It’s toned down? I quit the game because how op they were. What’s the current op civ?
mexico, japan and germany zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
On Field APM:
I think the long-term solution which improves the UX without functionally changing the gameplay, is to make the two Field modes into two separate buildings that have separate build buttons (so that you choose which mode to start them in when placing them), and the toggle instead transforms one into the other.
Current scheme:
** Build Field.
** Wait for Field to complete.
** Select Field.
** Toggle Field mode.
Suggestion:
** Build Coin Field or Food Field.
** Transform them only when needed.
This can be coupled with giving Granaries the ability to toggle all Fields inside its aura at one button press.
Ideally, since Field is a back-to-AOE2 mechanic, the game should also support AOE2-style drag-to-place-multiple, but there are most likely engine complications to stop that from happening.
if you use a hotkey it technically can be
** Build Field.
** Select Field.
** Toggle Field mode.
** Wait for Field to complete.
which while the same amount of action takes less of your attention
its a similar system to rice paddies
edit: another solution which I think works better is the aoe 4 system where it auto populate for you, its a perfect 3x3 grid so it should be simple-ish
so everyone wants to forget it entirely - i dont blame anyone, release date hausa was bonkers strong.
very much so, its one of the least played and probably one of the weakest civs now. otto is the new op civ according to many, china and sweden too it seems. japan in team games but its in a good spot for 1v1.
or… crazy idea here, have like or
5 vills on a field instead of 3
I think Hausa was really designed around eating the livestock for food as much as selling it coin or wood. (although it is not very good) For example fulanis can harvest livestock by default, without any card or tech, did anyone know that. clearly devs were trying to make hausa use livestock for food too, with so many livestock buffing card.
I often try to eat livestock if needed instead of saving for wood or coin or influence. And maybe its my low elo, but 8cow+market really comes in pinch in low hunt maps. Or when field transition is happening.
None of the military units that can gather are remotely viable. The UI is just way too bad to be able to operate them that way and needs to be improved. An economic stance to make them behave like villagers would be needed actually make them usable.
Fulanis also don’t benefit from any of the cards or improvements. Their gather rate from livestock is a flat 2 food/sec no matter what.
That would be an improvement but still doesn’t solve most of the issues.
African Fields are the ultimate synergy of horrible design. Every single unique aspect of them works together to make them infuriating to use.
They’re trying to copy the style of AoE2/4 farms, but it doesn’t translate at all to AoE3.
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AoE2/4 have massively more APM dedicated to mundane eco management. Needing to spend that much APM on your eco puts you at a huge disadvantage to every other civ in AoE3.
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In AoE2/4, the placement of fields is done much sooner and more gradually. You run out of sheep early on when you have few villagers and gradually put down farms as you need them. In AoE3 you hunt for as long as possible and you need to transition many villagers suddenly when you either completely run out or are forced off hunts and mines. That’s dozens of villagers going idle over a short period of time exactly when you are under the most military pressure.
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AoE2/4 farms only produce food and don’t need to be switched over. There is no need to select many individual farms so it isn’t an issue.
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The extremely slow build time of fields greatly compounds all the above issues. There is a huge delay for all of your idle villagers getting back to work and a huge delay getting the fields toggled to the right resource. Since it takes so damned long to actually build them you usually end up throwing down way more than you actually need and it becomes really difficult to keep track of and assign villagers to properly fill them.
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They take up an ungodly amount of space. Having to place them around a Granary means you need to take up double the footprint of a mill or plantation. A set of 8 fields does support more villagers, but it needs a huge square area as opposed to being able to tuck 2 mills into separate more restricted spaces.
Overall, the way it plays out in AoE3 makes it exponentially more tedious to manage.
No matter what, they need to make fields bigger. To keep them fitting around the Granary, they could crop off the corners to make them still line up, or just merge 2 fields together into a rectangle. With rectangular fields, you could split them into 2 different types such as a vertically oriented one for coin and a horizontally oriented one for food (or vice versa). You could rotate them when building, or toggle them to the other resource after being built to get a nice fit around a Granary.
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It makes more sense, playing with Hausa the last thing you want is to eat the cattle
I’ve never replied to your Field suggestion when it came out, but you have kept holding onto it, so this needs to be said:
Your criticism of the Field design is on point, but the “cut-off corners” suggestion is not good.
What you proposed:
1: Turn Field placements into a mini-jigsaw puzzle with non-rectangular pieces.
The reality:
1: The collision engine doesn’t support non-rectangular-shaped units on a basic principles level. Everything, from projectiles to soldiers to buildings is a box.
2: Suppose the engine supports non-rectangular shapes, they would need wholly new, additional UI code to “snap” them into place. Otherwise, they’d be impossible to place. Adding this “snap” code is more nontrivial work.
3: Fundamentally, you are fixing the currently problematic, but at least very simple mini-jigsaw puzzle of “placing 8 square Fields around a square Granary” - by replacing it with an even more complicated version, in a fast-paced RTS.
I finally checked this and it doesnt actually do any splash damage, hence no cap, its only the slow down effect that has AOE
If you don’t think it’s technically possible, you could have just said that. I was imagining it would work as hitbox of two overlapping rectangles, not actually an octagon. The cropped bits would just be visual. But if that doesn’t work I’m open to other ideas. The fact is that what we have now clearly doesn’t work and literature anything would be better. I’ve added an alternative option of just merging two fields together and possibly even giving two build options in the grid.
I’m convinced at this point that fields will never be user friendly. Setting up your eco while trying to place granaries, changing to coin after the absurd build time, and trying to do all that while also trying to fit in between your universities, palaces and generally extra tcs is just… its not pleasant. And you don’t even get a reward for it being harder, your eco is just soooo mediocre on fields
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if you use a hotkey you can toggle it on the foundation and it is done by the time its built
this shouldn’t be a thing anyone has to do, whether it works or not
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Can you please tell us, what the hotkey is?
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its whatever the hotkey is for toggling between res after the foundation is built, if your hotkey settings is grid it will be whatever the grid system is ( I don’t use grid so I don’t know)
for legacy you set it to whatever you want ( so say Q for food and W for gold) so just select the field foundation and hit W and it will be gold when it finishes.
same process applies to buildings that have toggles like factory, tps, porcelain tower, shrines etc
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So because I have no life I tried to test the actual impact of the hausa gather rate
Test 1:
24 hausa vils with grannary vs 24 british vils for about 10 mins
its a about equivalent, there were minor variations due to the fact that I couldnt set the african civ AI to just collect the res ( they start doing stupid stuff)
At first I saw that the euro vils were gathering more but i discovered this was because I didn’t pack them fully (24 vils on 4 mills). When it was 24 vils on 3 mills the efficiency was the same
Test2: same as 1 except hausa vils have +10% speed from market tech
there might be a tiny tiny effect like 0.5% difference
also looking at the idle villager graphs I think its clear why the net gather rates are more similar
on average about 4-5 euro vils are idling due to all the bumping and moving around
hausa vils are only idling like 2-3
So from that the net hausa food eco is probably comparable to a civ that is missing food silo.
Savegame of the scenario
hausa villager test with speed.age3Ysav (2.7 MB)
edit: if you want to test this scenario yourself, you have to set the hausa vils to gather from the fields manually around the 30-38 seconds mark
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3rd test - euro vils but only 4 vils per mills to see if you can minimise idle time
now the euro vils are gathering more and its noticeable in the graph - but its about a 2% difference
average idle time for euro vils is also down in this configuration so they gather more
that makes it evident that they need a buff, british without cowing has one of the worst food gathering rates.