List of suggestions for Quality of life features

Last updated: 14th October 2020

  • add Option to toggle on/off for “Go-To Hotkeys will center(move screen) on the unit’s location”

  • add Option to disable ALT key garrisoning (especially useful now since we can use the new ALT feature to signal units to move somewhere without attacking a building)

  • add 3 hotkeys for selecting all lumber camps, all mills and all mining camps (this one won’t really be needed if you implement the toggle above for centering on unit location or not)

  • add one more Health Bar option for always showing units but not showing buildings HP

  • add hotkey for select all water military units

  • add option to unqueue units via the units production queue(top left) by right clicking on the icons (or add hotkey for unqueuing units from buildings) - last time I made a post for this it got almost 40 upvotes but still nothing happened

  • separate hotkeys for elite battle elephant and elite steppe lancer upgrades (currently they are all stuck on the same letter but it would be nice to be able to modify)

  • add hotkey for ungarrisoning out of allied buildings (currently if you garrison in ally building, you can only click a button to ungarrison, hotkey isnt functioning)

  • Allow to speed up Recorded games faster (currently singleplayer can be speed up 8x times by using DEBUGSPEEDS steam launch options, recorded games can’t and are maxed out at a slower speed.

  • Suggestion for spectating ranked games more easily: Instead of naming every match AUTOMATCH, can we have it like RM-1v1-(player1)vs(player2)(avg-elo)

  • Please make it so that control group of Town Centers doesn’t get removed once the construction is finished (yes this can be considered more of a bug report, than a suggestion, but they keep saying that this behavior is intended by the devs(aka leftover limit from old code). So would be really nice if its fixable, if not then nevermind)

  • Allow to build 2 diagonal gates next to each other a.k.a. change the space the diagonal gate occupies. Probably is hard to implement due to engine limitations, but it would be nice to have. Currently it’s not possible to build diagonal gates next to each other (or anything exactly next to a diagonal gate) as shown in this forum post: Hope to fix an issue about building gates

  • Get rid of "L" shape when creating walls now!

  • Don’t show trees that are half chopped by someone in the fog of war if we didn’t scout that the tree is chopped yet. This one would have some impact on gameplay balance, because currently you are able to see where your enemy has migrated to chop wood if you have that area explored from earlier.

  • Double clicking palisade/stone walls foundations shouldn't also select built walls as well

  • improve the endgame Statistics score screen with features like these

    • Number of Town Center
    • Villagers Killed / Villagers Lost
    • Resource Count at end of game (showing how much resources the player had when the game ended, not just showing total collected amount)
    • Favorite Military unit (the unit that you made the most, with the number next to it how many times you made it, this one I admit feels to be a bit harder to implement, but who knows… Also, I saw this feature in aoe3)
    • Number of Towers constructed
    • show wheelbarrow and hand cart in the time line
  • Add Save and Exit option in ranked (to end a game without results updating if all agree, good if someone drops early on in a Rank TG)

  • The “aegis” cheat should also make vills instantly fell down a tree (when the animation of the tree changes from Full grown tree to a semi-chopped tree) so that there is no delay when starting to chop on a 100 wood tree.

  • add option to turn off “attack alerts” (useful for those who want to spectate a game without the attack sounds everywhere)

  • remove monks from select all military hotkey

34 Likes

How about able to queue an upgrade tech during the required tech is in research like

Researching two-handed swordsman - > research champion upgrade in queue

9 Likes

All of these suggestion would be great

I would prefer the select-all-mining camps option.

It would be great if this could be done via a hotkey, and also applied to control groups. Currently I have hotkey 1 set to center by default, and hotkeys 2-9 to not center, and I recently lost a vill because I forgot it’s hotkey wouldn’t center on it :confused:

2 Likes

We need the bonuses from allies shown at one place too. In team games/campaigns you have to go to each allies’ tech tree to see what their team bonus is.

It will help in strategizing and adjusting build orders.

5 Likes

I would like this as well. These are quality of life things that would make the user experience much better and less stressing. As you said, though, OPTIONAL, unlike hero glow in Age 2: DE :unamused:

1 Like
  • Add showing fishing ship count next to villager count
  • Show villager idle time after the game. In general, some more statistics would be nice.
  • When inviting people, show steam friends first
  • Add another tooltip option: only show very short description of techs and units + cost
  • Add another command for vills: they go to the next available dropoff point and start collecting ressources for this dropoff point.
  • Add a search option when in the map selection menu. This would be really good honestly.
  • Show the map preview in the lobby and publish the symbols used in these previews so that mapmakers can use them. (I know the map symbols are in the gamefiles but copy + paste is not a good workflow.)
  • Implement a tournament system in the lobbys that tournament organizers could use.
  • Improve the minimap: Make a clearer distinction between player stuff and ressources. Put the map texture more in the background and make elevation more visible. I know that there is a view that you can toggle on that does some of these things but it’s also lacking many things, like showing trees or being nice to look at.
6 Likes

Seems like a great idea in theory! But could be harder to implement and maybe several bugs could pop up (how would you implement what happens when you cancel the 2hand swordsman upgrade, does the champion get immediately canceled? would feel like a lot of work and effort need to be made if this is to be implemented)

this also seems like a nice suggestion. but I also think it might be a bit harder to implement (I don’t wanna be a hype killer :smiley: but thats just how I see it)

this one already exists, if you disable the extended tooltips in game or interface options

Seems a bit unnecessary in my opinion since I don’t like the game going in the way of automating gameplay decisions too much.

Agreed.

Yes definitely I think the Score screen could use a lot of improvements. I forgot about it while making this posts but heres some basic ideas I think that we need to get inside the score:

  • Number of Town Center
  • Villagers Killed / Villagers Lost
  • Resource Count at end of game (showing how much resources the player had when the game ended, not just showing total collected amount)
  • Favorite Military unit (the unit that you made the most, with the number next to it how many times you made it, this one I admit feels to be a bit harder to implement, but who knows… Also, I saw this feature in aoe3)
  • Number of Towers constructed
  • show wheelbarrow and hand cart in the time line
2 Likes

That option is good and I didn’t realize it worked so well since the last time I tried it it showed more information I think and I disabled the tooltips altogether then. Still, for some things it doesn’t work, like why are there 2 lines of explanation of what you can do with a tree and a villager…

In DE the hitboxes of ressources don’t work properly leading often to misclicks to an unreachable tree and also when multiple villagers are on the same ressource tile they bug out faster which makes this necessary. It is just so obnoxious to get your villagers working properly after being disrupted, in late game if I have ressources floating I usually build a new dropoff site so I don’t have to deal with this. Definitely not unnecessay for me, I miss this option in almost every single game. I don’t really get how this affects gameplay decisions.

A thread with uncontroversial and not-insane-to-implement QoL features is a really great idea, I have another two:

  • Add a rescan option for mods so that you don’t have to restart the game again to test most mods. This restarting is especially really bad since DE takes so long to start and close and multiple restarts can freeze even very strong computers.
  • Set the search mode to default/null after every ranked game. Accidentally played TGs multiple times because I didn’t realize the game had the search for TG still selected.
2 Likes

I agree with all your points. Some features look beautiful in our imagination, but in reality, they would require a lot of trial and error, and that’s not entirely worth it, when there are simpler things to improve and add to the game, with less development time, like the extra statistics you mentioned.

1 Like

And also the trade units (trade carts and cogs) count please :slightly_smiling_face:
I would like to see combined count of villagers, fishing ships and trade units in UI, like is displayed in post-game statistics.

5 Likes

Great recommendations… just to stress more on;
-show trade card count next to villager count
-dequeue/ cancel unit build by clicking left corner unit icon
-SELECT ALL WATER MILITARY UNITS
-speed up replays + add rewind if possible

2 Likes

I also have a something to add, it’s something very annoying. When you have many units garrisoned in a tc or castle, when ungarrisoning one, the spot where that unit was is replaced with the last unit on the group.
Fe: if you have 10 knights, 5 pikes and 5 scouts in a castle, and are shown in that orden in the castle, when you ungarrison a pike, the place that pike was is replaced by a scout, so it’s a mess if you want to get out all the pikes as you can’t just click five times the same spot
The fix would just be that units ungarrison in direct order, so when ungarrisoning one, it’s replaced by the next one and not the last

4 Likes

I totally disagree with this. The people use Alt F4 because the dev’s force people to play maps they don’t want.
Stop forcing people to play maps they don’t like. I miss a lot the free choice of map from voobly and steam 2013.

Let’s have “Select building” hotkeys work in the technology tree! That would make it about 10 times faster to use.

(I posted about this in my own thread a long time ago.)

1 Like

so instead they will wait for the game to load and then simply resign/alt f4??? what?

But if they wait for the game to load then they will lose elo?

Several of your suggestion regarding hotkeys already exist if you got thought the, said with the utmost politeness as I wish to help people out.

• add Option to toggle on/off for “Go-To Hotkeys will center(move screen) on the unit’s location”

Ans: You can do this by setting a hot key for select all TC. Look in hotkeys select all

• add 3 hotkeys for selecting all lumber camps, all mills and all mining camps (this one won’t really be needed if you implement the toggle above for centering on unit location or not)

ANS: Again this is already in the game, where you can set hotkey to select all lumber camps, all mills, or mines. Unless you mean you want to select all of them at one time.

• separate hotkeys for elite battle elephant and elite steppe lancer upgrades (currently they are all stuck on the same letter but it would be nice to be able to modify)
Ans: Look in Hotkey Stable Options…

You think none of the 16 people posting before you would have noticed?
Iets hope you’re right.
What is the hotkey that allows one to select mills - without centering on them?

1 Like

I appreciate your effort but your answers just feel like you are assuming I barely know anything about the hotkeys and are trying to teach me.

Believe it or not, I am actually aware of that. But what if someone wants to select only 1 TC, and to not have the screen snap to the location.

And yes I have already switched to using only the “select all of a type” exactly because of the reason that it doesn’t snap to the location.

Idk how you can tell that the feature already exists, when I have talked to a dev and he himself said they are considering implementing this option of being able to choose if a hotkey will Snap to Location. Yes a workaround for it exists. But it doesn’t exist as a feature officially. Age of Empires 3 has a toggle in the options for “Snap to Unit Location with hotkey”

Anyways the main reason I am suggesting that feature is because we are not able to snap to the lumber camp / mill / mining camp without having our screen move to that place. So I’d either want that feature or ability to select all lumber/camp/mill…

Select All Lumber Camp. Select All Mill. Select All Mining Camp. Those hotkeys don’t exist, only the go-to lumber camp etc…

And yes I mean that last line. select all of them at one time, so that the screen doesn’t snap and I can start researching an upgrade without my screen moving back to the woodline.

1 of these features would be enough for me: either them adding select all hotkeys for these 3 types of buildings, or adding an option to choose for the cycle hotkeys to not snap to a unit’s location

My Ans: Look in Hotkey Stable Options

they are bound to the same line and not possible to be separated

image

1 Like