AoE 2 Micro chores are a drag on the popularity and enjoyment of the game.
We can get a 16 person tournament for Rise of Nations, but good luck getting more than a handful of people interested in Age of Empires 2 DE tournament.
but that’s probably because the skill ceiling of Aoe is much higher, and the expectation vs reality gap is as well. That doesn’t mean it needs to be lower in my opinion, it just means it’s a game for the long way because you don’t ever reach the point where there aren’t things you can’t improve on.
But most of my friends have also quit Aoe because the skill gap wasn’t closing fast enough, so I don’t know… For players like me, it was a big factor for which I never got bored with it and still aren’t getting close to
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When the big difference between players is how quickly they can master the hot keys to build villagers, them I think the game has stopped being a game, and started being a chore.
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“We can get a 16 person tournament for Rise of Nations, but good luck getting more than a handful of people interested in Age of Empires 2 DE tournament.”
Wait, what? Surely you’re joking now.
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Nope. Qt3 had a few RTS tournaments in the past few years, and each time, Age of Empires 2 failed to take hold. The most popular one was Offworld Trading Company and Rise of Nations.
We also set up some casual comp stomp games, but that usually ended up with Company of Heroes 2, although we did get a game of Kohan 2 going once, which I am personally proud of.
I think we played Age of Mythology more often then Age of Empires 2.
So what about NAC, Hidden Cup, KotD to name a few? Are those not DE2 tournaments by your standards?
We set up some fun tournaments for our forum members. Now, mind you Qt3 tends to be full of people over 40, so you have to keep the audience in mind, but generally, people don’t find Age of Empires 2 appealing.
To quote one player. "A big thing for me is that the hot keys are used 99% of the time in the economy and not in combat.
In hero based games or games where units have individual abilities you absolutely must use single unit abilities at the right time and place… and that’s a much greater micro burden. The other thing about hotkeys in Age 2 is that because they’re not as useful in combat you don’t have quite the spread of skill difficulty in Age high micro vs Age low micro players like you see in more typical competitive games."
That isn’t a complaint, as he was one of the people that wanted a AoE 2 tournament, just an observation.
As for autoqueueing, this quote of his was most striking.
“But… to play at higher difficulty levels you absolutely must use hotkeys. Even if it’s nothing more than cycling through town centers and mashing A to build the next villager, without doing this it would be basically impossible to keep up. I regularly see “newer” players only have 70 villagers vs. 120+ for “moderate” players, and i’m sure hotkeys are playing an important role in that.”
Anything that moves us away from button mashing and into more interesting games is a net plus in my book.
In any case, you would think a bunch of older guys that love Strategy games would be the target audience of AoE 2.
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ME and my friends used to play Black Forest noob level (we had over 2k games of only BF) and the skills were mainly how many vills you had at a specific time, how to boom better, how to get the important techs the fastest, how fast you could attack. So we were not master strategists, but it was very entertaining and engaging.
Now ask yourself if there was a auto unit queue function back then. We would have lost interest 100% since there was nothing to do but queue vils, place farms, and think about what units should we go for.
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It’s black forest. Black forest is boring.
Perhaps with AQ, you would have dived into other sorts of games, like Mediterranean or Arabia.
Who can say. I mean, the past is the past.
So, you’re a group of jolly casual gamers that look at high level players and are not able to reproduce what they can and want to reshape the game therefore to make it fit your lower skill ceiling. Right.
If you’re not trained enough in the game to produce more than 70 villagers against an opponent who has over 120 then it’s not the lack of automation at fault but just simply being matched up against a better player.
You can’t just change a 20 year old game to make it in line with modern “jump in and play” games which is the industry’s standard now. Too many QoL changes and it becomes a different beast.
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Someone gets the point.
Some of are casual players, some of us are not. The fact that button mashing is the difference between a great casual player and a good regular player shows that it’s a artificial barrier that has no barring on the game play.
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You mean micro and macro? Those are not button mashing…
No, you basically mash on your keyboard A as often as possible. That isn’t strategy, that is button mashing.
It’s basically a way to ensure that no, new people don’t want to play online.
Or older casual players for that matter.
Edit: Added a comma.
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From your POV for sure though…
You do that in every game. RTS FPS RPG etc
If you didn’t stop playing online with UserPatch / AOC / WK then you won’t do so now either
You basically said it yourself. You basically beat people who out play you by constantly using hotkeys to continue village production.
Hotkeys do make games easier, but when it’s main use is just for a single function, and that function has no decision making behind it, it’s button mashing. It’s like taking M. Bison, and spamming his skidding trip over and over again.
Let me ask you, how often do you use the hotkeys to go to your town center and to build villagers? How often do you use other hotkeys?
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Imagine pressing W again and again for each step your soldier moves. So fun right?
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Yeah, that’s why every pro tells you to learn hotkeys.
As soon as I started learning them I became way better at the game. I use them often now.
Which is not what happening in AOE2.
In RPG and FPS games this works, I hope you don’t expect an auto-walk feature in those games too 11
We aren’t asking for an over haul, we are asking for a feature that is common in games that have large armies and that doesn’t detract from game play. Just like auto reseeding farms and auto rebuilding Fish Traps don’t.
Now press again and again to queue more units (15 max)
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