I don’t know if this is possible on the Age of Empires 2 Engine but what if we had a farm snapping system? You might be asking what that means, I’ll show you a poorly made gif i did.
Basically what it does is calculates the position of the mouse, if it’s on top of a farm or any building it places automatically adjacent to an already existing farm clockwise. If you dont want the farm snapping just move the mouse away from top of the building.
This would be an insane technological advancement for the game and remove a lot of the unnecessary APM that we get from placing perfect farms.
What do you guys think? Really wish the devs take a look on this one.
The thing is, in the late game, farming placement doesn’t matter as much. even if the farm is placed 3-4 tiles away from mill or TC the efficiency drop is only 7-9%.
As for Genie Engine, It did not have this snapping feature for anything in the game before iirc.
This is yet another feature that is nice to have but not really that necessary.
Nice concept in theory. Though I think it will be hard to realise in-game since we have never seen something like that in this game engine.
Also there is no real meaning for this feature since you get ample time to place farms properly early game and late game farm placement has no big impact.
Yeah Spirit of the Law did a great video on optimal farming placement and once you have hand cart it is negligible. The more interesting part of a change like this would be in late imperial when you are trying to setup a large farming area quickly. I don’t know about you but I start randomly painting the map with farms are probably half my clicks (at best) actually place a farm since I am randomly dragging the mouse around trying to place farms as quickly as possible. If the solution the OP suggested was implemented it would make setting up 10 farms take 10 clicks instead of the 100 clicks I do now lol.
I waste a lot of actions on trying to quickly spool up farms in castle/imperial so I wouldn’t mind if each of my clicks intended to make a farm actually made a farm.
if the question is separating good players from bad players, make it like auto scout, not efficient, but easier. where you shouldn’t get into the habit of doing it everytime, but it helps people who are coming into the game and want to try it out.
because its part of gameplay for one, and for two, every other form of automation in the game is designed to be less efficient then manual control, this would not be.
except the whole point of his request is to make it the most efficient farm placement possible.
furthermore, since its automated it would likely happen faster then what it takes good players to do.
except that would develop bad habits the players have to then learn to break later on, it isn’t that easy trust me. better to not encourage bad behavior.
the game is already very accessible. its one of the slower RTS games out there and overall the mechanics are pretty basic with no units having abilities like in other games.
we already have plenty of user friendly mechanics added to the game as well.
you said make it less efficient - outside of basically setting it up to go t90 farm style, how else do you plan on making such a mechanic inefficient?
Slippery slope into full AI control and play the game for human. Spoiler alert, with enough training, they can beat every single human player existing on earth and continue doing so forever.
My point is the attention on the farm can be used elsewhere and this is a nice to have but ok without feature, even less so important than auto scout. Yes, the efficiency will improve, but won’t be much, and auto snap may cause other problems we cannot predict as of yet.
Really wish the devs take a look on this one.
