I’m not sure if this would only postpone frustration. The thing you learn with something like this is to slice your attention, which is very important in any state of game. If you’re too focused on fighting and forget to produce units or relocate resource gathering, you end up in the same spot.
I also feel it’s often too much for me and I hate losing control, what is kinda inherent to RTS, so naturally, I would also like to test a concept in between RTT (CoH,…) and a RTS. But I think AoE4 is pretty good at what it wants to be. A more streamlined approach in too many parts would have been like Diablo Immortal for the starving fans of the genre. But for a spin off, I would be totally up for it.
I think no one doubts here that CoH is more RTS than RTT, as there is unit production and resource drip per zone conquered.
My only goal with the thread is to encourage the learning curve to be reduced (it would still be complex for being RTS, since multitasking, resource management and micro would still exist), giving the option to automate tedious tasks and little fun and bet on a better gaming experience.
Good strategy games are a series of interesting desicions. Deciding if I should build more villagers for the early-mid game its always ‘yes’ its not an interesting desicion. I see no apocalypse coming if auto queue is added.
Its still something the player should consider to use, the villagers are not auto assigning themselves if you are not paying attention you could have your villagers stand idle next to where a berry bush or gold node was and simply have wasted food.
In the late game you may end up with too many villagers if you simply leave it on without considering your population.
It’s hard to differ what is archaic game design and what is an elemental feature of the game, especially if it has such a long lasting history, though. Done wrong, it might end up like the new settlers.
I just don’t think AoE4 is a good game to test these things out, especially post launch. That being said, I enjoy wild rift more than pc lol, I just can’t stand mobile gaming. So there is imo a spot for MS to revitalize the Genre if they do something similar with an rts ip on PC.
I’m starting to come to terms with the Idea, I still think working on your vill production yourself increases the skill level, remember in AoE ii there’s a select all TC function that minimizes wasted production and apm… would it help?
I’m not talking about myself.
I have been playing AoE1 since 1999 and I know how to queue villagers and I don’t play competitive anyway so I don’t care much if I happen to forget it.
(But maybe it’s one of the reasons why the Ottomans are my favourite civilisation in AoE3)
And as I said multiple times. Removing one small task doesn’t turn the whole game into a turn based game.
I personally hate turn based games. But you know what I also hate more then any other game? League of Legends (no insult for anyone who likes it). I already hated Dota (the original) my friends always made me play it when we were playing Warcraft 3. And lol is just Dota in worse for me.
I love RTS. Supreme Commander (that has Auto queue btw), Empire Earth (The second had auto queue but I didn’t like the game for other reasons), Dawn of War (also has Auto Queue but it’s not really relevant), Starcraft 2 but my favourite was unsurprisingly Age of Empires/Mythology.
I don’t think that auto queue makes RTS less fun. But it sure makes it more accessibly.
I have an idea how to add auto queue while giving people that manually queue an advantage:
Auto queue only queues a new unit/technology after the building was idle for like 1 second (maybe 2 seconds but not more).
If you use auto queue you will train 1 villager every 21/22 seconds instead of 20. Giving people that manually queue an advantage.
But it also makes auto queue less annoying because you can manually queue different units before the building goes back to auto queue when it’s idle again.
I already told you that a game is not going to stop being competitive because that option is included, when the majority of players, starting at a medium level, win by strategy, micro or knowing how to manage/take advantage of resources.
The problem is that many people are averse to changes that favor the entry of players from the new generations and that is why the RTS genre does not advance.
Starcraft 2 was the most successful RTS game and it doesn’t have an automatic queue, but it has 2 resources, the game tells you how many workers are ideal in minerals and vespene and the only economic difficulty is to expand sooner or later and make workers, no there is more. It is a more accessible game for beginners, but the competitive mode is very hard, of course.
I just want to remind all the people freaking out about an auto queue removing the skill of the gaming and removing strategic components - that exactly the opposite is the case.
Queuing villagers in nothing less than an interesting strategic decision because there is no real option to it. If you remove that, you only loose that the skill of remembering it is rewarded. All the times where it is a real strategic decision to not produce villagers, e.g. because you need food for army, you can still do that by disabling the auto queue. It is exactly the same for farms in AoE 2 DE. And the game won’t even get less micro intense because there is a billion other things you could micro. Just look at all the awful lumber camps in pro games. You can clearly see that “The game is too boring, because it has so little depth and micro potential that players don’t know what to do with their time and brain” is not true. Adding a queue just removes a strategically uninteresting part of the game and allows players to focus on the interesting parts of the game. In my opinion at its heart it should be about strategy and not about attention management even though I think attention management is a cool and important thing. But not attention for decisions that are completely obvious. Then you could also make producing a villager cost 10 clicks and say: Hey its about speed and attention management that you manage to do 10 clicks to produce a villager while microing your army.
I made a similar post a long time ago, but at the time I didn’t know about the meta, I reflected that the game should reward those who know how to manage their praise, so I edited my post and added a note at the end: that I would at least like the queue Automatic for Adeans in the time of castles. But now I know that castles are usually reached around 15 min, I would propose the automatic queue of villagers in imperial times; In order for this not to harm competitive play, that technology must have a cost of at least 2500 in resources, a high opportunity cost that will not harm high competitiveness.
Only approximately 13% exceed 1200 rating, which I consider the minimum to understand the game, if most are casual or uncompetitive players, why not give them an option that is viable at their rating to enjoy the game and that for its cost won’t it hurt high level competitive play?
with the Shift key 5 units are produced, in order not to damage competitiveness my proposal is the automatic queue only for villagers in the Imperial Age, through a technology of 2500 in resources, for your opportunity cost
I think that knowing how many villagers you place in each resource or how many you build a building with is a much greater strategic ability.
The game should be more wellcoming for new players, at least from my point of view.
And this won’t affect competitive play just at elos above 1000. If you micromanage better or know how to spend resources or know what units to produce, you’re still going to be better at mid/high elos.
What exactly is the source of that MSPaint graph and why that specific Elo being considered the end-all be all of who “understands” the game? Who’s the arbiter here on that and why?
But with RTS I largely feel a lot of players overemphasize the fast click aspect of the games and de-emphasize the strategy aspect of the games, which is a shame IMO. I’d be curious to see how much of a difference having auto-queue would make.
My elo is 3000 and i individually queue each unit directly from the building. You guys need to learn how to play. Part of the fun is life long crippling carpal tunnel.
