Please make an auto queue option for vills

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
41

I am a serious player, i played all the Ages games, and Age of Mithology had it and it was an almost perfect game.
Let it be an opitional feature for the player whom prefer to compusively press keys tham plan a good attack/defense plan.

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42

I use a lot of control groups too, but you have only 9 of them and i use them all.

43

You got 10, or more if you bind it correctly. I for my self bound the Controllgroup 0 and the marcets to my mouse. So its not that hard to click a mousebutton+q every few seconds.

44

Or hit the H+Q keys every few seconds, it is not hard at all, it is annoying and could/should be automated.

45

Dude, if you had a feature that makes you require less skill then everyone will use it. Because we would have to, to not fall behind. Same thing as if there were a button to press to make you perfectly execute a build. You must have a weird idea of what it means to be serious when you make irrational suggestions such as these

46

No, its not hard but its a core mechanic to the series. Its not like you got to recreate a farm or chop every tree with the micro. its basicly the thing that the whole game turns around. Its all about eco until a certain point of skill level.

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47

I don’t believe repeatedly pressing the same buttons every few seconds may be considered skill. We’re talking about a strategy game, where we wear the mantle of military commanders who give orders to their followers. It is a type of game in which planning and quick thinking are the mandatory skills, not pressing repetitive keys compulsively, to create the same unit.

It could be an optional feature, and players whom dont like it could play with those that think likewise.

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48

I agree, man, but the game has to evolve or we’d still be having to recreate each farm every few minutes, wasting all our meager lumber in the process.
Age of Mythology was one of the best in the series and it had this mechanic to repeat a recruitment sequence and it worked wonderfully.
Furthermore, pressing buttons quickly is not a skill in a strategy game, but planning and quick thinking are.

49

So basicly everyone would turn this on, if its in regular match, because you would give yourself a disadvantage. It’s the same if you got autoaimlock in a FPS. Or always drive on the perfect line in a racing game.

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50

From 14:58, he talks about the introduction of autoqueue in AoM. Best collection of arguments you will hear against autoqueue

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51

I can’t believe how far off you are. It seems you don’t really like macro oriented RTS games. Try turn based games. Villagers are also not the only thing to keep track of. You need to keep up the house building, build new resource drop of point when the last one is too far away and so on. If you don’t like this genre, switch to a different one instead of trying to destroy this one. Being able to keep a lot of different things in your mind at the same time is the clue to these games. It’s an absoulutely ESSENTIAL part of the game. If you are not capable of doing it, play different games. Sounds like you would like total war better.

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52

Good video about the strategy behind what to spend your attention on and about how autoqueue ruins the game. I understand a lot of people are too slow to keep track of several things at once, but it don’t excuse them trying to ruin age of empires.

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53

Word.

If you aren’t that fast, but enjoy yourself on playing this title in 1v1 multiplayer, you’ll soon get matched with other people in your skillset. I didn’t encounter a big skilldifference on my 250+ hours i played so far.
And if you don’t like such a macrointense game, then some other games would really be better for you.
I for myself fell in love with this game because of the much more needed macro, then in other games. I personally find it much harder to micro units propperly (like sc2/wc3) then to macro.

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54

What drama some users have here.

Even with the extreme decision of an optional automatic production queue for all units, the macro would still be important in the game, what’s more, I would bet on giving the game more microintensity and favoring the reduction of macro with these measures (such as dodging the arrows or give special abilities to almost all units in the game).

With autoqueue you still have these decisions:

  • At what point to stop producing villagers when you already have enough.

  • When to stop producing military units, either to age up, change military unit, produce more villagers or make some economic/military upgrade.

  • Having to send the correct villagers in each resource so that there is no accumulation of those resources.

  • Having to build the necessary military buildings depending on the number of villagers or economic if you are going to boom.

  • Having to choose the economic or military upgrades you need.

  • Change from one military unit to another in the same military building.

In other words, with this there would still be multitasking (less), a somewhat smaller macro (it would be very important in the game as well) and micromanagement and battles would be prioritized more.

A general survey in this forum would be good to see what the members of the forum like most about AoE, if economic management in production or military management in battles and thus we see reality.

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55

Thank you for this input. Interesting perspective. Maybe I see the biggest argument against autoqueue might be that attacking and also defending does not cost that much because you have 1 economic micro task less?

I still think auto-queue would do more good than harm to the game.

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56

Why on earth are you guys so focused on this. it wont make you win more. You’ll still face low lvl people. But these will now also have less need to divide attention between differnet things.

Besides, this whole thread is basically larping. It will never be a feature, except maybe as a mod. But I doubt people that¨s able to make a mod will have any interest or need for this. The devs are previously aoe2 and aoe3 players among other RTS games. They know better than to ruin the game in this way. And we already have the horror story from aom where people stopped playing after it was added.

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57

If you have the resources you can even just hold shift q and point your tc to the resource you need and you won’t have to think about it for awhile while you do other things. Just keep an eye on your resources and know when to change it if you’re following a build order.

58

Harsh but fair. I hated macroing a lot too at first a few months ago after not playing an RTS since like 2001 but I’ve watched lots of videos and pro player trips to get better at it and after you get used to it remembering to create villagers isn’t too hard. You can already sort of do this if you have the resources just hold shift and q and it will make as many villagers as you can at the moment. I feel an auto command always doing it would take a lot of strategy out of the game too. Just take the time and learn how to macro better.

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59

So let’s break his argument to pieces as he only states 2, it’s super easy to analyze.

Exposing Balance Issues - That’s game design problem that is caused by asymmetric design obfuscating what is optimal and what is not. Same would happen without it given you would have large enough playerbase or total playtime. We can see it in AOE4 where META dominates the game and any significant imbalance is immediately problem. SO BALANCE ARGUMENT IS WRONG It would happen anyway and people would complain about one trick pony meta sooner or later…

Reduction of multitasking and dividing attention - Yes and no at the same time.

It reduces amount of clicks you need to do on repeat every few seconds. So it reduces only mechanical APM requirements. It does not take anything from anything else. And even if it reduces mechanical APM it still creates trade off decision where you need to balance what is auto-queued all the time, otherwise you end up with dysfunctional MACRO.

What it effectively does it reduces skill gap between players, which is fine as it makes players closer to each other and allows everyone to put a decent game against each other. It makes early rushing less effective in completely overwhelming your opponent with information overload and makes it easier for aggressor to actually effectively manage economy and production while being aggressive. But the goal of aggression is to slow opponent so it still works and its still effective strategy. You will just not see your opponent to completely halt, which would not even happen at high level ever.

So in the overall perspective you loose nothing and you gain nothing. Only effect it has it reduces skill gap and encourages MICRO as players have more APM for unit control. This provides defender with small advantage in short run and causes game to be longer.

So who does this affect and why is forums playerbase so much against it ? Well it splits playerbase to 3 groups. One thats fine with it. One that does not care. One that opposes it.

Why would anyone oppose it ? Because as it was stated it reduces skill gap, makes game longer and changes the focus of the game from being hotkey fest to produce units to hotkey fest to control units as game changes focus from economy to military. => going away from AGE macro focus

In the end its same trade off many strategy sub genres did over the year, they reduced economy/production/building and focused on armies to be closer to fast paced SC2.

The good discussion topic would be why people want the auto-queue instead of bashing it. (As it’s done by certain someone who makes almost half of comments in this thread to halt discussion.)

IMO auto-queue is requested and desired because hotkeys dominate RTS gameplay. Auto-queue is system that reduces that problems, but doesn’t solve it. RTS are extremely reliant on hotkeys, whole grid system is perfect example of absurd amount of keys player needs to memorize subconsciously to perfect the game. (Humans cant multitask, what we call multitasking is nothing other than action pattern memorization.) Good example of this over-reliance is recently introduced hotkeys that in the end do same thing that auto-queue does.

So if we agree that auto-queue moves game to direction majority of AGE playerbase does not want, then we should make still game more accessible by including options that makes it easier to play, so game can include wider playerbase and make it feel safe and enjoy the game.

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60

This is a very bad idea. Being agressive effectively should be hard. Because it’s difficult for the opponent to defend.

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