What was the reasoning for a sixty-unit selection limit?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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In my opinion, it makes the game feel dated. However, given DE exists, I assume a change was considered, but decided against. Any idea why?

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maybe i am wrong, but i think it used to be 40 before HD?

there are a few reasons i can think of:
in the original game most campaigns had 75pop limit, and the devs thought that multiplayer would also be played at 75 pop. in a situation like that you would rarely have more than 40 units of any type.
even now you will rarely have more than 60 units of any one type other than villagers

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But control groups are hard.

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learning them makes all games way more fun, i would really recommend it

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Since we can change it for a lobby games more higher than standard 200 pop (even 500, idk if 1000 is possible), possibility of select more than 60 units will be appreciated a lot.

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oh yeah, dont get me wrong. removing this limit would be a quality of life improvement that wouldnt negatively impact anyone

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well, you’d need an interface redesign to reliably fit all individual portraits into the panel with no selection limit (and changing this to aoe3 and 4 type of selection panel would mean taking away the greater UI side abiity to control your unit selection, and thats smt they should actively avoid doing (if anything current aoe2 unit selection panel should be copy pasted into 3 and 4))

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I would like it to be a higher number. It would be useful for actions like “select all military units. If you are pop capped and got lets say 120 vills, that command wont select all your army.

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I think it’s for performance reasons.
It does path finding to 60 units at once while also trying to keep them in formation.

I don’t think changing that is as simple as just changing a number.
The AoE2 formation logic is very hacky code what I’ve heard of.

You might already have notices that the path finding for 60 units is already not the best.

AoE3DE even had a lower limit until recently.

AoE3 has a command to send all military units to one spot and that even works when you have more units then the limit. Maybe it just goes through all units one by one and just sends them within a few seconds to not send all of them at once.
Super useful for revolutions.
The Burgundians could use that too.

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i think personally the 60 selection limit (95 in aoe3 de atm) is the result of the way pathing is coded, the modern flowfield pathing is coded like a hivemind to optimize how many commands are needed for processing, thats not the case with the “alphastar” pathing used in aoe games of the past, here instead, every single unit paths in isolation, which inevitably adds a ton of variables that need to be processed on top of the initial command, its far less efficient and will never be as smooth as proper flowfield implementation (for example, starcraft II pathing)

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