Exactly my thoughts…
Why not limit the game to 10 fps, so people have a harder time playing it.
Or maybe force them to use a controller instead of keyboard+mouse.
Or maybe make villagers train in one second, cost 3 food but only gather 1/20 as fast.
Why not artificially make the multitasking so challenging, that even the 400apm top players can not execute basic builds, let alone micro fights at the same time?
Now that we have these nice ideas, we could just change the scale of everything to 1/20.
4000 pop limit, 1 second villager train time.
All units would cost 1/20 of their current ressources, including buildings.
But hell no, not an auto-queue!!!
It’s the devil’s!!!
An example: as in aoe4 the production of a villager lasts 20 seconds
If you want to increase villager production time (as a penalty) in auto queue, these would be the equivalent results: With a production time of 21 seconds, a villager would be lost in exactly 7 minutes. With a production time of 22 seconds, a villager would be lost at 3 minutes and 40 seconds.
To begin with I’m firmly against designing games especially RTS with the “esports” as the main direction on mind.
But even if that is the goal, excessive multi-tasking is also anti-esports in the first place. That’s why esports is taken over by moba and fps games with less multi-tasking.
Quickly switching between screens is not fun to watch. Like audience can easily appreciate some good micro controls of units, but not quickly iterating between three screens and pressing 10 hotkeys in 2 sec (some may not even notice). There are already too many things going on for the audience.
The reason why RTS declines as esports is because it is tiring for both the players and audience, and some decisive factors in matches like multi-tasking management are not very apparent to the audience.
I believe it’s perfectly possible to create a game that is compatible both as a casual and competitive players. AoE4 didn’t a good job and thus abandoned a certain audience.
The secret to making an e-sports title is not trying to make an e-sports title, it’s making a good game that a lot of people enjoy playing and then keeping up the balance so it also can be played competitively.
Most of the games that try to focus on e-spots fail. They forget to make the actual game fun.
You don’t just need a good balance, high screen ceiling, nice viewing experience, good micro potential.
You also need to make a game that the person viewing the Twitch stream would also want to play themselves, even if they never become as good.
So focus on making a fun game and then think about competitiveness later.
AoE2 was very unbalanced and certainly not suitable for e-sports on release.
Actually popular esports games have 1 thing in common: difficulty. You’re making this seem like popular moba games like Dota and LoL don’t require immense amount of lane micro and camera movement. They’re popular because they are constantly changing and there can be clearly best team.
Issue with dumbing down a game is that too easy game cannot have esports scene. AoM is already relatively slow game with units, towers, castles and town centers doing much less damage. Reaching population cap is also much less damaging than in AoE2/AoE4 since units keep queueing and upgrades pass the queue. If you add the fact that harrassing enemy economy will never lead to any TC idle time, the game might just be bit too monotonous for most players.
So AoM without autoQ is already extremely casual friendly compared to popular RTS and there is a worry autoQ will make it too casual for players that play several hours a day to compete in.
Now your claim is that popular games are easy (which is obviously false). I counter with argument that popular RTS don’t have autoQ. Do not forget that your opponent also has to Q villagers and any good strategy YOU do will distract him from doing it. So it is a 2 way street. Either you have strategy game where strategy matters little and there is little micro, or you have a strategy game where strategy matters a lot and there is decent amount of micro. Easy games suck and are akin to playing hide and seek in small room => waste of time.
Yes, indeed mobas like LoL and dota, have lot of tasks done simultanously from dodging skillshots, last hitting minions, camera jumping between teammates, potion usage.
It isn’t true multitasking though and AoM isn’t any different, you do 1 thing at a time, just very fast.
Your definition of multittasking is wrong and you should say requires high APM
You do understand that anytime a MOBA has made a change to make it more accessible, the competitive scene and people who aren’t good enough to be competitive but consider mechanical APM to be the Ultimate Indicator Of Skill have repeatedly and consistently lost their minds?
I’m a longtime MOBA player. I played HoN for years (not that anyone will know what that is). I dabbled with LoL in the early days. I’ve played a moderate amount of DotA 2. I was never a high-level player (competent at HoN, but not competitive). But I have a lot of exposure to the scene for all three games.
Making warding more convenient? RUINING THE GAME. Ditch mindless APM requirements in favour of more accessible but no-less-skillful skill designs? RUINING THE GAME. Rebalancing Roshan (or Kongor, or whoever)? RUINING THE GAME. Fixing orb stacking (for those who don’t know, this was a literal holdover from WC3 where exclusive attack modifiers couldn’t stack)? RUINING THE GAME.
Time and time again, the value of the insight competitive players provide (which is real, and I regularly defend) is stacked up against the inertia they generate by keeping game mechanics as conservative and as rooted in early 00s game engine mechanics as possible. And we see this in the RTS space as much as we see it in the MOBA space (which makes sense, because the latter was created out of the former).
And here we have a game, AoM, where autoqueue already exists. This isn’t some awkward Chinese faction that as I understand it was super unpopular and didn’t do a great job at representing popular myth. This is a mechanic, that the game already incorporated into its design. The only argument I’ve seen in the entire thread for its removal is “it makes things too casual”.
Maybe, just maybe, if you can’t compete competitively with someone using AQ, perhaps you just need to work on other areas of your gameplay? If that’s the sole competitive advantage you have over such a player . . . why is that the fault of AQ?
Quickly executing a series of moves is not the same as managing several things at the same time, because the latter requires both high apm and fast decision making on multiple fronts. And it does not necessarily relate to difficulty.
More multitasking = more difficulty
Less multitasking ≠ less difficulty
Like fighting games are notoriously difficult with operations on frame-level precision and high apm. However they are still fun to watch, and players definitely are not managing several things at the same time.
Moba or ftg players quickly executing a lot of good moves is visible to the audience, and it’s usually the climax of the match. Quickly iterating between buildings and pressing a bunch of hotkeys in RTS I don’t know. Audience are still more excited by unit micro in battles not super fast management.
RTS already has its layer of difficulty in the form of micro unit control and macro management. AOM has 4 types of resources (most RTS has one or two), unique unit abilities and godpowers, the latter becoming manually controllable, which already is more to manage than many RTS let alone competitive games in general. Making it more micro demanding, especially on the management side, would make it even less accessible.
People seem to forget the AoMR will have manual abilities on Myth units (and maybe heroes), which adds a lot more things to micro.
Also AoMR will get other changes like higher population and recharging god powers.
So there are new things to sink your APM into that are not queueing villagers and military units.
Adding manual abilities and remove auto queue at the same time would make the game a lot less accessibly.
While I personally don’t care if there is auto queue in ranked I think it would be very confusing for people if one of the main features is disabled in ranked. It would also increase the burden of getting into ranked which would turn ranked into an even more elitist group where every new player has to lose 20 matches to get down to the right ELO.
Although I’m betting on consensus (because I know the average competitive RTS player), if it were up to me I’d say:
Automatic queue with no penalty on absolutely all units production buildings.
Optional Automation that exists on Xbox in placing % of villagers on each resource.
What Isgreen commented about Villager Priority.
Adding more interesting micromanagement in the game, making the skill ceiling go that way.
Team games with a favorable competitive environment.
A more aggressive elo filter system to place you at your elo as early as possible in the first few games.
I perfectly understand that AoM is sold as a potential game to play E-Sport (since casual is well covered and competitive was its weakness) in such a competitive videogame market where you want to reach a large audience.
RTS must evolve to have some MOBA elements (they could start with team games) or this doesn’t stand up.
What’s the issue here exactly? This feature is welcoming to new players which will help AoM Retold to survive for many years to come, and secondly those who use this feature will never be able to play just as good as someone who do everything manually that knows what they are doing anyway so where is the harm here exactly?
Issue is that people don’t see the negatives that autoQ can have to competitive play. They come here commenting only about positives while being blind to the negative.
Maybe autoqueue is net positive and some comments here come off overly negative, but forums also serve educative purpose. Some people just don’t understand that easier is not same as better when it comes to competitive games.
In summary, if they AoM ends up as easy as Sims, won’t it just have frustration of competitive play but not the thrill of challenging yourself?
You’re just assuming new players don’t like difficulty or improving their APM. Why did RTS games become popular originally? Was it not the difficulty and having a scene with players that seem to be doing the impossible?
Elo system and single player are there so anyone can play as casual as they want. Even without training villagers. New players don’t need TC idletime of 2000 elo if they’re in 800 elo.
Now I have done several comments about negatives of autoQ, and I want to make it clear that I don’t think it will make the game unplayable or much worse. I just think it will drive those who want to play RTS several hours a day, to prefer other RTS games. Because part of being an RTS player is desire to challenge yourself and being confident at being better than your opponent.
Did they make a mistake not adding AoE4/AoE3, much newer games, autoqueue? The developers decided not to after thinking about what the game should be for years. So there are obviously reasons not to do it. “All RTS should have autoQ and cater to casual audiences” - sure. But one would be delusional thinking they can experience decent matchmaking with much lower playerbase playing 1 game a month.
Nobody is “blind” to anything. The arguments being presented just aren’t that convincing to some posters. Not all. Plenty of difference of opinion to go around.
Personally, I think APM for APM’s sake isn’t gameplay. There’s always a ceiling on meaningful APM, and it’s far lower than it is in Starcraft for most RTS and MOBA games (and again, APM in Starcraft again dates back to the very mechanical nature of SC / Brood War and how the meta developed - it wasn’t some magical Rule Of Design that the developers followed at the time).
Do players need to improve it to get better at the game? Sure. Would they still need to improve if some form of autoqueue existed? Yes, they still would. It’s a non-problem.
It all comes down to looking for a less steep learning curve, no lowering of the skill ceiling and having fun with the game at the same time.
I’m all for more micromanagement of units and in other more interesting tasks (which I think is what Isgreen or Earnest Yuen are looking for) and to be a substitute for that tedious micromanagement that drives new players away.
Can a game be competitive with some automation in tasks that are not fun for many players? Yes, if it raises the skill ceiling in other areas.
Maybe it’s time that the “RT” of RTS can be approached differently, otherwise the genre will continue to plummet.
You can hotkey all TCs or just invest ton of food into to keeping multiple villagers in Q. There are ways to play around queueing one villager at a time… If your woodline gets attacked by raiding cavalry, then just react without losing Q time.
Overall, the easiest way to play around too much clicking is to invest resources into it. Just put 250 food instead of 50 into villagerr queue, and you need to click 5 times less. Will you be couple units weaker? Yes, but your elo will reflect that and you will still get good matchmaking.
This would be true if autoq wouldn’t nullify most effect that raiding, well-timed attack and harrasment has. Each second of TC idle time is hundreds of resources. If you kill all creative strategies then eventually balance of the game will be just about which god is best at direct fights.
