I task villagers to make a building and then I go and focus on other things, but when I check back the villagers have not constructed the building and instead are standing in the center of the foundation
Has happened at least 4-6 times per multiplayer match I’ve played the past couple months. It’d probably happen more if I wasn’t now paranoid and watching to make sure the villagers do what they’re supposed to do
This isn’t good when you’re trying to win matches
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
100% of the time / matches I play (ALWAYS) of online multiplayer matches, including Ranked ones.
It never happens when I play single-player skirmish matches
I have fast internet and fast CPU/GPU machine, so those shouldn’t be the issue
REPRODUCTION STEPS
Create private multiplayer lobby
Invite Steam friend
Add two computer “AI” (DE’s AI), random civs
Population Max: 400. Game speed: Fast. Reveal Map: All Visible
Start match
Play game frenetically and watch how a handful of times during the match you will have tasked villagers to go make a building somewhere only to find out minutes later they have just been sitting idle in the middle of the building’s foundation
But, like I said, it has happened in Ranked games, as well, which is even more frustrating
I’ve also noticed that this issue occurs in about one out of every three games since last year’s patch—something that hadn’t been a problem for me before but has recently become frequent. It’s quite frustrating, as it can significantly delay build orders and timings if you’re not closely monitoring your villagers.
This happens because you right-click the foundation after placing it. It’s something that many people have a habit of (I guess because it is something you do if you place a lot of farms in one go). In online play that last right click can get lost due to lag. It’s super annoying and I hope a fix will be rolled out at some point.
In the meantime: try NOT to right click the building foundation after you’ve tasked villagers to build it.
It also happens in aoE4 a lot for me, too. More frequent in that game.
I know if selected villys are currently busy chopping wood or whatever when you plant the foundation, they won’t go right away to go build. They instead stay to comtinue chopping or gathering the current tree, bush, animal, or mine chunk before going to build. Due to task queuing. So, in those instances, you need to right-click a 2nd time if you want them to start building right away.
If that is the cause or a cause, that should be fixed. If you rightclick.villagers to a foundation 10 times or 100 times, they should just know to start building rather than stand in the middle of the foundation in some silent protest. There are zero reasons why tasking a villy to an empty foundation should result in them taking a lunch break. No advantages to the player, and no scenarios where a player would ever want this to happen.
I will try to pay more attention to know if this is the.cause.
I saw a setting recently in one of the games. I think AoE4 where you can tell the game to prioritize building construction over resource gathering when this queuing conflict arises, but I think I still saw the issue happening after enabling that. Again, though, will try to pay more attention to see if right-mousing multiple times to get villys to disengage resource gathering is a cause or the only cause. Regardless, I say again, this villy behavior is never desired, and so should.be fixed if it is a reason. You can right-mouse task a villager to a sheep, shore fish, tree, or bush and the end result is never them standing in the middle of the resource twiddling their thumbs. Why should foundation construction be any different?
PS: There was a time years ago when my failing mouse was causing auto double right-clicks which resulted in the issue, but I replaced the mouse and my new mouse has been fine for a few years now, so that isn’t a cause anymore.
Unless you press shift while placing the foundation, you don’t have to right click the foundation after it is placed, even if they are busy chopping wood. You placed the foundation with a left click. This foundation placement also contains the task to build (with whatever villager(s) you had selected), clearing any active queue. So, the additional right click here is unnecessary.
It used to be the case that sometimes you indeed needed to right click, example:
You select 10 villagers
You Shift click 10 farms on the mill
Now, you don’t want them to run the queue, so you click the lot on the closest farm.
After the farm is built, they distribute themselves over the other farm foundations.
However, this behavior is also now default. The only reason you still want to right click a farm, is because it is the closest. Otherwise, they will finish the first farm together and distribute all the same.
And yes, if you want to add additional villagers to a build task, you right click. But this doesn’t result in failure, even if the villager that was added later to the build task, arrives first. This can potentially result in the late villagers standing against the foundation.
What likely happens is the following: you right click the foundation immediately after placing it. The server probably didn’t register the foundation yet, so the server interprets this click as a move task rather than a build task.
If this is indeed the case, then a fix here is quite difficult to implement, the game would have to run constant checks whether a move task is 0 points away from the center of a building foundation, even after the move task is given.
Sorry if I mixed up rightclick vs leftclick. I need to have the game in front of me to check.
Thanks for the info and advice. I will try again later
With what you said, can you see that being an issue only for multiplayer games? I only experience the issue when playing mulitplayer. Never in singleplayer skirmish
I found this issue in build 158041, but some seconds later villagers got unstuck and continued the building process, taking more time than expected (more than 4 seconds before realizing some of them should move out of the way).
No other clicks in the game result in such odd behavior. I don’t undersrand why this is the only one.
Like, I click to research a tech, it starts researching. I click to create units, they create. I assign villys to chop wood or gather berries, they chop wood or gather berries… they don’t stand idle at the base of the trees or bushes. I tell military to attack, they attack. I never have to give instructions twice for anything else… so why is creating a building any different?
Why aren’t timing mismatches happening all over the place in the game if that’s the supposed reason; why is this particular click-instruction special?
It happens in AoE4, too. And, again, it’s the only click-instruction that ever fails. Did they borrow AoE2’s code for building creations, or something?
I have high-speed internet. This shouldn’t be happening. Since it only happens for building creations, this tells me some code needs tweaking. There needs to be less or no reliance on server side for executing this task or something.
In Mar 2021 and Jan 2022, devs said it was being tracked as an issue. Wonder if it got closed and issue has popped up again, or if it was never closed?
GAME INFORMATION
