I don’t know, wether or not you mean that buildings and eco/military units should be treated as same priority as a target of an attackmove.
So let’s assume you mean that there should be no (!) attack priority.
Let’s make a comparison of open field vs fighting around buildings:
If anyone after this example still doesn’t understand why units and especially archers should not attack buildings when enemies are in (sight-) range, then that person should better not play ranked mode nor judge people’s opinion and experience of playing that mode.
5 archers (you) vs 5 archers enemy [open field]
You wanna use all archers to shoot one single target, to kill it as quickly as possible in order to lower the enemy’s dps as soon as possible.
You hold shift and right-click his units.
After 3 salves his first unit dies. If you are especially trying hard, you reduce the number of archers which shoot the target for the 3rd shot and let some shoot the next target already, so no overkill happens.
50 vs 50 archers [open field]
You wanna go into line formation and attack-move. That’s what you do on the open field to prevent overkills and get your max dps down while maximizing the enemy’s overkills onto your own archers.
It’s very clear in this case, the player with better micro/mechanics wins.
5archers vs 5archers [enemy got outpost in between of you]
The enemy has 5 archers at his outpost, you have 5 archers.
You as the aggressor are in the disadvantage, but you can at least do something.
In the worst case, the enemy will garrison his 5 archers into the tower and you won’t shoot any of his units a single time, all your 5 archers die. But let’s assume he doesn’t do that.
You can select your 5 archers and rightclick on the enemy units and even use shift-attack.
Your archers may or may not kill some of his units, before getting slaughtered by the arrows from the outpost [arrowslits or other units in there) and/or enemy archers.
Of course, he has the line-of-sight advantage because of the outpost, but let’s just assume you have placed your scout in “hold ground” mode close enough to have vision on his units to shoot them.
50archers vs 50archers [enemy got outpost in between of you]
As in the open field example, you wanna use line formation and attackmove, because you’d overkill HEAVILY by rightclicking with 50 archers on one enemy archer.
Unfortunately many of your archers attack the tower and you lose the fight. Most, if not all enemy archers survive.
You can try selecting the archers in small groups and right-shiftclicking the enemies.
But the enemy does NOT have to do this, he can use lineformation and attack-move.
This problem becomes worse with growing numbers and also numbers of buildings being around in close space.
It becomes even worse when you are near to the (capital) tc, as the enemy can garrison 15 units and the tc blocks a lot of space. If his archers are behind and yours in front, the chance is almost 100% that some of your units start shooting the towncenter, while getting slaughtered by his archers AND towncenter.
Because your units lose track ov enemy units, when this huge building is in between and maybe you don’t even have enough line-of-sight.
The towncenter, keeps, outposts etc are defensive buildings, which offer defensive value in form of garrisoning, high hp/ranged armor and being able to do damage to units.
This advantage should ONLY apply if you actively CHOOSE to attack that said building with military units, which offer low siege power.
But these and regular buildings are not supposed to be bringing up a gigantic micro/mechanical advantage
without any action of the defender needed.
Fact is, the defender is (almost) always in the advantage:
You have your production close to the fight for reinforcements, you have buildings to garrison your fragile units in, some of your buildings damage the enemy units.
And that’s about it. There is no need for more advantages and in fact there SHOULD NOT be.
If the villagers of the defender are idle, because the enemy takes the RISK to fight in his town, despite all the disadvantages of the attack, including the chance of the enemy teching up/building defenses before the attacker can reach his town, then well… It’s a strategy game and idling the enemy’s economy is a viable and NEEDED way to balance the game. It’s the only way to keep heavy boom/turtle/tech civs in check, regarding balance.
Now, with the new patch, since units can be ungarrisoned towards any direction [which is an amazing (!!!) change on it’s own, thank you a LOT for this!!!], the defender’s advantage becomes even more immense.
It is now high time, for the attack-prio to be very cleanly coded for and implented into the game.
Either through the use of a (global) button like “attack units only” or through consistent code, which could be done in different ways.
One of the Devs actually messaged me regarding this (because I reported this as a bug ages ago) and said the DEVs are working on a solution.
Let’s see what they’ll bring up.
I honestly can’t wait for the fix.
One more case where it’s becoming very obvious that the attack-behaviour and target-locking of military units is very much off:
You try to raid enemy villagers which are busy gathering food on farms.
You move your knights/men at arms or whatever units very close to the villagers and then attack-move.
Half of your units will start attacking farms (the building), even though villagers are right next to them.
To make it even worse, enemy spears will auto-target the cavalry units, as there is no other target for them.
The knights/horsemen die under tc/outpost/keep fire, while getting demolished by spearmen.
And they attack the farms…
Meanwhile the villagers have plenty of time to escape.
If you (applies to anyone reading this) have read until here and you still believe it’s working as intended and you “ideally do have to manage your units actively and a little bit of micro is needed in aoe4”, then read this whole post again until you understand it and can grasp what the whole post is about.
Even the last defender of the current code should now understand that the code is massively off and a change is way overdue.
I have already reported these things in the beta feedback.
The game has been released 2.5 years ago.
Now just count, for how long this broken code has been part of the game.
A cleanly implented permanent fix for this severe issue would be very much appreciated.
