Beginner questions

[Doctor Gitgud]

I just started the campaign and it has been a long time since I've played a proper RTS (seems like only MOBA and CoH-style trash is being made these days) so I'm having a tough time getting accustomed. After just a few missions, I already have tons of questions.

-How do you decide how to pace villager production? In starcraft, for instance, you can see that a vespane gas node is full and know not to produce more SCVs, but AOM has four different resources and it seems like you can throw an unlimited number of villagers at each of them, so it's hard to tell what's optimal.

-When I select a random villager and shift click to queue him up to build say...five houses, the foundations appear but he doesn't go build them. I have to select him again and then go back and shift click on all the foundations to get him to actually do the work. Is that how the game is supposed to be or am I missing something?

-Is there a way to face formations of units a certain direction without having to micro and move them around? Most RTS for a long time now have let you click and drag to set the location, direction, and width of a group of units.

-Is there a way to select only combat units when you drag the selection window and not have villagers be included?

[Stavrozium]

* The villager limit is 100,
and you will (almost) always want 100 villagers.
The only reason why you would want less than 100, is to free up pop for more army,
but in most cases, its better to have more income, than a few more units.

So just never stop making villagers; except for maybe the very early game,
you should pause villager production when you want to go to classical age. (age 2)
(as you age up, turn the villager autoqueue back on asap,
by right clicking the button, or using alt + hotkey)
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* Sometimes queueing up multiple buildings can be a bit weird,
but the way you describe it, it seems like the villager doesnt go build at all?

In any case, it is often a good idea to right click foundations again,
to make sure they build things in the right order. (especially for walls)
Also, the moment when villagers are done building something,
they will automatically search for nearby unfinished structures, and go build them.

And when building a resource dropoff point structure, try to always queue up again.
This way you make sure they will go to the gold, when trees are nearby. (f.e.)
(for example, when building a storehouse for a gold mine, (as the Greeks)
place the foundation, then right click the storehouse foundation,
then shift right-click the gold mine)
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* Im not really sure if that is possible in AoM. (havent really tried it yet)

If you want to take a defensive position, in formation,
perhaps you can try using shift clicking for this?
(move them to a point, then shift click a short distance away, to set the direction)
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* Yes, there is an option for this, called "easy military drag-select"

Go to the settings => Game, then scroll down,
you can find it under the "Gameplay" header.

(here you also find some other useful options,
like "immediately autoqueue villagers at game start", and "mouse walk paths".
They are not absolutely necessary, but really nice QoL options)

[Lotor13]

Originally posted by JCD3nton:

I just started the campaign and it has been a long time since I've played a proper RTS (seems like only MOBA and CoH-style trash is being made these days)

CoH is one of the best RTS

There are not really other CoH-style games