Incorrect villager counts in the upper left if villagers are walking to a location

Age of Empires II: DE II - Report a Bug
1

Game information

  • Build: 101.101.58259.0 8059288
  • Platform: Steam
  • Operating system: Windwos 10

Issue

The worker counts in the upper left often incorrectly includes villagers who were gathering a resource earlier and are currently following a command to walk to a new location. These villagers should not count as wood, food, stone, or gold gatherers because they are being sent to a new location where they will go idle unless you tell them to do something else. Counting them as workers makes it harder for me to understand my eco at certain points in the game where my villagers are on the move (e.g. because they are running from enemies or being sent forward to help with the war effort).

Why does this matter? Imagine you are playing the grand finals of Hidden Cup 6 and you have 10 villagers on stone because you want to drop a castle. Once you have 650 stone, you select all the your stone miners and send them across the map to drop a castle. While they are walking, you notice that the game still says you have 10 villagers on stone, even though you don’t need to collect anymore stone. You frantically check your eco to look for the useless stone miners, and you don’t notice when the enemy kills your forward army and builders.

Or just imagine you are trying to maintain 7 villagers on gold so you can afford to make archers from 2 archery ranges. You have two gold mining camps. The enemy attacks one of your gold mining camps so you tell the villagers to run away. A few seconds later, while the villagers are still walking to safety, the game is still telling you that you have 7 gold miners, so you don’t realize you need to get more on gold to afford archers.

Frequency of issue

100% of the time.

Reproduction steps

Here are the steps to reproduce the issue:

  1. Start any game involving villagers and trees.
  2. Select a villager and right-click on a tree.
  3. The wood worker count in the upper left should be 1.
  4. Right-click on an empty part of the map to tell the villager to walk there.
  5. Observe that the wood worker count in the upper left is still 1, when in fact it should be 0 because no villagers are currently chopping trees, dropping off wood, or walking to a tree to chop it.
  6. When the villager reaches its destination, observe that the wood worker count drops to 0, which is the correct value.
  7. Right click on an empty part of the map to make the villager walk again, and observe that the wood worker count erroneously jumps to 1 again.

Expected result

Villagers who are currently walking and have no commands to gather resources should not be counted in the worker counts at the top left. I believe that is how the game used to work, and I only noticed this issue in the last patch or two.

Image

incorrect_chopper_count
incorrect_chopper_count1920Ă—1080 354 KB

In the image above, the selected villager was told to walk across the map right after I told her to chop a tree. She is called a “Lumberjack” but she is not working on gathering wood, she will not gather any wood unless I give her another command, and she is not even carrying any wood. All the other villagers are idle and I did not touch them.

Game recording

incorrect_chopper_count.aoe2record (592.4 KB)

2

Yeah, it counts the amount of Woodcutter you have not how many are actually working. Else the vills would stop counting as Woodcutter every time they walk to the lumber camp to drop off the wood. This isn’t a bug. If it bothers you right-click an enemy building and it will turn them into vills and not lumberjacks.

3

No, that’s silly. The game stores a list of tasks that the villagers have been commanded to do, so it can distinguish between a lumberjack walking as part of his woodchopping duties and one that is just walking to a location on the map. If the game didn’t keep track of this, then how would the villagers possibly do the right thing when you command them to move or chop a tree? Sometimes they would chop a tree when they weren’t supposed to or sometimes they would just walk to a location when you actually wanted them to chop a tree.

It’s a bug.

4

This game uses a slightly modified Engine from 1999 - but whatever floats your boat mate.

5

It’s been 25 days. It would be great if an AOE2 developer or their representative could take a look at this bug report some time and respond, since it took effort to put together. You’ve been pretty good at responding and fixing the bugs I reported in the past. Thanks!

1 Like
6

Hi @Elavid570 !

I checked this behaviour with my team and it seems that it is like this by design.

Thanks anyway for your report :heart:

7

I think it’s a bad design, because those villagers are just walking and will go idle without collecting or dropping off any resources unless they are tasked to do something else. But OK, maybe you guys have your own reasons that just aren’t obvious. Thanks for checking.

8

This isnt the only issue with the counter. I also exclude trade cars and trade cogs and fishing ships. If you look at # on food and see a low number, then you might wanna add farms. But if you are fish booming, then this isnt correct, since you get enough food.

Same is true for team games and trade. You think you dont have enough on gold and add more, but in reality you already had enough on gold.

9

Well, it does show your active fishing ships in the small number under the food count, and it shows active trade units in the small number under the gold count. That’s good.

But the game still has the original bug I complained about, where it over-estimates your eco by reporting villagers that are walking without any order to gather resources. I haven’t heard a reasonable explanation about why that’s desirable, but apparently it’s by design.