Hello,
Without webresearch or a lot of studies you don’t know when it’s one of the best time to do an upgrade. For example wheel barrow.
It could be great to have a little green light on building which need an upgrage. For example lumbercamp if you don’t have double axe and 20 villagers on wood. When you click on the building the upgrade will have his color a bit modify.
New player will be help to improve their skills and for others it will be used as a reminder.
2 Likes
As long as I can turn it off in the options menu yes, may not be easy to get optimal time since nobody can agree on that but if it is excessive benefit you are losing - could do UI icon like some other RTS similar to the unit training queue UI icons that already show up but with an exclamation mark that takes you to the building when you click it instead of the building itself flashing(If it is not on the screen you will not see it flash) - I think many people will not like this and say auto everything though
1 Like
No. This game is too player-friendly already and it hurts the skill gaps.
This suggestion makes bad players appear in higher elo and consistently ruin the ladder eventually.
Also i want pro players to forget important upgrades so there are more fun moments. This is how the game is and should be. If you can’t upgrade yourself, or don’t know when to do it then its your own fault and not something the game should tell you.
4 Likes
The game is too player-friendly? Seriously there is more civ than ever. There is more unit than ever, there is more unit tech for each civ.
I played with a french top 100 and I show him that upgrade in blacksmith increase also the range of building and siege engeneering increase the range of siege unit…
He show me that rhino have the same attack than the boar but the attack animation is faster in the result aps is higher. There is hundred of thing to know. It’s not a bad thing but it’s not make the game friendly to new player.
1 Like
There is no need to debate whether this would kill the skill of the game because the real problem is that for the immense majority of questions you can wonder about in this game, the answer is “it depends”.
In your example, the quantity of wood you need depends on whether you want to make archers, or scouts, or fast castle, ect… The game can’t guess what strategy you’re going for so regardless of what time you choose for the button to activate it’s going to guess wrong.
What the game can guess is your ELO, so if you play ranked you will end up with people who will mostly do the same mistakes as you do so it won’t be too much of a problem. Eventually you will figure out what to do by yourself or by watching others play.
2 Likes
There are a lot of other priorities that need to be addressed before they start doing anything like this, better in-game tooltips about what things actually do when you research them eg. exactly what +1 building damage means on siege engineers(which is a lot more than one damage but new player would think it awful waste of resources to get), fixing technical issues, improving the lobby system etc. - but if they actually continue to develop the game for several years a feature like this making it into it wouldn’t be a horrible addition, it doesn’t need to tell you when to buy the tech, just that there are techs that have not been purchased yet - not really sure how much it would help people though, I don’t really have any use for it myself and I can’t say if it would have been useful to me when I started playing the game or not, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have any problems researching the technologies as they became available anyway(not necessarily at an optimal time but getting them) but that was 20 years ago so I might remember wrong
@BouffantBloom32 As far as the elo system being ruined by UI features, that doesn’t even make sense, if they’re using UI features and are at a certain elo then they can play just as well on average as someone at the same elo not using UI features, that’s like saying someone with tooltips turned on is ruining the elo system because they don’t have the unit stats and techs all memorized or that if you press the auto-reseed farm button in the mill you’re ruining the game for everyone else because your elo is inflated and you aren’t as good as it says you are, if you use hotkeys to select buildings instead of clicking them, you can continue this train of thought until you’re playing the game on an abacus and calculating every individual bit by hand - it doesn’t matter if you wouldn’t do as well without the feature if it’s available to everyone that wants to use it, if you’re able to reach an elo with it turned on you’re going to be as good as the other people at that elo level period no matter if they don’t need to use it or not, it would only affect your performance if it got removed from the game later and you were dependent on using it to perform at that level - half the people that play the game would be -300 elo points compared to older players if they took out farm reseeding and control groups, if you’re going to argue against something for ruining skill gaps because it provides a better display of information then you’re basing your skill on the wrong portion of the system, that’s like equating using a rolled up newspaper to check heartbeats instead of a stethoscope makes sure no bad doctors will exist - the only reason not to improve the UI is to give additional advantage to people that are used to using the current version of it with any flaws it might have, not to actually maintain a fair playing field - people that object to this so often just make me think they’re more concerned about maintaining elite status and afraid that they will lose ranking if the UI gets easier to use, not that they care if the game is actually still fair and balanced, they just don’t want someone that is better at RTS in general to be able to beat them without a massive time investment into AOE’s interface if it becomes too easy to learn how to operate which is the opposite of what will increase the appeal of the game
Automation is a different story, if someone can get the game to perform an economic strategy or unit production build order for them that is automation, but user friendliness in providing additional display of important information and better hotkeys and commands is not providing an input for the player, it is just allowing them to make an input in a less time consuming way or ensuring they can comprehend information they already have access to in a more concise way with less time spent clicking things to get to it - are you also in favor of removing the villager counter, population counter, minimap, attack alerts, go to last alert hotkey, go to tc hotkey, the resource pool values, and the score counter from the screen and placing them into an info box you have to click your town center to view?
2 Likes
Not sure if this suggestion will work. Let’s have a look at some noob examples
- If you have an idle villager, then you need to retask the villager. There is already an indicator showing the number of idle villagers. Noobs can see the number, but most wont really react to this number.
- The best play is to have almost no resources not used. Look at pros, they almost never float resources (except when they have a further goal with the resources, like getting some expensive tech or next age). Then look at noobs. While they already can see the number of resources, they still dont spend these resources.
So i am not sure if even more reminders will really help noobs.
What? Never heard about this one…
He is probs triggered because of autoscout or something
See autoscout triggers me but it’s because it is so awful that using it for anything seems like you’re consigning your scout to a horrible and pointless death that could have been avoided had you not clicked just one button
Yes but some people still think it’s too good or makes the game too easy.
It doesn’t depend a lot. An example very simplify The double axe cost around 150 of food it’s quite equal to 3 villager. The work rate increase is around 20%
It became the right move to upgrade the double axe when :
X lumberjack + 3 new lumberjack < X lumberjack*1,20 (+20%)
X>3/0,2
X>15
When you have more than 15 lumberjack it’s better to do the research than build new villager for more wood.
It’s not the best timing because the reality is more complexe but it could really help.
Upgrade are in a type of color when the upgrade isn’t availaible yet, the color is not the same when you haven’t enough resources. Why not a little bit of green to show that you really should do the upgrade?
I like your way of thinking, but it’s wrong, and, not to be disrespectful, your post makes it clear that you do not understand how games are played at medium and high level.
The cost of Double-Bit Axe it not ‘quite equal’ to the cost of 3 Villagers, because a Villager is worth a lot more than 50 Food. A Villager is also worth 25 seconds of Town Center working time, which is a valuable resource in itself. Since in competitive games, no one want to waste this resource, Town Centers are always working and are always pumping out Villagers until the late game. As such, the question ‘Should I spend resources on Double-Bit Axe or on 3 Villagers’ never comes up. Resources are always spend on Villagers and the question is what to do with your additional resources. A question that could come up is something like: ‘Should I invest in an economy upgrade to harvest more resources long-term, or should I invest more into military so that my forces will be stronger now, or should I save up my resources so that I can advance to the next age sooner?’ And the answer to that question is, indeed, very much ‘it depends’.
You don’t understand. Most of the time you produce more ressources than what you spend in the TC for vil. You research double axe very early because you have money in the bank and you can’t spend more on vil because the production rate of the tc is the bottleneck.
Bisou
I don’t think this should be part of the game. When to do researches is part of the decision making in the game, and such things should be left to the discretion of the players. Suggesting that there is some ideal time to do such researches is the wrong way of thinking. Such decisions will always depend on the context (what map you are playing, what strategy are you doing, what strategy is your opponent doing etc.)
Putting a light on the building would just give the players the wrong impression that these researches have to be automatically done at some point. Hence it would ingrain them with bad habits.
Aren’t you quoting the wrong person?
Imagine you are going FC and this thing tells you to do double bit axe xD
ur missing the point that JongleurMage203 is triyng to make. I also didnt knew whan 2 research techs whan i was new. Plus the fact that u say that pro players will be missing fewer techs is absolutly stupid, ur not here to laugh , ur here 2 play and enjoy.
1 Like
The decision is not always strategy. When you have more than 15 lumberjack it always to be stupid to create more villager to wood than double axe. When you create more lumberjack it’s only because you have forgotten to do the upgrade.
It’s only help good player to don’t forget and new player to make them discover that there is upgrade in lumbercamp and it worth it.
It’s like the color of a building when it’s doing a research. It’s useless because the player already know it because he chooses to do it… It’s like when the button of an upgrade or unit is in a different color to tell you that is not available yet or you don’t have enough ressources. Everyone know when you can upgrade such tech or the cost of it. In your mind it’s useless but it’s not.
Well, i disagree.
But, even if it’s noob-friendly so what? I mean sure if you play ranked or tourney, arguably it would be better to be disabled there. But for Single player or lobby browser? I think the more it’s noob-friendly, the better.
Not all people want to play this game competitively. There are players that just want to play the game casually.
“Your own fault”, so what? This is just a game, not work. Unless you play competitively, no one really need to be good at this game. As long as you have fun, even with bad habit or making a ton of mistakes and fault, it’s ok IMO. If the idea makes the game more fun, so be it.
Just remember not all people play this game competitively. To shut down an idea cuz “competitiveness” without knowing whether it would affect ranked or not is too early IMO.
2 Likes
Many a times the ideal time of doing double bit axe might be way before one has 15 lumberjacks. Any suggestion that an automatic algorithm suggests would obviously can’t take into account all the context needed, and hence will give newer players a false impression about the time to do the researches.
One solution might be for all buildings with available researches to be highlighted or for there to be some indicator in the main screen which tells you how many economic researches are done. But the place to tell new players when to do a research is in strategy guides, not from within the game itself.