Is it time? time for mongols to be openly discussed?
One of the more exciting parts of this game is that it tries to not be AoE2 in some places. Mongols have access to one of the more interesting mechanics in the game, the ability to pack buildings and unpack them wherever you want. This mechanic opens up many possibilities and uses for actual gameplay. In fact, the ability to move your buildings around is deemed so powerful that Mongols do not even have walls to defend themselves with.
So I ask you, why then, is it that this is somewhat of an underused feature? Don’t get me wrong, it is featured in every game ever–but, rarely is it central to a winning game, and if it is, it tends to be exceedingly annoying to attempt. So here is two reasons as to why I think this ability is actually being underutilized, as it is a shame that buggy programming is actively preventing Mongols from being enjoyable to many players.
Confused AI?
Packing and then unpacking buildings should be a smooth experience. For a slow moving unit, players should not have to babysit something that they’ve sent across the map and already commanded it to unpack. Yet, the simplest of functions is riddled with issues that Mongol players have to actively try to counteract. Not because it is meant to be difficult, mind you. But, rather because it has been programmed in a non-foolproof way, leading to being an unreliable mechanic. This by itself causes players to avoid these types of maneuvers. Remember, this is not because players do not want to use these mechanics–instead, because it is an unreliable mechanic, that makes players hesitate to use it.
Here is a very short little clip of how it behaves.
On a singular unit basis, it tends to work fine–until, another unit passes their unpacking location. This can be a villager, military or even more problematic; other packed buildings, which causes the command to be cancelled altogether. With singular buildings, there is the work-around of shift queuing a move into multiple unpacking commands. This essentially bruteforces the unit into repeating the action however many times you queued it up. There is however no feasible way to do this with multiple buildings.
Command groups getting erased
When packing and unpacking multiple buildings, some of them will tend to be erased from your command groups. This is a well known issue, which contributes even more to Mongol being unwieldy and stressful to operate when attempting to exercise their most basic mechanic. Here is a clip for those unfamiliar. You will notice how all of these production buildings had a control group at the beginning, after which half of them were erased by the end.
Now, I didn’t record a clip of this, but say you are raiding another player with horsemen, ideally you should be able to select your 3 stables with your control group and unpack them nearby that raid, without ever having to move your camera away from the base that you are raiding. With how things currently stand, Mongol players need to perpetually keep watch of their packed buildings, to see if their control groups got erased and if they ever even unpacked properly. As it stands, it discourages players from attempting this, something that is meant to be core to Mongol’s gameplay.
In the middle of a high-stakes battle, this is what makes these tactics unviable.
The reason I make this post is because as of right now, a year after launch, this is still an issue. And from my point of view, it seems like such an odd thing for them to not have fixed, as it seems so central to Mongol identity in this game. In fact, I’m somewhat astounded that there is so little ruckus being made about it.
I’ll end the post by asking, how do you deal with this, Mongol players? And how many of you also feel deflated about the difficulty in trying to utilize this mechanic at all? I have recently reported both bugs, but I figured I’d gauge how much of an issue this actually is and if we potentially could accelerate the fixing of these bugs by upping them in their priority list.