What improvment will increase the player level?

Hi,
What should be added to the game to increase the level of players?
(A user with this improvement will be better than previously, but without changing the game)
Few examples in the history of AOE2:
AOE2 Conqueror brings the ability to queue farm
AOE2 Forgotten empires bring the ability to select many buildings at the same time
AOE2 DE the ability to queue activities for unit (for example build a building and then go somewhere)
My ideas:
-An option to show how many life point each unit lose when they are hit
- The number will be of the font color of the opponent
- Don’t show more than 10 numbers at the same time
Why: It will help us to learn and discover all hidden bonuses. For example, I discover only by watching spirit of the law that hand Cannoneer doesn’t have the same bonus than janisary

  • Infinite queue (with a shortcut) like for farm or most of the game release, after 2000
    Why: free the mind of the player to be more focus on interesting part
  • Setting to show work rate of villager, fish boat, trade boat and cart
    Why: Help us to know what is better and help us to know where our focus need to be to help our incomes.
  • Building animation, have a different image when the building has 1 or more HP.
    Why: actually we can’t see if our quick wall is done or we skip to begin to build something

You have to pick one or the other. Infinite queue for unit would change the game a lot and it would make it worst

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A lot of what is suggested here can be done by showing all the extra stats of units in the techtree. Currently one needs to either test them out in map editor or visit a wiki or sites like aoe2techtree.net

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What is it with people thinking producing units isn’t interesting? Sure when you have an advantage and can afford to just spam your main unit to win it’s not the best part of your match, but otherwise you have to decide which army you will go for first (especially if your civ is a versatile one) then be careful to adapt to your opponent, prepare a different army composition in advance to surprise the enemy, tons of decisions like that. To me it sounds like something that doesn’t need an infinite queue feature to be interesting.

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This catched my eye.

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What you are describing is precisely the reason I think infinite queue could be interesting. (I’d have to try it out to be certain whether I’d like it, which sadly isn’t possible.)
All these decisions to make, what units do I make? when? where? with which upgrades? But currently it’s often better to focus attention on spamming halbediers/hussars/whatever efficiently, rather than to ask yourself the question whether you actually want/need those units. Attention is a finite resource.
It’s not like producing units without limit is always good.

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and yet Infinite Queue allows you to focus on other aspects of your game like your micro or strategy or your macro. you literally cut out something that requires you to make a conscious decision. and unlike auto scout (which is designed to be inferior), infinite queue is actually in some ways BETTER then manual queueing because

  1. it doesn’t take up your attention
  2. since infinite queue would only take resources as the units start training, you’re literally not spending resources that you aren’t using (for example if 1 stable has 3 knights in production, 2 of those knights are in queue, and the 120 food and 150 gold from those knights is already used, whereas with infinite queue those resources COULD be used elsewhere if needed).

so yeah, you’re talking about something that the only downside is if you forget about it being on.

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In Age of Mythology you can. But you would find out that as Mat said, the auto queue is pretty much better than manually queueing all the time, to the point it’s included in every AoM build order.

These units are spammed because they are spammable. On top of that their role is pretty clear. Light cav is always good to have in your opponent’s eco so even if you’re Malay you’re going to spam some. On the contrary no need to make any effort thinking about halb spam against Aztecs it’s pretty obvious it’s useless unless you’re in a trash war. You would need those units to be different for the situation to be different.

Also what I said above is only applicable for late game situations, because trying to mindlessly spam trash units means you will spend ressources you would have decided to use differently had you thought more about it. Kind of like auto-reseed can sometimes eat your wood just as you were about to build a TC or siege workshop and get your strat delayed that way, but much worse. But IF auto-queue was a thing, you wouldn’t have 10-ish pikemen worth of ressources sitting in your barracks being useless, but just one, so auto-queue would buff mindless spam when it’s supposed to not be relevant.

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The player levels depends on his personal efforts to improve and learn the game, if you want automatized features to do the things you find complex to perform, then you could coop the bots and play whenever you want and let the bot do the other stuff.

The features are to improve the quality of the games such as the auto reseed farms and ctrl group creations, the auto scout is still questionable, more auto features will make the game less desirable for the big base of players you know those adults who have kept the game alive for 20 years.

So to answer your question, to improve the levels of the players is not up to the game developers but up to each individual player.

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I see infinite queue not only for late game but also in early game. For example to build all your villagers. You can’t queue directly your 15 vil because you don’t have the ressources.
Activate infinite queue doesn’t mean that you will let activate for the whole game.
In early game I beleive that infinite queue is more important than in late game. In early game if you idle your tc or your stable it will impact more the game than in late game. And in early game you can’t often queue 5 units in building.

It still reeks of automation and unlike other automated features would be superior to anything you can get from playing without it. which is a hallmark of a bad system.

Also, why nerf pros? :rofl:

At this rate might consider letting AI playing the game for you.

A side note: auto scout was very controversial back then, and it was a dumbed down AI that helps you reach 100% exploration. Idk but auto queue would be even more controversial and wont be welcomed by community by large imo.

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Better ask what you can do to become a better player, rather than thinking about how you could change the game to become a “better player”.
I have a 17xx rating in 1v1m making me top 2% or something like that and I still feel somewhat overwhelmed with everything going on. It’s part of the game. It’s an important aspect of what makes it challenging. It’s an important aspect of why people play for thousands of hours and still continue playing. You can always get better, no matter how good you are. We would be stupid to change that! Simplifying things is the easiest way in that direction.

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Just remember the meme “killed 5 vills but forgot to create vils at home for 5 min”

It’s part of the game, why u need to do it easier for some players?
Some Low ELO Legends will overpower more skilled players with sick micro, without managing ECO(cause auto).
Example: 5 on berries(vils), 12 on wood, 6 on gold(archers) for nonstop production vils and archers. Next 7 minute u can only dancing with archers with the same number of vils.
Will it be fun to lose game at 900 ELO because opponent only microing archers?

Late game wont be really affected for most of players because: a few hotkeys (select all and shift+Q) - fast and easy way to queue a lot of units. (it’s easier than managing autoqueue for every stable, or managing the number of stables for queueing)

The suggestion barely change late game (for any 1000ELO+ player). But it will strongly affect early game for middle ELO players. (cause top have fast speed and Low Elo dont have understanding and build orders)

PS streamer Dave play on Controller at 1400 rating with 30 APM. it means, that even with low APM u can play good if u understand strategies and understand game.

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Manage where you spend your time is part of the game but spend time on stupid thing isn’t wonderful. You don’t play aoe2 to play a clicker game. It’s a strategy game. I don’t know when you begin to play to AOE2, I play since the release and I still have the CD box. The games evolves in a good way and don’t have to stop now. Try to play to an old version of the game and you will have less fun. You will wonder why you have to spend a lot of time on stupid things who doesn’t require any strategy and more than 50% of your action could be code in a bot for less than 5 hours. It’s a game you play with your brain.
Example of improvment to give you more time to spend on strategy. Do you really believe that the game was better before all that?
In DE you are now used to :

  • queue upgrades, before it was part of the game to don’t forget to go to the TC to queue next age at the right time
  • control group, it was part of the game to spam some short cut to queue some unit in different building or build them all in the same spot to double click them
  • infinite queue farm, it was part of the game to queue some farm but not too much to don’t lock too many ressources
    In forgotten:
  • select many building, it was part of the game to don’t be able to queue in different building
    In conqueror:
  • queue farm, it was part of the game to right click on each farmer to reseed a farm
    In an update of King
  • auto work villager, it was part of the game to ask to villager to chop a tree after build a lumber camp

For all you who are thinking that auto-que would decrease the skill gap, and who worry there’ll be less to do (@MatCauthon3, @VioletTexas3273, @SouMexican), just imagine what you could do if you had infinite que available.
Currently the whole question of “where do I want to produce?” is irrelevant for many players (including myself and SotL), because we always produce with select-all hotkeys. Just some ideas of what you could do, I’m sure more integrate exploits would be developed if players and pros put their minds to it:

  • que hussars in specific stables, with a gather point close to the stable, then send them out on targeted raids each time they reach a certain number
  • produce your slowest & most urgently needed units from barracks close to the front
  • have some fishing docks in safe water (currently it’s not worth it because of the number of wasted galleys it’ll produce)

And to use the spare APM:

  • focus on monk & magonel micro
  • decide where to research upgrades, and make sure there’s nothing in the queue before the upgrade kicks in
  • make beautiful farms
  • refresh lumber camps
  • control your armies
  • put your idle villagers to work

There has been a lot of added automation so far (just see the post above) and none of it has resulted in a lesser need for strategy and APM. It’s just made the game more fun.
(I’m not saying all automation would make the game more fun, just that the automation that has been implemented so far has made the game more fun.)

Like villagers automatically moving onto the next stone mine when the mine they’re using is depleted? Face it, without automation which is preferable to non-automation, the game would be unplayable.

You really think pros wouldn’t play better with infinite queue? I’d wager someone in the top-100 could beat the viper if he was allowed to use infinite queue. Pros will always be able to use ther APM and game knowledge to outplay the rest of us.

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I agree with everything in this post. Thanks for the recommendation.

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Yes, pros prolly wont play better with infinite queue because they have developed their own way of managing unit production that infinite queue may become a hindrance rather than assistance. And no, a top-100 player wont guarantee beat viper even if he is allowed to use infinite queue.

I play Supreme Commander a bit, casually. That’s a game where infinite queue is built in from the start. Unlike AOE2, resources are literally infinite. You mainly need to manage the production so that you always maintain a positive income.

That’s not the case in AOE2. I can sort of agree on the “benefits” you just mentioned. However a decent player can do some good job in some or most of those tasks already. On the contrary, just like auto farm reseeding, infinite queue can quickly burn through all of your resources if not paying attention, even though you are not really “banking” resources in production/research buildings.

My take on “nerfing pro players” basically means the skill value of players who can manage most or all mechanics of AOE2 goes down because production management has been taken away. Hence the “nerf”.

TLDR, infinite queue is a bad idea and a slippery slope into full blown AI control. Next step? Maybe another random forum member would propose the idea of auto micro? :rofl:

are you seriously comparing auto production to a worker moving to the next nearest node of the same resource? oh come on now man.
one is a staple of pretty much every RTS ever made, and the other is something almost every RTS avoids like the plague.

I propose if auto production is actually made a thing that any unit made with auto production automatically costs 10% more resources.

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It’s actually both and clicking is not as bad as you think it is. It’s a nice part of the game that you’re able to overwhelm your opponent. You force him to pay attention to things he doesn’t want to pay attention to and suddenly he’s not able to keep up with producing units. His ressources stockpile and he is in trouble. It’s a good thing that this is possible. I makes messy strategies possible. I don’t even like using them, but I still think they should be in the game). For sure I think the mechanical part of needing to click things is actually an important part of the game.

I do agree that it’s about finding a balance here. You don’t want to be only clicking stuff and have no time for strategic things, but you certainly also don’t want only strategic things without any mechanical aspect to it. Just play another game if that’s the case. Or if you want to micro units non stop, play micro scenarios or whatever. But I think AoE2 has a very good overall package right now and making more and more things easier to manage is not to way to go. There needs to be some mechanical challenge about managing your empire in an RTS.

So yes, I think the game is a lot better right now than it was at the start. But I also think there is a “too much” for QoL-changes and we need to be careful to be aware of that, because it’s very hard to go back and the game will then just slowly die.

This could actually be a suggestion that would make casual players happy, while not affecting competitive players too much. I think I’d like that.
It’s the same as auto scout (which is used by pros occasionally btw.) - it absolutely has to be worse than doing it manually.

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