AoE4 is the third most played RTS. You have the AoE2 section if you feel more comfortable there.
Maybe if you read the whole thread you could see that automation with some penalty could work and satisfy the needs of the vast majority.
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oh i see it now, if there was a comma there then the meaning reverses
i dont need to read the whole thread to know whats bad from good lol. i mean anyone can do a little thinking what auto queue vill will do to competitve scene and not only that there are other issues that comes into it too.
but again ive mentioned b4 i dont care if they implement it. aoe4 can be as casual as it can be and let itâs competitive side dies and turn into aoe3, so the hard core players can migrate to better games like sc1/2, aoe2 etc
You come here to throw the bait?
An automatic queue with penalty would not affect competitive play at medium and high levels at all, because nobody would use it as they DONâT USE AutoScout in AoE2.
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i coudl ask you the same, do you think auto scout is somehow comparable to auto queue vills? what a thing to compare, most obvious you are also not a competitive player. no competitive player would think this, period.
I rebroadcast and I know high level players who do not see bad the measure (with a penalty) so that whoever wants to use it in the lows.
Who are you?
It really depends on how it is implemented. Many people suggest it to be almost as good as manual villager production, which is the wrong approachâif it is almost the same as always correctly manually producing villagers, then it is superior to it to almost everyone besides the highest levels of play where money matters.
So that unfortunately means any automation would have to be quite bad in order to reach far enough down into the playerbase for it to not taint the actual essence of the game. At which point, it becomes a mechanic that beginner players will always be severely behind on due to the importance of villagers. A training wheel that does not in fact help them manually produce villagers, but also that limits their full potential.
A hybrid system would not work either. Say you always had automation in the background that worked way slower than regular production, and it could be overriden at any time by a manual request to produce villagers. What you have here is effectively manual production with a safenet. Basically, it is stronger than no automation and causes the same problems as full on automation.
In addition to everything I have mentioned above, the point is still this; any new players struggling with this fundamental mechanic will struggle with many more other in an RTS like AoE4, if villager production doesnât push them away, something else will. In contrast, simply commanding to produce more villagers is infinitely more simple than other mechanics in the game. Remember, automating the process, you are instead throwing new players at other mechanics to immediately work on, and the game overall becomes far more hectic as it shifts your focus away from production to other mechanics, which goes for all players in the match. Manual villager production is a mental anchor that ties your attention DIRECTLY to your economy. It, if anything, is in of itself training wheels for understanding and grasping the game.
Here is the final point. It is ok to make mistakes. It is ok that you lose because your opponent produced 10 more villagers. That is the point. Remove that, economies suddenly become far more equal. Battles become more sluggish. Gameplay becomes more hectic, and you need to do far more to make up a difference in skill. This, is anti-beginner moreso than simply having to produce villagers. The fact that one player can win over another over such a trivial thing is in of itself a good soft winning condition that low level players can hinge on and work on. Changing that, will only hurt those very players and not anyone who multitasks well and produces villagers without registering it.
Any âsolutionâ for automation, comes with it far more problems than they solve. Villager production is not a meaningless mechanic, and only appears so to those who have no understanding of why mechanics are in the game to begin with. Not every feature has to be flashy, and villager production could be baked into the game in other ways; but in Age of Empires, this is the form it takesâand its removal would spell catastrophy for this game, as it did for its cousin, Age of Mythology.
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Pretty catastrophic prediction for automated villagers to be honest, we donât have any relevant data that confirms these fears. Villager production isnât even an issue past plat 1 in my experience, interesting to see someone think automating that one process could cause the entire game to fail. Just like training wheels, itâll eventually come off as new players gain experience. Or be adapted to, and weâll have a new meta to play in as a result.
They are announcing a batch of information next week for the remaster of the game you claim failed by the way.
With all due respect, game design is a whole field of which there is plenty of data, principles and ideas to extract knowledge from. Your lack of said knowledge or understanding of it does not invalidate statements that are fundamentally agreed upon in this sphere. I am not trying to sound condescending here, but sincerely seek a book like Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell if you want to learn more about said principles and understand their purpose when you look at games or discussions around them. To invalidate the field as âlack of dataâ is some high arrogance to say the least.
You do this a lot in this forum, suggesting that there is no âdataâ due to your inexperience or inability to see connections of statements and end up rejecting them as invalid as a result. This is not a very productive mindset and most of the time; you mightâve as well have said nothing. A clear example of this is how AoM was brought up, which has a clear history of this exact scenario playing out hurting both the playerbase and the retrospective opinion of the game.
As for AoM, people, including myself, love AoM as it was. We all want a remake, a remaster, for there are a million and one things outside of villager production that define it. Automatic production came far later and after its glory days, but did have clear consequences nevertheless. Did it cause the game to utterly fade into obscurity? No, not by a lot more than it already had at that point in its lifetime, yet, leave a stain, it did. By the way, no where do I state that this will create a complete collapse of everything that is Age of Empiresâbut my stance is that it will hurt the game in the long run and leave a deep scar.
I personally donât believe automation will be featured in the remake of the game, and believe that it will be a mistake to add it.
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I have to say that there is still no RTS (that I know of) where automation in production has a penalty and where doing it manually rewards you, favoring both parties.
Sometimes itâs good to take a little risk and I think testing with that consensus can solve a problem in a Solomonic way.
As an option for custom games sure, but definitley not for competitive matches
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@TheAchronic very long texts that I donât have time to read, like when he tried to convince us to change the user interface 
My contribution
If you want to put more time into the auto queue villagers, these would be the equivalents
With a production time of 21 seconds, a villager would be lost at exactly 7 minutes.
With a production time of 22 seconds, a villager would be lost at 3 minutes and 40 seconds.
Personally I think the idea of villager production can exist in many different forms. It just happens that AoEâs way of doing it relates back to older games, for it is an old franchise. I do believe in iteration, but I donât believe automation is a solution that solves these issues people have noted here.
Zerg from Starcraft or Infernals from Stormgate feature different forms of villager production that allows for more errors as they build up over time and can be expended at a moments notice. This version is even more tactical than what we have in AoE, where villager production feels rather mundane and âpurposelessâ beyond expanding your economy.
Or, you could go in an entirely different route and think about how to create a new system altogether. Letâs try to make something that takes more micro but creates a different dynamic than villagers. A TC does not need to produce anything at all, and could exist as a mere ânexusâ to be defeated.
What if instead you just created drop off points that collected resources? Click to build a lumber mill that functions as one âvillagerâ that slowly collects resources by themselves. Say you do this all over the map, adding more and more drop off points to keep expanding your economical gains. This would be more difficult to work with and on than having villagers that are immediately sent to harvest X resource simply by pressing Q, but it would also bring a lot more purpose to specifically creating âvillagersâ as you are directly commanding what needs to be expanded. It also rewards multitasking far more, but shifts the game away from combat as a result.
Or what if there were no villagers, and instead, your army âcollectedâ resources from simply âcontrolingâ territory, winning battles or stealing artifacts that could be used to purchase more army? Suddenly there is no need for buildings and the game is looking quite dfiferent.
The point is, one big thing that defines Age of Empires is economy. Villagers have a good function, being vulnerable, mobile units that collect resources and that have to be exposed in certain parts of the map. Automation in itself is a small cog in this discussion, but it exists at the mechanical zenith of a core part that defines this specific type of game.
Think about it. If automation and ease of access is the goal, there are a million more things in that direction that can further make the game more accessible. For instance, AoE2âs console edition has a feature that lets the economy manage itself. This, is because console plays different and the game fundamentally becomes more oriented around army as a result.
So why stop at villager production? This clearly also makes it easier for new players, to simply focus on moving military units from A to B. And while weâre at it, why not automate build orders, military production and so on?
Where do we choose for players to have an input? What matters in this picture?
And more importantly. Is villager production actually a problem? I say no. As Iâve stated previously in this thread, if this is enough to make players quit, there wouldâve been other things in this game that wouldâve caused them to leave anyways. Moreover, I believe this whole argument is somewhat false, and stems from people specifically being frustrated with themselves losing games due to failing to build villagers. Which by the way, is OKâyou are meant to make mistakes, an RTS should challenge you to do as much as possible, and reward you for successfully doing so.
Manual villager production is the bare minimum, and its removal, along with anything beyond it, will progressively worsen the game and cheapen the purpose of this genre. Iâm sorry, but I associate AoE with economy and macro, without it, it is just not worth playing.
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Well, we must try to reverse this trend even though âunique unitsâ were introduced and the civilizations that most demanded
Do not come with philosophical positions, simply what was implemented is a mutual agreement that depends on the tastes of the community, since the game is not a simulator, however it is based on reality as an example: the archersâ arrows do not harm your allied units, neither in aoe4 nor aoe2, it is a simple agreement and thatâs it
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argument from authority, so youâre already out of options to use in your argument?
1+1 will always be 2 regardless if youâre pre kindergarten or with someone with math degree, auto queue vills will lower the competitiveness level, its very simple really.
if you are so dead set on it and dont wish to change your mind, go and talk to pro and have it recorded or something a keen to a vid/recording and prove it. show me that these âprosâ dont think it matters at highest competitive level since you are so confident, broadcaster!
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It is that, knowing the average RTS players (and several very conservative on this subject), I do not even want automation to benefit players of medium or high levels (hence the idea of the time penalty), because then someone from the AoE2 section comes to me commenting things with little sense when I have already clearly said that production automation would not be for someone who is in Platinum+ or for someone who is at 1200+ Elo in games like AoE2.
There are still players who are very fanatical about micromanaging even any nonsense (like manually reseeding farms) and think thatâs excitement and strategy.
Can villager production be made more interesting from a strategic point of view? Yes, but I doubt that this will be implemented.
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Hey folks,
Have you tried the auto-build villagers feature in the tuning pack Beautiful Empires by Tenjix? Itâs a game-changer, along with a host of other minor tweaks that enhance the overall gameplay experience. Letâs rally for its inclusion in future updates!
Check out the screenshots:
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To be fair, Auto Scout in AoE 2 is quite inefficient over manually scouting but you still do see it from time to time at medium and high level as people like to turn it on once they scouted their base and the opponent.
As for auto queue⊠I guess if you limit it to villagers and auto queue automatically disabling itself once there are no resources left, it shouldnât be too impactful.
Edit: Even better, you can make it an option you can turn on or off throughout various modes just like the scores, e.g. no Auto Queue in ranked but in Quick Play
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It is excellent, it works like military schools, but it does not work with Mongolian since the T is for moving the building
My suggestion is to put it in the secondary panel
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Oh, havenât played with Mongols in a while so I missed that, thanks.
Moved it to the position of the town bell and moved that one down, since itâs on cooldown after usage anyway. The first position of the secondary panel wouldnât work, since it would interfere with Mongolsâ double villager production and Dehliâs village fortresses.
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