I think Age of Empires III should add a feature where any villager who stays idle for more than 5 seconds automatically goes to work on a nearby resource (such as chopping wood, hunting, or mining).
Both the idle duration and the type of work could be configurable—for example, how many seconds they remain idle before triggering, and whether they return to their previous resource or choose whatever is closest.
Another suggestion: there should be a sound alert whenever villagers become idle, and if they stay idle for more than 10 seconds without being addressed, the alert should repeat. Additionally, there should be an audio notification whenever the number of idle villagers increases. This feature should be relatively easy to implement.
idk honestly, its technically already there if the villager has his profession set, hunter will seek more hunts, lumberjack more trees etc.
doing so to make idles, like full idles just auto search across the map imo interferes with skill expression of the player too much (just as bad as aimbots in FPS games can be), same reason i’m not too fond of auto queues in AOM, and lets not get started on the vill priority AI assistance, only reasonable if all that is flat out disabled for ranked at least
Yeah i love this idea in theory but anyone whos watched aoe3s quadrillion IQ hunt selection (kill the deer right there? No I’ll go backherd this other deer you pushed towards the TC) knows our current ai jist might not be up to snuff. Old engine with fresh paint and all
This could be made an optional feature—turn it on if you want, turn it off if you don’t. Personally, if it were available, I’d definitely switch it on.
Herding animals can sometimes drive them away from the TC, but if villagers switch to cutting wood nearby, you won’t have the problem of pushing the prey away (even if they started out hunting). That’s why I suggested the idea of them “going to work on a nearby resource.”
In the mid to late game, especially when you’re fighting on the front line (like when you need to hit artillery, handle HR, or switch queues), you might end up with a large number of idle villagers. Honestly, even if they just go chop wood, the loss isn’t all that big.
thats definitely true but this isn’t the be all end all fix
and imo there are other QoL problems that are related to direct player input that already exist in other games including aom retold and should be higher priority over this, the alt drag select for vills only is one, actually properly working multiple building select and distribution, reworked global queue system and problems like broken shadow maps on ludicris zoom out
the problem will problem come if you allow them to auto decide gather other res, they might decide to just stop and do something else which is really annoying
like if say there are hunts near a mine and you tell them to gather the hunts, sometimes vils can go idle due to crowding and animation error and then they decide to just gather the mine, which would be really annoying in the early game cause i would rather they go idle so i can see it in the banner and reassign them then gather something else.
So yeah our current AI is probably not good enough to do this
What might be a decent compromise is maybe a button on buildings and res to tell idle vils to gather it, which is a decent way to like pull ur idles to do something without it being too annoying
Like say a button on the livestock pen to call idle vils to gather fattened animals, or on the mills and estates to gather idle vils to it.
AOM has implemented something half way on this for livestock which tells livestock to come to buildings where they can be fattened, this would also be nice in aoe 3
natural res maybe harder but who knows might be possible
I just wish villagers automatically switched from an animal to another, and looked farther for trees before going idle. I just find it kinda annoying when villagers stop hunting because they killed all the capybaras even though they’re right besides tapirs. Or when they stop chopping wood even though there’s still trees in your line of sight (in general I think a problem in AoE3 is tree groups are too small and too far apart).
That’s a great idea and it pretty much covers most of what we need. However, there’s a potential issue: if there’s only one resource point that calls for idle villagers, they might end up trekking across half the map to get there.
yeah that is about the biggest downside but i think its a good trade off cause often when they are idle, you dont know where they are anyway and this way you atleast know of their existence
I do a similar thing right now with the select all idle vils hotkey, press it and just click on the nearest resource or thing to do, a few far away ones gets called but i wasnt paying attention to them anyway