Massive Outpost garrisoning issue -- Now you know why

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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Has your woodline ever been raided by a cavalry unit of horsemen when you least expect it? Well. At least you prepared beforehand and erected an Outpost. But, in your frantic panic to save your minions, something goes wrong. You select your villagers, push the Garrison button and click on the tower–But, it doesn’t work the first try. So you try again and again until it eventually does; but by then, blood has already been spilled.

This was something has happened to me on multiple occasions and, being so mild and rare, I could never figure out why and if it was happening at all, figuring I may have just missed the Outpost somehow. Finally I decided to try out a bunch of things to find the culprit, and I finally did.

Here some videos of this happening. In the video, you can probably tell who the culprit is, and why this is something that doesn’t always happen–Trees, even the leafless ones that blend with the background, have a massive hitbox that have priority of your cursor over Outposts/Keeps/TCs. First I thought “this is for ease of access when we want to chop them” but, no. An easy solution would be simply–clicking the Garrison button would only allow you to interact with Garrison-able buildings. This might not seem like a huge issue, but Outposts are rather slim and even leafless trees can unintentionally overlap them quite a bit.

Basically, their huge invisible hitbox extends quite far vertically. If you ever placed your Outpost behind a treeline, even if the Outpost towers above them, you are prone to experiencing this, as the tree will block your villagers from garrisoning. And as you can see from my clips, even a small tree has great blocking potential.

Being aware of it now, I can finally play around it. But, it begs the question; should it be like this? Should Outposts not be prioritized over trees? I feel that villagers should enter a “Garrison” mode when the button is pressed, and thus, should ignore Ungarrisonable objects. And especially due to the urgency of seeking shelter, a player should never have these kinds of errors popping up. I hesitated to put this on the Report-A-Bug forum, as I’m not sure if this is intended or not.

I don’t think it should be? What do you think, is this a bug, feature and should it be changed?

2 Likes
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this needs more attention brought to it, extremely annoying to deal with
edit: i suggest moving this to bug reports, as it should count as a bug in need of fixing

2 Likes
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I didn’t know, but I have always deactivated the garnish with the mouse, I use the F or the G

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Ah, maybe it wasn’t clear but in the clips above, I am using F to try and enter buildings, not right-click-to-garrison.

If you use G instead, you can bypass this as villagers will seek their own shelter. But, we all know how devastating pathfinding is in this game, and I would rather pick the path of my villagers–additionally, chose what Outposts they should garrison for maximum damage.

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This seems to, at least somewhat, link on with my less important post about struggling to pick up a treasure chest. As trees want to get selected also. I can see in the first video here the single tree wants to get selected. The tree was not the big issue here, I know, but it plays a part.