In the latest patch the following change was made:
Increased the radius in which Settlers will seek out and collect their respective resources to prevent them from idling when uncollected resources are within view.
It seems like this feature works and causes settlers to idle less, but I have come across two cases where this new addition is detrimental and where the previous behavior is more advantageous.
First minor thing is that I had a few games where my allies idle villagers were automatically walking from their base into mine to gather resource crates that just dropped. This seems bad as in one cases I had team mates quit when another player had his villagers gobble up his recently shipped 1000 gold card while they weren’t paying attention.
Second and more major issue I feel is that It causes settlers to walk way out of position seeking resources. After depleting a mine in my base my settlers chose to walk 1/3 of the way across the map towards a mine that was under my opponents area of control. This seems to happen a lot with the new change where villagers will automatically walk into a battle or towards an enemy camp in search of resources.
Perhaps its an issue with how I macro, but using the idle villager alert to show me when a group of settler is done with a hunt or camp allows me better control of where they go next. I understand this is very very useful to newer players to help cut down on idle time, but as a more experienced player It feels like I now have to babysit my villagers much more to make sure they aren’t wandering out of my base.
I would propose that there be a gameplay option that you can choose whether or not you want the new gather radius or not. If not I think there should be some tuning here to prevent or limit the aforementioned behavior.
While I do appreciate the update since the gather range was abysmally small before (hunters couldn’t even see deers right next to them), I agree it needs some fine tuning. Hunters and woodcutters seem fine, but miners seem to be on steroids, and many times I’ve seen 'em walk across the entire map and through multiple enemy towns just for one chance at continuing the Gold Rush
Ideally, we should have 4 settings. Off(Villagers will only move to another source if manually commanded), Defensive(Villagers will move to to the closest new source, but only if it is within the villager’s line of sight), Normal(Villagers will move to to the closest new source, but only if it is within 3x villager’s line of sight) and Aggressive(Villagers will move to the closest new source that has been discovered on the map, no matter how far.)
In team games, if your vill idles while your distant teammate has a crate under their TC, the vill will immediately walk to your teammate’s TC rather than idling. Idling much preferred
A few days ago I played a 2v2 and my strategy was to get 300 coin from mining then ship 700 coin to age up. Once the shipment arrived, ally’s settlers started gathering the coin. Extremely annoying and I lost a minute doing extra mining. In a game where every second counts this is quite a massive impact.