[Request] Infinite Queue Feature

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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AQ also responds to an action: Your villagers gathering the resources which it is then able to spend. The only difference is the interaction with your opponent other then yourself. Besides that they act pretty much the same.

Every action you do is dealing with the user interface. That includes every click on a unit and move command you do. What you describe with AQ is the reduction of macromanagement: It helps you spend your resources in an efficient way no player can do. This is one of the most important macro skills in the game right now and AQ would just make it way to easy to execute perfectly.

And the impact of that would be huge. As you don’t need as much attention to do this you will focus on other parts more and this is pretty much where the problem lies. Let’s take a look at your mentioned strategy options:

Resource Management will be a joke. It won’t be long until people find stuff out like “1 stable with Knights on AQ requires 9 on gold and 6 on farms”. You put 9 on gold, 6 on farms, start AQ and then you are pretty much set. This info will be around for every unit combined with eco techs. Resource Management will evolve into “put x villagers on resource y to perfectly generate unit z”. It already is like that right now, but since you execute yourself and humans can make errors there is potential to slip up and make resource management an actual important part of the game.

Producing: Well. The only reason you won’t use AQ for this is if you want a unit a specific numbers of times, which mainly happens for siege. So for the stuff you need the most like villager or your main unit in your army you turn on AQ. That means building your armies is pretty much only a few clicks in a game - not really much you have to actually do there.

Outplay: Now this is what I completly don’t understand. You can outplay your opponent in many ways, a better economy would be one way. What you probably mean is on the military side I guess? Where in the world is that so interesting in AOE2? The units in AOE2 can do 2 things. Move to a point and attack an enemy unit. That’s it. No active abilities, no unique ways to move around the map, just plain old moving around and fighting some units/buildings. This combat system is, if you only look at it and ignore everything else in the game, incredible boring - just Rock, Paper and Scissor with very little twists. Why the heck would you want to put a lot more attention to it? Don’t get me wrong, the combat System is good right now. But it is like that because you have so much other stuff you need to pay attention to which AQ would dumb down a ton. If you want to outplay your opponent with just military AOE2 is not the game for it. Making AOE2 to be like that would require sooo many more changes that a whole new game is a better idea. AQ just doesn’t fit as a good feature.

I admit, combat system is the wrong word I chose, there is definetly more to it. What I meant was the actual actions your units can do. Move and attack are mainly the only direct commands you give to your units (as mentioned above). Stances make your unit attack or not attack a unit. Attack Bonuses have nothing to do with what your units can actually do as they are a passive bonus.

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Completly forgot that part. No, Auto-Queue will not make you a better or worse player and so you are right: It is QoL and not a booster. And that is also the reason why you balance games mainly with the top end of the ladder in mind. Changes, no matter how small or big they are, will have a much bigger impact for high level players than low level ones. A good example for that is the new Goth buff, where people like TheViper completly abuse the dark age bonus. Low Level players will mostly not even notice a difference.

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I never understood why people call training units macro.
It is micro.

Micro = Small, one-dimensional, simple.
Macro = Big, dynamic, “whole-picture”, big decisions.

Micro = Training units, Luring boar, microing army for best effectiveness.
Macro = Which civ to use, Build Order plan, choosing where to build your extra TCs, choosing when/if to build walls,etc.

Unless you’re refering to macro as in macro from keyboard which is something that does multiple actions in one keystroke.

Because training units, even with Shift to queue 5 at once, seems just another form of micro to me.
The choice of which units you are queueing is the macro, the action of pressing keys to train them is micro.

So, by this definition wich imo is the correct one, AQ will only reduce micro, not macro.

And it will only help you “spend your resources in an efficient way no player can do” if you have good control of your AQ.
If you actually get to use it you’ll see that there will be frequent occasions you’ll end up with excess units that don’t help your particular current situation because you got careless and relied on AQ too much.

That is even more true for AoE2 which has a lot more emphasis on counters.

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143

No, your definition of Micro- & Macromanagement is not the one widely used in the RTS genre. A click in the game can be a part of Micro- or Macromanagement. The way you describe it every click you do is part of Micromanagement. But it is more about the “purpose” of the Action you do. Macro defines the broader approach while micro adds details to it. If I try to write an explanation it would be something like this:

Macromanagement: Managing the broader picture of the game. Expanding your base, producing units, managing your resources, telling your military units to attack the enemy. Stuff like that

Micromanagement: Adding details to Actions from Macromanagement, often have to be executed very fast. Rearranging your lumberjacks for more effiency, moving your units in a way allowing to dodge arrow fire, moving a unit back which is about to be converted, order your units to attack a specific enemy unit like trebuchet.

Since I could just say stupid stuff here I want to provide some sources:

People talk about it in starcraft.

Liquipedias Defintion, also using starcraft as reference

Wikipedia with micromanagement, also has a small section with comparison to macromanagement.

Yes, I will forget to turn it off. Yes, units will be standing around. But that happens because I am not a pro player. Say this to people who make money by playing this game. Even without AQ they dont have units standing around. And this is why the impact for us is usually lower than for high level players. And since the pro scene is probably the biggest reason the game is still thriving you want to balance around them, not people like us.

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144

I want to be respectful of people who are rightly proud of their skill in micromanaging all their buildings and production queues. It’s not easy, and you worked hard to get where you are. So I respect that maybe aoe2 is not the place to add in this feature because of the game’s history and community. However, in a vacuum, just asking myself “how would you design the ultimate RTS title?”, it feels like a feature that should always have been part of the game to begin with.

(Warning, I’m going off on a tangent about autoscouting in this next alinea, for context.)

My main game is an arcade racing game. The game has the option to use either automatic or manual gears. I use manual, mostly because I like it, it makes me feel like I’m serious about the game. There is a mechanical advantage to driving manual, with equal optimization it can save as much as two seconds on a lap. Yet many people drive automatic at least part of the time simply because it allows them to focus on other important aspects of the ride, which could save them even more time. It’s a fair choice, everyone can feel good about the choice they make. This is comparable to autoscouting. I like scouting, I don’t want to hand it off to a machine even though I’ll just scout my base and the rough position of the enemy and then forget about the scout for the rest of the game (or use it in a rush) because I’m too busy doing other stuff. But that little bit of scouting I do is still better than what the machine would have offered me in that same time period, so I feel good about my choice, even if my economy might have benefited a little bit from going against what I like and using the autoscout feature. The choice I made gave me the advantage I wanted to have, the better scouting. But it’s also understandable if people think the choice shouldn’t exist. There is an argument to be made that a real racer drives manual.

The point of this post is: queuing up units is not like that. Unlike scouting keeping your buildings producing at all times (or reseeding your farms, for instance) is not in itself fun to do. You do it because it’s better than not doing it, because you get an advantage from it, not because it’s an activity you want to be good at because the activity itself is so much fun. If you imagine yourself being a general in an RTS universe come to life there are certainly circumstances where you would tell your scout to “run over to that ridge, take a peak on the plains behind it and find out how far that forest runs, then report back in”, but you would never tell your barracks master “make a pikeman, now make another pikeman, now make another pikeman
” You would just tell the guy to keep making pikemen, because that’s what you want to do. You’re going 2 range crossbows 1 barracks pikemen after all. There’s no tactical element or choice to it, you already decided to pump out these units as fast as the three buildings will allow you. The work you do is all just execution, making sure that all the buildings are actually making units but you don’t waste resources on queuing up too many of them and the upgrade shouldn’t get stuck behind 3 units and not come in in time and
 It’s a menial, chore driven complexity for complexities sake.

This sits in contrast to the fun complexity, the things you have to think about, like “which resources should all these villagers be assigned to?”, “how fast do I need these new houses built?” and “what if my enemy sends villagers forward to tower my woodline?” Some of this stuff can be partially handed off to the computer, but at that point it’s the other kind of automatization, the part where you have a meaningful choice. Even without autoscout you can have a unit patrol the back of your woodline. It’s not as good as constantly keeping a look on it with a manually controlled unit, but it allows more of your attention to go elsewhere. And again, I think there are good arguments to be made against the choice being available as well, making an RTS without a patrol function is a legitimate choice.

But autoqueuing units, reseeding farms, stuff like that, bookkeeping for the bookkeeping where you put in work without having to make any kind of choice? I feel like that’s a no brainer, a good RTS helps you minimize that work, and lets you focus on the choices, of which there are in the middle of a nice heated match at least several every second. (The fishing ships should take the fish further away from the enemy fleet, my archers should withdraw against these skirmishers, the scouts in front should withdraw as well as a feint but if the skirmishers follow us I send them back in, I need more stone, I’ll take these two guys off wood, crap I ran into a tower, retreat
)

So yeah, I respect that aoe2 may not be the place for this because many people here already have the skills to work around difficult queuing systems and such and want to use those skills because they worked hard for them, that’s fine, I understand that, but in the bigger neutral picture, I’d say these features are just plain good.

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The arguments you bring to the table are pretty much your own preferences for a game, the stuff you like, you enjoy and also you find a hassle. But tastes differ among people. For people like me, who do not want AQ, it is not about “being proud of our skills” or anything. A lot still do basic mistakes or forget building villagers and what not. What you find a hassle, is a fun challenge for us to master. We fear with something like AQ included, the game will not challenge us enough in the way we like. We like to have the responsebility to manage our base and not let someone else do it. This is also why there were discussions for stuff like Auto-Farmreseed and MQ in the past. Those things take challenges away from the player. Since the majority of the player (pro and casuals) didn’t like these challenges the features are now in general accepted. The problem with AQ is that its impact will be far greater than the 2 examples mentioned before. Not only is the challenge of “playing fast” reduced, spending your resources perfectly will also be way easier than it is now. This will result in the game taking a complete shift on how it is played. There will be so few challenges left that you just have too little to do, resulting in every game being kind of the same. With so little base management you are forced to focus on the part of AOE2 which just does not have an incredible lot to give: Combat. But I do not want to repeat what I mentioned on this before multiple times, you can just read it above if you want. You could add AQ to AOE2 and make it work, but would also have to change a lot of other things, creating basically a new game.

Now you also mention the design of the ultimate RTS title. I have bad news for you: it does and will never exist, just because tastes differ. The same about AQ and every feature existing out there in the world. There is no game which a feature will ALWAYS improve. AQ for example is bad for competitive games where managing your base is a bigger part of game design, since it will make it to easy to come close to perfection. AOE2 in its current state is one of those games, Starcraft 2 is another. AQ is good for games where building and managing your economy is just needed to get the units out for its great combat system. Sadly I do not know any game which has AQ and is played on a high competitive Level (with money involved) for a longer time.

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146

So disable auto-queue for competitive games. Also disable auto seeding and auto scout for them.

Keep these features available only for casual comp-stomps and fun local games with friends.

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Auto Farm Reseed is fine for me, it doesn’t take much away. Auto Scout is something I have no clear opinion about for now, so I don’t know about that. There is a fine line between having too much and nothing to do and I think it currently hits the right spot to allow healthy high level competitive play, but also make casual and new players not feel completly overwhelmed.

I actually would not mind having those options only as casual lobby stuff. The question is if its a good idea to devide the community in such a way or not. But that is a complete different topic.

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What if auto-queue were a tech (free?) that can be researched upon reaching imperial age which then enables a toggle at applicable buildings? This could negate the effects of the early game eco-macro that seem to be the main arguments against it.

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You don’t understand. Some people are simply glued to the game as how it is and simply don’t want QoL changes. Some people didn’t even want auto-farms and fishtraps, it’s futile to argue with them.

If this was 1998 they’d be arguing against the implementation of building waypoints because makes the game have less APM and therefore lower the skill gap.

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It’s not like that. I have suggested more micro possibilities, like a hotkey to switch through your active unit selection. And that got also rejected with enough good arguments against btw.

But if I follow your logic then if this was 1982 you would probably be arguing about the fact that Donkey Kong has AQ but Mario not. :upside_down_face:

You can’t always get what you want.

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Yes that’s why I said “some”.
And bringing DK and Mario to this discussion sounds fun to me, lol.

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You make it sound like just because some feature is a QoL Change it automatically has to be a good thing. I am not against changes. I am against bad changes. The thing that irritates me the most about this whole AQ topic is people thinking “if its easier to do, it is good” which is so short sighted it hurts. We have some really small changes about goths and the competitive scene goes apeshit, making one of the worst civ for 1v1 almost broken now. The fact you can not see the immense impact a feature like AQ has is concerning. Auto Scout is still discussed about and you want now to implement a feature with the potential to completly change the game?!

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I think you do get my point.

I don’t flag, but that’s clearly a false statement as they do consider suggestion on the forum and they have the right to cherry pick what they like.

And waypoints or rallypoints already exist since AOE I (1997 trial version).

I’m Prince of Persia and Commander Keen here.

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Some do. Some don’t. That’s why I said “some”.
But flag all you want, I find flagging meaningless anyway.

That wasn’t my point. However afaik Rise of Rome implemented them?

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Unless really unconstructive and to the bone.

I can remember them from the beginning of this game. But the combination of full AQ economy and a lot more micro together could be interesting for sure. I guess that is the direction you would like to see?

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Less impact than waytpoints.

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Don’t know about that. If you make such claims elaborate yourself, otherwise I can also just say random things. And even if this is true, it does not mean in any way that the impact of AQ will be small or non existing.

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Not exatcly sure what this means but, I’d prefer to have my attention split to manage “APM” on more interesting things like strategy or the real battle. In the end everything is APM, the difference is if it’s of the more entertaining type or not.

Waypoints are a good way to reduce the “meaningless” APM. And also doesn’t make sense not having waypoints, it’s a basic feature.

The same is true for AQ. Waypoints “modernized” the game like AQ would. Not every “modernization” is bad, even though we live in a time were “modernizing” rarely means anything good.

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Try playing a game without using waypoints and you’'ll know.

I never said it will. However people often exaggerate on it’s impact.