Bug Description: The villagers gathering speed for shore fish is not being affected by the techs “horticulture”, “fertilization”, and “Precision Cross-Breeding”.
This seem to have been reported near the release of the game but didn’t get an official response and right now most players seem to think shore fish are affected by gathering speed upgrades.
The are also not affected by survival techniques as expected since this is fished meat not “hunted meat” but I tested this to confirm for completeness.
For the sake of completeness I tested with Mongols who get extra food gathering upgrades (I tested with both French and Mongols). It seems I have limited total file sizes so I included only parts of the video I recorded.
In all cases the villager gathers 60 food (with almost no walking) in roughly 67 seconds. I failed to upload my recorded videos probably due to file sizes?
One could also measure using what the villager is carrying instead of measuring income with little walk but I wanted to reduce time measurement error. Anyway, both lead to the same result that shore fishing with villagers is not benefitting from any tech.
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Hey @ProtossAMove! At launch there was indeed an issue here. I believe it was just a missing callout that these techs do not affect hunted food sources. However, they should be working now (including the tool tips being correct).
Do let me know if I’m missing something, though. Thanks!
Uploading: Age of Empires IV 2023-03-08 19-48-30_Trim.mp4…
You mean it has just been hotfixed? I did my testing 8 days ago, the day I reported. I will test again right away,
They should work as designed currently. Meaning that those techs (Horticulture, Fertilization, and Cross-Breeding) should NOT affect fish.
I see thanks, well the tooltip doesn’t say so it says does not affect hunt not fish. English is not my native language but I have never heard anyone say I am going to hunt fish. And if fish is considered hunted meat then why doesn’t “survival techniques” affect them? (I tested this as well).
Other Age games treat Hunting and Fishing as separate terms of art. It is inconsistent and confusing for AoE4 to now conflate the two verbs in that tooltip.
Villagers Hunt (huntables), Gather (berries), Fish (fish), and Farm (farms).
I believe the tooltip should read: “Increase Villager farming rate by 15%” or “Increase Villager Food gathering from Farms by 15%.”
“farming” would be more confusing because the horticulture line affects sheep, cows and berries which you probably classify as farming but the game has separate “farms”.
Thanks, you two! This is really great feedback on how we can better message things/be consistent. Will take it to the UX/UI and loc teams!
I believe it should, and if it’s not that’s a bug. We’ll look into it!
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To me it was clear that food sources are either affected by survival techniques or the horticulture line but not both, since I tested survival techniques first and found it not working and assumed logically it should be horticulture that works with fish I ended up reporting the horticulture line as bugged not the survival techniques.
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Then it would be Farming and Herding/Gathering/whatever term of art is applied to sheep but not applied to anything the upgrade doesn’t affect.
Most people here haven’t played it, but AoEO remains the gold standard for lots of franchise quality of life details, including consistent use of language, UI, and tool tips.
Here are a couple of relevant tool tips that demonstrate this kind of clarity. AoEO’s Plow (above) is a great example – it achieves in about nine words what AoE4’s Horticulture fails to achieve in 14 words.
You cannot overstate the value of clarity, consistency, and brevity. More can be found here: Champion Mode Tech Tree - Age of Empires Online Celeste
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“Does not apply to hunted meat nor fish.”
“Only applies to farms and berries.”
I guess the icon is suppoused to clarify that? I myself thought this would’ve applied to fish, as it doesn’t explicitly state otherwise. In fact, I never made the connection that Survival Techniques applies to fish under this logic, so that changes a lot of things gameplay-wise. There is currently no way to tell what gather rate your villagers have besides creating an isolated scenario and testing it to see the average income, so the description of the technologies should be crystal clear in their definition, as there is no numerical alternative that players can depend on during games.
Personally, I’m fan of the idea that you could click a villager and see their current gather rate of different resources. But, if that isn’t meant to be in the game, I do concur that the current text is somewhat vague.
Afterall, all fish is meat but not all meat is fish.
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