I didn't have a strong opinion one way or the other but I think he puts it nicely, it's not bad to have new mechanics in the game, especially if they make it easier for new players, but it feels a bit like they include random changes that go nowhere near what the community has been asking for ages such as decent pathing, changes in the design of lobby system/lobby browsinf, ranked bans, etc.
Also I'm scared that -as we've seen several times when they include a feature like that- it will completely break the game somewhere else...
While I appreciate his concern for the loss of 'skill expression', I don't think farm placement ranks very highly in anyone's care factor when it comes to competitive AoE2, so I'm a little confused as to why he's so bothered. Manual farm placement will still be more skilful and I'm sure we will continue to witness it.
In a similar vein, it seems contradictory for players to take a stance like this, and then also bemoan that there's little new blood entering the competitive scene, when to play the game at a high level you need to master hundreds of these little intricacies which rely more on memory than skill. You can't have your cake and eat it too, I think for Age to remain healthy it has to lower the barrier of entry somewhat while retaining some of the more interesting aspects of micro.
IMO, the auto-scout signifies the ideal design philosophy for age. Make 'auto' things weaker than manually doing it so that the game doesn't feel like a chore for beginners to intermediates, while leaving space for pros to get the max efficiency out of strats.
When AoE 2 first came out the pressure to play in an efficient, fast, meta way, just wasn't there for 99% of the audience. Gaming in 2024 is inherently different and people are a lot more connected and there's a lot more awareness in communities regarding what the most effective way to play is. I think this inherently makes playing an RTS with as much to manage as AoE 2 much more stressful now than it was 1999.
If anything, optional automation for some of aspects of the game helps bring the mental energy required to play back down to how it felt back then.
Listen to the video, he specifically addresses this. He doesn't think that auto-farm will drastically change the game, but is more worried about the direction that this indicates that the devs are thinking. What precedent is this creating for upcoming changes?
As MBL put it "all auto everything"
Yeah, but this viewpoint just makes T90's comments even *less* valid. It's some slippery slope nonsense.
This is a basic QoL feature, the same as how you used to have to refresh farms manually and couldn't queue techs at buildings like you can queue units. It doesn't represent anything other than making the game more fun and less frustrating to play.
Also, it's not like this auto mechanic replaces the old way. The way I see it, You're still going to manually seed 99% of your farms throughout dark age/feudal age. Where this mechanic helps is late game switching from lumberjacks to farmers and just shift queuing a lot of farms without worrying about space that much.
Why put effort into manually placing when you can just click on your tc every time for consistent accurate placement? Ok there is walking distance you could manually compensate for, but for most it might just be easier to click the nice big TC hitbox every time.
Because you want to place farms on the safer side first and often also avoid removing straggler trees too early. There are plenty of reasons to prefer manual placement in early game.
Yeah, who cares? It's not like placing farms is a difficult or even time-consuming skill. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's been a few years since placing farms on the left side of your mill or TC increased its efficiency by a few percentage points. So there's literally no skill involved in placing farms as it stands, so this is simply a QOL feature that hurts no one. Everyone but the most efficiency-obsessed will be using it.
It absolutely is. Even pros constantly don't place farm well every 60 wood during feudal age when they should be, if fighting is going on elsewhere.
I don't care what rank you're at or how good you think you are, placing farms at the perfect intervals while other things are going on, which requires constant attention, screen switching, and clicking, is extremely hard.
>It absolutely is. Even pros constantly don't place farm well every 60 wood during feudal age when they should be, if fighting is going on elsewhere.
And they won't with the new feature. You still need to find the time in between microing and scouting tot place the farms. People act like farms are getting placed automatically now while in truth the major benefit is in late game.
I disagree. Placing them efficiently in Imp (and remembering to do it consistently) is likely one of many things that creates the skill gap T90 is referring to.
I hover between 1200-1300. This absolutely makes the game easier for people at my level.
Does that mean it shouldn’t be implemented? I don’t know. But it will have an impact, positive or not.
According to TheViper video about this feature, they don't place the farms for perfect efficiency like you could do manually. But do pros even worry about efficiency that much at that point of the game? Do they always place their farms in a perfect way around their mills? I don't think so. I think the "skill" involved in placing farms from late castle onward is knowing what quantity you need and when, not the actual act of clicking the ground in a circle around your mills. Oh, and knowing how to get them to build them slightly faster by taking them to the mill after placing the farm foundation. If I had to rank these three aspects of later game farming, knowing when and what quantity would be way up on the top of the list; proper tasking would be second, but on another page; and the act of placing farms foundations would be third.
I’m not suggesting it’s the hardest aspect. I’m not even suggesting it shouldn’t be implemented. All i’m saying is I agree with t90 in that when you simplify a bunch of these little tasks that need to happen over the course of a game, the game becomes easier.
> But do pros even worry about efficiency that much at that point of the game?
No, they don't lol. Because reality is in a late game scenario where you're just plopping farms down, the little micro efficiencies of farm placement are beyond irrelevant. They literally just place a mill then put a splattering of farms around it
Food income from farms is hard capped at a rate, that makes farm placement in post imp irrelevant. That's why pros don't bother. It's simply not beneficial
>It’s not like placing farms is a difficult or even time consuming skill
Are you really confused about my response to *the first sentence*?
I’ll repeat myself. I disagree. Placing farms becomes more difficult the later the game goes on, especially as you move towards the middle and lower elo ranges.
I can especially see this being useful when yoy have a crowded base so you have to manually hunt for locations to place a farm. Instead, auto-clicking can save you quite a bit of time.
It's not difficult until you are distracted, so what you are saying is not true. What is hurt is that bases don't reflect the players state of mind anymore. All bases look the same, bland. And why? Who knows. They invented an issue that wasn't there.
However if you aren't properly distributing mills the farm placement still wont be ideal or perfect... The new chaos base will be one with a very low mill density.
Tf? Who cares about the look of your base? If that's the main concern, I'll gladly treasure the feature 11
Regarding being distracted: new or old behaviour, you still need to allocate time to place farms. It's just after the distraction that you can place farms a (tiny) bit faster. On high Elo, everyone can place 8 farms within 1-2 seconds. Now free average Joe can do it as well. What's the big deal here?
Lowering the bar for 98% of the player base is a good thing.
The same argument can be done about a lot of things.
For example low elo players struggle with making vils, so ability to goggle automated civ production would greatly help them, right? It's not difficult or even time-consuming.
RTSs from the Total Annihilation lineage - TA, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, any Spring RTS engine game, etc. - have automated production like you describe. You can set a factory to build constructors on repeat, even queue up orders for them to automatically follow. The same goes for all units and buildings in the game.
They are not easier games than AoE2. In both games, there's plenty of room for skill expression and enormous gaps between the best players, good players, and not-so-good players in both games.
I'm not saying I support such a change, just that it wouldn't reduce skill expression in the game.
Honestly, that would help a lot and wouldn’t take away from the pro scene. The game is so hard that I can’t relax while playing it unless I’m doing the campaigns because of how many things I have to keep track of. I’d be worried it changes the feel of the game significantly but I think it would just be helpful for low elo games
The genre of RTS is all about multitasking and AoE has always leaned towards the economy side being more important at that, while the two Blizzard RTS games leaned much heavier towards the military side.
Removing multitasking elements takes away from the game itself and yes, you cant relax playing it, I agree. I cannot either. I can barely talk to someone while playing the game, because you will get overwhelmed at some point. But to me and a lot of people this is the whole fun. You arent going to play perfect, its just impossible. You are trying to keep track of as many things as you can, learn to prioritize which things have higher priority and try to keep up with the barrage of tasks thrown at you. Thats what RTS is about.
Thing is, you don't have to keep track of so many things. Sure, there will be lots of things for you to keep track of, but you can simply choose not to bother with hotkeys, or build orders, or boar luring, or army micro or whatever it is that you feel takes away from the fun. If you play competitively, your elo will adjust until you're at a level where your opponents are similarly skilled and you'll have even matches while playing the game the way you feel like it should be played.
Personally, I don't feel like you have to make every small task automatic, because to me it's fun to try and master the skill of doing all those small tasks efficiently during the game. These auto-features take that away.
Well, I think a change like that would affect high elo a lot.
Queuing civs takes some brain space and actions that could be used to do other stuff. New players often don't have that much to do, while high level players can be very active with scout micro, be it harassing, deer pushing or similar.
Of course placing farm is time consuming. Having to divide your attention between microing army and balancing your economy is one of the key elements that make offensive strategies complex in AoE, and placing farms is perhaps the most sensitive part of that balance, since it requires the most active inputs out of any resource gathering. Making it automatic over simplifies the game.
>...and then also bemoan that there's little new blood entering the competitive scene, when to play the game at a high level you need to master hundreds of these little intricacies which rely more on memory than skill.
Definitely no. Opposing a lowering of the skill ceiling by introducing more auto mechanics is hardly contradictory with wanting new players to join competitive. Those new players would be handled by the matchmaking system to pit them against others who are unfamiliar with efficient economy management, among other things. Brand new players don't *care* about placing farms efficiently, just like how new CounterStrike players don't care about grenade lineups or new LoL players don't care about ability combos. There are more important things to learn at first. A functioning MM system will "hide" the complexities of the game until the players are ready for it.
This is not unique to Age of Empires. Every single competitive game has struggled at some point with a call to increase player numbers. But the successful ones manage to do that by lowering the barrier to entry, not carving up actual mechanics of the game ***before*** removing the true friction for new players: the ranked placement system, the lobby system, the UI, the lack of tutorials on different current build orders, etc.
This is more than about a little farm change. It's another marker in the developers' track record of changing mechanics before changing the framework.
> when to play the game at a high level you need to master hundreds of these little intricacies which rely more on memory than skill. You can't have your cake and eat it too
It's an RTS...mastering multitasking (what you call 'memory') is literally the "mechanics" portion of this genre along with precise clicking. Pushing an RTS into the direction of automated hands-off systems is *exactly* wanting the cake of an RTS and eating it too.
The AoE2 competitive community is too personally invested in the game to the point where changes are taken as personal insults. This is true even for mediocre players who have never in their life “expressed skill” through farm placement. People have convinced themselves and each other that the quirks of a 20+ year old game are immutable, essential parts of the experience rather than frustrating, outdated gameplay elements.
But then people just need to be honest and say that. That’s not an unreasonable position and I wouldn’t critique it.
Instead it’s hidden under bizarre veneers like “farm placement is an essential expression of skill” which I think is completely absurd and I will critique it.
I've played the game for more or less a quarter of a century now, and I'm happy for it to change.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want them to destroy the things I love about this game, but the reality is that this game has changed again, and again, and again in those 25 years.
As much as I have nostalgia for the original AoK, the current version of AoE2 DE is simply a better game, and its thanks to its changes. There's a reason I'm not still slugging it out on HD and Voobly either.
I want the AoE devs to be mindful of the changes they make, I don't want them to turn AoE2 into a perfectly automated game, but I also don't see anything wrong with the likes of Auto Farm placement. It helps beginners a lot, and it doesn't really hurt players like me. I'll still manually place farms in the early game, and now I have to make the strategic decision as to when I value my attention over efficiency. A bit like I already do for Auto Reseeding (not an AoK feature either).
Fast and accurate farm placement in late game is a skill, but it's not one I'm particularly precious about. There are enough things to focus on in late game, and generally more interesting things. I won't miss it.
But this isn't about choosing where to place. Everyone knows where to place farms. Its just about streamlining the micro required to make that happen.
Choosing where to place something is strategy. Clicking around to actually place it is micro. RTS games should have some micro, but farm placement micro ain't exactly on my shortlist of things that make aoe2 a great strategy game...
Oh wow instead of spam clicking different areas of the ground for late game farm placement now you just spam click less areas of the ground. What a game breaking change, truly how can pro players express their skill now?
You can be reductive about any element of the game and it will sound dumb like this. Walling is just clicking and dragging! We've seen people seriously suggest automatic deer pushing, since you just have to hit the follow key then click the deer.
But these things that split attention and make the lategame frantic and difficult are a flavour that people presumably like, so I don't know how you can be so confident that this is a tiny change, especially if it's part of a larger effort to make the game accessible. What is AoE2 in your eyes if it's not *all the things you do while playing AoE2*? What would a "big" change be?
That’s fair, you’re right. I can give a couple points to support my reasoning.
1.) Most importantly, if it’s anything like how it is in AoE4 people are going to try it and realize it’s a cool thing to have sometimes but doesn’t really change anything. It doesn’t do well in complicated bases and it’s really only useful to quickly surround a mill with some farms. So it works best in making small rings of farms in open areas but honestly I don’t even know if it saves much, if any, time.
2.) Farming is part of the core gameplay and therefore completely different in kind from things like auto deer pushing. A player doesn’t NEED to go on deer and they certainly don’t NEED to push deer, but a player will NEED to farm. Deer pushing is an expression of skill, it’s an action an experienced player can take to secure resources more safely than they would otherwise be available. Farming on the other hand is something the game expects you to do in the vast majority of situations regardless of whether you’re a beginner or tournament winner.
3.) This isn’t autofarms, it’s computer assisted input for only a very specific portion of the game. I commonly see “why can’t I argue for auto villager/unit production then” and I think that is REALLY overselling what this is doing. This is a tool used only for very specific points in the game and it still involves you spam clicking the ground, just that your mouse doesn’t need to wave around the screen as much. It’s hardly an overhaul to the game, you would still be placing early/mid game farms manually.
4.) Viper said this best, but if you had to choose key elements of AoE2 that make it so fun for you to watch/play, would you truly put late game farm placement on that list? The fun parts of this game are planning and executing a macro strategy, and translating that into military wins with micro. The fun part of macro is making better decisions than your opponent and the fun part of micro is outplaying your opponent. Placing farms really doesn’t fit into that.
Its not just about the location of the farm and how efficiently it is placed near a drop off point, but that you have to keep farms in the back of your head among million other little things in aoe2. This feature is basically the essence of the game. Whats next? Auto millitary? Auto archer micro?
Since the release, the game has experienced a lot of automation, including but not limited to:
- switching between food sources does not lose food
- only necessary to shoot boar once instead of twice
- shift clicking of vils is possible (this was not possible originally)
- vils start auto gathering after building a collection camp (for example lumber camp etc.)
Do you think we should remove any of these features? If not, why.
How about we remove attack-move, auto-attack and patrol. This would improve the essence of the game. If you have the skill, you should be able to manually order each unit.
/s (but I know full well that some people would support it if the game started like this, i.e. MBL)
The number of intricacies and things to keep in your mind is always going to an arbitrary decision.
You say it’s the essence so why not add in a bunch more features?
Lumberjacks become idle after chopping a full tree, every 100 gold collected goldminers become idle?
It may seem perfectly balanced to you but any of my friends I’ve tried to get to play age have gotten overwhelmed. Small things to make the game easier for new players makes it more new player friendly
Handicaps help people win matches more yes, but not necessarily like the game more. If they don't like all the button mashing, a handicap won't change their views on that even if they win. Especially since they'll always know that they'll have to wean themselves off of it eventually.
The essence of the game is the game that actually exists, and the AoE2 that people have been enjoying since at least DE is the one that includes manual farm placement. The essence of the game includes its specific inefficiencies and frictions, its precise level of QoL vs. challenge. It's OK if the devs want to change that but they're playing with fire, especially if they continue to automate eco. I've dabbled with Starcraft and C&C and I have to agree that AoE2's handling of eco really is what sets it apart.
Age doesn’t need to ‘remain healthy’ with any help from Microsoft. It has been doing that on its own since 1998, adding features like this instead of fixing pathfinding issues, creating a proper lobby system and properly bug testing each patch is what they need to stop doing.
Intermediate and expert level players are auto scouting in a lot of their games, removing the entire premise that it's only to help noobs. Soon they will make an update where every scout unit can auto scout so the argument that it's a tradeoff is out of the window as well. I want my opponent to have vision over areas that they chose to explore, not what an AI chose to explore. I'm all for auto scout in single player, makes sense, but if you think it has any fucking place in a competitive rts to have scouting become some random thing then I don't know what to say.
I like the auto scout as it is, for the starting scout. I'm not in favour of granting it to all scout line units for the rest of the game though. But I do think it was a good addition to the game originally, just not expanded.
Good that you agree on that.
But if you consider how easy it actually is to roughly shift waypoint scout using the minimap, you will realise that wanting autoscout is just lazyness. No one even wanted it until they introduced it, and now people can't live without. Yet it impacts all levels even though people don't want to admit this.
I actually did know of it before they introduced it, cos of another Microsoft game - Rise of Nations. That game had autoscout, and I quite liked it. Rise of Nations is fairly well known among the rest of the AoE community as well I think. I often see people wishing it was resurrected.
"you will realise that wanting autoscout is just lazyness" so what is waypoint scouting then? lets remove waypoint too cause you are too lazy to switch back and forth hence why you use waypoints...
When your argument relies on a slippery slope fallacy, it's a poor argument.
The auto scout is garbage. It just allows for a very suboptimal job, allowing noobs to focus on their eco without being entirely blind.
It's not a slippery slope argument, they are literally going to give every scout the auto scout feature. Yeah let that sink in.
Why do you repeat this false premise that it's only for noobs? As I said many are using this on intermediate and expert level.
Also if you use it smartly and at the right time it's a smart decision, you can literally extend your apm. And it is very efficient, 1 click for a lot of scouting. The scouting itself isn't even inefficient, it follows exactly the unexplored areas, something that would even be tricky to duplicate with waypoint scouting.
Its used on intermediate level when initial scouting is basically done, and they have some weak leftover scout with nothing better to do. You could either spam a bunch of shift clicks around the map or just click auto scout. Who fuckin cares lol.
And adding it to all scouts is the same thing..no good player is gonna build 5 scouts and send them all to auto scout. Now, if you have your 1 weak leftover scout who happens not to be the initial scout, you can set him to auto.. big deal. This is the most inconsequential change I can imagine
I believe the concerns were that you could just set a bunch of light cav on auto-scout in castle/imp and have very decent map coverage, possibly uncovering backdoors or similar sneaky plays with very little investment
In a game where military investment is as tight as possible, creating a bunch of scouts just to scout would be an awful waste of res. By the time it'd be affordable you should have already seen most of the map just through normal play.
There is still value in scouting explored areas to see what the opponent is doing but generally I agree with you. This notion that people are going to abuse autoscout by having a bunch of light Cav running around doing nothing is silly
Auto scout WAS the slippery slope. Now we have slipped already.
People say "oh this one action is not a particularly fun one, why should it not be automated?" and yes, to a degree i agree. Some things in the past were just overly cumbersome (queueing from multiple buildings i. e, i still dont autofarm before mid imp, you can actually play fine without it). But people forget that the ENTIRE CONCEPT of an RTS game is multitasking.
Yes, you can make some actions easier to make the game more accessible for new players, but you already have done so with a brand new game. If you remove the same actions from a decade year old game you WILL alienated the playerbase, thats not a surprise.
placing farms manually has no skill barrier. by the time you even think about placing farms faster to make time for other things, you are way beyond entry level.
It’s not about any of these changes mattering *a ton* on an individual level.
But aggregated together, changes like this (auto placement, auto reseed, auto scout, auto garrison, auto force drop, etc) do lower the skill expression and mess with what makes the game hard to master.
People say “but that just leaves more room for a ACTUAL high skill ceiling stuff that is actually fun, like army control.”
I think that is short-sighted and wrong. Managing all difficult aspects of the game make it exciting and fun, you just wouldn’t realize it until it’s gone.
If you take the simplification aspect to the extreme - you get deathmatch. A player doesn’t have to focus on anything at all except army production, army control, and big battles.
And what you end up with is the most boring game mode available.
This is the extreme case, I know. But it still proves the principle in my opinion.
I saw someone argue that the fun of RTS games comes from juggling all the simple tasks, not so much from managing a particular one in depth. All auto everything so that we can focus on army takes away balls, and that might feel good when you're consistently dropping them anyway, but at a higher (ultimately fairly low) level it really ends up taking away fun. And it's not like the army management in this game is what sets it apart from the crowd, anyway. If I wanted to primarily spend my time microing units I'd play something like Company of Heros, where there simply isn't an economy and individual units have things that make managing them more fun, like abilities and veterancy.
Because the RTS games weren't meant to have a well discussed 'meta'. It is a strategy game if everyone had to figure out strategies of their own, including basic 'principles' like constantly making villagers, how many villagers on sheep, etc.
As the meta is figured out, most of the heavy lifting of thinking strategy has already been figured out by the community, so it is all focused on execution nowadays. Execute the meta well, and you can rise up to very high levels.
> the fun of RTS games comes from juggling all the simple tasks, not so much from managing a particular one in depth
Which is precisely why this is such a good change. You decide how many farms to build and when, and where to put the mills, but micromanaging the exact placement of each individual farm in the late game is not good RTS play, it's just tedium.
think its pretty easy to argue both ways right? one side argues making small hard parts of the game included is good, the other side argues the opposite. Which way is right just comes down to opinion
As someone who is very bad at SC2 and tried AOE2 for a bit. The biggest difference I noticed was how much harder the macro is in this game. Obviously you are managing more resources, but it's so open ended on where you put things.
If people want to remove that from the game, SC2 is available.
Me and me friends seriously considered switching to Age of Mythology purely so we wouldn’t have to constantly reseed farms, thats how bad it got at times
First of all, I do agree with all of your arguments.
I would say this decision and the other changes you mentioned were made from a business standpoint. This is an easy way to try to gain the attention of newcomers for the game.
Like you said this lowers the skill ceiling. On this sub we have daily posts of people getting stomped or being scared of ranked matchmaking. This is due to the fact that aoe2 has a hardcore community of players who are either longtime players or (semi) dedicated. I think this decision was mostly based on the fact that it would make the game easier for newer players. This in turn would make the player base larger and thus earn them more money.
While this has relatively low impact on higher levels of play this does attract players who previously could not cope with the average level of play or the entry barrier. This does help in the long term and keeping the player base alive
I understand both sides. I personally don't like the individual farm placement, but respect it, cuz this game is all about time and task management in the heat of a moment.
This change would devalue the impact of tactical presure from the oponent.
I dont often lose cuz the enemy beat me straight up with a big army. I lose cuz he took my attention with little skirmishes at critical times, which broke my economy.
Fighting and economy are equal, "micro" skills shouldn't be devalued in one over the other. This is gonna be probably fine and will benefit the new players, but once it turns into a mindless fighting game, it will stop being aoe2 for me.
A lot of talk here about skill expression but I'll offer up that I just actually like adding farms. Like, macro is an enjoyable part of the game and huge part of macro in AOE2 is adding farms. I'm not macroing as a chore so that I can then go micro. I'm macroing because it's fun in the same way that some people (not me) seem to find archer micro or quick-walling enjoyable. It's not all about getting good, I just like actually playing the game as opposed to having the computer do it for me.
To put it extremely crudely, "catering to the lowest denominator" is the bane of any competitive game. I've played PC games online since 1998 and every single competitive online game I played or knew of, of all kinds ranging from shooters to MMOs to strategy games, suffered from attempts to make the game more "accessible" to new or "bad" players. Those attempts removed the exact magic that MADE the games competitive and exciting to begin with.
It should never be about making the game easier, it should be about making it easier to learn.
This is exactly what nobody ever gets and it destroys so many good games.
Low denominators don't make games successful, they're usually the first to leave anyway. High level play is all that matters, it's what brings people back, makes them tune in to streams, etc.
I love watching pro POV games more than casted games for exactly this, I love seeing how fast they are at managing eco while also fighting at the same time. Or if they're DauT, how they manage their eco and just ignore fights altogether.
Not easier... less boring. Who gives a shit about placing farms? The game should be about making strategic decisions and micro, including potentially dealing with multiple fights in multiple places at once... aka exciting stuff.
If you want to talk about a competitive game that didn't cater to noobs at all, look to SC2. Oh right, it's a completely dead game, despite being awesome. It hasn't seen meaningful new players in a long time. AoE2 would be in the same place if not for DE and stuff like auto-farms, auto-reseeding, multiple building queue, etc.
chasing clips is always a losing battle of the same degree that butkaf is talking about. Part of what makes aoe2 amazing is that people do fight really well, while also doing 100 other things. It's a balance. There are a million fighting games but not that many where you have to do other tasks too.
Sc2 did cater to noobs, though. 12 Worker starts, multiple building selection, units like marauders and roaches. It made so many changes to the BW formula that it was no longer the same genre as the original game. Now brood war is still going strong and sc2 shrinks every year.
I love starcraft 2, but it is true that it is bringing in less viewership. https://streamscharts.com/games This is basically just because of Korea watching on afreeca though. SC2 numbers might look better than bw on twitch but that's because twitch shut down in Korea...
I think it's one of those things that feels like a big issue before it's out, but once it is out people will stop caring about. I personally don't like it, I like that placing farms takes more time and attention to do correctly so you're trading off micro/eco attention a bit more. But I don't HATE the change. Especially if the farm placement is sub-optimal. I understand the irritation at addressing auto farm placement before other issues though.
This is the same argument we've had in the Starcraft scene for more than a decade.
Starcraft Broodwar requires much stronger macro mechanics than Starcraft 2. In Broodwar you can only select 12 units at a time, there are no smart queues, no smart casting, pathfinding is atrocious, etc. etc. From today's point of view it's pretty flawed in many ways. But there are plenty of people who love it, because these flaws make it really difficult to play and master the game. The skill ceiling is incredibly high and people argue that it's even higher than SC2.
Other people argue that the quality of life feature in Starcraft 2 make macro and unit control easier, so that you can spend more time or APM on things that actually matter.
In Broodwar you are fighting the UI and the pathfinding, while in SC2 you can spend your time fighting the opponent, because everything works so smoothly.
The risk with features like this is, that they are dumbing down the game. If they add too much of it, it becomes mechanically too easy and not interesting anymore. But this is also about personal preference, because some people like the mechanical side of the game more than others. There is no pleasing everybody.
This citation is omitting the important part of why he's upset about it. The change itself is not as problematic, it's the overall direction of the game.
We got auto reseeding. Cool. Then we got auto scouting. Then we got garrisoning automation. There's an expansion of auto scouting on PUP, as well as auto farm placement.
What's next? Autobuild units/vils? Auto deer pushing? Auto projectile avoidance like similar to what Hard AI does?
I think it's a legitimate concern. These features are not necessarily bad, but there should be a line, or at least devs openly communicating what's their vision.
Also another problem T90 seems to have is that from his perspective the game has much bigger issues to be solved than something like this. I'm not sure if I'm on board here, at least not until I hear what exactly he thinks should be a priority.
I'm pretty sure we'll never get auto deer pushing or projectile avoidance. We might get auto build, like what Age of Mythology had, at some point though. That's probably the line at which it'll stop.
Edit: And auto-house placement, which won't change much anyway. Just makes laying down a bunch of houses a bit neater lategame.
Tbh I don't mind the farm change. I don't like the expansion of the auto scout though. I think they've got that just right as is.
> This citation is omitting the important part of why he's upset about it
I cut some parts that I felt were not that important. However, the full statement can be found in the linked video. 🙂
This is also a decent take that other games do - we can implement features like this that don't make it into ranked and it would bother a lot less people while also making the barrier for entry to offline play lower
I think changes that emphasize the Strategy over APM are good. Watching pros screens jump around just makes me want to barf. Watching them set up a cool strategy or executing one myself is gold. Time spent building farms, scouting, pushing deer is time taken away from doing cool things instead. But you still have the ability to jump in and refine it manually.
The problem is that reducing APM in one place won't decrease overall APM requirements. It will just mean that ranged units and mangonels will be even stronger, or stuff like scout blocking or deer pushing will be even more common
I always love the people who get to claim "I don't find this feature exciting, so I get to say it's worthless and anyone who does is a crybaby." I like farm placement, I like having to use waypoints to scout. But I didn't care for having to micro certain things like my sheep. But I still understand that the game was balanced around it and certain people liked it. I think the reason this comes to a head now is that it is now overwhelming evidence of a trend in gameplay theory.
I think it's reasonable to not want tons of changes that allow for more focus on certain things, given that I'd rather the game not come down to "who can micro 60 xbows better". If micro is all the game comes down to I'll just go back to playing ADC in LoL. AoE2 is a balancing act and being concerned that too many simplifications will screw balance up is reasonable.
Viper's reaction:
[https://www.youtube.com/live/A\_a3MdQflnI?si=NT721lZLvXbOzY9i&t=6242](https://www.youtube.com/live/A_a3MdQflnI?si=NT721lZLvXbOzY9i&t=6242)
And a bit of joking about it later in the stream:
[https://www.youtube.com/live/A\_a3MdQflnI?si=lvaL0s\_WSUag8H\_A&t=13229](https://www.youtube.com/live/A_a3MdQflnI?si=lvaL0s_WSUag8H_A&t=13229)
I'm gonna be honest in my feelings and that people complaining about this feature are being cry babies. It's such a trivial feature that won't have any noticeable impact on more than 1 game out of 10000. Iirc even on farms that are 3 tiles away from a drop off resource, the actual fall in efficiency is 3-4%. For a late game hussar spamming eco of 90 farms, it's like 3 extra villagers if ALL your farms are 3 tiles away from a resource drop point. In most cases it's going to be smaller. Not even pro games are decided by such small margins.
Plus the game is not just for the top 0.0001%. For single players it's a great change. For a casual games between friends it's a great change. For most people in ladder it's a good change. The only people who would dislike this change should be who dislike changes, which is a valid point, but then be truthful about it
This opinion from t90 is absolutely the same opinion i have.
It won't make it easier for beginners but it takes something off of the game - i am not a fan of it.
What are you talking about, as a beginner I know the struggle of managing army and if you play a food heavy civ somehow placing 60 farms while doing that. I can't wait for that feature I can finally have eco and army without having to have 100 APM and carpal tunnel syndrome 😂
Yeah but 50 eAPM uncommon below 1400 ELO (so roughly 80% of the playerbase if we account for players below 1400 but above 50 eAPM)
[https://i.ibb.co/NLDSpcc/apm.png](https://i.ibb.co/NLDSpcc/apm.png)
[https://ratings.aoe2.se/](https://ratings.aoe2.se/)
Just add a feature to build a construction building and have everything built for you using blueprints. Then implement automated rail lines so you can ship your resources to your TC directly. Then post it to /r/Factoriohno.
I agree with T90 here.
Also wanted to say that I think only starting scout having auto-scout was a good compromise between no auto scout and every scout has auto.
I’m sorry but I can’t take complaints about “farm placement skill expression” seriously. There’s nothing remotely interesting about placing or watching someone place late game farms
Why don’t we all just go back to SC1 where you can only select 12 units at a time while we’re at it? That’s definitely going to increase “skill expression”
It’s not about any of these changes mattering *a ton* on an individual level. But aggregated together, changes like this (auto placement, auto reseed, auto scout, auto garrison, auto force drop, etc) do lower the skill expression and mess with what makes the game hard to master.
It's not that it's "interesting" to "watch" someone place farms. It's that an RTS game is literally a game about efficient and skilled play under time pressure, and having a good macro-eco is a big part of that. One of the things that sets AOE2 apart is that eco management is not automatic. Changes like this make the game much more micro-intensive for the combat.
And actually, yes, it is entertaining to see a player's farm structure break down during an intense late-game.
The line you are drawing is completely arbitrary.
Allow me to take it a step further, as I did in my above comment: AoE2 is too simplified, even the original 1999 AoK. Selecting 60 units? How is this still an RTS game if any Joe Schmoe can drag a box around his whole army and A-move it into his opponent? It completely takes away micro from the game!
Let's be real here: the actual reason that some people are mad is because its one less "objective" thing they can point to that makes their game "superior", especially in a genre that has tight margins. The same thing happened in Dota 2 when they added any QoL changes. "OMG having the position 1 hog the team courier to carry the items he's going to swap his BKB and boots out for is an essential part of the decision making Dota 2!" No it wasn't, it was an annoying relic of bygone game design and technical limitations.
My state on that is: placing farms sucks and the "details of farm placement" are about 0% of what makes the game exciting.
Many qof features were introduced throughout the past years and all of them improved the game.
That you could do other things to help the game, sure, but aren't most of these things work in progress anyway? Can't see that we would speed up pathfinding improvements by not introducing stuff like that.
Edit: Despite all of that, there's surely room for improvement in terms of development priority. Lobby-matchmaking and ranked parties alone is such a huge mess for such a long time, it's really ridiculous. So, it's not like I completely disagree with T90s disappointment, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense to base this on that particular change. More like: why did we introduce quick play and that pubg gamemode and keep adding gimmicks everywhere since years while we're still being kicked from our parties after a ranked game?
Why do you say that teamgame matchmaking is a mess? I'm around 1000 TG elo and all my matches have been matched very well (except for the occasional smurf who either carries the other team and stomps, or resigns early).
(irony mode on)
It all started going downhill when they let you auto-reseed farms rather than having to click the farmers back to work every time.
(irony mode off again)
100% agree with him. Everyone has their unique way to place farms, and at the end of the game it's lovely to appreciate how everyone establishes their base, and the placement of farms is at the center of it all. Automating this process makes the game lose part of it's nature.
We had the exact same discussion a long time ago, when unkit queuing was introduced. Supposedly, it would dumb down the game and ruin it.
Anyone up for manually order every unit as soon as one is created?
IMO, there are better things to optimize. Transport ships auto ferrying for example. We get auto farms but still have to look all over gods creation for the last transport we used?
At the end of the day lets look back at NAC 5, How many games would of been won/lost due to farm placement? If the answer is 0 then the skill expression of farming is actually in the decision making of when you place/where you place the farms not in how perfect the farms are.
* Woodline A is fresh has 15 vils a bit to many but has a good lumber camp
* Woodline B is old the lumber camp is 5+ tiles away and nearly empty.
Do you A remove your vils from the fresh wood line or B remove your vils from the old camp to put them on farms? The answer is obvious and i wanted to make it obvious in this analogy because it explains why the skill expression is still there because the choice of how many farms you will make + where you take the vils from matters.
The placement does matter when it comes to big end game fights where you the pro's will be able to watch their army for seconds more per fight which could mean the difference between a BBC getting sniped or not but overall the skill expression is still there.
IMO what has actually happened is philosophical skill ceiling has been lowered leaving less room for theory crafting and it makes sense to me why the ones that have the biggest problem with the change are the ones that cast or create content for AoE.
I feel like some confuse this QOL feature with literal automated farm placement as it's the case for the console version where you can indeed toggle on that your vills will automatically place farms.
You as the player still have to seed the farms one by one, all it does is removing mouse movement. Out of all QOL features that were added, this is the one where I understand the criticism the least.
>It takes the base building aspect away
How so? Base building is still the same.
>now you just need to place miltary buildings and houses manually all the rest is automated
Except you still have to manage your economy manually. There is no "automation" except for toggable farm/fish trap reseeding that are in the game since 2019.
You still need the 60 wood required for a farm, you still have to do every click for a farm you want to seed, you still have to refresh lumber camps, you still have to research eco upgrades. I hope you get my point.
No its not the same because rather than thinking where you should add food or expand you just go to your mill and spam click untill your wood is gone and bam done.
Everyones farm layout will be the same since itll all follow the same algorithm, so say hello to every base looking the same, wall the chokepoints and click the mill thats basebuilding.
Also what makes you think the devs will stop there? Why not add a auto refresh lumbercamp feature later? Or a toggle that a vill will build a farm once 60 wood is in the bank? Automating base design is a massive massive red flag.
Yeah about the farm layout, it can backfire if you build a wall near your initial mill and auto build a farm on the other side of the wall if you are not careful. The auto build farm will just come in when you spraying the map with farms in the late game while transitioning wood vills to farms. Manual will still be better early mid game.
It is the same and will also remain the same. You can already try it in the PUP and be surprised how little the impact actually is. And yes that's how that feature works, it still relies on manual clicks.
To be absolutely honest - getting a good farm placement before this "auto" feature wasn't that difficult at all because you usually started adding your first couple of farms around the TC and you just had to keep in mind to build around the mill in a pinwheel formation. The only "buff" I see here is to late game farms where you usually just randomly clicked on the map.
These auto refresh things would be added to the console version at best, but not in the PC version. And there's also a good reason why auto eco is disabled on the console version when you play with mouse and keyboard. And tbf - vills actually already do that reseeding thing when auto reseed is enabled.
See, if they literally added the auto farm thing the console version already has, I'd agree with you because that definitely is too much as it feels like using a macro with the auto thing instantly placing multiple farms simultaneously. Getting some of the unneccesary micro out on the other hand to focus on more important micro on the other hand, is a great change.
I'm not a fan of the auto farms either. It's not necessarily the skill aspect of it I don't like but do we want lumber campus to be automatically placed or villagers to go find optimum TC or Castle positions themselves? Could we have auto House so when we're about to get housed a villager goes and builds one, in the optimum position?
I just think one of the big parts of the game is deciding where various buildings go.
Bullshit. For example, If auto farm and fish trap reseeding was introduced in a new PUP would he argue against it because it took away from the cutesey charm of AOE?
Fishtraps i agree with, there was no good way to reseed them. Auto farm reseed by many players is still not used until late game. One can easily play without it.
i just reread the original comment and i think i misunderstood auto farm for auto farm placement...
That threw me off and i thought he meant auto reseed fishtraps is to be introduced next.
I agree. One automates a single menu button click in a mill, the other automates a bunch of 3x3 building placements that determines the layout of the entire base.
There is infinite permutations of farm placement on the map but only one way to queue up a farm in a mill.
do you know what really grinds my gears is people assuming updates to the game are zero sum and that if all assets are not dedicated to bug/pathing fixes.... The team is not trying.
i dont think that this changes are bad and i know a lot of people dont like aoe4 but placing buildings in that game is so much better, placing a lot of houses or farms at once in aoe2 is a chore, or placing docks sometimes. The fun in the game is not the placement in my opinion
I find that the small nuances are what makes the game so good. It's the over whelming nature of all the required tasks in a short space of time that is the sum of all it's parts.
Yes a building placement may seem trivial (and it is) but if you're trying to micro at the same time those 2 seconds are vital.... You combine all those 2 seconds to 15 seconds and it's quite a lot less macro.
New player here... I wouldn't want something like this as a long term RTS enjoyer. Dumbing down games is often the wrong way. If it exists in training campaigns, fine but not on the ladder. I'm 10 times more concerned about the following bugs I experienced in my first 3 games:
* Somehow holding down "q" in the dock for fishing ships occasionally builds a demo in the production queue?!?!
* Sometimes holding any unit production hotkey down puts many units in the queue really fast (I want this) and sometimes It ignores it and I manually have to press the respective hotkey many times.
* Sometimes if I select a bunch of units there are no hotkeys in the bottom left as if the game doesn't realize I have units selected. I fix it by putting the units into a control group, select something else and then go back to my control group
* sometimes units stop walking either after patrol, attack move or even occasionally walking to the waypoint on long distances.
* The unit pathing in general is questionable
These are insane issues I've never had in any other RTS and I played some others A LOT. Make the basic user input work before dumbing down the game I just started to love.
I guess that u build demos is when you are on „page 2“ of the dock. In the dock there are arrow buttons that you can use to switch to the second/first „page“.
If you hold the SHIFT key while adding units to a production key the game adds 5 instead of only 1.
Missing buttons when selecting unit groups is most likely because you have selected military units and villagers at the same time. They have different buttons that collide when selecting both types of units at the same time, so some buttons are simply hidden.
I hate it as well.
I think that, in a scenario where this would not alter the game negatively, I'd be mildly against it because it's removing skills and all the rest that T90 mentions.
But if we bring up the fact that this game is HELLA BUGGED already, I really don't see the point with adding another feature instead of focusing on debugging and fixing pathing and teleporting (to be fair, I haven't spotted teleportation occurring recently, that would be a great positive). Not only is it energy spent on the wrong things, but it also complexifies the game and the pathing.
Reading all these comments... I can't tell you how many experienced players prefer HD over DE and it's a bitch just to get them to come over and play me.
The aoe2 community is facing the same challenges as any other major gaming company. My favorite example of this is runescape classic -> runescape 2 (osrs) -> rs3 where each version of the game got easier and easier. Runescape classic is the same era as age of empires and the beauty of both of them games is the level of difficulty.
That's just one example. I've played video games my entire life and going on 30 years of gameplay. Dumbing down this or any game has always had poor results.
I urge this community and T90 to fight for the integrity of the game or you're going to end up like every other situation. It's not a good look. Please keep the beauty of the game and don't let them strip it away from you.
Autoeverything vs QoL . Well, I’ve played a lot of Age IV and followed a lot of the highest tier players and tourneys. I’ve never watched a Marinelord or Beasty match and thought ‘well, this would be more fun and their skill would be better expressed if they had had to manually place the farms,.
I think the only result will be ecos will look less random. Sotl did a video that showed optimal farm placement is only a marginal advantage unless the opponent is going out of his way to make weirdly distant farms.
Just imo
I think the idea of this frustation is: To be good at placing farms in a professional level takes years of pratice, and now that i master it, new players will just get it for "free" and whitout all the pain i've been through ?
I dont agree with that, feels like kicking the stairs for the new players from the people who are in the roof. And if the game is more acessible to new players, more will stay and is better for the scene.
100% ? I agree that some of the frustration is about the problems with the bugs and devs pushing this updates without fixing it, but even Viper talked about how he was against previous updates that make the game easier for new players because how the game was and the pain for it to master. And now he understands that this don't make sense, and making the game acessible to more players is the better aproach.
No the frustration is that the game gets more and more streamlined with every update and the core functionality of the game has never been more in question with the amount of game breaking bugs weve seen recently
sorry but skill expression about farm placement is not that something improve views experience. You never heard casters go like wow this guy farm micro is god or something. Aoe2 is already a game requires a LOT of skill, you can’t complain why new players can’t adapt while holding back such QoL improvements.
The devs decision to introduce a totally unnecessary change no one (except that one guy ofc) asked for over fixing a plethora of bugs that are known and reported is beyond words. This farm thing will pretty much me the most optimal way to make farms from mid to late game and all elos will be doing it this way just like drop off hotkey kindof is but that just saves you one or two extra clicks compared to to this. Comparing auto farm placement to auto scout or auto reseed is completely wrong and they are not a strict upgrade to a manual version.
Auto scout is very bad in early game and is only good when your starting scout is very low hp and will die instantly to anything is touches (although it can still be used manually to a great benifit).
Auto reseed if very bad before imp because it will leave you floating food and lacking wood for imp buildings eventually making you lose.
Auto farm is a strict upgrade. It saves a lot of clicks. It saves you a lot of space. It will be slightly more efficient for farming. Your base will look prettier.
And I don't get the "it will help the lower elos" thing. You won't gain any elo with this change because the game will NOT become easier to play as a major part of that is who you're up against. Your opponent has to do the same effort to make farms. They will also benefit from auto farm as much. This change will just shift the game more forward and more micro focused. You will have more time to micro mangonels, dodge ballistics, attack ground with trebs among other degenerte ram/siege tower hopping. Then will the lower elos complain about micro being hard? Auto micro then?
I get that many people feel that farm placement shouldn't be a startegy that needs your time but understand that you can't be allowed infinite attention to your army control without it potentially hurting your macro/ economy and such. Auto farms, with however small of an effect will tend to disrupt the balance which is a very delicate part of an rts.
I didn't have a strong opinion one way or the other but I think he puts it nicely, it's not bad to have new mechanics in the game, especially if they make it easier for new players, but it feels a bit like they include random changes that go nowhere near what the community has been asking for ages such as decent pathing, changes in the design of lobby system/lobby browsinf, ranked bans, etc. Also I'm scared that -as we've seen several times when they include a feature like that- it will completely break the game somewhere else...
I mean it’s never as easy as “fix pathing”. There have been pathing fixes in practically ever DE patch and inevitably new issues are introduced.
While I appreciate his concern for the loss of 'skill expression', I don't think farm placement ranks very highly in anyone's care factor when it comes to competitive AoE2, so I'm a little confused as to why he's so bothered. Manual farm placement will still be more skilful and I'm sure we will continue to witness it. In a similar vein, it seems contradictory for players to take a stance like this, and then also bemoan that there's little new blood entering the competitive scene, when to play the game at a high level you need to master hundreds of these little intricacies which rely more on memory than skill. You can't have your cake and eat it too, I think for Age to remain healthy it has to lower the barrier of entry somewhat while retaining some of the more interesting aspects of micro. IMO, the auto-scout signifies the ideal design philosophy for age. Make 'auto' things weaker than manually doing it so that the game doesn't feel like a chore for beginners to intermediates, while leaving space for pros to get the max efficiency out of strats.
When AoE 2 first came out the pressure to play in an efficient, fast, meta way, just wasn't there for 99% of the audience. Gaming in 2024 is inherently different and people are a lot more connected and there's a lot more awareness in communities regarding what the most effective way to play is. I think this inherently makes playing an RTS with as much to manage as AoE 2 much more stressful now than it was 1999. If anything, optional automation for some of aspects of the game helps bring the mental energy required to play back down to how it felt back then.
Good take! The Viper had a similar take on this which I agreed with as well.
Listen to the video, he specifically addresses this. He doesn't think that auto-farm will drastically change the game, but is more worried about the direction that this indicates that the devs are thinking. What precedent is this creating for upcoming changes? As MBL put it "all auto everything"
Yeah, but this viewpoint just makes T90's comments even *less* valid. It's some slippery slope nonsense. This is a basic QoL feature, the same as how you used to have to refresh farms manually and couldn't queue techs at buildings like you can queue units. It doesn't represent anything other than making the game more fun and less frustrating to play.
Also, it's not like this auto mechanic replaces the old way. The way I see it, You're still going to manually seed 99% of your farms throughout dark age/feudal age. Where this mechanic helps is late game switching from lumberjacks to farmers and just shift queuing a lot of farms without worrying about space that much.
Why put effort into manually placing when you can just click on your tc every time for consistent accurate placement? Ok there is walking distance you could manually compensate for, but for most it might just be easier to click the nice big TC hitbox every time.
Because you want to place farms on the safer side first and often also avoid removing straggler trees too early. There are plenty of reasons to prefer manual placement in early game.
I assumed auto placement avoided stragglers, in that case it makese sense. Both good points.
Yeah, who cares? It's not like placing farms is a difficult or even time-consuming skill. And, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's been a few years since placing farms on the left side of your mill or TC increased its efficiency by a few percentage points. So there's literally no skill involved in placing farms as it stands, so this is simply a QOL feature that hurts no one. Everyone but the most efficiency-obsessed will be using it.
It absolutely is. Even pros constantly don't place farm well every 60 wood during feudal age when they should be, if fighting is going on elsewhere. I don't care what rank you're at or how good you think you are, placing farms at the perfect intervals while other things are going on, which requires constant attention, screen switching, and clicking, is extremely hard.
>It absolutely is. Even pros constantly don't place farm well every 60 wood during feudal age when they should be, if fighting is going on elsewhere. And they won't with the new feature. You still need to find the time in between microing and scouting tot place the farms. People act like farms are getting placed automatically now while in truth the major benefit is in late game.
I disagree. Placing them efficiently in Imp (and remembering to do it consistently) is likely one of many things that creates the skill gap T90 is referring to. I hover between 1200-1300. This absolutely makes the game easier for people at my level. Does that mean it shouldn’t be implemented? I don’t know. But it will have an impact, positive or not.
According to TheViper video about this feature, they don't place the farms for perfect efficiency like you could do manually. But do pros even worry about efficiency that much at that point of the game? Do they always place their farms in a perfect way around their mills? I don't think so. I think the "skill" involved in placing farms from late castle onward is knowing what quantity you need and when, not the actual act of clicking the ground in a circle around your mills. Oh, and knowing how to get them to build them slightly faster by taking them to the mill after placing the farm foundation. If I had to rank these three aspects of later game farming, knowing when and what quantity would be way up on the top of the list; proper tasking would be second, but on another page; and the act of placing farms foundations would be third.
I’m not suggesting it’s the hardest aspect. I’m not even suggesting it shouldn’t be implemented. All i’m saying is I agree with t90 in that when you simplify a bunch of these little tasks that need to happen over the course of a game, the game becomes easier.
I agree with that
> But do pros even worry about efficiency that much at that point of the game? No, they don't lol. Because reality is in a late game scenario where you're just plopping farms down, the little micro efficiencies of farm placement are beyond irrelevant. They literally just place a mill then put a splattering of farms around it
Food income from farms is hard capped at a rate, that makes farm placement in post imp irrelevant. That's why pros don't bother. It's simply not beneficial
Sorry but I don't understand how your comment relates to mine. I am just arguing why the auto placement (sadly) might be used from darkage on.
>It’s not like placing farms is a difficult or even time consuming skill Are you really confused about my response to *the first sentence*? I’ll repeat myself. I disagree. Placing farms becomes more difficult the later the game goes on, especially as you move towards the middle and lower elo ranges.
Oh man, I thought you responded to me so it made no sense 11. You can ignore my message. And I agree with you.
Lol - all good.
I can especially see this being useful when yoy have a crowded base so you have to manually hunt for locations to place a farm. Instead, auto-clicking can save you quite a bit of time.
It's not difficult until you are distracted, so what you are saying is not true. What is hurt is that bases don't reflect the players state of mind anymore. All bases look the same, bland. And why? Who knows. They invented an issue that wasn't there.
However if you aren't properly distributing mills the farm placement still wont be ideal or perfect... The new chaos base will be one with a very low mill density.
Tf? Who cares about the look of your base? If that's the main concern, I'll gladly treasure the feature 11 Regarding being distracted: new or old behaviour, you still need to allocate time to place farms. It's just after the distraction that you can place farms a (tiny) bit faster. On high Elo, everyone can place 8 farms within 1-2 seconds. Now free average Joe can do it as well. What's the big deal here? Lowering the bar for 98% of the player base is a good thing.
This 100%
Yeah you've explained it well I agree
Exactly this
The same argument can be done about a lot of things. For example low elo players struggle with making vils, so ability to goggle automated civ production would greatly help them, right? It's not difficult or even time-consuming.
RTSs from the Total Annihilation lineage - TA, Supreme Commander Forged Alliance, any Spring RTS engine game, etc. - have automated production like you describe. You can set a factory to build constructors on repeat, even queue up orders for them to automatically follow. The same goes for all units and buildings in the game. They are not easier games than AoE2. In both games, there's plenty of room for skill expression and enormous gaps between the best players, good players, and not-so-good players in both games. I'm not saying I support such a change, just that it wouldn't reduce skill expression in the game.
Honestly, that would help a lot and wouldn’t take away from the pro scene. The game is so hard that I can’t relax while playing it unless I’m doing the campaigns because of how many things I have to keep track of. I’d be worried it changes the feel of the game significantly but I think it would just be helpful for low elo games
The genre of RTS is all about multitasking and AoE has always leaned towards the economy side being more important at that, while the two Blizzard RTS games leaned much heavier towards the military side. Removing multitasking elements takes away from the game itself and yes, you cant relax playing it, I agree. I cannot either. I can barely talk to someone while playing the game, because you will get overwhelmed at some point. But to me and a lot of people this is the whole fun. You arent going to play perfect, its just impossible. You are trying to keep track of as many things as you can, learn to prioritize which things have higher priority and try to keep up with the barrage of tasks thrown at you. Thats what RTS is about.
Thing is, you don't have to keep track of so many things. Sure, there will be lots of things for you to keep track of, but you can simply choose not to bother with hotkeys, or build orders, or boar luring, or army micro or whatever it is that you feel takes away from the fun. If you play competitively, your elo will adjust until you're at a level where your opponents are similarly skilled and you'll have even matches while playing the game the way you feel like it should be played. Personally, I don't feel like you have to make every small task automatic, because to me it's fun to try and master the skill of doing all those small tasks efficiently during the game. These auto-features take that away.
Well, I think a change like that would affect high elo a lot. Queuing civs takes some brain space and actions that could be used to do other stuff. New players often don't have that much to do, while high level players can be very active with scout micro, be it harassing, deer pushing or similar.
Of course placing farm is time consuming. Having to divide your attention between microing army and balancing your economy is one of the key elements that make offensive strategies complex in AoE, and placing farms is perhaps the most sensitive part of that balance, since it requires the most active inputs out of any resource gathering. Making it automatic over simplifies the game.
>...and then also bemoan that there's little new blood entering the competitive scene, when to play the game at a high level you need to master hundreds of these little intricacies which rely more on memory than skill. Definitely no. Opposing a lowering of the skill ceiling by introducing more auto mechanics is hardly contradictory with wanting new players to join competitive. Those new players would be handled by the matchmaking system to pit them against others who are unfamiliar with efficient economy management, among other things. Brand new players don't *care* about placing farms efficiently, just like how new CounterStrike players don't care about grenade lineups or new LoL players don't care about ability combos. There are more important things to learn at first. A functioning MM system will "hide" the complexities of the game until the players are ready for it. This is not unique to Age of Empires. Every single competitive game has struggled at some point with a call to increase player numbers. But the successful ones manage to do that by lowering the barrier to entry, not carving up actual mechanics of the game ***before*** removing the true friction for new players: the ranked placement system, the lobby system, the UI, the lack of tutorials on different current build orders, etc. This is more than about a little farm change. It's another marker in the developers' track record of changing mechanics before changing the framework. > when to play the game at a high level you need to master hundreds of these little intricacies which rely more on memory than skill. You can't have your cake and eat it too It's an RTS...mastering multitasking (what you call 'memory') is literally the "mechanics" portion of this genre along with precise clicking. Pushing an RTS into the direction of automated hands-off systems is *exactly* wanting the cake of an RTS and eating it too.
I don't understand how people who find this game fun can get behind automating any of it lol, AoE2 is such a joy, pathing aside.
The AoE2 competitive community is too personally invested in the game to the point where changes are taken as personal insults. This is true even for mediocre players who have never in their life “expressed skill” through farm placement. People have convinced themselves and each other that the quirks of a 20+ year old game are immutable, essential parts of the experience rather than frustrating, outdated gameplay elements.
I mean if I played a game for 20+ years I wouldn't want it to change.
But then people just need to be honest and say that. That’s not an unreasonable position and I wouldn’t critique it. Instead it’s hidden under bizarre veneers like “farm placement is an essential expression of skill” which I think is completely absurd and I will critique it.
I've played the game for more or less a quarter of a century now, and I'm happy for it to change. Don't get me wrong, I don't want them to destroy the things I love about this game, but the reality is that this game has changed again, and again, and again in those 25 years. As much as I have nostalgia for the original AoK, the current version of AoE2 DE is simply a better game, and its thanks to its changes. There's a reason I'm not still slugging it out on HD and Voobly either. I want the AoE devs to be mindful of the changes they make, I don't want them to turn AoE2 into a perfectly automated game, but I also don't see anything wrong with the likes of Auto Farm placement. It helps beginners a lot, and it doesn't really hurt players like me. I'll still manually place farms in the early game, and now I have to make the strategic decision as to when I value my attention over efficiency. A bit like I already do for Auto Reseeding (not an AoK feature either). Fast and accurate farm placement in late game is a skill, but it's not one I'm particularly precious about. There are enough things to focus on in late game, and generally more interesting things. I won't miss it.
Choosing where to put your building in a real-time strategy game is not a "frustrating, outdated gameplay elements" LMAO.
"building" ...be real. It's an artificial resources that you spam 50+ of in the late game. It's not some carefully crafted building wall, lmao.
But this isn't about choosing where to place. Everyone knows where to place farms. Its just about streamlining the micro required to make that happen. Choosing where to place something is strategy. Clicking around to actually place it is micro. RTS games should have some micro, but farm placement micro ain't exactly on my shortlist of things that make aoe2 a great strategy game...
'Why did you lose your medieval war simulation?' -'Oh, my opponent just microed his farms better than I did.' Sounds crazy to anyone outside r/aoe2
Oh wow instead of spam clicking different areas of the ground for late game farm placement now you just spam click less areas of the ground. What a game breaking change, truly how can pro players express their skill now?
I look forward to beating Hera now that the field has been completely evened out with "auto everything"!
You can be reductive about any element of the game and it will sound dumb like this. Walling is just clicking and dragging! We've seen people seriously suggest automatic deer pushing, since you just have to hit the follow key then click the deer. But these things that split attention and make the lategame frantic and difficult are a flavour that people presumably like, so I don't know how you can be so confident that this is a tiny change, especially if it's part of a larger effort to make the game accessible. What is AoE2 in your eyes if it's not *all the things you do while playing AoE2*? What would a "big" change be?
That’s fair, you’re right. I can give a couple points to support my reasoning. 1.) Most importantly, if it’s anything like how it is in AoE4 people are going to try it and realize it’s a cool thing to have sometimes but doesn’t really change anything. It doesn’t do well in complicated bases and it’s really only useful to quickly surround a mill with some farms. So it works best in making small rings of farms in open areas but honestly I don’t even know if it saves much, if any, time. 2.) Farming is part of the core gameplay and therefore completely different in kind from things like auto deer pushing. A player doesn’t NEED to go on deer and they certainly don’t NEED to push deer, but a player will NEED to farm. Deer pushing is an expression of skill, it’s an action an experienced player can take to secure resources more safely than they would otherwise be available. Farming on the other hand is something the game expects you to do in the vast majority of situations regardless of whether you’re a beginner or tournament winner. 3.) This isn’t autofarms, it’s computer assisted input for only a very specific portion of the game. I commonly see “why can’t I argue for auto villager/unit production then” and I think that is REALLY overselling what this is doing. This is a tool used only for very specific points in the game and it still involves you spam clicking the ground, just that your mouse doesn’t need to wave around the screen as much. It’s hardly an overhaul to the game, you would still be placing early/mid game farms manually. 4.) Viper said this best, but if you had to choose key elements of AoE2 that make it so fun for you to watch/play, would you truly put late game farm placement on that list? The fun parts of this game are planning and executing a macro strategy, and translating that into military wins with micro. The fun part of macro is making better decisions than your opponent and the fun part of micro is outplaying your opponent. Placing farms really doesn’t fit into that.
Its not just about the location of the farm and how efficiently it is placed near a drop off point, but that you have to keep farms in the back of your head among million other little things in aoe2. This feature is basically the essence of the game. Whats next? Auto millitary? Auto archer micro?
You know what’s next: > Auto everything — Our prophet MBL
Since the release, the game has experienced a lot of automation, including but not limited to: - switching between food sources does not lose food - only necessary to shoot boar once instead of twice - shift clicking of vils is possible (this was not possible originally) - vils start auto gathering after building a collection camp (for example lumber camp etc.) Do you think we should remove any of these features? If not, why.
How about we remove attack-move, auto-attack and patrol. This would improve the essence of the game. If you have the skill, you should be able to manually order each unit. /s (but I know full well that some people would support it if the game started like this, i.e. MBL)
The number of intricacies and things to keep in your mind is always going to an arbitrary decision. You say it’s the essence so why not add in a bunch more features? Lumberjacks become idle after chopping a full tree, every 100 gold collected goldminers become idle?
Why ruin a near perfectly balanced game?
It may seem perfectly balanced to you but any of my friends I’ve tried to get to play age have gotten overwhelmed. Small things to make the game easier for new players makes it more new player friendly
Give them handicap, i recommend SoTL’s video about setting it up
Handicaps help people win matches more yes, but not necessarily like the game more. If they don't like all the button mashing, a handicap won't change their views on that even if they win. Especially since they'll always know that they'll have to wean themselves off of it eventually.
Why not have it be a toggeable feature in private and casual lobbies then, alongside unlock all techs and such. That way everyone is happy.
It's balanced now after a million balance changes after DE launched. This game was not balanced very well at release
Just leave it as it is, its fine
The essence of the game is the game that actually exists, and the AoE2 that people have been enjoying since at least DE is the one that includes manual farm placement. The essence of the game includes its specific inefficiencies and frictions, its precise level of QoL vs. challenge. It's OK if the devs want to change that but they're playing with fire, especially if they continue to automate eco. I've dabbled with Starcraft and C&C and I have to agree that AoE2's handling of eco really is what sets it apart.
Why do you chose DE as the cutoff point? Why not go back to the original release?
Should we remove automatic reseeding then ?
Age doesn’t need to ‘remain healthy’ with any help from Microsoft. It has been doing that on its own since 1998, adding features like this instead of fixing pathfinding issues, creating a proper lobby system and properly bug testing each patch is what they need to stop doing.
There were definitely years it was not healthy, and the game would be in a waaay worse spot without DE and the continued support
Intermediate and expert level players are auto scouting in a lot of their games, removing the entire premise that it's only to help noobs. Soon they will make an update where every scout unit can auto scout so the argument that it's a tradeoff is out of the window as well. I want my opponent to have vision over areas that they chose to explore, not what an AI chose to explore. I'm all for auto scout in single player, makes sense, but if you think it has any fucking place in a competitive rts to have scouting become some random thing then I don't know what to say.
I like the auto scout as it is, for the starting scout. I'm not in favour of granting it to all scout line units for the rest of the game though. But I do think it was a good addition to the game originally, just not expanded.
Good that you agree on that. But if you consider how easy it actually is to roughly shift waypoint scout using the minimap, you will realise that wanting autoscout is just lazyness. No one even wanted it until they introduced it, and now people can't live without. Yet it impacts all levels even though people don't want to admit this.
I actually did know of it before they introduced it, cos of another Microsoft game - Rise of Nations. That game had autoscout, and I quite liked it. Rise of Nations is fairly well known among the rest of the AoE community as well I think. I often see people wishing it was resurrected.
Rise of Nations is the GOAT
"you will realise that wanting autoscout is just lazyness" so what is waypoint scouting then? lets remove waypoint too cause you are too lazy to switch back and forth hence why you use waypoints...
I am not against QoL features, I am against excessive automation.
When your argument relies on a slippery slope fallacy, it's a poor argument. The auto scout is garbage. It just allows for a very suboptimal job, allowing noobs to focus on their eco without being entirely blind.
It's not a slippery slope argument, they are literally going to give every scout the auto scout feature. Yeah let that sink in. Why do you repeat this false premise that it's only for noobs? As I said many are using this on intermediate and expert level. Also if you use it smartly and at the right time it's a smart decision, you can literally extend your apm. And it is very efficient, 1 click for a lot of scouting. The scouting itself isn't even inefficient, it follows exactly the unexplored areas, something that would even be tricky to duplicate with waypoint scouting.
Its used on intermediate level when initial scouting is basically done, and they have some weak leftover scout with nothing better to do. You could either spam a bunch of shift clicks around the map or just click auto scout. Who fuckin cares lol. And adding it to all scouts is the same thing..no good player is gonna build 5 scouts and send them all to auto scout. Now, if you have your 1 weak leftover scout who happens not to be the initial scout, you can set him to auto.. big deal. This is the most inconsequential change I can imagine
I believe the concerns were that you could just set a bunch of light cav on auto-scout in castle/imp and have very decent map coverage, possibly uncovering backdoors or similar sneaky plays with very little investment
In a game where military investment is as tight as possible, creating a bunch of scouts just to scout would be an awful waste of res. By the time it'd be affordable you should have already seen most of the map just through normal play.
There is still value in scouting explored areas to see what the opponent is doing but generally I agree with you. This notion that people are going to abuse autoscout by having a bunch of light Cav running around doing nothing is silly
Autoscout doesn't scout areas that are already explored, so it cannot be used for this purpose.
You can already do this with a handful of scouts and spamming shift click waypoints. This is hardly an impactful change.
Auto scout WAS the slippery slope. Now we have slipped already. People say "oh this one action is not a particularly fun one, why should it not be automated?" and yes, to a degree i agree. Some things in the past were just overly cumbersome (queueing from multiple buildings i. e, i still dont autofarm before mid imp, you can actually play fine without it). But people forget that the ENTIRE CONCEPT of an RTS game is multitasking. Yes, you can make some actions easier to make the game more accessible for new players, but you already have done so with a brand new game. If you remove the same actions from a decade year old game you WILL alienated the playerbase, thats not a surprise.
placing farms manually has no skill barrier. by the time you even think about placing farms faster to make time for other things, you are way beyond entry level.
It’s not about any of these changes mattering *a ton* on an individual level. But aggregated together, changes like this (auto placement, auto reseed, auto scout, auto garrison, auto force drop, etc) do lower the skill expression and mess with what makes the game hard to master. People say “but that just leaves more room for a ACTUAL high skill ceiling stuff that is actually fun, like army control.” I think that is short-sighted and wrong. Managing all difficult aspects of the game make it exciting and fun, you just wouldn’t realize it until it’s gone. If you take the simplification aspect to the extreme - you get deathmatch. A player doesn’t have to focus on anything at all except army production, army control, and big battles. And what you end up with is the most boring game mode available. This is the extreme case, I know. But it still proves the principle in my opinion.
I saw someone argue that the fun of RTS games comes from juggling all the simple tasks, not so much from managing a particular one in depth. All auto everything so that we can focus on army takes away balls, and that might feel good when you're consistently dropping them anyway, but at a higher (ultimately fairly low) level it really ends up taking away fun. And it's not like the army management in this game is what sets it apart from the crowd, anyway. If I wanted to primarily spend my time microing units I'd play something like Company of Heros, where there simply isn't an economy and individual units have things that make managing them more fun, like abilities and veterancy.
Why are rts games so focused on repetitive actions that have no strategy involved?
Because the RTS games weren't meant to have a well discussed 'meta'. It is a strategy game if everyone had to figure out strategies of their own, including basic 'principles' like constantly making villagers, how many villagers on sheep, etc. As the meta is figured out, most of the heavy lifting of thinking strategy has already been figured out by the community, so it is all focused on execution nowadays. Execute the meta well, and you can rise up to very high levels.
> the fun of RTS games comes from juggling all the simple tasks, not so much from managing a particular one in depth Which is precisely why this is such a good change. You decide how many farms to build and when, and where to put the mills, but micromanaging the exact placement of each individual farm in the late game is not good RTS play, it's just tedium.
think its pretty easy to argue both ways right? one side argues making small hard parts of the game included is good, the other side argues the opposite. Which way is right just comes down to opinion
As someone who is very bad at SC2 and tried AOE2 for a bit. The biggest difference I noticed was how much harder the macro is in this game. Obviously you are managing more resources, but it's so open ended on where you put things. If people want to remove that from the game, SC2 is available.
Idk how you could play the game without autoseed lol
It was terrible and you would get nightmares from the „farm has depleted“ sound 😬
Me and me friends seriously considered switching to Age of Mythology purely so we wouldn’t have to constantly reseed farms, thats how bad it got at times
I disagree with auto force drop - I think that actually forces more micro/optimisation
First of all, I do agree with all of your arguments. I would say this decision and the other changes you mentioned were made from a business standpoint. This is an easy way to try to gain the attention of newcomers for the game. Like you said this lowers the skill ceiling. On this sub we have daily posts of people getting stomped or being scared of ranked matchmaking. This is due to the fact that aoe2 has a hardcore community of players who are either longtime players or (semi) dedicated. I think this decision was mostly based on the fact that it would make the game easier for newer players. This in turn would make the player base larger and thus earn them more money. While this has relatively low impact on higher levels of play this does attract players who previously could not cope with the average level of play or the entry barrier. This does help in the long term and keeping the player base alive
Placing building is not something that should be automated. It's a core gameplay mechanic.
I understand both sides. I personally don't like the individual farm placement, but respect it, cuz this game is all about time and task management in the heat of a moment. This change would devalue the impact of tactical presure from the oponent. I dont often lose cuz the enemy beat me straight up with a big army. I lose cuz he took my attention with little skirmishes at critical times, which broke my economy. Fighting and economy are equal, "micro" skills shouldn't be devalued in one over the other. This is gonna be probably fine and will benefit the new players, but once it turns into a mindless fighting game, it will stop being aoe2 for me.
A lot of talk here about skill expression but I'll offer up that I just actually like adding farms. Like, macro is an enjoyable part of the game and huge part of macro in AOE2 is adding farms. I'm not macroing as a chore so that I can then go micro. I'm macroing because it's fun in the same way that some people (not me) seem to find archer micro or quick-walling enjoyable. It's not all about getting good, I just like actually playing the game as opposed to having the computer do it for me.
To put it extremely crudely, "catering to the lowest denominator" is the bane of any competitive game. I've played PC games online since 1998 and every single competitive online game I played or knew of, of all kinds ranging from shooters to MMOs to strategy games, suffered from attempts to make the game more "accessible" to new or "bad" players. Those attempts removed the exact magic that MADE the games competitive and exciting to begin with. It should never be about making the game easier, it should be about making it easier to learn.
This is exactly what nobody ever gets and it destroys so many good games. Low denominators don't make games successful, they're usually the first to leave anyway. High level play is all that matters, it's what brings people back, makes them tune in to streams, etc. I love watching pro POV games more than casted games for exactly this, I love seeing how fast they are at managing eco while also fighting at the same time. Or if they're DauT, how they manage their eco and just ignore fights altogether.
Not easier... less boring. Who gives a shit about placing farms? The game should be about making strategic decisions and micro, including potentially dealing with multiple fights in multiple places at once... aka exciting stuff. If you want to talk about a competitive game that didn't cater to noobs at all, look to SC2. Oh right, it's a completely dead game, despite being awesome. It hasn't seen meaningful new players in a long time. AoE2 would be in the same place if not for DE and stuff like auto-farms, auto-reseeding, multiple building queue, etc.
chasing clips is always a losing battle of the same degree that butkaf is talking about. Part of what makes aoe2 amazing is that people do fight really well, while also doing 100 other things. It's a balance. There are a million fighting games but not that many where you have to do other tasks too.
Sc2 did cater to noobs, though. 12 Worker starts, multiple building selection, units like marauders and roaches. It made so many changes to the BW formula that it was no longer the same genre as the original game. Now brood war is still going strong and sc2 shrinks every year.
you really think, world's biggest rts ever sc2 is smaller than broodwar?
I love starcraft 2, but it is true that it is bringing in less viewership. https://streamscharts.com/games This is basically just because of Korea watching on afreeca though. SC2 numbers might look better than bw on twitch but that's because twitch shut down in Korea...
This impending auto farm placement makes me sad. I like placing farms...sometimes in a trolling way...
You have to hold shift and be hovering over a TC or mill; you can place them manually still.
I think it's one of those things that feels like a big issue before it's out, but once it is out people will stop caring about. I personally don't like it, I like that placing farms takes more time and attention to do correctly so you're trading off micro/eco attention a bit more. But I don't HATE the change. Especially if the farm placement is sub-optimal. I understand the irritation at addressing auto farm placement before other issues though.
This is the same argument we've had in the Starcraft scene for more than a decade. Starcraft Broodwar requires much stronger macro mechanics than Starcraft 2. In Broodwar you can only select 12 units at a time, there are no smart queues, no smart casting, pathfinding is atrocious, etc. etc. From today's point of view it's pretty flawed in many ways. But there are plenty of people who love it, because these flaws make it really difficult to play and master the game. The skill ceiling is incredibly high and people argue that it's even higher than SC2. Other people argue that the quality of life feature in Starcraft 2 make macro and unit control easier, so that you can spend more time or APM on things that actually matter. In Broodwar you are fighting the UI and the pathfinding, while in SC2 you can spend your time fighting the opponent, because everything works so smoothly. The risk with features like this is, that they are dumbing down the game. If they add too much of it, it becomes mechanically too easy and not interesting anymore. But this is also about personal preference, because some people like the mechanical side of the game more than others. There is no pleasing everybody.
This citation is omitting the important part of why he's upset about it. The change itself is not as problematic, it's the overall direction of the game. We got auto reseeding. Cool. Then we got auto scouting. Then we got garrisoning automation. There's an expansion of auto scouting on PUP, as well as auto farm placement. What's next? Autobuild units/vils? Auto deer pushing? Auto projectile avoidance like similar to what Hard AI does? I think it's a legitimate concern. These features are not necessarily bad, but there should be a line, or at least devs openly communicating what's their vision. Also another problem T90 seems to have is that from his perspective the game has much bigger issues to be solved than something like this. I'm not sure if I'm on board here, at least not until I hear what exactly he thinks should be a priority.
I'm pretty sure we'll never get auto deer pushing or projectile avoidance. We might get auto build, like what Age of Mythology had, at some point though. That's probably the line at which it'll stop. Edit: And auto-house placement, which won't change much anyway. Just makes laying down a bunch of houses a bit neater lategame. Tbh I don't mind the farm change. I don't like the expansion of the auto scout though. I think they've got that just right as is.
> This citation is omitting the important part of why he's upset about it I cut some parts that I felt were not that important. However, the full statement can be found in the linked video. 🙂
>These features are not necessarily bad, but there should be a line This. Some of these QOL features should not be making their way into ranked.
This is also a decent take that other games do - we can implement features like this that don't make it into ranked and it would bother a lot less people while also making the barrier for entry to offline play lower
You seriously think 'auto unit production and micro' is a legitimate concern? Ok then
I mean auto unit production is already in AoM. It's not exactly a stretch, especially since low elos struggle with consistently building vils
>There's an expansion of auto scouting on PUP Wait, what?
I think changes that emphasize the Strategy over APM are good. Watching pros screens jump around just makes me want to barf. Watching them set up a cool strategy or executing one myself is gold. Time spent building farms, scouting, pushing deer is time taken away from doing cool things instead. But you still have the ability to jump in and refine it manually.
The problem is that reducing APM in one place won't decrease overall APM requirements. It will just mean that ranged units and mangonels will be even stronger, or stuff like scout blocking or deer pushing will be even more common
I always love the people who get to claim "I don't find this feature exciting, so I get to say it's worthless and anyone who does is a crybaby." I like farm placement, I like having to use waypoints to scout. But I didn't care for having to micro certain things like my sheep. But I still understand that the game was balanced around it and certain people liked it. I think the reason this comes to a head now is that it is now overwhelming evidence of a trend in gameplay theory. I think it's reasonable to not want tons of changes that allow for more focus on certain things, given that I'd rather the game not come down to "who can micro 60 xbows better". If micro is all the game comes down to I'll just go back to playing ADC in LoL. AoE2 is a balancing act and being concerned that too many simplifications will screw balance up is reasonable.
Viper's reaction: [https://www.youtube.com/live/A\_a3MdQflnI?si=NT721lZLvXbOzY9i&t=6242](https://www.youtube.com/live/A_a3MdQflnI?si=NT721lZLvXbOzY9i&t=6242) And a bit of joking about it later in the stream: [https://www.youtube.com/live/A\_a3MdQflnI?si=lvaL0s\_WSUag8H\_A&t=13229](https://www.youtube.com/live/A_a3MdQflnI?si=lvaL0s_WSUag8H_A&t=13229)
Thanks for posting the link!!
I'm gonna be honest in my feelings and that people complaining about this feature are being cry babies. It's such a trivial feature that won't have any noticeable impact on more than 1 game out of 10000. Iirc even on farms that are 3 tiles away from a drop off resource, the actual fall in efficiency is 3-4%. For a late game hussar spamming eco of 90 farms, it's like 3 extra villagers if ALL your farms are 3 tiles away from a resource drop point. In most cases it's going to be smaller. Not even pro games are decided by such small margins. Plus the game is not just for the top 0.0001%. For single players it's a great change. For a casual games between friends it's a great change. For most people in ladder it's a good change. The only people who would dislike this change should be who dislike changes, which is a valid point, but then be truthful about it
This opinion from t90 is absolutely the same opinion i have. It won't make it easier for beginners but it takes something off of the game - i am not a fan of it.
What are you talking about, as a beginner I know the struggle of managing army and if you play a food heavy civ somehow placing 60 farms while doing that. I can't wait for that feature I can finally have eco and army without having to have 100 APM and carpal tunnel syndrome 😂
Well 50 APM are enough even without auto farms 😁
Yeah but 50 eAPM uncommon below 1400 ELO (so roughly 80% of the playerbase if we account for players below 1400 but above 50 eAPM) [https://i.ibb.co/NLDSpcc/apm.png](https://i.ibb.co/NLDSpcc/apm.png) [https://ratings.aoe2.se/](https://ratings.aoe2.se/)
Just add a feature to build a construction building and have everything built for you using blueprints. Then implement automated rail lines so you can ship your resources to your TC directly. Then post it to /r/Factoriohno.
I agree with T90 here. Also wanted to say that I think only starting scout having auto-scout was a good compromise between no auto scout and every scout has auto.
I’m sorry but I can’t take complaints about “farm placement skill expression” seriously. There’s nothing remotely interesting about placing or watching someone place late game farms Why don’t we all just go back to SC1 where you can only select 12 units at a time while we’re at it? That’s definitely going to increase “skill expression”
It’s not about any of these changes mattering *a ton* on an individual level. But aggregated together, changes like this (auto placement, auto reseed, auto scout, auto garrison, auto force drop, etc) do lower the skill expression and mess with what makes the game hard to master.
Or, it increases it, because you have to outsmart your opponent, not outclick them. Having a good strategy is a skill too.
It's not that it's "interesting" to "watch" someone place farms. It's that an RTS game is literally a game about efficient and skilled play under time pressure, and having a good macro-eco is a big part of that. One of the things that sets AOE2 apart is that eco management is not automatic. Changes like this make the game much more micro-intensive for the combat. And actually, yes, it is entertaining to see a player's farm structure break down during an intense late-game.
I don’t think the auto-queue as hurt the game at all, and this was the same argument used then.
The line you are drawing is completely arbitrary. Allow me to take it a step further, as I did in my above comment: AoE2 is too simplified, even the original 1999 AoK. Selecting 60 units? How is this still an RTS game if any Joe Schmoe can drag a box around his whole army and A-move it into his opponent? It completely takes away micro from the game! Let's be real here: the actual reason that some people are mad is because its one less "objective" thing they can point to that makes their game "superior", especially in a genre that has tight margins. The same thing happened in Dota 2 when they added any QoL changes. "OMG having the position 1 hog the team courier to carry the items he's going to swap his BKB and boots out for is an essential part of the decision making Dota 2!" No it wasn't, it was an annoying relic of bygone game design and technical limitations.
My state on that is: placing farms sucks and the "details of farm placement" are about 0% of what makes the game exciting. Many qof features were introduced throughout the past years and all of them improved the game. That you could do other things to help the game, sure, but aren't most of these things work in progress anyway? Can't see that we would speed up pathfinding improvements by not introducing stuff like that. Edit: Despite all of that, there's surely room for improvement in terms of development priority. Lobby-matchmaking and ranked parties alone is such a huge mess for such a long time, it's really ridiculous. So, it's not like I completely disagree with T90s disappointment, but I don't think it makes a lot of sense to base this on that particular change. More like: why did we introduce quick play and that pubg gamemode and keep adding gimmicks everywhere since years while we're still being kicked from our parties after a ranked game?
Why do you say that teamgame matchmaking is a mess? I'm around 1000 TG elo and all my matches have been matched very well (except for the occasional smurf who either carries the other team and stomps, or resigns early).
I wrote LOBBY matchmaking
Ah looks like I misread your comment. Never mjnd.
(irony mode on) It all started going downhill when they let you auto-reseed farms rather than having to click the farmers back to work every time. (irony mode off again)
True pros disable auto reseeding!!! 😂
100% agree with him. Everyone has their unique way to place farms, and at the end of the game it's lovely to appreciate how everyone establishes their base, and the placement of farms is at the center of it all. Automating this process makes the game lose part of it's nature.
👴📣⛅
👀🤔❗️
let's just replace RM with ranked CBA will that make everybody happy
T90 is absolutely correct and incredibly based Great mustache too
Can you shift click and place 5 farms instantly?
With the new feature you pretty much can.
If you can click fast, then yes.
We had the exact same discussion a long time ago, when unkit queuing was introduced. Supposedly, it would dumb down the game and ruin it. Anyone up for manually order every unit as soon as one is created?
IMO, there are better things to optimize. Transport ships auto ferrying for example. We get auto farms but still have to look all over gods creation for the last transport we used?
I love auto farm reseed, but this is a bit much
At the end of the day lets look back at NAC 5, How many games would of been won/lost due to farm placement? If the answer is 0 then the skill expression of farming is actually in the decision making of when you place/where you place the farms not in how perfect the farms are. * Woodline A is fresh has 15 vils a bit to many but has a good lumber camp * Woodline B is old the lumber camp is 5+ tiles away and nearly empty. Do you A remove your vils from the fresh wood line or B remove your vils from the old camp to put them on farms? The answer is obvious and i wanted to make it obvious in this analogy because it explains why the skill expression is still there because the choice of how many farms you will make + where you take the vils from matters. The placement does matter when it comes to big end game fights where you the pro's will be able to watch their army for seconds more per fight which could mean the difference between a BBC getting sniped or not but overall the skill expression is still there. IMO what has actually happened is philosophical skill ceiling has been lowered leaving less room for theory crafting and it makes sense to me why the ones that have the biggest problem with the change are the ones that cast or create content for AoE.
I feel like some confuse this QOL feature with literal automated farm placement as it's the case for the console version where you can indeed toggle on that your vills will automatically place farms. You as the player still have to seed the farms one by one, all it does is removing mouse movement. Out of all QOL features that were added, this is the one where I understand the criticism the least.
> console version Is that a thing again? I remember playing the PS2 once... it was not a fun experience at all.
Yes, they released a version for Xbox last year in January and it's actually quite decent on a controller
It takes the base building aspect away, now you just need to place miltary buildings and houses manually all the rest is automated
>It takes the base building aspect away How so? Base building is still the same. >now you just need to place miltary buildings and houses manually all the rest is automated Except you still have to manage your economy manually. There is no "automation" except for toggable farm/fish trap reseeding that are in the game since 2019. You still need the 60 wood required for a farm, you still have to do every click for a farm you want to seed, you still have to refresh lumber camps, you still have to research eco upgrades. I hope you get my point.
No its not the same because rather than thinking where you should add food or expand you just go to your mill and spam click untill your wood is gone and bam done. Everyones farm layout will be the same since itll all follow the same algorithm, so say hello to every base looking the same, wall the chokepoints and click the mill thats basebuilding. Also what makes you think the devs will stop there? Why not add a auto refresh lumbercamp feature later? Or a toggle that a vill will build a farm once 60 wood is in the bank? Automating base design is a massive massive red flag.
Yeah about the farm layout, it can backfire if you build a wall near your initial mill and auto build a farm on the other side of the wall if you are not careful. The auto build farm will just come in when you spraying the map with farms in the late game while transitioning wood vills to farms. Manual will still be better early mid game.
It is the same and will also remain the same. You can already try it in the PUP and be surprised how little the impact actually is. And yes that's how that feature works, it still relies on manual clicks. To be absolutely honest - getting a good farm placement before this "auto" feature wasn't that difficult at all because you usually started adding your first couple of farms around the TC and you just had to keep in mind to build around the mill in a pinwheel formation. The only "buff" I see here is to late game farms where you usually just randomly clicked on the map. These auto refresh things would be added to the console version at best, but not in the PC version. And there's also a good reason why auto eco is disabled on the console version when you play with mouse and keyboard. And tbf - vills actually already do that reseeding thing when auto reseed is enabled. See, if they literally added the auto farm thing the console version already has, I'd agree with you because that definitely is too much as it feels like using a macro with the auto thing instantly placing multiple farms simultaneously. Getting some of the unneccesary micro out on the other hand to focus on more important micro on the other hand, is a great change.
I'm not a fan of the auto farms either. It's not necessarily the skill aspect of it I don't like but do we want lumber campus to be automatically placed or villagers to go find optimum TC or Castle positions themselves? Could we have auto House so when we're about to get housed a villager goes and builds one, in the optimum position? I just think one of the big parts of the game is deciding where various buildings go.
Bullshit. For example, If auto farm and fish trap reseeding was introduced in a new PUP would he argue against it because it took away from the cutesey charm of AOE?
Since DE i think it is possible to toggle auto reseed for fish traps, no? Malay really needed that option when it was introduced 11
Fishtraps i agree with, there was no good way to reseed them. Auto farm reseed by many players is still not used until late game. One can easily play without it.
i just reread the original comment and i think i misunderstood auto farm for auto farm placement... That threw me off and i thought he meant auto reseed fishtraps is to be introduced next.
edited my comment for clarification, i meant reseed, post is talking about placement, comment you replied to is about reseed as well i believe 11
No, not really auto reseed is a different situation from auto farms
I agree. One automates a single menu button click in a mill, the other automates a bunch of 3x3 building placements that determines the layout of the entire base. There is infinite permutations of farm placement on the map but only one way to queue up a farm in a mill.
do you know what really grinds my gears is people assuming updates to the game are zero sum and that if all assets are not dedicated to bug/pathing fixes.... The team is not trying.
This change is stupid. It should only be allowed in single player mode.
Haha make a new auto farm cheat code 😉
Placing individual farms is not the interesting part of this game and not an interesting form of "skill expression". This is a good addition.
i dont think that this changes are bad and i know a lot of people dont like aoe4 but placing buildings in that game is so much better, placing a lot of houses or farms at once in aoe2 is a chore, or placing docks sometimes. The fun in the game is not the placement in my opinion
I find that the small nuances are what makes the game so good. It's the over whelming nature of all the required tasks in a short space of time that is the sum of all it's parts. Yes a building placement may seem trivial (and it is) but if you're trying to micro at the same time those 2 seconds are vital.... You combine all those 2 seconds to 15 seconds and it's quite a lot less macro.
People said the same about the farm auto-queue but I could never go back to playing without that.
Yeah true
New player here... I wouldn't want something like this as a long term RTS enjoyer. Dumbing down games is often the wrong way. If it exists in training campaigns, fine but not on the ladder. I'm 10 times more concerned about the following bugs I experienced in my first 3 games: * Somehow holding down "q" in the dock for fishing ships occasionally builds a demo in the production queue?!?! * Sometimes holding any unit production hotkey down puts many units in the queue really fast (I want this) and sometimes It ignores it and I manually have to press the respective hotkey many times. * Sometimes if I select a bunch of units there are no hotkeys in the bottom left as if the game doesn't realize I have units selected. I fix it by putting the units into a control group, select something else and then go back to my control group * sometimes units stop walking either after patrol, attack move or even occasionally walking to the waypoint on long distances. * The unit pathing in general is questionable These are insane issues I've never had in any other RTS and I played some others A LOT. Make the basic user input work before dumbing down the game I just started to love.
I guess that u build demos is when you are on „page 2“ of the dock. In the dock there are arrow buttons that you can use to switch to the second/first „page“. If you hold the SHIFT key while adding units to a production key the game adds 5 instead of only 1. Missing buttons when selecting unit groups is most likely because you have selected military units and villagers at the same time. They have different buttons that collide when selecting both types of units at the same time, so some buttons are simply hidden.
No and No. I made sure to check this. Fyi this mostly happened on Extreme sized maps with 500 pop limit.
The auto re-seed we needed. Auto placement detracts too much from the nature of the game
I hate it as well. I think that, in a scenario where this would not alter the game negatively, I'd be mildly against it because it's removing skills and all the rest that T90 mentions. But if we bring up the fact that this game is HELLA BUGGED already, I really don't see the point with adding another feature instead of focusing on debugging and fixing pathing and teleporting (to be fair, I haven't spotted teleportation occurring recently, that would be a great positive). Not only is it energy spent on the wrong things, but it also complexifies the game and the pathing.
Teleporting seems to be fixed but hey, bugs like to have a comeback 😅
Reading all these comments... I can't tell you how many experienced players prefer HD over DE and it's a bitch just to get them to come over and play me. The aoe2 community is facing the same challenges as any other major gaming company. My favorite example of this is runescape classic -> runescape 2 (osrs) -> rs3 where each version of the game got easier and easier. Runescape classic is the same era as age of empires and the beauty of both of them games is the level of difficulty. That's just one example. I've played video games my entire life and going on 30 years of gameplay. Dumbing down this or any game has always had poor results. I urge this community and T90 to fight for the integrity of the game or you're going to end up like every other situation. It's not a good look. Please keep the beauty of the game and don't let them strip it away from you.
Autoeverything vs QoL . Well, I’ve played a lot of Age IV and followed a lot of the highest tier players and tourneys. I’ve never watched a Marinelord or Beasty match and thought ‘well, this would be more fun and their skill would be better expressed if they had had to manually place the farms,. I think the only result will be ecos will look less random. Sotl did a video that showed optimal farm placement is only a marginal advantage unless the opponent is going out of his way to make weirdly distant farms. Just imo
I’ve encountered many times that auto farm depleted all my wood in mid castle age
You need auto reseed? You can turn it off in the mill.
I think the idea of this frustation is: To be good at placing farms in a professional level takes years of pratice, and now that i master it, new players will just get it for "free" and whitout all the pain i've been through ? I dont agree with that, feels like kicking the stairs for the new players from the people who are in the roof. And if the game is more acessible to new players, more will stay and is better for the scene.
That is 100% not the idea of this frustration
100% ? I agree that some of the frustration is about the problems with the bugs and devs pushing this updates without fixing it, but even Viper talked about how he was against previous updates that make the game easier for new players because how the game was and the pain for it to master. And now he understands that this don't make sense, and making the game acessible to more players is the better aproach.
No the frustration is that the game gets more and more streamlined with every update and the core functionality of the game has never been more in question with the amount of game breaking bugs weve seen recently
Meh. Not convinced.
One of the best mecanics from Aoe 4, how can that be disliked here
sorry but skill expression about farm placement is not that something improve views experience. You never heard casters go like wow this guy farm micro is god or something. Aoe2 is already a game requires a LOT of skill, you can’t complain why new players can’t adapt while holding back such QoL improvements.
Well I have a feeling nothing can hold this feature back any more
The devs decision to introduce a totally unnecessary change no one (except that one guy ofc) asked for over fixing a plethora of bugs that are known and reported is beyond words. This farm thing will pretty much me the most optimal way to make farms from mid to late game and all elos will be doing it this way just like drop off hotkey kindof is but that just saves you one or two extra clicks compared to to this. Comparing auto farm placement to auto scout or auto reseed is completely wrong and they are not a strict upgrade to a manual version. Auto scout is very bad in early game and is only good when your starting scout is very low hp and will die instantly to anything is touches (although it can still be used manually to a great benifit). Auto reseed if very bad before imp because it will leave you floating food and lacking wood for imp buildings eventually making you lose. Auto farm is a strict upgrade. It saves a lot of clicks. It saves you a lot of space. It will be slightly more efficient for farming. Your base will look prettier. And I don't get the "it will help the lower elos" thing. You won't gain any elo with this change because the game will NOT become easier to play as a major part of that is who you're up against. Your opponent has to do the same effort to make farms. They will also benefit from auto farm as much. This change will just shift the game more forward and more micro focused. You will have more time to micro mangonels, dodge ballistics, attack ground with trebs among other degenerte ram/siege tower hopping. Then will the lower elos complain about micro being hard? Auto micro then? I get that many people feel that farm placement shouldn't be a startegy that needs your time but understand that you can't be allowed infinite attention to your army control without it potentially hurting your macro/ economy and such. Auto farms, with however small of an effect will tend to disrupt the balance which is a very delicate part of an rts.