There should be Automatic Units Production.

[rex2017]

AOE2:DE is much more friendly to new players now with its more convenient settings, such as the new hotkey system, automatic farm reseeding and the new automatic farm replacement.

But I feel there should be Automatic Units Production, Just like the automatic form reseeding, With a bottom switched on, a building can keep producing a kind of unit as long as there are enough resources.

I know lots of players would be against this. Continuous villager production is like a standard to distinguish noobs from more skilled players. But, is keeping clicking units production every few seconds really a fun way to play? It’s highly repetitive. If a new player tries to control his units in a fight, he probably won’t be able to keep producing units. Keeping inserting units production in fighting scene is more like a distraction. The high level players could deal with this distraction with their muscle memory. But it’s not very friendly to new players.

Unlike some RTS while players produce dozens of units in a match, players will produce hundreds of units in an AOE2 match. If a highly percentage of player action is on a highly repetitive action, I don’t think it makes the game more fun to play.

Furthermore, as players upgrade themselves through the “continuous villager production” level, they then focused on balancing incomes and expenses. For example, if I have 14 farmers, I can keep producing villagers and scouts cavalry. If i have 4 lumberjacks 6 farmers and 6 gold miner, I can keep producing villagers with 1 TC and archers with 2 archery range. In this way players can turn their resources into military might as quickly as possible. The production Queue is not very helpful because high level player don’t want to stack too many resources as every bit of resources you don’t spend quickly makes you weaker. If your aim is keeping the stock low, then you can’t make a long queue. Keeping your economy-military model working while maximizing utilization of resource is what makes this game really interesting (besides micro control in fighting scene).

Yet more than half of the players can never reach this level. What’s the biggest barricade that keep a new player from playing like this? Hundreds of hours on practicing “continuous units production”.

Don’t worry about that this would make the game boring, players still have to assign work to villagers and build buildings and try to have a good fight. And besides that, you have a better experience in control fighting units because the process will be interrupted fewer times.

There should be automatic units production. But maybe we shouldn’t be too radical, here’s my suggestion:
1.Enable Automatic Units Production since Feudal age so that continuous villager production is still a thing in the dark age. In this way, AOE2 could retain some of its traditional flavor.
2.If you think automatic battle units production has gone too far, just add automatic villager production. If players like this, they will ask for more.

[Quintem]

Short answer: No

Long Answer: Also no but why.

This is monumental shift in design. The automatic farm placement honestly is kind of whatever. It's not nearly as helpful as automatic villager production.

Also automating unit production could with a huge list of drawbacks. If you keep making units you're not going advance to the next age very quickly. It would honestly be a noob trap. Slightly better players will manage when they need units and when they don't.

Currently there are hotkeys to select all buildings of a type. It is really not THAT difficult to press the hotkeys or set ones up that work for you that allow for ease of access to all production buildings. You hold shift + the hotkey you want and you can spam 5 units at a time. Got 10 barracks. Press select all barracks hotkey, press shift + W twice. Out come 10 halbs in 30 seconds.

Another problem with automation is turning it off. If you waste your resources on producing the wrong units then you also run into economic issues.

Automatic production does not have a place in games like this, Starcraft is the same. It's not big enough scale like maybe some games that do offer this that your economy can just churn out 100s or 1000s of units easily.

It just damages the fabric of the game and it's design too much and brings a whole host of balance issues. I also feel like it would create a greater divide between lower skill players and higher skill players. Higher skill players won't use this ever. Except maybe auto villagers. You'll just end up in a situation of toggling things on or off anyway. Also for some civs where swarming enemies with units is a thing. It would make Goths kind of annoying to play against at lower levels where fast producing cheap infantry can just pour out of barracks effortlessly. That's just one example.

[Moist Butt]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q879j3ydfw8

[yujiri]

Absolutely agree with this proposal! It's something I've been wanting for a while for all the reasons you said. Planning on designing an RTS that has it.

[Quintem]

Nguyên văn bởi Moist Butt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q879j3ydfw8

Your descent into madness is complete.

[Mitchel]

It would be really nice to have this implemented. This would just make things less frustrating in my opinion. The real pro's probably won't use this, and for casual players it requires a lot less hotkey spam. People are always scared of QoL updates, but so far none of them really changed how the game is played. Also this feature is in Age of Mythology and works just fine there.

It could be disabled for ranked matches if that makes people less scared of this feature.

[Kampfschwein Fjonda]

Just like 75 pop limit in early campaigns it teaches poor play:
In late game you dont need spam button, you need 20 military buildings on a hotkey.

[Moist Butt]

Nguyên văn bởi Quintem:

Nguyên văn bởi Moist Butt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q879j3ydfw8

Your descent into madness is complete.

why bother in even trying. Applaud to u for trying still tho lol.

[box]

Can I introduce you to AOE2 CBA?

This isn't a good idea. The whole point of controlling production is so you have the ability to determine what kind of army you need in what situation.

So now taking your idea a bit further,
As you are aware you need a barracks in order to access the Archery range and stable (unless Khmer) now if I wanted to archer rush why would I want my barracks to be spitting units out and draining resources?

Then there's the question of what kind of units do I want the building to spit out, if I want to counter a scout push with spears do I really want my barracks to be spitting out unupgraded militia?

Thirdly there's this problem, the front progresses and I build some more production buildings forward, forgetting I had a few other buildings at the back of my base that are on auto. I now have these buildings spitting out units even though I no longer want them to, eating up my population space and my resources.

I think the easier thing is for new players to practice macro than ask for an inefficient design idea to be implemented. That way the player improves their gameplay instead of relying on crutches that foster bad habits to compensate for their inexperience.

[Mitchel]

There is already so much automation going on. Villagers do basically everything automatically. Gather resources after building a TC, mill, lumbercamp, mining camp. Automatically drop off resources. Continue building new buildings that are close after finishing one. Fishing ships do the same stuff.

Then there is auto scout. Waypoints. Patrol. Attack move.

If you want to better manage your economy then you can just turn the auto queue off. Or don't use it. The devs can even implement a hotkey and/or button to disable all auto queues at once. Don't think in problems, think in opportunities.

[box]

Nguyên văn bởi Mitchel:

If you want to better manage your economy then you can just turn the auto queue off. Or don't use it. The devs can even implement a hotkey and/or button to disable all auto queues at once. Don't think in problems, think in opportunities.

Perhaps the player who doesn't want to engage in the gameplay might want to look at playing another game instead.

[Mitchel]

Nguyên văn bởi Kampfschwein Fjonda:

Just like 75 pop limit in early campaigns it teaches poor play:
In late game you dont need spam button, you need 20 military buildings on a hotkey.

You still need to spam hotkeys to create units. What's the point of that? It's annoying and unnecessary. Auto queue would solve that. And if you want to stop creating units, you just turn it off again. Easy as that.

[Mitchel]

Nguyên văn bởi box:

Nguyên văn bởi Mitchel:

If you want to better manage your economy then you can just turn the auto queue off. Or don't use it. The devs can even implement a hotkey and/or button to disable all auto queues at once. Don't think in problems, think in opportunities.

Perhaps the player who doesn't want to engage in the gameplay might want to look at playing another game instead.

You could say that about any change that's being proposed then. This game already received many QoL updates. Look at auto farm reseed, queueing technologies, multiple building queues etc.

If you want to be a purist then one could say you should stick to the original game as well.

[box]

Nguyên văn bởi Mitchel:

You could say that about any change that's being proposed then. This game already received many QoL updates. Look at auto farm reseed, queueing technologies, multiple building queues etc.

Queuing units and tech, shift building and shift clicking has been around since the beginning.

Also shift clicking unit production queue is a thing.

[Kampfschwein Fjonda]

Nguyên văn bởi box:

Also shift clicking unit production queue is a thing.

To rephrase this more clearly: you can queue 5 units with one click. So with 20 stables you can build 20 hussars with 4 clicks in a few seconds. Where is your auto army, then?

There have been many overreactions on the autofarm addition and it was clearly shown that most of the community with some competitive spirit sees the red line crossed badly at autoproduction.

I guess the feature would also be a big noob trap, draining all your food so you can never click up to castle / imperial age. Kindly stay away. Thank you.

[Quintem]

I feel like my post was not read by based off the comments here by some. There is a fine line between QoL and the game plays itself.

Claims of making units is annoying has got to be one of the silliest. Knowing when, where and what to produce is a key component of the game. If you have your buildings spit out any old unit you're going run into issues. Your economy will run into issues. The game is not built around this level of automation.