UI improvements, mods, cheating?

[Ishy]

A friend of mine with some programming know-how was inspired by Raid Frames, DBM and other raid-helper mods in World of Warcraft, and so he made a simple tool for AoE that can extract information from the screen and use that information to present visual and auditory warnings and notifications to the player. As an example, he made it so that when he's getting close to the current the housing limit, a big red text flashes on the screen with an accompanying sound effect. Same thing happens when the idle villager button lights up, or when his TC(s) is/are idle (by monitoring the queue in the upper left corner), among other things.

Naturally, these are all things that an observant player would keep track of anyway, but it still lets him offload some of the conscious processing to an external helper. He also made it track some things that are relatively difficult to keep track of as a player, e.g. approximate resource collection/spending rates per minute. We only play against the AI (so he doesn't use the tool in a competitive PVP setting), but some others in my play group deemed it cheating to use this kind of UI enhancer, especially since it's not an UI mod, but an external tool. And curiously enough, there are relatively few UI mods available that accomplish similar things.

Though keeping track of villager counts, housing limits etc. might be considered core skills in AoE, I don't believe they are necessarily a very interesting part of the game, so I don't really mind. I also think the base UI could be improved in a similarly to what my friend has done (with options to toggle such warnings/notifications on and off, of course). While there have been some improvements (the option to have exclamation marks above idle villagers, for one), overall the UI is kind of basic and uninformative most of the time.

I'm interested in the public opinion on UI enhancing mods (and by extension, external UI enhancing tools). What kind of information would you accept before you'd consider it cheating, and what kind of UI improvements would you like to see in AoE? My friend is also looking for ideas of how to utilize the UI information in creative ways to enhance his gameplay, so those are welcome as well.

[Solid Snack]

Honestly, I already consider small trees to be cheating, as you would realistically be otherwise able to "hide" villagers from enemy chasing them and sneak scouts into enemy bases while distracting them on the other front. But I accept that I'm in the minority with that, so what you are proposing is honestly probably no different to that (ie. won't be considered cheating by the vast community). Personally I don't (and wouldn't) use mods like that as it would make me feel dirty, but - as I said - I'm in the minority and you'd probably find a lot of people interested in making the game more boring.

[Ishy]

Hehe, in that case I'm cheating quite heavily as well, since I use the Age of Cubes UI mod, which turns all the resources (including trees) into colored cubes, making it very easy to spot villagers etc. behind the trees.

[The Owlogram]

I think the devs didn't enforce anything against graphics/UI mod because that would encroach on the players' freedom to mod their game, and some of them are kinda their own fault tbh (like the mod that showed the circle on which TCs would always generate in 1v1, it exists only cuz the devs at some point messed the map gen), but theoretically they could set up an anti cheat to detect external programs, and I'm pretty sure no one who seeks to organize any kind of competition would write a set of rules that allows programs such as your friend's. That being said the housing and ressources notifications are features that already exist in AoM and AoE3 and they don't strike me as advantages big enough to turn losses into wins, however I think the TC one is pushing it a bit far, in DE you can see your unit production at all times and the "select all" hotkeys make it trivially easy to keep up continuous production without even needing to look at your base so there is no excuse to need something like that.

[Gequi]

Originally posted by The Owlogram:

they could set up an anti cheat to detect external programs, and I'm pretty sure no one who seeks to organize any kind of competition would write a set of rules that allows programs such as your friend's.

Anti-cheats do not solve the problem at 100% and they cause serious risk to the system kernel, so all Linux / Steam Deck players could not play AoE2 as it is happening on other games like GTA5 online.