I miss manually queuing farms and scouting

As the title says, since auto reseeding farms has been introduced I just toogle the auto Farm like everybody else.

The more I play the more I notice that this has made the game much more boring to me!

It is one less thing I actively had to use my brain. Always binded the mill to a control group and checked in repeatedly. Felt always great when my enemy focused on micro units and got expired farm’s, while I focused more on eco and lost an my units to a siege onager.

The auto farm favours the guy that actually enjoys microing units over they guy that likes farm vile.

Same thing for auto scouting. Now I just toogle auto scouting, which does a better job than me. Even thought this helps me play better, it has again made the game more boring.

Please don’t tell me I should just get better, since this is just my subjective feeling towards auto everything I felt the need to express and I play the game for enjoyment and not to perform.

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Then do it manually again.

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Yeah, but not using these auto features would put me at an disadvantage, because they do exist for my opponent.

It isn’t fair

Also I am lazy like most humans, why would I work extra when I really don’t need to. If there was an auto viper feature, the game would just die as there is no point in playing anymore.

It is a very philosophical topic actually.What is the fun in playing aoe2? My theory is that it’s the light stimulation to your brain, which is caused by the need of thinking and decision making.

Auto stuff makes games boring when it’s over done, or would anybody just watch the game play itself. I don’t want to manually control every single vil tree by tree either. It is a fine and subjective balance where the line for automatism should be drawn . For me it was auto farms, and I believe this game would not have survived 20 years if it didn’t have a great balance already.

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Fully agree, both auto features are a serious degradation to the game. And the thing is, new players will never understand this because you have to put yourself out of the comfort zone to learn and remeber to do those things. At first they seem like a burdon but only later you understand what it impact it has on the game.

And when both players use such cheat functions, nothing became easier. You just took some nuance out of the game. It’s fine that 25-50% of the map stays unexplored for most duration of the game, this creates a skill curve where you have to think out of the box to explore those parts. Reseeding farms is not hard at all, just a quick go to mill + shift reseed and your whole food eco is set. This is just lazyness and a breach of a classic AOE standard “1 input equals 1 output”. If you are behind and the opponent uses auto reseed then the game only became harder, in the past he might be too busy attacking and forget his eco. Now there is only less chance for a comeback.

The fact that the devs force those features on us, not even a lobby/mm toggle shows little integrity and understanding. With that in mind their ideas about striking a balance between new and old players is no more than total nonsense. You are just trading depth for lazyness/ ease of use.

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I always scout manually, it’s not putting me at a disadvantage. It means i get better scouting.

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I feel like this is a strawman fallacy, you are refuting a playstyle that no decent player would use.

No one would start the game and put on auto scout, that’s trash. No you start scouting as usual and you will start recognising moments where your scout is idle (eg; early castle age) and then you use the auto scout feature to extend your apm where the scout would otherwise be idle. We have already seen Viper do this in the finals of HC3 vs Hera, the scout was able to spot all the black spots, an extra gold and the entire backside of hera’s base. It gave Viper a huge amount of intel without investing any apm. This also allowed him to tower the extra gold and deny Hera’s chances to move out in that direction.

It should be obvious how a good player can find smart ways to use this feature, so your argument falls apart. I’m tired of hearing it. And it entirely ignores that these features should be a setting in lobby/mm so that players can agree upon using them and no one is forced to deal with it.

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Hitting Ctrl+I and spamming Q isn’t really exciting.

But then there is truely no downsides for you to go back to doing everything manually again, whether you believe it’s a disadvantage or not.

When they made it so that Villagers start working right after they finish an eco building they broke this rule. For the better since checking back on your building isn’t hard but is tedious. Like reseeding farms.

Reseeding farms isn’t much. It’s not something that can turn the tide like being able to focus on villager or military production. That’s why I think the snowball effect you describe, while it would definitely happen as a result of introducing auto-queue, can’t be caused by just auto-farm.

Auto-scout is still (theoretically) open to changes. As of auto-reseeding, the community is overwhelmingly in favor of it so implementing it definitely didn’t feel like forcing anything upon anyone.

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Omg here we go again. I really appreciate that you took that screenshot for me in the other topic but jezus christ your arguments are almost not worth responding to. But I feel like I have to.

When they made it so that Villagers start working right after they finish an eco building they broke this rule. For the better since checking back on your building isn’t hard but is tedious. Like reseeding farms.

Don’t compare an infinite loop aka “set and forget” to basic unit logic. Come on. Maybe indeed not everything is literally 1 input 1 output but there are clear differences, and you know exactly what I mean.

Reseeding farms isn’t much. It’s not something that can turn the tide like being able to focus on villager or military production. That’s why I think the snowball effect you describe, while it would definitely happen as a result of introducing auto-queue, can’t be caused by just auto-farm.

It increases the advantage for the one with the upperhand, no one is claiming that this is the only reason why the “tide turned”. However it is very much capable of doing that when farms are left unattended. We all know those moments where your focus was all on the offence but in the mean time you neglected your eco for a couple of minutes and it slows you down, that is what I mean. That’s a good thing to have in a game.

Auto-scout is still (theoretically) open to changes. As of auto-reseeding, the community is overwhelmingly in favor of it so implementing it definitely didn’t feel like forcing anything upon anyone.

Did you just ignore my whole point of it not being optional in lobby/mm? Ofcourse it is forced on those who disagree.

The amount of people that are vocal about something says nothing about what it adds to the game, this is an argumentum ad populum. I prefer sticking to actual arguments on how it impacts the game. And “making it ez” is not particulary a reason that I find thoughfull or beneficial to the game. Go to mill + Shift reseed is a perfectly balanced action for what you are getting in return. Things like that should not come for free. That is not what I consider fitting for the game.

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Ah yes so fun to press F in the middle of death battles

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Using auto scout already puts you at a disadvantage. Its been proven to be inferior to manual scout

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1.To the people saying auto scout is anyway bad.

In my elo brackets it is a pure advantage to use it since then I can just entirely focus on not having an idle t in dark age
For me and people in my skill level the game was just made a little less nuance full and In my mind boring. It isn’t even lazyness, maybe I am just too bad but this should not be the argument here.

  1. To the people saying queuing farms isn’t fun and they can focus on more interesting things.
    To me managing the eco is The fun in this game. This used to include farms. Now there is one less fun thing to do for me. I just don’t like controlling military and just patrol my units in most of the time and then put out some more perfekt farms and lumber camps.

Now my playstyle got a slight nerf since my enemy can just use auto Farm, which of course I am forced to do as well to not put myself in a disadvantage.

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a suggestion to fix this:

  1. make Auto Farm and scout a lobby option
  2. In ranked matches, where the lowest players elo is above 1150, these features are disabled for everybody, else they are allowed for everybody
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Another point against auto scout at low elo:

If I am lucky my auto scout survives longer and I end up with a lot of explored area, without me contributing. If I am unlucky he just dies at the enemy tc.

At my limited skill level, I feel like I am not even involved in this. Its like gambling, playing the slot machine against your equally bad opponent using auto scout

I thought some more about this and realized there is an actual BIG difference between manual seeding and auto-seeding: with auto-seeding you pay your farms as they are constructed, while with manual seeding you lock away your wood (up to 900 wood if you want a full 15 farm queue). Not a big difference in late-game but it makes harder to use normal seeding early on.

The auto farms is the best features they put in this game IMO. You don’t like it, go play Voobly or HD then. I’d rather focus on my military in Castle and Imperial than reseeding farms. You old school AOE players sound like my grandparents… people will never know how it was back then. Who cares. Things change and the auto farm is a good change for the game. Even the auto scouting is fine. If you’re using auto scouting beginning of a match you’re bad at the game.

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Hey,

Yes I am bad at the game, stats why I use the auto scout, because it its better than me. But Iwould actually prefer to do it myself, if it is want a pure disadvantage for me, since my equally bad enemy will use auto anyway.

You say you would much prefer focus on your military in caste and imp. That’s you, I would rather focus on eco and make sure my farms are working. Who can judge which is the supposedly right way to enjoy this game.

My way of enyoing the game has been spoiled, since there is just less to do now.

I am not going to go back to HD and lagg and no matchmaking but thx for the suggestion.

Well buddy I hate to spoil your party but you’re one of a very few that doesn’t like auto farms. As for auto scouting, you might get more support on that one. You have the OPTION to manually do both if your heart desires. And if you feel it’s unfair because the other players have an advantage using it, well buddy you’re out of luck again. To me, it sounds like you’re living in the 1990s almost when it’s 2020 and technology and things changed. To each his own though.

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This forum is filled with toxic casuals it’s incredible. Even when we suggest it as a lobby feature they insist on it being forced on all players. Why they are allowed to tell others to move to another platform is beyond me. Zero respect or tolerance coming from them. This should be met with a warning and a ban from the forums.

@PattoN306 You have not made a single logical argument. You are just insulting others with your non arguments.

@JoJo9942 You realise that this is a strategic management game right? Many people do consider it fun when it is balanced in such a way. But again I am not taking the feature away from you.

I thought some more about this and realized there is an actual BIG difference between manual seeding and auto-seeding: with auto-seeding you pay your farms as they are constructed, while with manual seeding you lock away your wood (up to 900 wood if you want a full 15 farm queue).

@CactusSteak2171 Yeah that is a good point. A huge benefit to using auto reseed. That used to be the cost of queueing reseeds in comparison to manual reseeding.

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even if you meant this as sarcasm, this used to be one of my facvourite thins to do in this game…

I agree that auto-farm and scout should be options. I called for auto-farming to be an option when AoE was still in beta. It’s unfortunate they didn’t listen to feedback.

The upcoming Command & Conquer remastered collection make unit-queuing an option for both SP and MP, with it being set for MP in the lobby. That’s the right way to do it.

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