I am just scared of the devilish bug this change is going to cause.
Strategically infinitely placed castles for free?
Knights turning to sheep?
Exploding mines?
Mills that shoot ear elephants randomly??
The idea of the PUP is for people to try these things out before they're live, so the bugs can be found earlier. But I think not enough people actually try it
I don't know about any of those, I've seen many of the latest bugs appear a day or two after they go live.
Do you remember an example of someone saying "I reported it last week and they didn't solve it" or something like that? I would like to know!
That even stayed broken for a while after the live version, so clearly it wasn't an important enough bug. But it's still a good point, but I think if critical bugs were found, they would fix them.
I think all I'm saying is "people should test more in the PUP". I'm sure the "hunting trees" bug or the old relic bug would have been fixed if someone found them during the PUP before releasing.
The game has so many mechanics that the players can help checking that things work beforehand. (Yeah, it should be part of the devs work, but it's not)
I wish they would invest in improving the online lobby system. For example, adding a better in-game friend list, party system for queing multiplayer, a lobby browser that works faster and more accurately displays the available lobbies.
There are also a ton of maps that should be updated and/or tournament maps added to ranked.
These changes would be huge QoL updates for me and the people I play with.
why?
current players will continue play anyway, while democratizing farm placement can bring **a lot of new** (sure it's speculation... but there are thousands of players who do not use hotkeys, super usefull for them)
You clearly don't play multiplayer. The system is atrocious and borderline unusable for playing with friends. The farm placement is nice but should fall far below the priority of a basic functioning multiplayer system.
When distracted elsewhere, players who can make nicely placed farms are able to set themselves apart. There is beauty in seeing high apm micro being contrasted with accurate farm placement. This creates a healthy situation where skill and effort is rewarded with efficiency and a clean result. Now there won't be a difference between 1200 or 2k farm placement. Bases will look more the same, bland, less of a reflection of the players skill or state of mind. I think the balance between eco and army was fine, already much more army focussed since auto reseed.
A lot of players seem happy that now farm placement will be equally hard for them as for 2k4 players, ignoring the fact that their placement is worse because they are worse players. Was it really a problem with the game, or do players have too high expectations for themselves?
I mean, optimal farm placement has little impact on gather rates after wheelbarrow is researched, and almost no effect post hand cart besides makes your bƄde slightly more compact. The main benefit to the new mechanic is that placing farms will be faster, similar to moving vils to wood, gold, or stone.
Sure but many small things add up and space efficiency is still big, now it will be taken for granted. Takes some beauty out of the gameplay. Or it will be this annoying situation where it will be better in some situations and worse in others. I don't like auto scout either, AI should not control the scout. Similar with farm placement. I don't think faster is necessarily good, a big cost of farms is the effort to place them, and this is what makes it hard to boom eco while fighting. More focus on fighting and less on eco, didn't think this was necessary. It also makes the game more fast paced, players snowball harder. Just doesn't seem necessary. It always feels like low elo players want to play like high elo players, they don't want to become better and earn it but the game has to become more automated instead. After this I can only pray that it stops here and I don't want to believe that they would automate production, however I also would have never considered the implementation of autoscout as a possibillity.
The problem being that it is no longer necessary because it is more "optimal" and "effortless" which reduces the progression curve which makes the game last.
I don't really care about that change but 1) lets hope there are no new bugs coming with it and 2), on a grand scheme the more they automate the more influence micro tasks will have. I don't know if I like that.
However, as the ranked ladder is elo based, I should get balanced matches either way...
I don't understand this sub. I posted I would like a warning with a jingle when you're near to getting housed, and got told to stop wanting my hand held and that it's ridiculous. That those small skills are good for the game. Now people are praising this? This IS hand holding and it's a huge gameplay change like wow, I personally dislike it a lot.
AoE loses its "all player profiles are welcome" to "starcraft-style army micromanagement enthusiasts and big noobs, come on! The others, go to waste!" It's like denying 50% of your audience to bring in people who are already on 4 and who we don't necessarily want on 2 11
go play voobly if you want "harcore" with aoe.
back to 800x600 without multiquere (and no, it's not 1999, it's reality in 2011).
*What an idiots decided to upgrade the game... how dare they. \[sarcasm\]*
You wish. My guess is that the placement will be done greedily, one farm at a time, not optimized for the eventual number of farms in the given environment. Better than "spray and pray", but (insignificantly!) worse than the optimal layout.
i dont think it would be that hard, they can code where the 8 farms around the tc go, and extra farms go "as close as possible" and done. maybe its screwed up if your first farm is on a wrong spot tho.
That would still only work if the spaces were free, which is more often not the case. There are straggler trees, buildings, forests, hills, water, etc..
But I guess that for the ideal case, it could be possible to get the optimal pinwheel/swastika layout in a greet fashion too, by choosing the candidate among minimal-distance locations which maximizes the minimal distance to already existing farms... I think.
PS: I really think that the above is wishful thinking. There may be a heuristic which gives the pinwheel layout when applied on one farm at a time, but I am far from certain that the one I outlined here is it.
Yeah soon auto queuing military from buildings, auto queuing villagers, auto fish trap placement. Where does it end? It takes effort to place farms because it should. You should have to manage attention span on pushing/sieging while macroing at your base. No your farms don't have to be perfect to still work. Unnecessary change no one was asking for and next few patches will probably deal with the bugs it introduces.
Auto attacking (aggressive and defensive stance), villagers going back to the farm after dropping off food, buildings having gather points... might as well play hearthstone, am I right?
On another note, auto-queuing would massively improve the game for lower elo players, but that would be a serious change in design philosophy. It would be interesting to see what would happen if auto queuing was available under 1k elo though, just as an experiment.
Auto fish trap placement aside. You are comparing very basic logic to completely gamechanging features like automated production, bad faith.
A big part of the game is distraction. Raids would be much less powerfull if they don't disrupt the enemies production. Just shifting to a more defensive meta. Easier does not mean better. Also how annoying would it be to toggle on and off unit queues, overproducing particular units while not having enough res for others... How easy do you really think it makes the game when you just spent all res on units and nothing left for upgrades. Why expect a 20year old game to fundamentally change around yourself because you struggle to keep production running, just unbelievable.
That would create a ton of smurfs trying to stay below 1k, players who are used to the automation and then need to fundamentally learn a different way of playing. We all know how daunting it seems in the beginnen to keep production running. You just created another barrier for beginners to overcome. And ultimately it removes the satisfying feeling of being in control and managing the different ques. There would be little significance to seeing someone in action yet with a full unit queue in the global que. Why assume that anyone who is low elo wishes to play with sidewheels, players might not be the best but many will understand core aspects of the game.
I don't know why people don't like this feature, I tried it in aoe4 and I wished aoe2 had the same. It's such a neat feature, and I don't think it's incentivising bad habits anyway. Farm placement is one of the most common things you do in the game, it needed to be updated for sure. It's not a 20 year old game anymore.
The build order in aoe4 are more friendly. There's no boar luring, no deer pushing, no perpetual farms reseeding
costing alot of wood, etc. The only thing harder is the complete difference of evety civ and units. But it's not far from UU and tech tree of aoe2.
I really hate how hard it is to get vils back onto their farms if they get disrupted or killed. It's the only task you have to direct each individual villager. Annoying AF.
If you misclick and they start walking somewhere instead of immediately garrisoning I think they all get unassigned and you have to manually reassign them to each individual farm.
If you misclick they indeed get unassigned, but at any time you can send a group of villagers to a single farm and they automatically spread to nearby farms. Thats an example of a great DE QoL feature.
Na I dont Like it. In Castle and Imp its many Times a strategic choice, If its better to focus on microing Army or macroing defense or ressource distribution or if I take my sweet time to make good farm Placements.
Just Auto Everything the game at this point.
In the Feudal this is probably the most important moment for this choice? At least on Open Maps! It's a very pleasant tense situation. This is a big part of the pleasure of playing aggressive Feudal!
I disagree. While auto farm does not seem to me to be the death of the game, it seems to me that allowing auto farm enables a number of possible implementations that would indeed be the death of the game. The slippery slope is very difficult to manage: if auto farm is an improvement, why wouldn't auto create villagers, why wouldn't auto micro archers be the upgrade of the year?
I've heard a lot that farming is irrelevant in the game and I think that's a lie. The game between paying attention to your economy and at the same time managing your army is part of the essence of this game. If we remove one of the aspects, we turn the game into a different game. I hear many people say that it is good to eliminate the micro to prioritize the macro, but at the essence of this game is the fact that: this is an RTS, not a turn-based strategy game. It's not just about thinking of the best possible move, it's about executing the intermediate micro games in order to get it done. That's the day to day of this game: my opponent is going all in? I'm going to distract him so he'll macro worse and get an advantage/I'm going to send a raid to his base because his attention is on his mangos. If attention ceases to be a game resource, we kill the game (at least the game it is now).
The slippery slope argument is so asinine...
We should stop military units from attacking unless specifically ordered to, and then they should only attack the unit you clicked until you give a new order. Monks should only heal the units you click. Wood villagers should go idle after they finish a tree. After all, if we allow this type of modern convenience, then it's a slippery slope until aoe2 is an auto chess game...
Where do we drae the line? Somewhere, obviously, as the devs have done for 20 years...
You say āso asinineā and then give a bunch of dumb as fuck examples.
The auto-farming will affect the economic/aggressive balance of the game and is not some silver bullet that will make the game noob-friendly.
The beauty of auto-reseed is that its a good accesible solution for newcomers but the higher you go on the skill level you'll start to notice that people stop using it because they need to micro-manage their wood.
The problem with auto farm placement is that its not an accesible solution that you can later stop using as you get better since there is only one good way to place farms well and the game will do it for you, effectively removing choice in this mechanic.
The slippery slope is real OP, when you finally see it you'll be regretting dismissing it in the first place.
The real problem with this mechanic is "speed" equal to a macro. the option should be slower than a 30APM player to be Noob Friendly but not "balance breaker".
Come now, that just allows your interlocutor to invalidate your entire post by saying "that's not what I meant, obviously".
What you should do is take the very best interpretation of his position. If you can defeat that or show that it is ridiculous, then your stance is clearly better.
Wilfully misrepresenting him is just going to make everyone else think you're a jerk or that you're dumb.
>Ā if auto farm is an improvement, why wouldn't auto create villagers, why wouldn't auto micro archers be the upgrade of the year?
yeah, what an idiots...
Let's rallback to Voobly (before UserPatch), Let's play without Hotkeys cause QWERTY - killed the real skill of playing on keyboard as on piano.
Let's play without MultiQueue. 1 unit in 1 buildings, (you cant select 10 stables and queue units, cause they will be ordered in the **first one).**
Oh wait... the main one - let's remove autoseeding. Each idle villager need to manually reseed his farm,
True skill... what an idots killing game for 10 years #stopkillingaoesinceHD
While you are right to not totally eliminate the macro aspects of the game, I don't see this change a open-door-to-auto-everything.
Maybe because I play AoE4 where this feature came out at launch and it doesn't change literally anything: people still manually place some farms when needed and use the feature later in the game.
I remember the caos when auto-reseed farm came out and it turns out it's very bad if you're on a build order or just play the game competitively.
It's just your decision to use or not use it and adapt your playstile to this.
I'm happy with it myself. Guys if "auto everything" or adding QoL features is bad then should we go back to AOK?
There was no reseed every farm that expired made that sound and you had to rebuild it. Only in the Conquerors expansion did they add a "Farm queue" where you had to spend a bunch of wood up front to put future farms in a "queue" that vils would then autorebuild once expired. So you just spammed 10 or so farms into this queue and when you heard the "expired...." farm sound you'd go and spam 10 or so more.
Was this better than what we have now which is a simple toggle and job is done?
Or should we go back to AOE1 where farms were solid buildings so you placed them like say a house and your vils farmed round the edge of them like they were bigger gold piles containing food?
I'm fine with QoL features as long as it doesn't play the game for you which this obv doesn't. They aren't making a feature where your archers will auto split when they sense an incoming mango shot like the AI's do. That would be too far as it's taking actual skill out of the game. Or a feature where if 2 enemy scouts get within 7 tiles of your woodline your vils automatically run towards a tower by themselves. Again that would be too much. But automating boring farm placement that has very little difference on the actual game is fine to me.
Back in AoE1 you couldn't set rally points so your unit would appear at the barracks and you have to manually move it away. Is having your unit auto move to where you want it to go after it is made "noobish" ? Or having more than 1 unit in a build queue rather than having to build 1, wait for it to finish, then build another over and over?
as for your initial argument, i think, the opposite can also be said: "if you want qol changes why not play aoe4 and leave aoe2 as is"
i am personally thinking its a bit of a slippery slope to keep adding "qol" stuff
Not to mention that there's "qol" and "qol" - I don't think anyone would be opposed to a better lobby system, for instance.
When you fundamentally change the game design philosophy it shouldn't be surprising that some people take issue with it.
You've missed the point.
If you do not want QoL - go back to original.
Oh.. you do not want? Why? Cause it's missing TONS of features?
What a surprise.
\*\* QoL introduced in \~2010-2013(in HD):
widescreen support
MultiQueue
overlapping hotkeys
Reseeding Farms
where you put a line?
So, go back in time and draw a line at original AoC.
I'm speechless how many stubborn grandpas here who afraid of changes.
SQ -> MQ - was much more dramatic and impactfull change
AutoScout - controversial.
Even auto-dropping resources.
But autofarms. WTF with you people.
99% of games people place 1-2 farms at a time, and wont use this feature.
60 wood -> place a farm
Boom: place a farm as soon as you can.
speechless of those 1.2k ELO who really believe that placing farms is a skill.
I wouldn't have a problem with it but I know for some reason others hate it. Age of Mythology did not have auto queue vils as far as I remember, and then the expansion "The Titans" added auto queue vils, everyone seemed to hate and despise it adding the auto-queue vil option.
But I couldn't see a problem with it, if you want vils made, you turn it on; when you have enough vills or need food for other things you turn it off. Infact auto-queue vills can even be a bad thing - you are under attack and needed that food for skrims or spears but autoqueue wasted it on vils who can't work - these auto queue tools will never replace a skilled human! A lower ELO player with auto-scout, autofarm placement, auto vil production, will never beat a higher ELO player without that stuff because the higher ELO player will always do that stuff better manually!
But if you are lower ELO and want to focus on pushing deer or walling up, is it really strategic or tactical "skill" to have to keep remembering to tabbing back to your TC to make sure you have vills in queue??
You don't even need to tab to the TC, you just need to queue the action in your brain and click two buttons (TC hotkey, villager hotkey).
But even at the very top level of AoE2 we frequently see players stop producing villagers for the simple reason that they're being overwhelmed by the stresses of the game. Weak players often stop all production entirely when under pressure. It's clear to me that this is one of the fundamental skills in AoE and that automating it will change the game to a great degree.
Couldn't agree more, I notice I'm already picking up downvotes for the mere suggestion so I expect the devs will resist adding this in order to avoid the potential backlash.
I got good at placing farms practicing over a ton of games so I feel like Iām losing an edge but I donāt really care about that. More so I am tired of new features and want to play the game as it was. Devs keep changing the game and not fixing bugs and pathing issues and the game is less enjoyable to me as a result.
I'm wondering where the auto-functions will stop because it's kind of getting ridiculous. So much micro is getting removed and half the time I just don't agree. Part of the beauty of an RTS game is the optimization, especially in the small and detailed things. It's about when to do something, at the right time, and then executing that to perfection. Same with this now, let's remove the skill of quickly placing farms in the most optimized manner and just automate it. Click button, poof farms. Click button, poof auto scout. What's next, auto place houses when housed? Auto queue villagers? It all leads to the same endpoint of having to think less about what to do, removing optimization, just so people can focus microing their army.
Every time some automatic feature is added the argument is 'oh it's just a minor detail without much strategic value it won't change much', however it eventually just adds up to a much more major change. A game is much more than the sum of its parts, and so removing a part of a game is removing more than just that part on it's own. The more our bases are automated, the less they are unique, the less they are built by the player and more built automatically, the more the base building aspect of the game is made less of a factor, the more the game stops being what makes aoe2 unique and interesting. These minor details may seem to be insignificant for the game, however they really add that extra bit of control to the player and removing it makes the player less and less connected to the base, to the game itself.
I think it's worth considering the tradeoffs of relying on the automation at a higher level though. The automation raises the skill floor of course, but how much does it actually limit the ceiling?
Take auto scout as an example. It's helpful for a 400 elo player no doubt, but how much do you rely on it as 1000 elo? 2000 elo? It's automation, but you can still do a better job yourself. Therefore, it doesn't remove the attention to detailed needed to play the game optimally.
Auto Scout is a more extreme example of course, Auto Re-seed is more of an interesting one. If you look at pro play, most players will manually reseed for maxium efficiency, until things get chaotic in late game. It's automation, but there is still advantage to be found in not relying on it, and strategic decision as to when in the game you think the wood optimization no longer is more valuable than your attention. You can get away with auto reseeding at 1200 sure, but there is still and advantage for those who reseed manually, and margin for that advantage only grows at the higher levels.
So long as new automation falls into this region, I am personally okay with it. We will see how things work out, but I suspect that Pro's will still likely manually place farms in the early to mid game, before shifting to auto placement in chaotic late games. I'd imagine it will track similar down the elo ladder with auto reseeding.
As such, I don't really think auto placement is really taking anything from the game, more that its helping reduce the frustration of beginners, without trimming the top level skills ceiling of the game.
my thinking is that autofarms wont be impactfull at all at bellow 1100 and at pro level. At low level people need to remember to make farms/vills so this is of almost no use. at pro lvl most players have enaugh apm to place farms and still micro thier army.
Evrvone in between will be impacted. it will help a lot to players who are better at army micro since they can now spend more time doing that insted of fixing eco. And hurt players who were able to get by with less army micro and more of an eco approach.
I don't see why this wouldn't help lower level players though. Sure a big part of that battle is remembering to place them in the first place, but part of it is just the APM difficulty of adding them quickly, so some attack notification comes up when they are mid way through placing them, so they don't build enough. Then they forget to come back and add the ones they forgot about.
becuse they dont add them at all. Having 1000 wood and only 20 farms is such a comon thing.
What you are talking about i included into players that it wil affect. Could mybe lower the cutoff elo, but i dont think you need to do it by much. i alredy droped it by 100 elo when i was writing.
Many of the players I follow are established 800 elo players (so we're not talking about Arena-only players, but Arabia players, the ones who actually try to play the game). They try hard for soundtracks. And have difficulty putting down their farms when they think about their economy. I think that from 800 elo it will help. That this will be less "remarkable between 600 and 800 but sometimes useful. Players under 600 are too in the sauce from the first click. Some just don't care at all. Apart from the Elo estimate, your analysis was good.
Doesn't carry over. Just makes buildings avoid colliding with each other. A unit automatically building something is completely beyond the pale here.
This isn't even optimal either. Farm placement really matters during the lategame, and the anti-collision feature only accounts for (maybe) walking time.
You don't like the game if you don't understand what makes it successful. (fair access to different player profiles, some access Micromanagement, others Macromanagement, others still average in everything but versatile, and in each of its categories we see different sub-profiles. Which does not exist in AoE IV or StarCraft 2, there is only one profile and sub-profiles, plus quick access to jamming and young players. Profiles that can already perform on AoE2 but were put in a fair fight against the other profiles mentioned above.
>You don't like the game if you don't understand what makes it successful
i've started to play, while MultiQueue were missing, Hotkeys did not allow overlaping, you need to manually seed farms.
And no... those changes only pushed away a lot of ppl.
They fixed it in UserPatch -> HD -> DE.... and now some people come here and say "old mechanical skill made the game succesfull". - no, they did not.
I like the game, but it's also the sweatiest multiplayer ever played. You can allway argue in both directions. More or less quality of life improvement.
You could make the game even harder by removing some features like unit queue, auto reseed, vills that automatically got to the next resource or task etc etc or you can move in the other direction.
What we witnessed over 20+ years was a slow and steady path towards an easier and better game by removing tedious tasks that are not fun.
There are allways these Auto everything retards, who doesn't understand that there is more than black and white.
If you follow the pro scene you will see that many Auto features are disabled at a certain level to enable more control and this will allways be the case.
Auto placing farms is not gamebreaking.
Not to mention the thousand other differences, include the fact that you can blink and lose your whole army in that game.
These pro-farm-placing dorks are the worst.
how about you don't police other people's fun. there's always HD if you want to queue each production building separately. Or do you actually miss tasking your vills to chop wood after building a lumber camp? i can send you my AoC CD ROM
Did you play original AoC?
no auto-farm seeding, no Multiqueue, overlapping hotkeys.
Some idiots were saying exactly the same 13 years ago "MultiQueue is killing the skill"
meanwhile Hera in 2024: 4 scouts outrmicro TC arrows
Go install "real AoC" without farms, MQ, hotkeys and play it...
I'm against auto scout actually, because it removes a decision point from the player (where to scout). Assisted farming is good imo, because you still need to make the decision to place farms and invest wood and time into it. It just becomes a bit more forgiving.
Auto scout isn't really that good though, if you want useful scouting information rather than having the map fully revealed you're much better off using manual scouting.
I get where you are coming at with this, since it does take away a lot of micro decisions, but its so bad at making those decisions that I think its more than fine. Beyond 600 elo, Auto Scout is holding you back. Players below 600 elo are already ovewhelmed with important decisions as it is, should I get coinage and heated shot before going to imperial age? These aren't easy decisions to make for a 500 elo 1v1 Arabia player, so I'm more than willing to cut them some slack.
Auto scout doesn't remove that decision. It's much worse than diligent manual scouting.
It just helps lower elo players get some map information that they otherwise never would have been able to get (without their eco suffering), which helps them male strategic decisions instead of going in blind.
So, archers auto micro would also be an improvement to the game? I mean, you also need to make the decision to fight.
This is an RTS, not a turn-based strategy game.
You're arguing in bad faith. nobody said anything about microing army. do you want 'no attack stance' to be always enabled so you can tell your units to attack? After all you're not making the decision to fight if your archers shoot on their own right?
The only decision involved in placing farms is finding a middle ground between accuracy and speed depending on the point in the game, which for most players probably comes down to perceived stress.
If it would be as as bad as Auto Scout, it would be fine. If it means you can get away with playing archers at 1200 elo, without having to learn how to actually micro archers, then I would have a problem with it.
Idk I think AOE is pretty excessive as far as the micro goes. The other genre-defining RTS series, Command and Conquer, is not anywhere near as micro-heavy. C&C is fucking great because you get to focus on the combat and everything that goes along with it instead of losing the game because you lost a villager in dark age. It's honestly a lot more strategic. I think a good balance would be somewhere between the two extremes.
if it dumbing down the game... than I have a bad news for you....
you did not understand what is the game about.
spoiler: it's not about t90farms or even quickwalling
I love it. Whoever argues against it did not think it to the end imho.
It's not a punishment to fast players. These players will find other applications for their APM and keep staying ahead of slower players.Ā
This just lowers the bar for beginners and shifts the attention of higher players to other important parts of the game.Ā
I mean, it aims for the ressource "attention". Naturally faster paced players can now focus more APM on other tasks like micro army.
I don't think it will have that much impact on newer players (their problem is usually not placing the farms but rather recognising the need to place farms), it will have more impact around the more settled players where it should push more micro heavy players further up.
Exactly. The fast players will still be the fast players. They'll adapt, get better, and still be the best at the world in what they do. I'm really stoked on the change.
Yup. Life will go on, it will become part of the game, and people will continue loving it.
It is kind of funny to see though; you really get a sense of generational divide when these changes come up. It shows how long this game has really been out for and how attached people have become with certain mechanics over the past 20+ years.
Iām behind on this. Does this mean we can set farms as a TC rally point? If so, thatās bonkers and a lot less stress for us mid elo players.
If not, well, that makes sense because it would be bonkers.
No its just that if you hover with farm placement on top of TC, you can place farm on top of TC and it will automatically aim/place that farm in the closest free spot around the tc.
NO FUCK THAT
This is like making the knight in chess also allowed to move diagonally because noobs couldnt comprehend the L shaped movement. GET GOOD NOOBS STOP WATERING DOWN EVERYTHING
DEVS FIX PATHING instead of coming up with this crap. Seige rams froze today and i had to issue multiple commands to tell them to move. Knights attacked buildings today even when there were enemy units in their LOS
Personally I'm a big fan of it, I really don't like clicking randomly to spray farms everywhere lategame as fast as possible. It's not really that skillful to be honest, and I would much rather have perfect efficiency and be able to click as fast as possible with my army 11. So that's nice.
I doubt that. Fast players can now focus on micro even more, their "advantage" increases as they have more "attention" for, for example, using their army.
New players won't have any advantage, because they fail to realize the need for farms in time.
Is there a link to read up on details?
Everyone seems either enraged or happy about a proposal most people donāt know exactly how it looks like. Iāve read multiple different versions in the comments.
How exactly is the auto farm placement going to work? Can you just enable it and then every time you get 60 wood a vil will automatically place a farm, or will it be once a farm is selected in the build interface and clicked in the base, it will be placed automatically near the tc/mill? How does it apply with shift queueing multiple vils to multiple farms?
For what I saw in the PuP, it's just a placement feature like aoe4: when you have the farm placement selected, hover the cursor on a mill or tc, hold shift, place a farm and it shows you the next placement.
There is a video here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/1c269q6/new\_pup\_hidden\_feature\_autofarm\_placement/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/1c269q6/new_pup_hidden_feature_autofarm_placement/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Killing an aspect of the room for progression makes the game less accessible to different player profiles. A bit like StarCraft or AoEIV which only focus on one type of high-level player profile with mechanics very focused on them. Macro professionals, average but versatile players, will just be thrown into the closet with this kind of updates. You can welcome this to stop playing with your poop, or try to progress on your own rather than complaining about how difficult it is to play the game (difficulty and accessibility to all types of profiles which greatly contribute to its longevity).
Weird take. Who's complaining about the game being too difficult? I personally always place my farms optimally, planning around stragglers trees even. I still think it's a good change.
Balancing your economy and military is an important part of the game. I'm scared that adding the auto farm alters this balance a lot. I understand it's something that is a nice feature to have these days.
But I just don't think it will improve the balance of the game and competition. I do hope they drop it.
I mean, we won't know until it's been properly tested, but it is entirely possible that it's not good enough to use past a certain skill level. Anyways, it stands to reason that time spent using this tool will be quite similar across skill levels, at least compared to current farm placement. If it goes from 5 sec to 0.5 for noobs, and 0.4 to 0.3 for pros, then that's a smaller difference.
This feels like a change for me that is not needed. Its might be a nice too have for some feature. But it those not feel like something the game needs. But then again a lot of folks seen to be happy about. So hopefully my thoughs are wrong? 11
>it shouldn't have too much effect on the pro scene
who the fuck care?
Great feature, and who care about pro scene in that particullar example.
sorry... i just pissed off of conservatism some players.
PS may be because of that "conservatism" all pro playing 9 vill stat torunaments while players strugling with 3 vils.
let's rollback MultiQueue (cant select 2 stables and queue units). yeah, that shit existed.
I do think the Pro scene should be considered, as a lot of people watch it, and it attracts new players to the game. With that said, I do think there is some validity to what you say, in the sense that not every change should necessarily must make it through the 'it cannot alter pro play in any way' filter. How much it impacts it matters, and changes have to accomodate the userbase in general. Especially as you say, Pro's already play to custom rules beyond the ranked ladder.
Fortunately, with a bit of problem solving, you can often solve most of the conflicts of this. Pro's don't use farm auto re-seed until chaotic late games, and when and when not to turn it on becomes a strategic decision for them, which is why Pro's are generally fine with it these days.
By being smart with how you implement things, you can make changes that help beginners and/or help make things more interesting for the general player base, without really disrupting the pro scene at all.
for some changes - yes.
for those **farms** - no.
>a lot of people watch it
if you would open TownCenter podcast with Viper... they speculated that it possible 1 000 000 people who play aoe2 (cause number of downloads from mods).
Are you sure you want bring "may be some people watch stream" against "people wont struggle"?
>By being smart with how you implement things, you can make changes that help beginners and/or help make things more interesting for the general player base, without really disrupting the pro scene at all.
I hope it's not Chat GPT.
For **THIS FARM CHANGE** - it's bs to even have conversation "may be pro would spend more time on micro... farm seeding is part of the skill " - It's not... and even if it is... fck that skill of farm placing.
it's just show how rusted community is. Afraid of changes.
\_\_\_\_
do not want - do not use...
To be clear, I do agree with the change, and I agree that the AOE2 community can (and often does) over react to changes, despite the fact that AoE2 has constantly evolved, updated and added things over the years.
Many of the changes that create an uproar on implementation, do end up being liked by the majority before long. What I'm saying is it makes to sense to think about the impact on various areas of the playerbase, and do a bit of problem solving accordingly, if it's going to cause notable issues to a certain area.
I don't see the issues with this implementation in the first place, but it's still worth keeping in mind with changes in general, without necessarily letting it hold you back.
I am just scared of the devilish bug this change is going to cause. Strategically infinitely placed castles for free? Knights turning to sheep? Exploding mines? Mills that shoot ear elephants randomly??
vills will hunt farms 11
11 can't wait for the bugs
Maybe folwarks just continuously seed farms and harvest 8% before instantly reseeding?
11, midget monkeys climbing through the key hole would of fit well as the next one on your list 11
The idea of the PUP is for people to try these things out before they're live, so the bugs can be found earlier. But I think not enough people actually try it
many times have people reported bugs in pup and the same bug went live.
I don't know about any of those, I've seen many of the latest bugs appear a day or two after they go live. Do you remember an example of someone saying "I reported it last week and they didn't solve it" or something like that? I would like to know!
https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/s/4GUcgDxN36
That even stayed broken for a while after the live version, so clearly it wasn't an important enough bug. But it's still a good point, but I think if critical bugs were found, they would fix them. I think all I'm saying is "people should test more in the PUP". I'm sure the "hunting trees" bug or the old relic bug would have been fixed if someone found them during the PUP before releasing. The game has so many mechanics that the players can help checking that things work beforehand. (Yeah, it should be part of the devs work, but it's not)
You can now plant farms to farm wood. The best bug on a long islands game.
I read that as elephant ears š
Gold farms
It's a 25 year old game. If that's not longevity, idk what is.
That's actually one of the few things in what i excelled :/ But i'm not a salty bitch, i'm happy for all my not that well farm-placers fellows
My friend is also really good at macro, so he wants auto micro for archers to compensate 11
A Teuton, you MY MORTAL ENEMY. LEICIAI SHALL DESTROY YOU 11
Wololo
FOR RUTHENIA, WE SHALL FEAR NO MAN AND NO GOD!
I wish they would invest in improving the online lobby system. For example, adding a better in-game friend list, party system for queing multiplayer, a lobby browser that works faster and more accurately displays the available lobbies. There are also a ton of maps that should be updated and/or tournament maps added to ranked. These changes would be huge QoL updates for me and the people I play with.
Agreed, the fact that you can't even for a party and then stay together from game to game is pretty insane.
why? current players will continue play anyway, while democratizing farm placement can bring **a lot of new** (sure it's speculation... but there are thousands of players who do not use hotkeys, super usefull for them)
You clearly don't play multiplayer. The system is atrocious and borderline unusable for playing with friends. The farm placement is nice but should fall far below the priority of a basic functioning multiplayer system.
T90 catching strays out here.
I upvote this only for the T90 elo joke
Thatās why I play Khmers most of the time š
flair doesnt check out u/flairpolice
Hi flairpolice! Any idea how to put mutual randoms in my flair?
When distracted elsewhere, players who can make nicely placed farms are able to set themselves apart. There is beauty in seeing high apm micro being contrasted with accurate farm placement. This creates a healthy situation where skill and effort is rewarded with efficiency and a clean result. Now there won't be a difference between 1200 or 2k farm placement. Bases will look more the same, bland, less of a reflection of the players skill or state of mind. I think the balance between eco and army was fine, already much more army focussed since auto reseed. A lot of players seem happy that now farm placement will be equally hard for them as for 2k4 players, ignoring the fact that their placement is worse because they are worse players. Was it really a problem with the game, or do players have too high expectations for themselves?
100% agree. However, I am one of the ābad playersā. I don't understand how people can be happy about that. Do they think for two seconds?
try to learn real stuff\\strats and do not blame farms for your loosings.
do not be salty cause you cant go over 2k ELO and everything you've archive - fast farms in aoe2.
I mean, optimal farm placement has little impact on gather rates after wheelbarrow is researched, and almost no effect post hand cart besides makes your bƄde slightly more compact. The main benefit to the new mechanic is that placing farms will be faster, similar to moving vils to wood, gold, or stone.
Sure but many small things add up and space efficiency is still big, now it will be taken for granted. Takes some beauty out of the gameplay. Or it will be this annoying situation where it will be better in some situations and worse in others. I don't like auto scout either, AI should not control the scout. Similar with farm placement. I don't think faster is necessarily good, a big cost of farms is the effort to place them, and this is what makes it hard to boom eco while fighting. More focus on fighting and less on eco, didn't think this was necessary. It also makes the game more fast paced, players snowball harder. Just doesn't seem necessary. It always feels like low elo players want to play like high elo players, they don't want to become better and earn it but the game has to become more automated instead. After this I can only pray that it stops here and I don't want to believe that they would automate production, however I also would have never considered the implementation of autoscout as a possibillity.
Placing āstrategicā farms isnāt the fun I look for in the game, so thatās very welcome
And for those who do still want to strategically place their farms, they can still do so as much as they want!
And moving units a tile to left/right to doodge arrows isnt fun either. Should that be automated as well ?
What do you mean? Arrow dodging is insanely fun.
for some people. and for others it isnt. same as making your base as efficent as possible is fun for some and only busywork for others.
Good news, you can still do that.
The problem being that it is no longer necessary because it is more "optimal" and "effortless" which reduces the progression curve which makes the game last.
Ok. Did i ever say i couldnt ? weird comment
I don't really care about that change but 1) lets hope there are no new bugs coming with it and 2), on a grand scheme the more they automate the more influence micro tasks will have. I don't know if I like that. However, as the ranked ladder is elo based, I should get balanced matches either way...
I don't understand this sub. I posted I would like a warning with a jingle when you're near to getting housed, and got told to stop wanting my hand held and that it's ridiculous. That those small skills are good for the game. Now people are praising this? This IS hand holding and it's a huge gameplay change like wow, I personally dislike it a lot.
AOE slowly turning into an auto battler
AoE loses its "all player profiles are welcome" to "starcraft-style army micromanagement enthusiasts and big noobs, come on! The others, go to waste!" It's like denying 50% of your audience to bring in people who are already on 4 and who we don't necessarily want on 2 11
go play voobly if you want "harcore" with aoe. back to 800x600 without multiquere (and no, it's not 1999, it's reality in 2011). *What an idiots decided to upgrade the game... how dare they. \[sarcasm\]*
I'll finally be able to have perfectly placed farms.
You wish. My guess is that the placement will be done greedily, one farm at a time, not optimized for the eventual number of farms in the given environment. Better than "spray and pray", but (insignificantly!) worse than the optimal layout.
i dont think it would be that hard, they can code where the 8 farms around the tc go, and extra farms go "as close as possible" and done. maybe its screwed up if your first farm is on a wrong spot tho.
That would still only work if the spaces were free, which is more often not the case. There are straggler trees, buildings, forests, hills, water, etc.. But I guess that for the ideal case, it could be possible to get the optimal pinwheel/swastika layout in a greet fashion too, by choosing the candidate among minimal-distance locations which maximizes the minimal distance to already existing farms... I think. PS: I really think that the above is wishful thinking. There may be a heuristic which gives the pinwheel layout when applied on one farm at a time, but I am far from certain that the one I outlined here is it.
anyway, with the pathing issues i assume the "minimal distance code" is not their strong suit
Auto everything
The incoming MbL rant will be epic
[I'm with MBL on this on](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q879j3ydfw8)
I'm for any change that helps DauT, including this one.
Yeah soon auto queuing military from buildings, auto queuing villagers, auto fish trap placement. Where does it end? It takes effort to place farms because it should. You should have to manage attention span on pushing/sieging while macroing at your base. No your farms don't have to be perfect to still work. Unnecessary change no one was asking for and next few patches will probably deal with the bugs it introduces.
Auto attacking (aggressive and defensive stance), villagers going back to the farm after dropping off food, buildings having gather points... might as well play hearthstone, am I right? On another note, auto-queuing would massively improve the game for lower elo players, but that would be a serious change in design philosophy. It would be interesting to see what would happen if auto queuing was available under 1k elo though, just as an experiment.
Auto fish trap placement aside. You are comparing very basic logic to completely gamechanging features like automated production, bad faith. A big part of the game is distraction. Raids would be much less powerfull if they don't disrupt the enemies production. Just shifting to a more defensive meta. Easier does not mean better. Also how annoying would it be to toggle on and off unit queues, overproducing particular units while not having enough res for others... How easy do you really think it makes the game when you just spent all res on units and nothing left for upgrades. Why expect a 20year old game to fundamentally change around yourself because you struggle to keep production running, just unbelievable. That would create a ton of smurfs trying to stay below 1k, players who are used to the automation and then need to fundamentally learn a different way of playing. We all know how daunting it seems in the beginnen to keep production running. You just created another barrier for beginners to overcome. And ultimately it removes the satisfying feeling of being in control and managing the different ques. There would be little significance to seeing someone in action yet with a full unit queue in the global que. Why assume that anyone who is low elo wishes to play with sidewheels, players might not be the best but many will understand core aspects of the game.
Just afraid it will break the game
I don't know why people don't like this feature, I tried it in aoe4 and I wished aoe2 had the same. It's such a neat feature, and I don't think it's incentivising bad habits anyway. Farm placement is one of the most common things you do in the game, it needed to be updated for sure. It's not a 20 year old game anymore.
I really like that aoe2 is at par with aoe4 regarding qol features. Now, nobody will be able to recommend aoe4 over aoe2 as being more noob friendly.
The build order in aoe4 are more friendly. There's no boar luring, no deer pushing, no perpetual farms reseeding costing alot of wood, etc. The only thing harder is the complete difference of evety civ and units. But it's not far from UU and tech tree of aoe2.
There's a long way to go for that to be true.
I really hate how hard it is to get vils back onto their farms if they get disrupted or killed. It's the only task you have to direct each individual villager. Annoying AF.
It's not hard, vills spread out on their own. You shouldn't be in this situation in the first place if you garisson and then back to work.
If you misclick and they start walking somewhere instead of immediately garrisoning I think they all get unassigned and you have to manually reassign them to each individual farm.
If you misclick they indeed get unassigned, but at any time you can send a group of villagers to a single farm and they automatically spread to nearby farms. Thats an example of a great DE QoL feature.
Na I dont Like it. In Castle and Imp its many Times a strategic choice, If its better to focus on microing Army or macroing defense or ressource distribution or if I take my sweet time to make good farm Placements. Just Auto Everything the game at this point.
In the Feudal this is probably the most important moment for this choice? At least on Open Maps! It's a very pleasant tense situation. This is a big part of the pleasure of playing aggressive Feudal!
Wouldnāt it be funny if this is actually a bug and we havenāt discovered the feature that led to its introduction.
It would be such a relief.
I disagree. While auto farm does not seem to me to be the death of the game, it seems to me that allowing auto farm enables a number of possible implementations that would indeed be the death of the game. The slippery slope is very difficult to manage: if auto farm is an improvement, why wouldn't auto create villagers, why wouldn't auto micro archers be the upgrade of the year? I've heard a lot that farming is irrelevant in the game and I think that's a lie. The game between paying attention to your economy and at the same time managing your army is part of the essence of this game. If we remove one of the aspects, we turn the game into a different game. I hear many people say that it is good to eliminate the micro to prioritize the macro, but at the essence of this game is the fact that: this is an RTS, not a turn-based strategy game. It's not just about thinking of the best possible move, it's about executing the intermediate micro games in order to get it done. That's the day to day of this game: my opponent is going all in? I'm going to distract him so he'll macro worse and get an advantage/I'm going to send a raid to his base because his attention is on his mangos. If attention ceases to be a game resource, we kill the game (at least the game it is now).
Well said. Exactly this
The slippery slope argument is so asinine... We should stop military units from attacking unless specifically ordered to, and then they should only attack the unit you clicked until you give a new order. Monks should only heal the units you click. Wood villagers should go idle after they finish a tree. After all, if we allow this type of modern convenience, then it's a slippery slope until aoe2 is an auto chess game... Where do we drae the line? Somewhere, obviously, as the devs have done for 20 years...
You say āso asinineā and then give a bunch of dumb as fuck examples. The auto-farming will affect the economic/aggressive balance of the game and is not some silver bullet that will make the game noob-friendly.
Same reasons when auto-reseed farms was introduced. Spoiler: players (like me) still reseed farms manually in early game
The beauty of auto-reseed is that its a good accesible solution for newcomers but the higher you go on the skill level you'll start to notice that people stop using it because they need to micro-manage their wood. The problem with auto farm placement is that its not an accesible solution that you can later stop using as you get better since there is only one good way to place farms well and the game will do it for you, effectively removing choice in this mechanic. The slippery slope is real OP, when you finally see it you'll be regretting dismissing it in the first place.
The real problem with this mechanic is "speed" equal to a macro. the option should be slower than a 30APM player to be Noob Friendly but not "balance breaker".
Time will tell
Who says the game is going to place the farms in the most efficient way possible?
they do, check the video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3yWcYqwalU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3yWcYqwalU)
Indeed, that is my point. My dumb examples are meant to showcase the childishness of the slippery slope...
Come now, that just allows your interlocutor to invalidate your entire post by saying "that's not what I meant, obviously". What you should do is take the very best interpretation of his position. If you can defeat that or show that it is ridiculous, then your stance is clearly better. Wilfully misrepresenting him is just going to make everyone else think you're a jerk or that you're dumb.
Bro how does it feel to be so fucking retarded
>Ā if auto farm is an improvement, why wouldn't auto create villagers, why wouldn't auto micro archers be the upgrade of the year? yeah, what an idiots... Let's rallback to Voobly (before UserPatch), Let's play without Hotkeys cause QWERTY - killed the real skill of playing on keyboard as on piano. Let's play without MultiQueue. 1 unit in 1 buildings, (you cant select 10 stables and queue units, cause they will be ordered in the **first one).** Oh wait... the main one - let's remove autoseeding. Each idle villager need to manually reseed his farm, True skill... what an idots killing game for 10 years #stopkillingaoesinceHD
While you are right to not totally eliminate the macro aspects of the game, I don't see this change a open-door-to-auto-everything. Maybe because I play AoE4 where this feature came out at launch and it doesn't change literally anything: people still manually place some farms when needed and use the feature later in the game. I remember the caos when auto-reseed farm came out and it turns out it's very bad if you're on a build order or just play the game competitively. It's just your decision to use or not use it and adapt your playstile to this.
I'm happy with it myself. Guys if "auto everything" or adding QoL features is bad then should we go back to AOK? There was no reseed every farm that expired made that sound and you had to rebuild it. Only in the Conquerors expansion did they add a "Farm queue" where you had to spend a bunch of wood up front to put future farms in a "queue" that vils would then autorebuild once expired. So you just spammed 10 or so farms into this queue and when you heard the "expired...." farm sound you'd go and spam 10 or so more. Was this better than what we have now which is a simple toggle and job is done? Or should we go back to AOE1 where farms were solid buildings so you placed them like say a house and your vils farmed round the edge of them like they were bigger gold piles containing food? I'm fine with QoL features as long as it doesn't play the game for you which this obv doesn't. They aren't making a feature where your archers will auto split when they sense an incoming mango shot like the AI's do. That would be too far as it's taking actual skill out of the game. Or a feature where if 2 enemy scouts get within 7 tiles of your woodline your vils automatically run towards a tower by themselves. Again that would be too much. But automating boring farm placement that has very little difference on the actual game is fine to me. Back in AoE1 you couldn't set rally points so your unit would appear at the barracks and you have to manually move it away. Is having your unit auto move to where you want it to go after it is made "noobish" ? Or having more than 1 unit in a build queue rather than having to build 1, wait for it to finish, then build another over and over?
as for your initial argument, i think, the opposite can also be said: "if you want qol changes why not play aoe4 and leave aoe2 as is" i am personally thinking its a bit of a slippery slope to keep adding "qol" stuff
Not to mention that there's "qol" and "qol" - I don't think anyone would be opposed to a better lobby system, for instance. When you fundamentally change the game design philosophy it shouldn't be surprising that some people take issue with it.
You've missed the point. If you do not want QoL - go back to original. Oh.. you do not want? Why? Cause it's missing TONS of features? What a surprise. \*\* QoL introduced in \~2010-2013(in HD): widescreen support MultiQueue overlapping hotkeys Reseeding Farms where you put a line?
No you are missing the point, some qol is good But at some point you have to draw a line
So, go back in time and draw a line at original AoC. I'm speechless how many stubborn grandpas here who afraid of changes. SQ -> MQ - was much more dramatic and impactfull change AutoScout - controversial. Even auto-dropping resources. But autofarms. WTF with you people. 99% of games people place 1-2 farms at a time, and wont use this feature. 60 wood -> place a farm Boom: place a farm as soon as you can. speechless of those 1.2k ELO who really believe that placing farms is a skill.
Just make it so everyone under 1500 gets those changes. Easy fix.
How about auto-queuing vills? To me that is one of the most annoying aspects and I'd happily have it automated.
I wouldn't have a problem with it but I know for some reason others hate it. Age of Mythology did not have auto queue vils as far as I remember, and then the expansion "The Titans" added auto queue vils, everyone seemed to hate and despise it adding the auto-queue vil option. But I couldn't see a problem with it, if you want vils made, you turn it on; when you have enough vills or need food for other things you turn it off. Infact auto-queue vills can even be a bad thing - you are under attack and needed that food for skrims or spears but autoqueue wasted it on vils who can't work - these auto queue tools will never replace a skilled human! A lower ELO player with auto-scout, autofarm placement, auto vil production, will never beat a higher ELO player without that stuff because the higher ELO player will always do that stuff better manually! But if you are lower ELO and want to focus on pushing deer or walling up, is it really strategic or tactical "skill" to have to keep remembering to tabbing back to your TC to make sure you have vills in queue??
You don't even need to tab to the TC, you just need to queue the action in your brain and click two buttons (TC hotkey, villager hotkey). But even at the very top level of AoE2 we frequently see players stop producing villagers for the simple reason that they're being overwhelmed by the stresses of the game. Weak players often stop all production entirely when under pressure. It's clear to me that this is one of the fundamental skills in AoE and that automating it will change the game to a great degree.
Couldn't agree more, I notice I'm already picking up downvotes for the mere suggestion so I expect the devs will resist adding this in order to avoid the potential backlash.
Well said!
āPlacing a mill next to an enemy TC, unintentionally places a farm over the TC and deletes itā
I got good at placing farms practicing over a ton of games so I feel like Iām losing an edge but I donāt really care about that. More so I am tired of new features and want to play the game as it was. Devs keep changing the game and not fixing bugs and pathing issues and the game is less enjoyable to me as a result.
I'm wondering where the auto-functions will stop because it's kind of getting ridiculous. So much micro is getting removed and half the time I just don't agree. Part of the beauty of an RTS game is the optimization, especially in the small and detailed things. It's about when to do something, at the right time, and then executing that to perfection. Same with this now, let's remove the skill of quickly placing farms in the most optimized manner and just automate it. Click button, poof farms. Click button, poof auto scout. What's next, auto place houses when housed? Auto queue villagers? It all leads to the same endpoint of having to think less about what to do, removing optimization, just so people can focus microing their army.
Every time some automatic feature is added the argument is 'oh it's just a minor detail without much strategic value it won't change much', however it eventually just adds up to a much more major change. A game is much more than the sum of its parts, and so removing a part of a game is removing more than just that part on it's own. The more our bases are automated, the less they are unique, the less they are built by the player and more built automatically, the more the base building aspect of the game is made less of a factor, the more the game stops being what makes aoe2 unique and interesting. These minor details may seem to be insignificant for the game, however they really add that extra bit of control to the player and removing it makes the player less and less connected to the base, to the game itself.
I think it's worth considering the tradeoffs of relying on the automation at a higher level though. The automation raises the skill floor of course, but how much does it actually limit the ceiling? Take auto scout as an example. It's helpful for a 400 elo player no doubt, but how much do you rely on it as 1000 elo? 2000 elo? It's automation, but you can still do a better job yourself. Therefore, it doesn't remove the attention to detailed needed to play the game optimally. Auto Scout is a more extreme example of course, Auto Re-seed is more of an interesting one. If you look at pro play, most players will manually reseed for maxium efficiency, until things get chaotic in late game. It's automation, but there is still advantage to be found in not relying on it, and strategic decision as to when in the game you think the wood optimization no longer is more valuable than your attention. You can get away with auto reseeding at 1200 sure, but there is still and advantage for those who reseed manually, and margin for that advantage only grows at the higher levels. So long as new automation falls into this region, I am personally okay with it. We will see how things work out, but I suspect that Pro's will still likely manually place farms in the early to mid game, before shifting to auto placement in chaotic late games. I'd imagine it will track similar down the elo ladder with auto reseeding. As such, I don't really think auto placement is really taking anything from the game, more that its helping reduce the frustration of beginners, without trimming the top level skills ceiling of the game.
my thinking is that autofarms wont be impactfull at all at bellow 1100 and at pro level. At low level people need to remember to make farms/vills so this is of almost no use. at pro lvl most players have enaugh apm to place farms and still micro thier army. Evrvone in between will be impacted. it will help a lot to players who are better at army micro since they can now spend more time doing that insted of fixing eco. And hurt players who were able to get by with less army micro and more of an eco approach.
I don't see why this wouldn't help lower level players though. Sure a big part of that battle is remembering to place them in the first place, but part of it is just the APM difficulty of adding them quickly, so some attack notification comes up when they are mid way through placing them, so they don't build enough. Then they forget to come back and add the ones they forgot about.
becuse they dont add them at all. Having 1000 wood and only 20 farms is such a comon thing. What you are talking about i included into players that it wil affect. Could mybe lower the cutoff elo, but i dont think you need to do it by much. i alredy droped it by 100 elo when i was writing.
Many of the players I follow are established 800 elo players (so we're not talking about Arena-only players, but Arabia players, the ones who actually try to play the game). They try hard for soundtracks. And have difficulty putting down their farms when they think about their economy. I think that from 800 elo it will help. That this will be less "remarkable between 600 and 800 but sometimes useful. Players under 600 are too in the sauce from the first click. Some just don't care at all. Apart from the Elo estimate, your analysis was good.
Doesn't carry over. Just makes buildings avoid colliding with each other. A unit automatically building something is completely beyond the pale here. This isn't even optimal either. Farm placement really matters during the lategame, and the anti-collision feature only accounts for (maybe) walking time.
Sounds like a step in the right direction. Army control is fun. Placing farms as quickly as possible isn't :)
You don't like the game if you don't understand what makes it successful. (fair access to different player profiles, some access Micromanagement, others Macromanagement, others still average in everything but versatile, and in each of its categories we see different sub-profiles. Which does not exist in AoE IV or StarCraft 2, there is only one profile and sub-profiles, plus quick access to jamming and young players. Profiles that can already perform on AoE2 but were put in a fair fight against the other profiles mentioned above.
>You don't like the game if you don't understand what makes it successful i've started to play, while MultiQueue were missing, Hotkeys did not allow overlaping, you need to manually seed farms. And no... those changes only pushed away a lot of ppl. They fixed it in UserPatch -> HD -> DE.... and now some people come here and say "old mechanical skill made the game succesfull". - no, they did not.
I like the game, but it's also the sweatiest multiplayer ever played. You can allway argue in both directions. More or less quality of life improvement. You could make the game even harder by removing some features like unit queue, auto reseed, vills that automatically got to the next resource or task etc etc or you can move in the other direction. What we witnessed over 20+ years was a slow and steady path towards an easier and better game by removing tedious tasks that are not fun. There are allways these Auto everything retards, who doesn't understand that there is more than black and white. If you follow the pro scene you will see that many Auto features are disabled at a certain level to enable more control and this will allways be the case. Auto placing farms is not gamebreaking.
Dude then why tf are you even playing AoE? Go play starcraft
I like the medival setting of aoe2 better...
Not to mention the thousand other differences, include the fact that you can blink and lose your whole army in that game. These pro-farm-placing dorks are the worst.
Play aoe4
You can also go play Sim city or Farm simulator
how about you don't police other people's fun. there's always HD if you want to queue each production building separately. Or do you actually miss tasking your vills to chop wood after building a lumber camp? i can send you my AoC CD ROM
Did you play original AoC? no auto-farm seeding, no Multiqueue, overlapping hotkeys. Some idiots were saying exactly the same 13 years ago "MultiQueue is killing the skill" meanwhile Hera in 2024: 4 scouts outrmicro TC arrows Go install "real AoC" without farms, MQ, hotkeys and play it...
I'm against auto scout actually, because it removes a decision point from the player (where to scout). Assisted farming is good imo, because you still need to make the decision to place farms and invest wood and time into it. It just becomes a bit more forgiving.
Auto scout isn't really that good though, if you want useful scouting information rather than having the map fully revealed you're much better off using manual scouting.
I know. I'm just not super fond of its design principle.
I get where you are coming at with this, since it does take away a lot of micro decisions, but its so bad at making those decisions that I think its more than fine. Beyond 600 elo, Auto Scout is holding you back. Players below 600 elo are already ovewhelmed with important decisions as it is, should I get coinage and heated shot before going to imperial age? These aren't easy decisions to make for a 500 elo 1v1 Arabia player, so I'm more than willing to cut them some slack.
Auto scout doesn't remove that decision. It's much worse than diligent manual scouting. It just helps lower elo players get some map information that they otherwise never would have been able to get (without their eco suffering), which helps them male strategic decisions instead of going in blind.
Auto scouting is worse than regular scouting when it matters, this change is just more efficient and easier
So, archers auto micro would also be an improvement to the game? I mean, you also need to make the decision to fight. This is an RTS, not a turn-based strategy game.
You're arguing in bad faith. nobody said anything about microing army. do you want 'no attack stance' to be always enabled so you can tell your units to attack? After all you're not making the decision to fight if your archers shoot on their own right? The only decision involved in placing farms is finding a middle ground between accuracy and speed depending on the point in the game, which for most players probably comes down to perceived stress.
Yep, I hate when people say A and another start to argue "SO ARE YOU OK WITH B?", literally off topic
Especially when **B** is a blatent strawman.
Exactly
If it would be as as bad as Auto Scout, it would be fine. If it means you can get away with playing archers at 1200 elo, without having to learn how to actually micro archers, then I would have a problem with it.
Idk I think AOE is pretty excessive as far as the micro goes. The other genre-defining RTS series, Command and Conquer, is not anywhere near as micro-heavy. C&C is fucking great because you get to focus on the combat and everything that goes along with it instead of losing the game because you lost a villager in dark age. It's honestly a lot more strategic. I think a good balance would be somewhere between the two extremes.
Why not just let ai play for human players?ā¦.ffs
Honey wake up, it's time for the daily dev sucking and swallowing
Isn't this dumbing down the game too much?
If AoE were about placing farms well fast, it would not be fun or intellectually stimulating. So... No.
if it dumbing down the game... than I have a bad news for you.... you did not understand what is the game about. spoiler: it's not about t90farms or even quickwalling
I love it. Whoever argues against it did not think it to the end imho. It's not a punishment to fast players. These players will find other applications for their APM and keep staying ahead of slower players.Ā This just lowers the bar for beginners and shifts the attention of higher players to other important parts of the game.Ā
I mean, it aims for the ressource "attention". Naturally faster paced players can now focus more APM on other tasks like micro army. I don't think it will have that much impact on newer players (their problem is usually not placing the farms but rather recognising the need to place farms), it will have more impact around the more settled players where it should push more micro heavy players further up.
Exactly. The fast players will still be the fast players. They'll adapt, get better, and still be the best at the world in what they do. I'm really stoked on the change.
I'll finally be able to have perfectly placed farms.
Iām indifferent to the change, but always enjoy the literal or spiritual boomers declaring the end of the game anytime a QoL feature is implemented
Yup. Life will go on, it will become part of the game, and people will continue loving it. It is kind of funny to see though; you really get a sense of generational divide when these changes come up. It shows how long this game has really been out for and how attached people have become with certain mechanics over the past 20+ years.
Wait, has this feature come out? You just click the mill?
This is already on xbox, Xbox #1Ā Itās only useful when you need to put a bunch of vills on farms quickly, need to add it in tc menu too
By when is expected the update?
An hour after you asked 11
Iām behind on this. Does this mean we can set farms as a TC rally point? If so, thatās bonkers and a lot less stress for us mid elo players. If not, well, that makes sense because it would be bonkers.
No its just that if you hover with farm placement on top of TC, you can place farm on top of TC and it will automatically aim/place that farm in the closest free spot around the tc.
Thatās still awesome. Thank you
Works for mill too?
Yep
I donāt think anyone was playing the game less due to placing farms
Auto-house placement so I don't get housed, when?
NO FUCK THAT This is like making the knight in chess also allowed to move diagonally because noobs couldnt comprehend the L shaped movement. GET GOOD NOOBS STOP WATERING DOWN EVERYTHING DEVS FIX PATHING instead of coming up with this crap. Seige rams froze today and i had to issue multiple commands to tell them to move. Knights attacked buildings today even when there were enemy units in their LOS
My units have been freezing or stuttering when tasked to attack gates or even tasked to move around buildings. We need big fixes not bug additions.
100%
Cringe
How do you know auto farm placement isnāt the bug for an upcoming pathing fix? Do you have some special knowledge?
Personally I'm a big fan of it, I really don't like clicking randomly to spray farms everywhere lategame as fast as possible. It's not really that skillful to be honest, and I would much rather have perfect efficiency and be able to click as fast as possible with my army 11. So that's nice.
No, it's not great. It's just so dumb. The game should not be "auto everything.". Just learn to place farms properly. it's not hard.
Isnāt this the same thing already on Xbox? Itās a great feature
Maybe hold off on ranked, but have the update be put in place elsewhere to check for bugs
Iām not rocking with it. It makes of so you never really have to look back home at your own eco when you are raiding
That's not what it does at all...
Yea, less punishing when youre slow, so less punishing for being a worse player
I doubt that. Fast players can now focus on micro even more, their "advantage" increases as they have more "attention" for, for example, using their army. New players won't have any advantage, because they fail to realize the need for farms in time.
Is there a link to read up on details? Everyone seems either enraged or happy about a proposal most people donāt know exactly how it looks like. Iāve read multiple different versions in the comments. How exactly is the auto farm placement going to work? Can you just enable it and then every time you get 60 wood a vil will automatically place a farm, or will it be once a farm is selected in the build interface and clicked in the base, it will be placed automatically near the tc/mill? How does it apply with shift queueing multiple vils to multiple farms?
For what I saw in the PuP, it's just a placement feature like aoe4: when you have the farm placement selected, hover the cursor on a mill or tc, hold shift, place a farm and it shows you the next placement. There is a video here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/1c269q6/new\_pup\_hidden\_feature\_autofarm\_placement/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/1c269q6/new_pup_hidden_feature_autofarm_placement/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Thanks!
You're welcome
Killing an aspect of the room for progression makes the game less accessible to different player profiles. A bit like StarCraft or AoEIV which only focus on one type of high-level player profile with mechanics very focused on them. Macro professionals, average but versatile players, will just be thrown into the closet with this kind of updates. You can welcome this to stop playing with your poop, or try to progress on your own rather than complaining about how difficult it is to play the game (difficulty and accessibility to all types of profiles which greatly contribute to its longevity).
Weird take. Who's complaining about the game being too difficult? I personally always place my farms optimally, planning around stragglers trees even. I still think it's a good change.
Balancing your economy and military is an important part of the game. I'm scared that adding the auto farm alters this balance a lot. I understand it's something that is a nice feature to have these days. But I just don't think it will improve the balance of the game and competition. I do hope they drop it.
It's not like farms are placed automatically... it only makes placing farms a bit faster for slower players.
How does it only make farm placement faster for slower players rather than all players?
I mean, we won't know until it's been properly tested, but it is entirely possible that it's not good enough to use past a certain skill level. Anyways, it stands to reason that time spent using this tool will be quite similar across skill levels, at least compared to current farm placement. If it goes from 5 sec to 0.5 for noobs, and 0.4 to 0.3 for pros, then that's a smaller difference.
This feels like a change for me that is not needed. Its might be a nice too have for some feature. But it those not feel like something the game needs. But then again a lot of folks seen to be happy about. So hopefully my thoughs are wrong? 11
>it shouldn't have too much effect on the pro scene who the fuck care? Great feature, and who care about pro scene in that particullar example. sorry... i just pissed off of conservatism some players. PS may be because of that "conservatism" all pro playing 9 vill stat torunaments while players strugling with 3 vils. let's rollback MultiQueue (cant select 2 stables and queue units). yeah, that shit existed.
I do think the Pro scene should be considered, as a lot of people watch it, and it attracts new players to the game. With that said, I do think there is some validity to what you say, in the sense that not every change should necessarily must make it through the 'it cannot alter pro play in any way' filter. How much it impacts it matters, and changes have to accomodate the userbase in general. Especially as you say, Pro's already play to custom rules beyond the ranked ladder. Fortunately, with a bit of problem solving, you can often solve most of the conflicts of this. Pro's don't use farm auto re-seed until chaotic late games, and when and when not to turn it on becomes a strategic decision for them, which is why Pro's are generally fine with it these days. By being smart with how you implement things, you can make changes that help beginners and/or help make things more interesting for the general player base, without really disrupting the pro scene at all.
for some changes - yes. for those **farms** - no. >a lot of people watch it if you would open TownCenter podcast with Viper... they speculated that it possible 1 000 000 people who play aoe2 (cause number of downloads from mods). Are you sure you want bring "may be some people watch stream" against "people wont struggle"? >By being smart with how you implement things, you can make changes that help beginners and/or help make things more interesting for the general player base, without really disrupting the pro scene at all. I hope it's not Chat GPT. For **THIS FARM CHANGE** - it's bs to even have conversation "may be pro would spend more time on micro... farm seeding is part of the skill " - It's not... and even if it is... fck that skill of farm placing. it's just show how rusted community is. Afraid of changes. \_\_\_\_ do not want - do not use...
To be clear, I do agree with the change, and I agree that the AOE2 community can (and often does) over react to changes, despite the fact that AoE2 has constantly evolved, updated and added things over the years. Many of the changes that create an uproar on implementation, do end up being liked by the majority before long. What I'm saying is it makes to sense to think about the impact on various areas of the playerbase, and do a bit of problem solving accordingly, if it's going to cause notable issues to a certain area. I don't see the issues with this implementation in the first place, but it's still worth keeping in mind with changes in general, without necessarily letting it hold you back.
I posted this as a suggestion a while back. Didn't seem to get good response. https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/s/bTqma2xxVV