Every time I’m going into a fight I’m forgetting to keep producing villagers, or create more army.
Sometimes my economy sucks because I forget about the upgrades, or don’t spread my vills across the resources good enough and send too many for one resource.
Anyone has those issues as well?
The most annoying thing about this is the fact I’m aware of all these issue, and before each game I’m telling myself “this time I won’t forget to create vills” , but the moment I have the smallest distraction I just stop right away and focused on something else.
For non-stop villagers production you should use the hotkey for your TC more often and after some time you will get used to check your TC and your vill production.
And for the spread problem i think it depends on what do you want to do in the game.
Age of empire a game where you can’t do everything perfectly. You can speed up yourself by learning all the hotkeys and try to do everything as quickly as possible, but it is not unusual that you do not have time to do everything, especially in battle.
If you’ve trouble with producing villagers regularly use a timer app on your phone or something which makes a sound every minute or so and then you press h for tc and then q a few times for the villagers on standard keys. When you have more town centers use a control group or press h q q q h q q q to add three villages in two town centers.
After doing that for a few games you won’t need the app.
I have the time, I don’t know how to make my brain produce vills during a fight.
I’m so focused on the fight that I’m forgetting everything, I know it sounds weird but when I’m focused on a single task I’m not doing anything else but that task, and it’s very hard to change that.
I can try this but it feel like cheating to me, I want to be able to do it by myself, I don’t think a notification will help me do it in the future just like using google maps while driving didn’t help me to remember how to get to places.
Well optimally you want to be building villagers until you’re at ~100 so the goal is to train yourself to do that efficiently. The target method is doing it regularly with hotkeys—as this takes away the least attention of what you’re doing otherwise. How specifically you get there is up to you. What I suggested is basically a training wheel method to establish that habit. As with training wheels you don’t need them anymore when you can do it by yourself.
It’s just training to be better at the game. If you don’t want to use an external timer, there’s a “timer” in the game. The spawn villager sound, whenever you hear it press the TC button and queue up a villager—making sure that there’s always 1+ in queue, don’t let the queue expire. Of course that timer expires when you forget it.
The same applies to the distribution of your villagers. You can look up a build order used by experienced players or write down your own and put a good old-fashioned piece of paper in front of you to remind yourself of a good distribution in the first minutes of the game. After the first few minutes build orders aren’t that important any more as it is more important to go with your changing game plan. If you want to go for rams sent more on wood. If you want to go quickly to castle age make sure you have enough on gold & food.
It sounds crazy but try to delibarately NOT look at your fights too much. Just A-Move your army in and focus on your economy meanwhile. Eventually you’ll have to find a balance but this worked for me just to get used to work on other stuff while you fight.
Just an advice. Producing villagers must be an automatic action. Not something you think to do. If you wait the vill production sound, cause this only will move your attention to “produce villager” and you will forget what you was doing. Just put a control group in the TC, maybe “4”. Press it all time, while you are scouting, press 4 continuously, you build a lumbercamp, then press 4. No matter what, you press “4”. 4,4,4,4,4. Just look at The Viper for example. Once you get used to continuously select the tc it will be much more easier to keep producing vills.
I know about the TC spam with a group, every streamer does that, I just keep forgetting, it doesn’t work for me.
But listening to the vill sound is a bit better for me.
Actually my issues go much further than that in AOE4,
I’m forgetting to create army, forgetting that vils finish the gold and are idle, forgetting capacity, forgetting to rearrange vils from one resource to another, forgetting TC rally point changing, forgetting and forgetting almost everything in this game while focusing on something else
producing vills is just one issue out of many I have
This all comes eventually through repetition.
Just keep playing and use your hotkeys.
It’s normal to forget to make vills for a bit when in the middle of a battle.
I find this game sometimes to be too overwhelming as there are a lot of things to do at the same time once it starts getting into mid to late game. Specially when it gets to the point when villagers start to eat through ressources like mad and start to go iddle all the time. This is one thing I miss in aoe3 as once it gets to late game you can pretty much forget about the vills and just focus on the army
It’s just a learning thing. If you sit the first time in a car, you’re overwhelmed by all the stuff you have to handle. When you get the mechanics down, they don’t need attention anymore and you can focus on other stuff until the point you drive casually while talking to someone and know where to focus to, as most things are now signals that are directly linked to information you don’t need to think about any more.
My tip is to focus on special things to improve until they are automated and don’t need your attention anymore. In time you have the basics down and you’re more free to actually think how to use the things automated rather how to do the things you’re thinking about.
Ps: true multitasking is a myth, we’re all single cores and slice our attention to fake it
Right, I’ve read about it also after 1 week with aoe4 (my first serious aoe, never tried multiplayer before)
I know a good multitasker is a single core, that can efficiently ‘switch’ between threads.
A bad multitasker (like me) is one that focusing on one thread and not switching at all, and when finally switching all of my army will die right away.
We know humans can’t do two things at the same time, but I think the good players are “aware” of their economy and upgrades and army and a lot of other stuff simultaneously, they don’t do that all at once but they are fully “aware”, so they can efficiently change between tasks just because they are “aware” of many tasks at the same time although they do only one task at a time.
My issue is when I’m doing something, I’m just not aware anymore about the other things, everything is like deleted right away by my focus, and only when I’m fully done I’m like “Wow I have other things to do which I forgot” and it can be very harmful in this game.
I don’t like this example due to a very basic thing, mirror checking is connected to either: crossing between paths or doing a reverse, it’s connected to something so basically it’s a single core operation when you can say “I do A before I do B”, it’s easy.
But checking all the stuff you mention is not connected to “I need to kill his horseman” so no way my mind will think about this stuff when I’m doing a totally different thing.
I’ll give you an real example that fits from real life.
I’m cooking some dish and while cutting salad I have something on the oven on the same time, I need to keep switching between checking the oven and the salad, and there is no connection between the two what so ever.
And the truth is I suck at those things even IRL, I can overcook meat in a BBQ becaise I was setting up the table, I just suck
driving is just a bad example.
