Doesn’t happen for all games (some gamers preserve and prolong the fun in certain games), but with so many “auto”, QoL, and optimized things added to AoE2:DE, it seems that game is certainly going down this path, for better or worse. So far it had maintained fun decently, but we’ll see if it is.able to catch itself before it spirals into the “auto everything” abyss (trap) too much more
Quote doesn’t say automate, but optimize.
Automation isn’t the point IMHO. In the original AoM, you couldn’t order the cyclops not to automatically pick up and throw the first soldier they got in a fight with. And you couldn’t order the cyclops to pick up and throw that war elephant specifically. You could order it to attack the elephant, and if he would pick it up and throw it would depend on if his special attack bar is recharged or not, which you could check. So when it came to special abilities of myth units and heroes, you had all the automation, with no ability to turn said automation off.
And did anyone complain? Not to my knowledge.
Auto Que was added with the Titans Expansion. It has been there and been used a lot for two decades.
Yeah, people argued about it, and still do.
But that’s not what ruins the game for people. People who don’t like it can just not use it. It’s now even possible to turn it off, and in ranked its disabled and impossible to be turned on.
Optimisation is not the same as automation. In the right context, with the right presentation, setting up autonomous systems and watching them go can be fun.
Optimizing the fun out of Age of Empires would be mathematically calculating the objectively best possible build order, army composition, base layout, villager number gathering resources, etc, and then sticking slavishly to that mathematically calculated formula, until a patch changes resource prices, tech requirements, or unit stats enough to neccesitate recalculating everything.
At that point, you’re spending more time doing math than playing the game, and when you’re playing the game, you’re following a mathematically calculated formula rather than immerse yourself into the game.
That’s what optimizing the fun out of a game is about.
I interpret the quote in my own way which can include automation. Automation, after all, is a form of and/or method of optimization.
Otherwise, we would be making all products without the use of robots and computers. Those automations have helped optimize the processes. When a boss asks you to optimize a process, surely you might try automating it?
So auto queue was added to AoM:R and people argued about it? It’s because that optimization… i.e., automation… decreased their joy 
Which is what the quote warns will happen.
In relation to the quote…
With every decision to optimize something… make something more efficient… i.e., automate something… some set of players might or probably will lose joy. I’ve seen it happen over and over again with AoE2 QoL discussions.
- In AoE2:DE, ‘auto scouting’ was implemented, ‘auto farm reseeding’ was implemented, ‘tower range indicators’ to auto-show you how far they will shoot, and so on. (The latter is a fringe case, but still applies in the automation/optimization realm, imo. It eliminates all human ambiguity.) Some or all of these were controversial additions to some players.
And your solution is to just have people quit playing if they don’t like the automations? And devs should find ways to automate more and more things at the expense of more and more people losing joy, because you think automation isn’t optimization and the quote doesn’t apply?
- At some point, I bet your automation threshold would be reached where too much of your gaming joy would’ve been taken away. That’s the time you stop playing, as you suggested other people do at that moment, or you’d try to find an old pre-automation version of the game. That loss of joy through automation is the type of thing the quote warns about.
Do I feel some automation is necessary? Of course.
Especially ones that we are used to in AoE games that we’ve been enjoying for years. They are part of the base mechanics of the games, making them what they are, and what we all loved or grew to love.
- Like, in AoE2, villys gather resources, auto drop off, and auto return to gather more. An automation I know and love and I think many do. (Which I was sad to see go in AoE3, by the way. AoE3 made it more automated, which is an example of joy lost due to automation. I also didn’t like “auto TC shipments” and “auto train income” in AoE3 due to personal tastes.)
We all know and love the AoE games for our own reasons. It’s a slippery slope, though, when adding more and more automations that have never been there before, or when the automations are so rampant from the start (like in AoE3) that the fun from the surrounding game doesn’t make up for the lost joy due to automations.
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The main reason the game is losing players is because of the Atlanteans. The Atlanteans are really broken, they are vastly superior to all pantheons and most Atlantean players only spam archer heroes. I’m sorry to say but the Atlanteans are ruining the game with their troll play style. The Atlanteans are like if you mixed all the pantheons and only chose the advantages of each pantheon and created a pantheon called Atlanteans.
Facing a team of Atlantean players is practically a guaranteed defeat because the Atlanteans almost always advance first to the next age and collect resources twice as fast so they can make any kind of strategy it is totally unfair I wish the Atlanteans did not exist in the game because many players are already tired of seeing the same cowardly strategy of only archers heroes and siege weapons.
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That seems like it would be an easy balance tweak if it’s, indeed, a problem. I say easy, but I mean in relation to other issues that might occur needing deeper and more prolonged dev work. Hope it can be tweaked soon!
So you’d rather you’d have to click every time a villager has picked up 30 gold, so the villager carries that to the drop off site, and then assign the villager to the gold mine again?
Nope, and I never said or alluded to that
Yep!
That is what I do not like about AoM
The automation thing is insane
Better would be to have easier shortcuts like Stormgate and add a toggle option to disable/enable autoqueue!
So the game would feel enough balanced, accesible and also keep fast paced
You made it sound like any and all automation is just bad and wrong in your eyes.
If that’s not your point, then you might have to rephrase.
I can agree that the new auto economy feature is taking it too far, where the villagers are simply gathering resources on their own, without you having to do anything besides click two buttons. But they chose to have PC players and console players playing together, and mouse and keyboard are objectively the better tools to manage an RTS economy than a controller, so those on consoles would be at a disadvantage without it.
That it’s assigning the villagers in a stupid way and constantly breaks the economy it generates itself doesn’t help either. So the only real reason to use it is if I let my 7 year old son play the game, who struggles to keep track of the economy and chooses minor gods soley based on how the portraits look.
What I see as the bigger problem, tho, is the elitist mindset some “pros” have. The people who care about nothing but PvP and leaderboards, and suggest changes to the game “To keep the noobs out”.
The place a game should strive to be is low skill floor, high skill ceiling.
Low skill floor, so the barrier of entry for a new player not knowing anything about the game to be able to play it and have fun is low. High skill ceiling, should be obvious.
All those quality of live features make it easier for new players to get into the game. You can argue that is the wrong approach.
The “pros” made it seem like they were the vast majority of the RTS community, if not the entirety of it, even tho they are, at most, 15%, in the late 2000s and 2010s. Plus Esports was a big deal at some point, with Starcraft and korea, so many RTS studios tried to go for the esport crown by catering to the “pros” only, causing the RTS genre to pretty much die. And it’s only now slowly coming back.
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For sure. Thankfully, AoE2:DE does have toggles for some of the things, but let’s be honest, how many people would disable those things in a ranked or competitive match I wonder? 
Once the “auto” is in the game, there’s no going back, usually
Still, for AoM:R that would be nice to add toggles. Could definitely benefit single-player vs. AI games, if nothing else, I bet!
Thanks! Not how I meant it. I don’t have time now, but will review again and the rest of your post later
Thats what I am talking about!
Competitve wise is pretty bad because it make the players rely only on Military skillset
Only you have to take care of workers distribution, obviously if Villager Priority Automation is disabled of course. A feature that make the game even worse for the competitive scene.
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The discussion about automation is so cool I wanna jump in too!
But first let me be clear: I don’t think AoM is dying, And I don’t think that automation is reason behind AoM not having the big player numbers.
I honestly think that adding villager auto queue just decreases the amount of fun the game has. You have no choice. You have to use it since it’s in the game otherwise you are at a massive disadvantage. And adding solves such a big part of the skill needed to play Age of empires games. And I do think these games were not designed with auto villager production in mind.
It’s like saying “Oh recoil control in counter strike is difficult, Let’s add Auto Recoil control so new players have better time” But this doesn’t work. Recoil control albeit being annoying and difficult is part of the joy of counter strike (Although it is definitely not the only fun part of counter strike series).
In the meantime not having some amount of automation is just too obnoxious. Like as said before manually ordering your worker to gather again after dropping of their resources. Or Manually reseeding every farm after they run out (in AoE2).
would like to hear other people’s opinion about this.
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@Ashinferno On the subject of the villagers’ autoqueue, I have to admit that I’d be hard pressed to do without it now if they removed the feature.
I find it quite pleasant and comfortable, and as the continuous creation of villagers is essential to the game, I don’t see it as too much of a problem. It’s true that I’d be very annoyed if I had to go back to spamming the keys to create villagers all the time.
The game is complex enough as it is, with spells, god choices, army composition and so on. Why make it more tedious?
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Yea sure removing the villager auto queue would be a disaster now.
There are so many memes in AoEIV community about “forgetting to queue villagers” too sad AoM won’t be having them. Although AoM does have it’s own challenges and silly mistakes.
A better explanation on why Auto queue and automation is not fun and harm. impossible!
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I feel like they have advantages in some places.
Maybe nerfing heroes rising up the cost and time?
I can’t understand why developers think by making the game more competitive their game will grow more popular. It’s such a common mistake among RTS developers. I was baffled when frost giant studio also made the same mistake.
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@Ashinferno It’s not even just a question of competitiveness, everything about their game is a complete failure, even the simple fact of making a game by mixing sc2 and wc3 shows how little creativity they have. The graphics are atrocious. In short…
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Yep. The funny part is almost all developers know that the most important part of any video game is “fun”. The main problem is “what is fun? how do you define fun? why are some games fun and some not? why was Starcraft 2 fun back then but not fun now?”. RTS developers seem to be not even bothered with these questions.
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I dear, I wished they have done that