Poll: Are you in favor of auto queue villagers on PC? (Toggle - can turn on / off)

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
87

I absolutely disagree with every single point you made.
But that’s ok, since everyone has their opinion.

The facts:
Toggling an auto-queue is an active choice.
There is no difference between clicking once each unit to produce one and toggling a queue on, from the standpoint of a strategic choice.
Also, you have to deactivate the queue again when you wanna stop producing.
So, there is no difference in strategic choice, it adds nothing and takes nothing.
The only thing it changes, it saves you a little bit of APM.
But (!) you still have to switch the queue on and off, be smart about it and not accidentally leave the queue on, especially for military units.
People forget how punishing it can be to overproduce something that you didn’t want in terms of popspace and ressources.

Also, while you are being harrassed to the absolute limit and forced into a micro-intensive battle, it is not helpful at all having to leave your unit selection over and over in order to click h q.
The idea of having to manually train every single unit in single-numbers and not at least batches like in aoe3 (good one!), is very very outdated imo and feels very robotic.
It makes the game artifically more apm-demanding.
If you watch a lot of pro matches, throughout the match people’s micro suffers for even the most top-end players that exist, because they are being loaded with artificially bloated tasks.
It’s not the strategic choice behind it that overwhelms them, but the unnecessary robotic spam requirement of single-action buttons.
How is someone supposed to be fighting at 5 different points of the map while managing eco and micro-ing all fights perfectly? It’s not humanly possible.
Summing up some of the tiny-steps as a cluster and make them PURELY strategic and not spam-based, would make the game a lot more skilled honestly.
People would be more attentive with units fights, map control and other things and the overall skill-level would go up.
Even pro-matches would be a tiny bit more exciting to watch as the strategic part and the fights would be more competitive.

Last but not least, as I always curiously ask about this:
You are talking about apm, competitiveness similar parts.
What is your rank in 1v1/team?

Parts like this
“Do you understand what that means? It becomes a battle of endurance. If both players have automated spamming units into the middle of the map, you have created a deadlock with no engagement. How does a player make a difference when there’s little separating them?”
are very easy to explain.
It’s about timing, micro, movement of army, choosing which parts of your army go where, fight where, position where.
Flank with some, harrass with some, split some, or use them all together in a deathball?
None of this would be changed by perma-queues.
In fact, with the reduction of button-spam enforcement and artifically forcing you to de-select whatever you have selected over and over, these parts would become more challenging, as your ENEMY will ALSO micro better and be more attentive and use his ressources to invest into army/vills.
All this doesn’t take the choice off you, how many units you wanna produce, when, in which order and what you wanna do with them.
In fact, it only lets you EXECUTE these things a little bit more consistently.
And that’s amazing, as the overall gameplay would benefit for the player and also the viewer, as there will be more action.

88

“Usual rts stuff”?

So let me get this straight. You want to just micro units. No economy. No building. All of these things are only shoehorned into the game for the facade of gameplay. Who actually wants to build farms? Who actually LIKES building houses every 20 seconds?

I don’t get it. Age of Empires is specifically known for its macro and micro heavy economy gameplay. To move away from that is like asking for a whole different type of game. Dawn of War, Warcraft, these games have that “gameplay” you are looking for.

Even if you don’t mean all of this, and merely want to have less micro, you are still moving in a direction where you are removing impact from actual gameplay. If units are built for you, houses made for you, farms placed for you, then there is no strategy or meaning to attacking or destroying these things beyond the fact that they are resources. Are you truly suppoused to “win” because you said “I’m going to harass this side of his map” and that’s it?

Because here is the thing. The game already works like that.

We already do this to win. It is almost as if you are implying micro dilutes this, which is the complete opposite. Having to micro makes it extra punishing when your work goes undone. If building 20 farms is a struggle, it means infinitely more to see them burn than if they had been placed by a machine. Tell me, what does it matter if your mega proxy base is destroyed if you did NOTHING to build it yourself? The answer is clear, and the consequence of automation should be obvious to someone like you.

I suggest moving to a different game if the cognitive load of an RTS is not fun. That. Should. Be. The. Point. The micro is a large part of why I even bother with these games. If you want to play something without it; autobattlers exist, go play that.

1 Like
89

Yes, we already do this to win. You were asking what the player does to make a difference if a bunch of things were automated (bearing in mind that once again the topic is villagers only, and not any other forms of automation). That’s the answer. It doesn’t matter that we already do it. Your question was “what is there”. I said nothing, nor did I mean anything, about micro “diluting” anything.

There are other RTS games that don’t even rely on this particular villager-resource intersection (a bunch of Relic’s, for example, including the well-known and generally-loved Company of Heroes 1). There are other RTS games that automate this specific thing. Age of Mythology is one, and there’s a parallel discussion on the topic given Retold is on the horizon.

Without crossing the streams too much, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that there’s no magical standard that makes manual villager creation an integral part of the game in such a way that it undermines the concept of AoE to automate it. That’s my opinion, and you’re free to disagree. But again, if all you have is suggestions that people need to “git gud” (in as many words, “cognitive load” doesn’t really mean much else, right?) . . . that doesn’t make your argument look to good. Does it?

My opinion is that the game has plenty of micro without manually producing villagers, and the game will continue to have micro without it.

If you can make the argument that this really opens up such a gap in the cognitive requirements for playing AoE IV, I would humbly suggest we can fill that with other applications of micro. We shouldn’t be bound to the past just because you think the “mashing of H and Q to make villagers” - something you admit “isn’t very engaging” (in quotes to signify a direct and accurate attribution) is apparently the only reason that separates AoE IV from people allegedly wanting an “autobattler”.

90

The argument isn’t “to git gud”. While I do believe a lot of the online support for automation stems from players who dislike queuing villagers because they themselves forget to, or blame their bad performance on it, automation isn’t merely designed for them. Instead, developers focus on the possibility of a wider more casual audience.

These two groups are not the same by the way. The first does take the game decently serious, but sees queuing as an antiquated, old, meaningless mechanic which frustrates them due to their own bad performance, while the other, casual-like players don’t see much value in a competitive RTS to begin with, and instead, see it as an immersive RTS experience, in which, queuing your villagers is a minor inconvenience. These groups are wildly different.

And that is the issue. The first group should be dismissed. The truth is that these games should feature mechanics that can punish you if you play badly, no matter how much you think it should be like Warcraft or CoH instead. And I understand their angle, despite the lack of transparency. They see it as a “dumb” mechanic that shouldn’t have as much power as it does, and feel all types of negative emotions from falling under pressure of raids, or mismanaging micro, which leads to them being behind on villager count. Despite their frustration, that is the point of the game and they should learn to deal with it.

As for the casual players, I can see the argument for making it more accessible for a wider audience, however, that too I am against because frankly not every product needs to appeal to everyone. While we all want to see this franchise succeed, the truth is more complex than that. I like Blue, and some people like Yellow. A developer pushing a product to look Green in an attempt to appeal to both ONLY benefits the developer. And I don’t care for that type of decision making; I LIKE BLUE. Not Yellow. Not Green. Not every product should be for everyone. What people need to understand from this message is that, these types of changes do not simply improve the game. They sometimes detract and move away from the original point.

But, to entertain your idea of making a change regardless, and filling it with something else, there is an issue with that too. I did state that queuing is not intriguing in of itself, but that is missing the bigger picture. The game isn’t just you sitting around queueing villagers. Queuing a villager is a small portion of the game, yet it is not so insignificant that it can be blindly replaced.

Here is how I see it; queuing introduces multiple benefitial factors to these games. For one, it creates a tactical way for someone to directly interact with their economy. By pressing one button, you are immediatelly adding to your economy in a massive way. And though it may sound contradictory, the simplicity or dullness of it is another benefitial factor. Because as a minor mechanic, it is complementary to the actual gameplay that takes priority.

Queuing your villager improves your economy but it also acts as a mental break away from the constant battle the game would be composed of without it. It brings the player back to their Town Center, literally “recentering”, like an anchor point to your economy. It reminds the player to take care of home, lest you fall behind. Because that is the ultimate truth of villager queues; AoE games are more than just microing battles. It isn’t Warcraft. It isn’t Dawn of War. It isn’t Company of Heroes.

Personally I will remain a skeptic of the “automate” wave we have. While queuing your villagers is so incredibly important early on, to simply assume “well, it might as well be automatic if that is going to be the case!” goes against its entire purpose. The purpose is to hold you, as a player, anchored from the get go. Each queue is a decision you make to push your economy, and each time you fail, should count.

1 Like
91

You are mostly not talking about beginner level but high level play, where tiny nuances decide about win or loss.

Again, I wanna ask you, what is your current rank in 1v1/team?

I wanna repeat that on the very lowest level of play auto-queues for both villagers and also military units only have advantages, no disadvantages.
It makes the game waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more accessible for very new/very low rank players that are trying to get into the game.
I can only imagine many new players will get a lot less overwhelmed by the amount of simultanous tasks that have to be executed to be able to play at an entry level already.
Hence it could function as a tool to increase player pool size.

And again, I think at high diamond+ (1v1) people don’t forget making villagers, as they wouldn’t reach that level if they didn’t consistently make villagers.
In any elo above that, we don’t even have to discuss that.

92

My opinion has not changed on this issue.

Real Time Strategy games should be more Strategy than Real Time for better accessibility without losing competitiveness.

Everything that is not strategic should either be automated or you should be notified (like when you are full pop for not building houses) that you are not producing villagers or there should be a slight penalty if you activate the option.

Tedious tasks for many players should be automated as was done in the past with the shift and the increased ease of multi-tasking.

RTS must evolve, even if its more orthodox community insists that it remain in the small niche they never want it to leave.

5 Likes
93

I didn’t think the two of us would ever completely agree on something in every single point.
But wonders happen.

If they actually did fix the meta by reworking the civs a little (hre/ayyu/english/byz) and remove the current game dictating almost non-counterable nonsense play (1v1), fixed the attackmove and attack priority AND bring up villager+military auto-on/off-option, I will definitely return to aoe4 RIGHT AWAY.
Currently I’m just standing at the side waiting for the Devs to make a move.
I don’t have too much hope for the mentioned things to happen though.

94

You have to be realistic with what you are asking for and with the resources and time available to the devs.

95

Ressources and time should be plenty as sultans ascend was - officially stated by M$crosoft - the most EVER successful aoe dlc.
It’s soon been a year since that dlc and they couldn’t upsize the dev team?
Come on, they don’t WANT to.
They want our cash and run away with it.

96

I took the mention of “cognitive load of an RTS” literally. RTS games in general have a pretty high focus requirement (something that MOBAs, despite the opinions people hold of them in RTS circles, continued and in fact magnified by moving the decisionmaking all the way out of macro and way into micro). I’m a fan of multiple RTS games (including AoE) - where would I go?

Besides, I play the game at my own pace. Not necessarily for immersion, either. I recognise my limits and know when even campaign missions are taxing me (it’s a long incompatibility with me and certain types of classic RTS mission structure, as far back as the late 90s for me).

And in doing so I propose a third group, if not more groups besides. Those who approach this purely from the perspective of games design. There’s a bit of player psychology in the mix here as well (which is where AoE IV differs from AoM in that this didn’t exist in the mainline AoE games before, discounting the console release for IV, whereas AoM had it introduced already and the community evolved in a different way). I approach this from the perspective of games design, and my personal opinion is - bluntly put - that games need to adapt or die.

This isn’t change for change’s sake, or anything like that. But I’ve written a tonne of words already and I don’t want another 500 explaining the nuances in bringing genres forward while respecting where they came from.

Some of the arguments in this and other threads would lead me to exclaim “what if you had to micro every hit of every villager’s hammer when they built something”. But on some level I also mean that. How do we work out which monotonous repetitive action benefits the gameplay, and which doesn’t. How do we determine that threshold?

Because the problem we have is that there’s a lot of inertia. Especially in RTS, and especially in titles with histories as long as AoE. Starcraft has (had?) a very similar problem (I haven’t kept up with it, I just remember the outcry during the pre-release SC2 MP beta). It’s a very conservative playerbase across the genre that doesn’t tend to respond well to change. And particularly in the case of something like queuing villagers, it’s become synonymous with a level of skill. This is a player psychology point in addition to being anything real, and it’s hard to objectively divorce that.

Emergent gameplay is still valid gameplay. Something repetitive is still a skill by mastery of repetition (and being young enough / lucky enough to not trigger something like RSI). There’s a reason so many competitive players are on the younger end of the game spectrum. Mechanical actions are physically demanding.

But a parallel I like to look at is (again) MOBA games. I think most of the big ones have now mostly broken the old crowd association with pure APM / filler actions as a component of the skill ceiling. The phrase “meaningful APM” is now (or was) much more prevalent (going back to before the pandemic as I haven’t kept up with LoL or DotA 2 - I mainly played HoN). So many holdovers from the old WC3 DotA mapmod have been removed, revamped, or generally made more accessible. Summons have been made less demanding. Item accessibility has been revamped, and revamped, and revamped. Map readability likewise. So many things that ease the cognitive burden of a genre that by most metrics an incredibly hard learning curve (and that’s before we talk about the kind of community it struggles with). And it’s still very high-skilled, with competitive players once again on the young end of the age spectrum.

We can automate something like this without losing something “good” about AoE. I fully believe that.

And skepticism is fine. I respect your skepticism, and I just want to say I appreciate the longform reply.

My tl;dr in return is that the purpose of a mechanic can (and often should) change throughout the game as the pace changes and the respective foci demand different things from the player. Queuing villagers is a different cost / benefit analysis in the early game than it is in the mid or late game, and the impact on any automation should be evaluated contextually across the stages of any given game. But I do believe it’s something that we should at least try.

2 Likes
97

I agree 100%. I couldn’t say it better! To attract new players it will be necessary to evolve. Focus more on strategy than on repetitive tasks that require a high APM. I notice this in practice when bringing some friends to the franchise. Some gave up precisely because of this.

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98

Since so many people who are not even high elo (even less than diamond) bring up the argument of “auto-queue hurting ranked”, there is one of the top-top players who actually has given his opinion.

Beastyqt himself got absolutely annoyed when people said auto-queue should not be ingame because of ranked play.
He said it would be an amazing idea.
Can’t remember wether it was on stream(twitch) or youtube.
Because it helps the newer players learn the game and helps increase the playerpool because new players won’t get overwhelmed so easily, means, they will not quit playing out of frustration.
For the pros, it makes no difference wether the auto-q is in it or not, because they anyways don’t forget queuing up anything usually.
It just makes the game more comfortable for everyone.

3 Likes
99

After seeing the automatic queue of Age of Mytologhy, I prefer the way this mod does it, because this way it allows you to improve and then not need to use it, which the Age of Mytologhy way does not do.
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100

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https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe4/comments/1e39zwp/with_all_the_new_rtses_coming_i_think_it_can_only/

1 Like
102

I have verified that you can create villagers manually despite having the automatic queue, therefore it seems valid to me.

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103

Autoqueue in AoM:RE has just further cemented why this should never become a feature of competitive ranked play in AoE4. If anyone here actually played the beta or stresstest, you would know how quickly killing villagers becomes a fultile strategy, and how tiring the entire process becomes in trying to grind down your opponent.

104

Well, AoM seems to me perhaps the one that most “favors” the aggression of the franchise. Villagers that don’t take long to die and the multitasking of the raider becomes more effective.

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105

The gameplay is also much faster than any of the other age series games, villagers have a 14 second training time in this game and aggression happens much earlier with a free myth unit on age up. Most of the posts I’ve seen on the AoM subforum have been people seeing more utility in having autoqueue, very little to no negative feedback on the feature.

3 Likes
106

More utility? What does that mean?

Because all there is to it is the game playing itself. It removes a massive strategic part of these games for the sake of, I suppouse simplifying the game and removing elements from it. Can’t see why any fan would want that.

Personally, I want more things in Age games, not less. AoE4 would NOT benefit from this.

107

Let’s remove the rally point in a resource so as not to remove “a massive strategic part of these games”

Also let’s remove the automatic orders with Shift since AOE2 brought it after 20 years :wink: