see an onager shot coming in?
Who said he was only booming? But tell me this. Why should the full agro guy get free wins because the game makes up for his lack of multitasking by making auto queue a thing?
And after auto queue Villagers comes auto queue units right? Yeah no thanks.
I’m guessing you are against auto-farm-reseed then ? I just really struggle to understand why you consider having to go back to the TC every 30 seconds a good “decision making” mechanic. I would happily support not having auto-vil if I could see some meaningful benefit / value it adds to the game but at the moment I just can’t…
