@@ChillyEmpire It's actually pretty good strategy with Loki because you convert villagers into berserkers for free,so it's a great solution when you're out of gold,I use it with bragi because dying berserkers give you favour
There's always going to be a balance between quality of life features and skill expression, and I think it depends on the game, honestly. For example: in Blizzard RTSes there is actually a strategy to choosing when to cut worker production because of the way macro works in those games. A lot of high-level build orders in Brood War and SC2 involve getting to a specific number of workers, or otherwise simply saturating a specific number of bases, then cutting worker production to put all resources into military. Stormgate is like this too: you often don't want to be continuously making workers for the whole game because if you fall too far behind your opponent in military it's incredibly difficult to not just lose the game to an attack. It's far easier to get new players on board with manual worker production when they only have to remember to do it for like 5 or 6 minutes before focusing more on military production and combat. Macro in Blizzard RTS is also incredibly straightforward so I think manual worker production is justfied in those games. The problem with Age of Empires is not just that there's no point where cutting worker production makes strategic sense, but moreso that worker production has to be maintained for potentially 30-40 minutes, and newer players will absolutely forget about their worker queues at some point during that time. And I think macro in AoE is complicated enough that it doesn't need manual worker queues to be interesting
100% agree. My razor in RTS games is “does this feature create interesting strategic choices for the player?” If choosing to make vills actually involved strategic cost/benefit analysis, then yes, it would make sense to make training vills manual. I wish I brought this up in the video but here’s an example to reinforce my point: The Town Center in Age games for the most part only produce villagers, so the strategic choice there is obvious. Imagine if we instead had a civilization that produced all of its military in the Town Center as well. Now all of a sudden things are interesting. I can’t only spam villagers because I eventually will need to make military. But when I choose to make those units is where the “fun” and skill expression is. (The examples you gave also perfectly illustrate this)
I despise queuing my villager, but I despise Auto-queuing more. That feature sums up the next generation of game, where it minimizes your Attention Span & make decisions for you. And any Age game can't be compared head-to-head to Blizzard RTS, Age game doesn't have complex Unit Skills where you Blink, create Roadblocks, or positioned your utility unit that have Shield Generator buff. Most of Age skills involves purely on target-casting and aura buffs. So... yeah, Blizzard have simpler worker mechanic because it focused more on the enemy engagement. TLDR: Manually queuing workers in Age games is a skill expression, it involves coordination & discipline. It can truly what distinct a good player and a bad one. "I forgot to produce more villagers, It's so frustrating" is what a complacent player with a minimum attention-span would say.
I agree! AoE2, AoE4, and AoM all have very cheap and very fast training villagers, so they pay off very quickly and even if you lose a villager 1-3 minutes after training it it was likely still worth it. Another option would be to design a system where making villagers actually IS a choice with pros and cons. AoE3 did this a little differently where villagers were actually quite expensive and the train time was longer (which also means you don't have to queue as frequently), and it usually led to a few moments in each game where it was better to stop training villagers in favor of a military unit or technology for a brief period. It doesn't quite achieve the goal of making it a decision, but it's closer. SC2 also has this to an extent since you can saturate a base, and then more workers becomes inefficient. But sometimes oversaturating can be good so you can more quickly saturate a future base. Tricky to design something like this for Age of Empires, but a fun thought experiment :)
@@meepo1862 no, chess blitz is mostly about making the right desicion fast, and only after about clicking and premoving on the last 10 seconds - you need to survive to this stage whole 3 minutes lol
Wait what, It's the opposite... Training villagers requires you to be on your toe, it involves spending resource & population. Not mentioning the amount of coordination & discipline. It is what distinct good & bad Age player. In chess, autoqueuing is like "I don't press the clock button because everyone should know I stopped my time when I move my piece". you see? It's complacency
@@fbi9965 without autoeverything ,you have to make right decision fast , because of the multitasking, there's no time to think, so yea it's exactly like playing chess blitz
@@meepo1862 nah, you can't compare pressing button(which is done automatically online), with casting magic spell on 400 apm. Did you see beastyqt streams? It's ridiculous, it's not about macro or micro, it's just some clicker simulator
Factorio mode should honestly be a gamemode in many of the Age of Empires games. You not only have to gather raw resources, you must also bake bread from wheat, cook meat from animals, turn wood into workable lumber, and your resources are physically at the drop off site you place, so you must collect it from there to move it to the next site for construction. It would complicate the game greatly, but also reward players who can manage base building. And it would be a gamemode of its own, so no worries about the base game.
I think both villager queue, and military queue are valid - and even enhancing - features. RTS should always be about executing players decisions over players performing those decisions, and turning on auto-queue is one of those. Aoe1 had no unit queue, and much like being able to queue up some units makes the game more about decision making and ultimately more interesting, auto-queue does the same. I don't see it as a slippery slope at all - auto-everything mentality has got it wrong. People seem to forget that there are many instances where you don't want auto-queue - such as when your rushing to the next age, or if you leave it on and make too much of the wrong / countered unit / or don't spend your population efficiently in late game. People seem to treat auto-queue as some sort of cheat code, when really its just another tool, bringing the skill ceiling higher - and that's always a good thing. Its also not like your enemy has it and you don't. Its the same with placing farms in an area, the decision is I want farms tightly packed here, once that decision is made, it shouldn't be hard to execute mechanically - its just placing farms. (Honestly they should change that so you hold down shift when placing a farm it simultaneously ghosts for placing N farms according to how many villagers you have selected.)
Military autoqueue is where I draw the line, because my razor is “is this a strategic decision”. You always want to make vills. You don’t necessarily always want to make that specific military unit.
@@ChillyEmpire that's the point tho. If you use auto queue to accidentally make the wrong unit, that's on you. Dumb dumb. It's a tool it can be used for the wrong reason. Hence why it's never hurt the pro scene, and why it's a perfectly valid feature. Noobs can use it for better or for worse.
Totally agreed with everything you said, keep spreeding the word so we can bring back the glory days of rts with new elemments, new mechanics, focus on battles and in the fun!
It's annoying that I have to continuously hit q on my TC every single game because players want to include a limitation that was done back in the 90's. It's just a QoL feature. Yes building villagers continuously is a skill... but in terms of gameplay it adds 0 to the fun or strategy - It's not even a choice! If you didn't have to worry about it because you had autoqueue, you could literally spend that time/effort on the more high value parts of the game that are more fun to play and watch. The game has such a high skill cap it will make no difference to high level play at all. I never hear people arguing to remove multi building select. Why is that an OK QoL feature and Auto-Queue isn't?
Auto-queue is not a quality of life feature, because it directly impacts gameplay as opposed to a minor change such as reorganizing the user interface and making things clearer to see. It's incorrect terminology and needs to be referred to as a 'gameplay feature'. Same for multi-building select, that is a gameplay feature and not a QoL feature which implies insignificant gameplay impact.
@@mnmmnmm you're being extremely pedantic. You're talking semantics. I don't agree that's it's not a QoL. QoL can include gameplay features that make the game more convenient to play.
@@TheIceSaffron Making villagers is a skill you have to master, and its called macro. If you play vs someone who knows how to constantly build them, and you cannot, you will lose duo to having less economy. As an example: At one point in SC2, the devs decided to change a similar mechanic to be an auto cast. What ended up happening? Platinum league players started playing like low masters, because suddenly they could make a much bigger army way faster then before, which skewed the balance since other races mechanics didnt get a similar touch up. Im against doing that as building vills constantly (part of the overall macro) is 1 more skill you can get good at to give you an advantage, rather than the game becoming "who has better micro" and only that.
haha how it does not add to the strategy? U literally have to make vills while u micro units to win a battle but also to win the macro economic war, so that's why u see lot of players with a really good micro but dying easily with players with a better macro, and that's very difficult to do. And u just dont do vills when u need to make upgrades or go next age, hitting just a button to autoqueue is just a dumb idea. And if u dont like making vills, Deathmatch exist, its an aoe 2 mode where u start in imperial age and u dont make vills at first till ur waste ur high resources, just units and it never was so popular like RM mode. Aoe 2 need lot of improvments but auto vills is not the way
As someone who has been playing RTS since a little boy, i agree with you. Constant making villagers was never the most engaging part of theses games, but the good decision making. Should i upgrade my army and advance in age or make more units ? Should i harass my opponent or defend? The right answer to this questions gives the most satisfaction to the player like no other game in my opinion.
I've played RTS games since I was 5, and the biggest appeal has always been the combination of decision making and mechanical execution. More automation takes away from the mechanical execution that brings more chaos to the gameplay. While I personally don't like Auto-queue villagers, I think it's fine since there's little reason to not keep producing them in the Age games (compared to other games where there's actually situations where you need to stop making workers), but military auto-queue is too much because of the macro that it takes out of the game for people that enjoy macro gameplay as opposed to micro gameplay.
Limiting workers like SC2 was a brilliant move because they want you to focus more on showing off your prowess in unit skills. Age game on the other hand, is always about the fundamental blueprint of any RTS formula. And auto-queuing shouldn't be mandatory because it just tells you that you lack endurance & discipline. If auto-queuing is a welcome feature, then Instant Building should be a feature as well.... Hell, Instant Unit production should be as well, because apparently that is where the fun is right? I personally despise it, I played AoM when I was 7yo, and what makes me love it other than other RTS is because the fundamental formula is there, just as it was, just the way we all like it when gaming is at its peak.
I also agree that building vills is effectively a non-choice in rts games that use workers/builders. I feel like if there was more of a balance to it perhaps by giving military units economic functions or allowing an option to automatically harvest resources at a slower rate (like Malians in AoE4) could make vill production into a strategic decision but as it stands it's just a barrier to entry.
I honestly believe AoM is tackling the RTS difficulty issue in the best way possible. Vill auto-queue, military auto-queue outside of ranked games, and auto-grouping makes it infinitely more fun and comfortable to play. Saying this as someone who's been playing RTS since Starcraft. It's not about taking features away like Battle Aces, it's about making them not be a nuisance while allowing you to focus on the *strategic* choices. I don't agree with BeastQT's solution to it, because it's basically making auto-queueing useless, it defeats the whole purpose. They should just make a different queue for like the 3 sweats that are totally against auto-queue and let the rest of the people enjoy the game.
Thank you, finally somebody brings the point that it's not an option not to make villagers, didn't hear that any time during the hours long discussions of other creators. I come from aoe2 to aoe4 and now to aomr, and this feature makes the game so much more fun and friendly to me and my friends that play it casually.
It's an issue in general within gaming. There's this weird group of gamers who insist they're "casual" cuz they "only" have a rank of X or whatever. Gamers seem to think that unless you're top 0.1% you're a filthy casual for some reason....
I greatly agree with your arguments here and especially liked the point about auto-queueing opening up opportunities for new, actually strategic skill expression like AoE4's influence system offers.
Personally I think the more automation like this strategy games have the better. There is this thing called "macro cycle" you do in games like sc2 or wc3 which consists of you going through all your production stuff and ensuring it produces something. You essentially just train a habit to do this regularly. I don't think this is the kind of skill expression most people are looking for in their rts games. And really, production automation can not possible detract much from a skill expression in the rts game because it just frees up your apm to do a lot of other stuff. It's a real time strategy game, there's always something you can micromanage (aside from earliest minutes of some games) and people that excel at it or have higher apm will still be able to express themselves through it.
This is exactly what I don't want to see as someone passionate with actively playing RTS games and greatly enjoys macro-based gameplay. If I wanted to play a strategy game with little mechanical expression, I'd play a turn-based strategy game, a 4x strategy game or something like Battle Aces (no base management at all and all about micromanging units). RTS is the combination of strategy and mechanical execution, not just strategy only.
@@mnmmnmm there're still plenty of ways to express your mechanical skills, there always will be, it's a real-time game. If anything, macro-cycles detract from mechanical expression by tying up your apm in mindless tasks. You could be using that apm to actually express your skill.
There is a new meta forming in the aoe2 community where one idles the tc to make certain unique units that cost wood and gold. Just throwing it out there
This is absolutely the best argument for Autoqueue I've heard. I just can't stand the monotony involved in most RTS games despite always being interested in playing multiplayer strategy games. Age of Mythology is a breath of fresh air in a sea of long dead RTS's that barely get off the ground. I do wish AoE4 also had Autoqueue, it's such a good and modern feeling game but with AoM out now I don't think I'll ever go back. It's just so much easier to get into
If there's anything from AoE4 I'd like to see added to the game it's the roads and decorative objects that appear in the base, giving it more detail and makes it look lived in and detailed.
I love this take. I want every RTS to have villager or worker auto queue. Personallly, I don’t think military should be auto, but villagers always. I say this as a guy who has played thousands of hours of RTS over my life. The genre needs to be more welcoming to people not like me, but towards new people.
When you said : "It seems like there are more engineers playing RTS games" I think it's more : "RTS games are pushing kids towards engineers careers" lol
Easily the best feature and even made me consider ranked play. I never cared for APM nor any gameplay requiring I do a line of cocaine before playing. No one is forcing you to use streamlined features of modern games like short combos in fighting games or aim assist in console shooters but you can't force normal pplayers not to use them.
I think autoqueue is a fine feature for players to have available. But I really think people are too attached to it. I've seen many players refund or boycott the game because of no military autoqueue in ranked... Which is stupid. I generally dislike autoqueue (as a pretty bad player myself) but I'm fine with it existing overall... I'm just sick of the 'discourse' around autoqueue which often devolves to nothing more than bad faith shouting matches unfortunately. And yeah, autoqueuing Villagers as opposed to military is a very different thing and I agree that if it's good for the community and newer players overall, it should be at least seriously considered as an option for players. Military autoqueue is different though and I'm just not a fan of it outside of casual environments, and villager priorities are a whole different beast.
As someone who hates playing aoe2 multiplayer, I think the villager queue is what did it. I’ve played a few ranked games in retold now and, even if I lose, I feel like I did my best and it was enjoyable. I think the villager auto queue gives me the time to focus on the fighting
Fully agree. Producing vills is about the least fun in the game. Smartly building your base, how you distribute your vills, scouting and chosing units and strategy accordingly, big battles... Basically everything is more fun than building vills. And it at least for vills, this will not really impact tournament lvl gameplay since nobody there forgets building vills.
It's a little different but Stronghold already have villager auto queue. They even go a step further and every building gets assigned a villager to work there when it's built which to an extent also eliminates idle workers being a hurdle for new players. As a very very casual player it really does make the game more accessible so I can get to the fun combat stuff faster and not once did I ever think "Man I really wish I can manually control villager production"
Look I do understand what you are saying here and I do think these are very valid reasons to support auto queue, but the problem is that it won't stop with only villager auto queue, military auto queue is already a thing, and there also has been the proposal of having tech auto queue (and if I'm not mistaken the Xbox version of AoM Retold also has an option to make your villagers automatically distribute themselves amongst the different resources), auto scouting is also a thing now. And yet again, this things are not actually bad by themselves, and I do understand the reasoning for having them into the game, you don't wanna waste your time dealing with this tedious, repetitive tasks every single time, and instead wanna focus on "the real fun" which is engaging your army in epic battles. But the thing is, the players that have this mindset and want these kind of mechanics added to the game don't actually want to play and Age of Empires game anymore, they want to play something like Battle Aces, and I don't say it as an insult or anything, I'm being completely serious, that's exactly what that game is about, it takes away all the macro, and instead puts all your focus into microing your army, it is a very solid gameplay loop and the genre that it is pioneering is very fun I'll admit, but that is not Age of Empires anymore, its a new genre, a Fast-Phased RTS as the devs of that game have referred to, it is not a traditional RTS. The way I see it, the fun in a traditional RTS comes from mastering the art of multitasking, is reorganizing your villagers as your start needing more of less of each resource, is deciding when is the most optimal time to research every tech given their cost and the time it takes for them to pay of, actively using your army to either defend or attack, never idling any soldier, make more houses as you need it, scouting you opponent to react to what he's doing, and being able to do all of this things one after another, without forgetting to do anything, while reacting to what your opponent is doing, who is also dealing witch the exact same matter, and yes, remembering to queue up new villagers, is part of that dance. Being all honest I can agree with you that villager auto queue can be accepted in the genre of traditional RTS, as like you mention in the video, there's never a reason to not be constantly making new villagers, unlike troops and techs which do have their time to be made and not made, but I just don't see a way that introducing this mechanic will ever be ending on just that, it is going to cooperate to the already ongoing process of automation that has being in act with all the Age games, with auto scouting, the aforementioned automatic villager recourse distribution, the game Age series is slowly losing their original identity. What's next, will villagers now automatically make new houses as you get close to hit the population cap? Will the units now have a Seek and Destroy command so that you can just select 10 horsemen and tell them to go around and do the raidings for you? This is not the game that I want to play anymore, I don't want to play a fast-phased RTS, I want to play a Classical RTS, and if you don't, that is completely respectable and I don't have anything against you whatsoever, but just go play Battle Aces instead, show your support to that genre so that it gets more recognition and more games of that nature are made, but don't try to make the Age series to convert into Battle Aces. Live and let live ya know, I just don't think is fair for us old folk to see the game that we enjoyed to slowly disappear just to get new audiences that are not even interested into what the actual deal of the game used to be, to hop in to the game.
Completely agree with you. And when I saw the option of automatically allocating your villagers (it's in the PC version as well) I was kind of shocked. What then is even the gameplay anymore? This is turning into an auto-battler of sorts (I've never played Battle Aces)...
Thanks for the well thought out post. In my view, designing with a specific razor solves the concern you raised. My razor is “does this aspect of the game create interesting strategic choices for the player”. If not, cut it. Villager training in AOE games is something you should almost never not do. So automate it. Military and tech autoqueue doesn’t fit with this razor. You shouldn’t always be making military or researching techs. The player’s choice to do so IS an interesting strategic choice. I’m not a fan of battle aces. I’m not all about the battle micro. I also love the base building aspect. It’s why I like Age of Empires. My point is that base planning and resource management can be given more complexity to compensate for the autoqueue. Base planning IS player expression, it’s visual (so esports friendly), and it’s fun.
This is absolutely true. I've followed both RTS games and many other genres of games for a long time, and the reality is that introducing these kind of features isn't going to bring new players into the game, because they just aren't interested in the how the genre itself plays. People that don't enjoy managing their macro or micro just aren't people interested in traditional RTS gameplay, and instead just play games like Total War where it's entirely based on decision making with little depth in mechanical execution of gameplay. Not saying those kind of games are bad at all, but they're a different kind of games with a different audience. People continue to say that increased automation of 'boring gameplay' will bring new players in, but really it's just appeasing one side of the already existing RTS audience in favor over the other, not attracting people that don't even play RTS games. The RTS genre just isn't popular because of the trends of gaming in general, with many people preferring less complex gameplay for something that's trivial to learn and play on the same day they pick it up. Same reason why MMO and MOBA games are much less popular than they used to be, despite still having active competitive scene, it's because they take too long for current gamers to learn how to play before they get bored or frustrated enough to move onto something else.
Dribbling also performs an essential role of creating a measure of vulnerability for the player with the ball, as someone else can swipe it from them. Without dribbling, basketball would be decided purely by grip strength alone. Villager production however doesn’t have such an impact. Not in any way that is changed by making it auto-queue-able at least
I think a game that has opened up a lot of qol features but expanded more on strategy is BAR. That game has so many nice features that free up apm whilst at the same time making base building, eco management, and tech much more interesting and in depth.
I think a lot of people come to BAR and are surprised by features... that are over twenty years old because they were already in Total Annihilation and later Supreme Commander. It's just a different tradition of RTS design.
My issue with this position is that it doesn’t follow proper design thinking. You’re punishing noobs for being noobs basically. And it disconnects newer players from understanding what pro players are actually doing. Making the esports scene less relatable. Beasty also emphasized that he liked the macro elements of AOE. My point here is, add autoqueue because villager production isn’t creative/strategic anyways , but also add new basebuilding and resource management mechanics.
7:45 in regards to aussiedrongo never saying, "oh my god he remembered to build his villagers." Sure thats true, BUT in the end game analysis its very common to check the villager graph and thats where we see true skill expression of people being able to continue making them under pressure. I've seen mid/pro games where that pressure is enough to make the difference and the opponent pulls a win. Auto Q is terribly bad and takes away from the constant "remember to make" from new players and will translate to them failing "remember to keep pumping army" I believe the constant pressure to make villagers makes a better player (muscle memory and APM) practice. I can also touch more on why auto Q is bad, but I don't want to write a whole essay lol.
Good to see you pudge. Yeah I mean you’ve seen my streams, you know I also like checking villager graphs post game. I agree that auto queue is not a perfect solution. My point is that with auto queue implemented we can start moving towards more interesting base planning/macro features. (Like factorio style algorithms) The point is that what makes you win in a strategy game should be based on the strategic choices you make, rather than mechanical habits.
@@ChillyEmpire You don't want to improve the Age series. You want to play a different game. That's perfectly fine, just don't try to ruin what works for other people.
I am not totally sure tbh. I did get a rush on lower ELO AoE2 matches where you are able to counter rushes by simply keep making villagers. For beginners there is this difficulty where playing aggressive makes you forget your villager creation and in that stage defending and doing your villagers is actually a fun way to win eventually. I think those games are actually my best memories on competitive AoE. But it's very technical in a sense. I do like how auto-queuing emphasizes different aspects that should be more important: strategizing, decision making. I think this is a very healthy decision cause it's also making AoE2 and AoM competitive scene totally different and making sure AoM is not just an AoE2 clone in a different setting. I'm not totally sure I like it more than AoE2 then, but it's great to have both!
If they argue that autobuild 1 villager then another and so on is bad for RTS, then it should also be true that having the options to que 2 or more villagers is bad for rts. You should press once, after it ends you need to go back and press again. Yes, queuing 15 units is bad cause you lock resources, but forgetting to deactivate autobuild is also bad. This mentality is why LoL is more popular than Dota, I want to have fun in a game not to work. I want to harass my opponent when he tries to kill my minion I don't want to kill my own minion and deny his Kill & Rewards.
Generally i have friend who cant get into aoe cause of how the intense the eco is. But the auto que actually has one of them interested. Frankly i love it on military to cause you can still screw yourself if your waisting your resource on units that wont help you win. There are ao many other thing to worry about along with auto q still being less efficient as it it doesn't need to have a nerf attached to it
Edit: The video's title has been changed, so my criticism is no longer valid, but below is my original comment :) I completely agree specifically for the Age series. However, I don't think this should extend to "every RTS game where you make villagers and build buildings", because in a game like StarCraft 2 for example, auto-queue would be pretty detrimental. The big difference there is that Age matches tend to be long. Very long in comparison. And remembering to produce villagers over the whole game is hard. You mess up with villager production at the 10 minute mark, and suddenly you're way far behind and you get crushed. You also have more resources to think about, because your villagers need to mine gold, chop trees, gather food, and sometimes even produce favor, on top of building construction. In Starcraft 2, by minute 5 the players have already been poking at eachother for a while, trying to find a weakness, maybe preparing to send unit drops into the enemy's base, etc. You only have to saturate 2 resources and each base has an exact maximum amount of effective workers, after which there is no reason to make them anymore. The villagers are close to the base at all times, and the opponent cannot hide villagers out on the map without building a whole new base there. There are also many instances in the game where a player WILL in fact choose to build more army instead of workers. You have to find a good balance between the two. The game also isn't designed to go on too long, and when it does, matches often reach a point where the players sacrifice their own workers on purpose to free up supply. In a game where most matches end before the 7-8 minute mark, I believe remembering to produce workers is one of the things that can make macro that much more engaging, rather than just focusing on producing your military units and attacking. So, while I generally agree with your point, I believe there's an important distinction to be made that not every game with villager macro would benefit from this.
Oh 100%. I should rename the video. In the video I emphasize that it’s “any rts that’s like aoe”. And that aoe specifically is balanced in a way that villagers should always be produced.
every time i see comment like "what's next, making the game play itself " it takes another year off my life. "oh, they have a godpower that let's you send meteors? what's next, a godpower that just corrupts your opponents hard drive?" be serious. you sound like a child.
I didn't play game with auto-queue yet, but I like the "fantasy" of focusing more on micro. I remember few battles in AOE4 where I played engagement really well and destroyed enemy. Even though. :D It happened rarelly. But I am 100% sure that game needs to choose if it always allows to use it or only in SP and unranked. Because... if you get used to it and then you reach certain rank and you are forced to produce manually, you are fucked.
So, I've never hit the auto queue button for villagers. I've never played a ranked game, but I think I'm pretty good in RTS. I've done all the campaigns in Titan level and am currently going through the ones in Retold in Titan again. I think the reason why I've never done it is because I think I need to control my villager dispersion and allocation. I tried the auto "priority" option in Retold and lasted all but 5 seconds and I don't think I'll ever use it again. Like, I have my plan for each villager at the moment they're spawn and I don't like having villagers being constantly created because then they take up population for nothing. However, I 100% mourn the auto queue button for the warriors, I've always used it for when the game reached it's pinacle and I'm launching my big offense. Not having it will force me to rewire my brain so that I end up with no back up army when I'm so consumed by the offense. I do see your point though. I think it's a very valid way of playing and I do agree that for new players, especially new RTS players, it's a welcome option. I really wonder why they took it out. Maybe if we complain enough, they'll put it back? The Dev definitely seem to be listening to our opinions and critics. I've never learn that way because I simply never grew up with it. I started playing Age of Empire I when I was 8 or 9 and I've stuck with it for as long as I could. Age of Mythology is the only RTS game I've ever played that even offers it.
@@raptorhacker599 In general - autoqueue is not the way to go for rts. It removes a huge chunk of the game and it's one of the most enjoyable ones as well.
Yeah, totally agree, and bounced off villager priorities just as hard. The fact that all of my existing allocated villagers just stopped and ran off to do something I didn't tell them to do irked me so hard I turned it off immediately. It's the minute-to-minute micromanaging that is what I enjoy about the Age games, and the illusion that my decision to make that next villager is what made that particular scenario or skirmish play out the way it did. I can see the argument for these being QoL features for new players who don't want to deal with that sort of stuff, as auto reseeding was in 2DE, and fair play to them, but having it on either by default or as the only option is not the way I want to play an RTS as a single-player main and would probably turn me off the genre forever.
@@Chili_Bass Yeah it remove a chunk, the boring chunk, you might enjoy going to your tc every 30 seconds to do something that's not an option and that could be automated but I'd rather spend this time on my micro and strategic decision making. It's the reason I bounced off age of empire but really enjoy age of mythology.
Age series are games that promotes macro play above micro (compare to starcraft). More TCs, bigger eco, more vils (when you play defensive you usually have smaller idle time). Its a part of the game. Even as older player you can play smarter and beat kid with insane micro (look at Daut). Autoque kills this idea and makes game more closer to starcraft. Beasty explored this topic and he makes valid points there.
With the villager AQ there is still a lot of macro in the game and on top of that in AoM it fits more because the game is more frenetic than other AoE. Automating something where you have no choice of where and when (tedious task in general) is a good thing for the genre as there is more skill on the other hand.
@@ChillyEmpire i did, i like it. I just prefer the Beasty point of view as its more conservative. AoE2 has the biggest playerbase maybe even in entire RTS right now and game flourish. I really like how both AoE2 and AoE4 plays out and i;m biassed in those direction. In AoE2 recently there was a huge debate about autofarming feature and many, many arguments there could be moved into AQ debete here. Overall if you remove all tedious tasks only thing is remains is micro and fights which isnt great imo. I get your point and i guess from all games AoM fits the best with the autoque
Although Stormgate is not doing well for other reasons, their devs were right about what needs to be done to enlarge the niche in RTS games: Greater accessibility and a competitive team scene.
Any RTS released today needs to emphasize team games. In fact, I’d argue that they should be balanced around team games specifically. RTS dinosaurs (even like myself) are a dying breed.
Nah it's the same as saying whether or not we need to remoce box area unit selecting(just shift + lmb select bruh) or ctrl + numbers grouping😂😂😂 it's just QoL feature. That kind of stuff should not be argued😂
it isn't just a arbitary "click a key to make villager/unit" there is strategy in it as well. The problem lies in the significant resource benefits of auto-queing, instead of paying all at once for a bunch of units, your paying one at a time. this removes decision making in the game. Should I expand and tech up? or should I build an army and be aggressive. With autoqueue your getting both at the same time essentially. this would be most apparent in military autoqueue, but it would also be seen in villager autoqueue to some extent. The solution would be that when you autoqueue, you immediately load up the queue of at least 5-7 units that refills as you get them. even if you don't have enough resources, you would load up all the villagers you can afford and then it would siphon your resources as you get more until the queue is full. this means that it's still useful to manually queue up villagers in the early game, but autoqueue them when it gets tedious in the middle and lategame
Apologies in advance for the rant and the negativity, but what you described is kind of exactly why I'm apprehensive about them adding it for everything (or rather putting it on by default/potentially mandating it, since right now you can simply choose to keep it off if you want). Think people focusing on the strategy vs skill dichotomy aren't hitting something very important to me. Before, back in the blissful ignorance of just playing against AI in skirmishes and doing campaign shenanigans, "not building villagers" absolutely 100% was (still is, really) a viable strategy. You can arbitrarily choose to build some more villagers, Age up, get a food-heavy myth unit like a Hydra, get a few more units to fend off a raid. Leaving villager autoqueue on is "objectively" a better use of your resources if you are in a safe situation, but it's such a meta/pvp-focused mechanic that I feel like it sucks the joy out of skin-of-your-teeth shenanigans that AoM is the absolute pinnacle at. More than once in skirmishes in the beta I'd end up with a blob of idle villagers because I simply had no idea the game was making them by default for newly built TCs - thanks, but I built those TCs to get more pop space for military units, not for more eco production. Tbh, the "time to fun" concept just straight up does not apply for me. I'm a guy who spends hours looting knives and forks in Skyrim because they'll go into my LotD safehouse kitchen collection. For me, clicking the button to decide between a villager and a military unit is in fact the fun, as well as partaking in hour long matches and researching everything possible, not the optimisation or getting more games in faster. If you really wanted to get rid of things that the player doesn't choose and maximise utility, then why build a starting base at all? You never need to think about that. That's what a build order is for, just select it at the start of the match and pop into the game with it fully made, with the "influence" placement already min-maxed to perfection. Empire Wars maxed out. I worry too many RTS devs, content creators and pros think too much about the meta, skill depth, and philosophy of the mechanics when it comes to pvp, whereas the vast majority of players never even touch multiplayer, are true "casuals" like myself, and are just in it for the moment to moment enjoyment of whatever they're doing. It's less a matter of skill and more a matter of believing that what you do matters a lot. That illusion is broken when autoqueue just does it for you, in the same way I'd argue an auto-build order would. There's ofc a matter of QoL, but there does come a point where it stretches too far. Villager priority was that for me. Toggled it off as soon as I tried it. Yes, I am indeed an engineer. Electrical & electronic, to be specific :)
Hi thanks for watching the vid and writing up this response. I think I"m unclear on your argument. Are you saying that there are people such as yourself who don't like autoqueue because it's too overwhelming? I think you also tried to make a point about how not building villagers is a viable strategy. This is simply incorrect. The way the game's numbers work out right now, building Villagers is something you 99% want to do. The case you described where you save food for a Hydra is the textbook case of why autoqueue is so important. I mention this in the video in fact. Because of manual queue, there new players, like yourself, who end up learning how to play the game wrong. These players are tricked by the illusion of choice with regards to training vills, and end up learning really bad habits - like saving food for Hydra instead of a villager. In reality, there is no actual choice here. Even in campaign. Yes you can get through campaign on moderate without making vills. But as you play higher difficulties, and if you want to get through the campaign more efficiently and faster, you should also be making vills.
@@ChillyEmpire My argument is predicated on autoqueue taking away the fun of being in the moment playing the game, by taking that element of the game away from you. I don't really care if I'm playing "poorly" if I'm having fun. In terms of "a viable strategy" I mean of course if you're not playing competitively. I don't mean making absolutely no villagers either, ofc, I just mean that you don't have to immediately bump up to 100 vils in order to get what you want done, in any skirmish or campaign scenario. I've been rolling with about 60 villagers for any given campaign the whole time, Titan difficulty and all. Basically, it's not about whether or not TC idle is a bad habit or suboptimal play, it's about enjoying the agency (or illusion of it). To be clear I'm perfectly aware that you should always be queueing up villies, and that's what I do if I'm playing "seriously". I just feel like in your argumentation you're tantamount to saying "if you're not playing the correct way you shouldn't be playing this game at all". Which is why I point out that most casual RTS players games don't touch multiplayer or play ranked or anything. It's not important to us. We do have a choice on whether to make that villager or make that hydra.
tl;dr - I am fully aware that turning on autoqueue (or simply always queueing villies to 100+) would make me a better, more efficient player. That's simply not important to me. I play video games to have fun, and I have fun micromanaging my base and economy, and *feeling* like every decision matters.
@@rioplats I see, to rephrase in the way I’m understanding you: Some players, especially new players, prefer to be able to control the speed of their ramp. Allowing them manual queue of vills lets them set the game at the pace they’re comfortable with. It’s an interesting take that I hadn’t considered.
@@ChillyEmpire That's about the gist of it, I think. All about picking your own pace, not going 100% all the time. I totally understand what you mean, don't get me wrong - for anyone looking to up their game and improve their skill and strategies, autoqueue is nothing but a boon that frees up attention for other things like microing army, and it's something so trivial that it doesn't use brainpower or planning anyway. But I just prefer to play at my own rhythm, one action at a time, one vill at a time. It's how I unwind and kill time after a long day at work; efficiency doesn't factor into the equation. So as long as I get the option to stick with that approach and not use the feature if I don't want to, I'm happy for y'all to do what you like with autoqueue :) Sorry about the paragraphs, I just feel strongly about there not being a "right" answer to this because in the end, it's what you personally find enjoyable about the game.
100% agree! Brilliant idea :) I really enjoy having it on military units too and choosing when to enable and disable it is quite an important decision or what units to pump. I'm a very casual player and I played it as a kid, very fun. How old are you chilly?? I'm 36, I feel like that's about average for RTS these days especially age games.
yeah i agree.....i prefer autoqueues cause my brain must be focused on battles or strategy......even battles are automanaged by game engine.....when your army clashes wih another army it's game engine that manages pathfinding of units.....pathfinding of units is all automanaged....vills autosearch for deers.....now scout autocollect deers.....monks autoheal....ecc....
Look, there's just no strategy in micro, its not interesting, its binary. If I have spearmen horsemen, and my opponent has spearmen archer, its objectively correct 100% of the time for them to attack my horsemen with their spears, and my spears with their aechers and vice versa. There is no interesting decision making, just awful sweaty apm skill check (which is apparently a bad thing in a competitive game). Also, I'm bad at micro. Therefore, I think we should have automicro where units attack the unit they counter automatically to get rid of this tedious, repetitive task that lacks any meaningful decision making and has no place in RTS. This would free up the player to do things that ARE fun, like queuing villagers and deciding what military units to build :)
The "fun" aspect is kind of a non-arguement in some spots, you assume a lot of things about whether something is fun or not, but if clicking villagers isn't fun, then neither is clicking the tech buttons, or creating military. Hell, I don't think clicking my age up gives me any dopamine either, and so on and so forth. May as well automate everything if clicking buttons isn't fun. What I do agree with, however, is that these options should always be available for people who are new to the series. But, only in the campaign or in AI games, where newer players are more likely to go for their first experiences in an RTS. Or, I do agree that if it's going to be put in multiplayer, it needs to be nerfed heavily. An example would be like in Street Fighter 6. Combos are important, just like villagers, but if people use the easy mode, they're doing less damage overall. If they want to do the most damage, they have to learn the combo. Making auto queue villagers, or even using the new "AI Villager" mode should be an option, but an obviously worse option, to incentivise people to learn how to make villagers and manage their civilization. It's a key feature of the game. People should know and learn how to juggle their economy along with their military, it's just part of the game experience.
your just aking way too far, talking about automating villager production in a game where you always want to be making them isnt equal to autoing everything, i think it should exist everywhere including ranked, its just boring monotonous tasks, everything else is fine, also without any penalty, its not like they dont learn how to play, its just less annoying, i rly dont get your far reaching argument at all
I could’ve been more clear in the vid - my razor for fun in an RTS is “does this aspect of the game drive interesting strategic decision making?” Making vills isn’t actually a decision. You should always be making vills. Which is why it should be automated. Things like making military IS a strategic decision, which is why it shouldn’t be automated. Keep in mind I’m also advocating for more interesting base building and resource management. These aspects of macro ARE interesting strategic decisions.
@Noximillien-LHorloger I'm reaching far as a dramatic example. Auto scouts, auto farms in aoe2, auto military queue in these games, the list goes on for all the real automation examples already in the games. Don't get me wrong, I do think some of these options should exist, but not when it interferes with the core gameplay. It's already kind of happening with AI Villagers, so 'what's next?' is essentially what I'm getting at. If we automate these essential actions, then the game should also automate military for you. After all, it's pretty essential to kill your opponent to win, and it's fairly monotonous just clicking on the military button every time. May as well give us AI Military as an option too, etc. You can probably imagine I don't actually advocate for that, it's just an example of what I mean.
@@ChillyEmpire Then micro shouldn't be in the game, since you should always micro. If you only care about decision-making and not about execution, you should play a board game.
@@MrShadowThief Does there exist a spectrum of execution? Like, even you have to agree that some executions are more compelling than others right? Building a base is interesting execution. It's visual, it's creative. Microing your army is interesting execution. It's visual, it's creative. Queueing vills is one of the LEAST interesting executions in the game while SIMULTANEOUSLY being one of the most important. Not only that, but it also cuts out new players from getting into the game. The choice couldn't be more obvious. The only compelling argument I see for not having auto queue is if you believe the only audience available to RTS is the legacy old-head audience who grew up playing these games.
Interesting. Auto-Queue wasn't a feature I even remembered or was aware of until the recent discussions. And now I'm surprised everyone says it's the most important feature and they can't even play without it and stuff.
Just look at another controversial: auto-placement buildings. Before you had to place the building exactly where the cursor at. Now you can simple over a building with shift and place buildings around automatically with the best space possible. AOE1 we didn't have a queue. We had to manually select the building and produce. Then queue was invented. Now it's auto queue. Games evolve!!
Older RTS such as Supreme Commander even dawn of war 1 have auto que or auto build units from factories so i don't get why people are against it. Even if there was military auto que theres still a degree of knowledge and skill need to use those units not point having 5 buildings pumping out units if they just die one by one or their rally point is set up badly.
Next feature needs to be, implementation of ChatGPT so that it can also take away the decision making. Also yes, queuing vills is no exciting as Beasty said it, it is remembering to do it while doing 10 other things at the same time.
You can't hit Conq in AoE4 and be casual. (: Conq 1 players are in like, the top 5% of RANKED players. I'd say if you are playing online ranked, you some degree of competitive. So anyway... Congrats on hitting Conq! Thats a big achievement!
I think its a really good idea for custom games or casual games, would help me a ton with getting my friends to play more😁 but imo keep it out of ranked, i think apm is the hidden resource in rts
Also think it should be 2-3 sec penalty to incentivize trying to play without it and finally try out ranked que. Once we have them malding in ranked que we got them boys🤓😁
@@teeedeeeee no just normal que time and no penalty whatsoever, few people actually think doing a repeating task every few sec is strategic or engaging
if I wanted apm checks I can play action games. apm checks in rts should be about battle micro or quickwalling not a braindead spam vill autoqueue that I bet pros even have programmable mouses for and that casual players like us don't care to even set up.
Its probably so controversial I wouldn’t add it to any existing games. It’s a political decision, ignore the merits. (AoE2 freaked out when farm placement was added. Which is just a duh QoL move). I agree that it’s probably the best decision I disagree with your last bit. I don’t think QoL is holding RTS back. QoL is something already existing RTS players consider when choosing their game. Players new to RTS? Yeah that’s a huge topic but I don’t thing QoL features is part of the discussion.
I suspect rts is a generational game genre. I struggle seeing younger gamers enjoying them. This may just be my 30 year old showing but I think kids these days would feel like they’re being punished if they played an RTS game. Anyways. Love your channel chilly
I 100% agree and I am never going back to playing rts games that dont have vill autoqueue. I would say it's the greatest addition to age series especially competitively.
5:25 u are totally mistaken here, if u are raiding or having micro battles with ur enemy u can really know he is struggling with making vills, I mean this happens to everyone even the pros, the skill is in who has the better macro to take the game, I mean it's obvious unless u are so bad at the game to see it. Maybe u are talking to much in general, but in aoe 2 at least is not a must and is not the way to make the game better, what's next? Auto micro units?
The "what next" question doesn't apply. I clearly define the design razor in the video. My line is - "does this lead to meaningful strategic choices". Microing units IS a meaningful strategic choice, so no, I would not automate it. To reiterate my other point - there's absolutely no way you know exactly how many vills your opponent is losing out on due to your raids distracting him. It's just guesswork. EVEN if you had his entire base under vision you'd have a near-impossible time keeping track of how many vills he has. In essence, manual villager queueing needlessly complicates understanding your opponent's ramp level.
@@ChillyEmpire It does apply, it only helps to lazy players who wants everything easy, auto farm, auto scout, auto vills, auto production. It was a joke anyways, clearly an auto micro is nonsense like auto queue vills too. I only talk about aoe 2 but I dont see how microing units is strategic for you but making vills and not making it are not, making vills is clearly a strategic choice for going all in strats, go 1 2 or 3 town centers, only produce army or outboom ur opponent. Actually the "no making vills strats" and market abuse are very broken in this game but also there are plenty of examples where the macro players destroy the micro players by outbooming them, the top elite players they all have the best macro, but not always the best micro. But I don't understand why u need to know exactly the numbers of vills of your opponent? For what? In any game u should always consider he never stopped making vills, and u make a guess from that, from ur production too and by exploring him, which all of this requires skill. Even if auto vills is a thing and u kill lot of vills from him, u would never know exactly his number of vills and u dont consider he will be raiding u too in the case is an even match. By knowing the exact number of vills of your opponent it will just make players to quit earlier if they know they are so behind in vills and possibly army too. There are plenty of competitive games out there, where one player having way more eco and vills but less army made them lose the games, and opponents with less vills and more army made them won, but both weren't fully aware of this which helped the second player with less vills, if they know exactly their vill number, u kill that type of situation. Players will just quit earlier with less eco and won't even try. Or players with more eco will just hold their advantage and will extend the game. Like I said at least in aoe 2, sure there are plenty stuff to make it better game but auto queue is not the way
It is okay but if you enable it you cannot play another RTS, it screw up your muscle memory. And I cannot outmacro my opponent because the AI did it for my opponent as well, sorry, NO, I don’t like it. Because when you raid your opponent he is more likely to panic and forget to build villa by the moment, it should be your advantage. It is like a car racing but you don’t need to pedal gas, it is wrong, you are supposed to be know and skilled doing it. If they also enable ranked option disable Vill autoqueue I am happy to disable it, I rather we compete fairly instead of the AI doing our basic skill.
There are many ways to do the macro beyond the automatic villager queue. The games I've seen in AoMR where a player has spent resources best by constructing the right buildings at the right time, producing military units efficiently, moving idle villagers to the right resources, researching the right economic technologies and raiding opponent have been several.
@@ChillyEmpire so let it be fair, you don't click TC and Q, you lose, it is a basic skill, and blockading this basic skill who cannot do it under stress, should be awarded.
When you say you come from game design, you mean card/board ge design, right? This whole argument is basically just an argument to turn aoe into a card game. If all you care about is strategy then that's the logical conclusion. Aoe is real time strategy. The whole point is we play it because we don't just enjoy the strategy. We enjoy the execution. We enjoy, can you believe it, having to click villagers. Yes you mention army micro. But again you're confused about what ge you're playing. Aoe 2 is specifically an rts with an economic emphasis. It is not, and does not want to be, starcraft. Its designed for people who enjoy having to "micro" their economy. It's the only one like it, and I'd argue it's exactly why it's the best one.
Well yeah, I completely agree with what you're saying - I also love the age games because of the economy micro. But my point is that the economy micro can be more fun and interesting than just simply clicking on villagers. I point out how AOE4 does a great job with the "influence" mechanic that makes you think more carefully about how you lay out your base. That's super fun in my opinion because it involves strategic decision making. I'd personally welcome more features like that - to the point where planning out your base becomes something closer to programming a factorio-style factory - rather than just simply clicking the train villager button.
@@ChillyEmpire Again, base planning is has no execution factor to it. It's pure strategy. The influence mechanic could be implemented on a board game. From what I can tell, APM is not important for Factorio at all. Age of empires 2 is not a strategy game. It just isn't. Having APM-dependent non-strategic actions involved is a core part of what it is. You could make the argument that counter strike should just have aim bots built into the game, because "clicking on the enemy is just an execution thing it isn't strategic". You could say that positioning, timing, how many players to send down each passage, those are the "real" strategy elements and being able to click on the enemy is just a skill barrier. And I would say you have a real point. And I would say, if you want to make a game like that, a "strategy only" FPS, it would be a great game and I would probably play it. Seriously. However, if you said counter strike should change and become that, they'd all tell you to get lost. And rightly so. Because that isn't what counter strike is. Counter Strike is a combination of strategy and technical execution. And some of that technical execution is not about how fast you can execute a strategy. It's literally just can you click fast enough on the screen. No strategy to it. And that's how they like it. That IS what they find fun about it. The combination of mindless skill and deep strategy is the game. AOE2 is no different. If you want to make a strategy-only RTS where APM doesn't matter much at all and strategic decisions are all that matters, go for it. I'll probably play it. But aoe2 is not that.
@@ChillyEmpire To add further, while I'm perfect fine with people being different to me and enjoying different things, I really do think that you're missing out on the beauty of this game with your thinking. You say that there's nothing impressive about spectating someone who remembers to queue up villigers. I could not disagree more. To me, the most amazing feeling as a spectator, is watching an enormous fight with monks and mangonels and archers all dancing around an being in utter awe at how they're managing to control everything, and seeing one player gain a slight advantage with better army micro, only to look down and realise that at the same time as all this has been happening, the other player has kept their TC working constantly, built more farms, added 5 houses, and launched a sneak attack at the same time as well, and realise that the player with the advantage in the battle who you thought had godlike control was actually the one slumping. Those moments to me are the absolute peak of spectatorship. It's the same feeling as when you're watching a movie and the good guy is getting beat up but then you realise they were actually a step ahead the whole time and it was all part of the plan. Things happening "off screen" doesn't detract from the viewing experience. It makes it better. It means you're constantly being surprised by how much better the payers actually are than you think they are. How much more they're doing that you aren't even thinking of. And, in a similar vein, some of my best moments playing are when I engage in a scout/spear vs scout/spear fight in Feudal where I struggle like crazy to keep up on the battle, but then notice my score rising, and realise the other guy is putting 100% of his focus into it while I'm still adding farms and houses and have no idle TC. That feels incredible.
@@neildutoit5177 To be clear - I've trained myself to do the Villager macro. I personally do appreciate when I see pros perfectly manage their villager macro despite all the big battles happening. But again, this isn't visual. This isn't "apparent". It's inferred. I don't deny that there is fun in learning this stuff. Once you get good at villager macro you feel really proud of yourself for remembering to queue up vills. It's definitely a mark of skill. I'm very much a part of the "old guard" that enjoys this stuff. But look at the growth of RTS (or lack there of). Look at the player count. Look at the average player age. The people who like these mechanics that you're arguing for will soon be dinosaurs. And the genre as a whole is quickly just becoming nostalgia bait (ie. Stormgate, AOM Retold). Every new player I teach falls off because of the Villager macro. That's why I feel strongly that this is an area to fix up. Also, you come from AOE2. I don't have strong opinions on AOE2. From what I can tell the community is entirely made up of stuck-in-their-ways old heads that practically beg for more complicated bullshit in their games. I recall ya'll really didn't want automated farm placement either. If AOE2 insists on being old school that's fine, the game is old and the community is there for nostalgia reasons. I'm more referring to AOE4, and whatever comes after that.
@@ChillyEmpire okay so you do understand. Yes, we are stuck in our ways dinosaurs who beg for more complicated bullshit. That is exactly what we are and what we want. And yes autofarm was a big mistake and one of many that has made the meta in aoe2 de so much more stale than aoe2 aok. The more they simplify the game, the less variation we're seeing and the more forum posts about how boring the strategy is becoming. Unsurprisingly. Is it just nostalgia? I would argue it's more to do with it being a classic. You don't fix what isn't broken. Would you call chess nostalgia bait? It hasn't changed in hundreds of years. Yet somehow it still tops twitch charts. For all the improvements and innovation in game design, people, even young people, still prefer a thousands of years old game. Not everything has to evolve in order to stay relevant. So actually, we almost certainly aren't all dinosaurs. There are certainly many young pros entering the scene. You can point at player stats but it doesn't prove anything. All the new RTS games (with their flashy new mechanics) do worse than aoe2. So sure, aoe is small. But that doesn't imply that changing it would make it bigger. This might just be the best you can do. These new games all tabking supports that argument. But you cannot know either way just based of stats. More importantly though, the goal of a game isn't to be the most popular. If it was, we could all just get 30 seconds and call it a day. Games should fill different niches for people with different tastes, even if it limits their growth. Same way I like the fact that I have a local steakhouse to stay the way it is even though it could be more popular if it became a McDonald's franchise. I'm glad you're not focused on aoe2. Title seems bizzare then though.
HARD DISAGREE!!! Games are supposed to require skill, part of why people like Viper isnt winning everything anymore is that other mechanically good players like Hera also imporved in strategy. I don't want AOE to be a strategy game purely, it ought to be about execution as well. You dont win war with tactics and sticks. You win it with tactics and military technology
It seems to me you just want a different type of RTS games and I'm surprised people want auto-queue as much, based on the comments. I don't like it, I've never used and I never will. It automates something that is a strategic choice. When and how you build villagers, where you allocate them etc. That was always then a difference between the pros and casuals - that even during the heat of battle they could sometimes even allocate worker units, make new ones, build something... And if your argument is basically just - "oh I have to click it again, omg so boring", then what's even the point of playing? Oh shit, your favorite commentator never mentioned villagers being produced, must mean that's boring. What are you on about? The auto-queue teaches players nothing and adds nothing to the game, except making it WAY easier and removes the tactical aspect of it. And if your argument then is: "oh but it's tactical because you can always stop making units by disabling auto-queue" - no you just like your games to be way too easy and you don't want to engage in all aspects of the game, you want to prioritize just on the "action" parts which are engaging the enemy when you already have an army and that to me defeats the purpose of RTS games.
The only "strategy" on non-stop villager production is if you have 1 or a few more in queue. If in an RTS, being some time without producing villagers, it works for you to do an all in, then I would agree with you, but it is not like that and on top of that it is a heavy task and not much fun for many players.
I think my video didn’t do a good job of conveying my message to you. 1. My issue with autoqueue isn’t that it’s boring. My razor is “does this create interesting strategic choices”(it’s a strategy game after all). In AOE, because of the way the vills are balanced, it’s almost never something you’d want to not do. As a result, automating it is a good solution for now. 2. You mention resource allocation and base building under pressure. I agree 100%. That is good. I’m not advocating for auto allocation. 3. What I’m really advocating for is any choices in the game that are strategically interesting. Base planning, resource management, these are strategically interesting areas of the game. I’d love to see these emphasized.
It is still moronic that Esport-ifying RTS games has made it so that their acumen is not Strategy but having to handle a quagmire of tactical minutiae.
It's ironic because that's kind of my problem with this whole debate. People are arguing to get rid of manual queueing specifically *because* it frees up your attention for more tactical minutiae, for more electrifying e-sports action. Whereas I specifically want to manually decide to create each and every one of my vils and choose where they go because that's each time a moment dedicated to thinking about my economy.
What is so bad about losing and having gaps at top and lower levels honestly? If you cannot build villagers while microing admit that you are bad at the game instead of saying that the game needs auto q or practice. This is like the journalist demanding a easy difficulty for the souls games. Boo hoo players dont want to play anymore because they cant be asked to learn to build villagers constantly. Of course the game must lower its standards to get more players who being casuals abandon the game anyway. Yes it is absolutly fun to keep an economy rolling while microing fights. Not knowing if the enemy is producing villagers is not a reason to have auto q. This is the dumbest take by far. Yes I can tell if the enemy is not producing villagers but even if I couldnt there is still the chance that overwhelming him will cause his macro to weaken, auto q will remove this. Skill issue if you cant finish a game in 1 hour mark. Not everygame needs to be 20 min sweet spot. Ironically noobs love long games. Just quit if you dislike the game to be that long and play something else. Commentators make note everytime a player forgets to build villagers there is even a stat that tracks tc idle time in Aoe 2 spectator. Aussie has commentated on low elo games and there are players who choose to stop building villagers. Yes that means they are bad dont then go and ask for the game to play itself for the poor poor noobs who probably enjoy the game more than you do as it is. Jesus Christ at the end you just admit you want a different game. Asking for auto q because then than will somehow make the devs make other things more difficult is literrally asking for another game. Age of Mythology does not have more difficult macro or micro because it has auto q. You say you come from game design. What have you actually designed? Aoe 4 does not need to be more like factorio wtf. You want less apm play Homeworld, Total War (specially shogun 2), Men of War Assault Squad 2 or that garbage company of heroes where the time to kill allows a child to retreat.
absolutely furious, and for what? If people like you were the only ones who played this game, it would die in a month and then you'd have *no* game at all. Casuals are the lifeblood of any game, stop trying to scare them off, not every game has to be do-or-die. This is coming from someone who was successful in this game before auto queue.
Ive been playing aom since 2010 but just know auto queue feature it useless for me even if im still new to the game i want every thing under my control that how you get good without auto this and that
It should be a feature but it should give a debuff like auto combos in SF6 that deals 20% less damage, 10-20% increased production time to help new players but to not remove skill ceiling it is the perfect help for new players but for people who actually want to become good and competitive have more skill depth Edit I dislike the younger audience take because coming from SC2 where there are still a lot of new players also younger ones coming there is nothing they like more than having to click a lot and fast so removing the macro cycle does not make sense. I would as I said take the Street fighter approach make it accessible but with a debuff.
Hard disagree. Villager queueing fundamentally isn’t fun and isn’t a strategic decision. There’s nothing here to defend. It’s a legacy feature that old heads cling on to for no reason. And that stifles innovation in the genre.
@@ChillyEmpire I love macro skill expression in SC2 innovation was well known due to having perfect macro hitting every worker hitting every military unit having perfect resource management etc. Fun is very opinion based I love having these cycles a lot for me that is part of the fun of RTS having to manage multiple things and cycles but removing it / making it suboptimal not do it yourself is imo awful. Then where do you stop with the automatic things a lot of my friends dislike the base building for example because they only want to fight and micro. So you remove that as well? What if people dislike micro because it is not fun to lose because you cant micro as well as your opponent and its not fun for them to micro units like focus firing or splitting whatever? I think adding auto feature is fine definetly but it must come with a downside. Once you shave enough away it is not a RTS anymore imo and more Battle aces style game.
@@SoonTW again you also really just try and push it too far, were only talking about villager production in a game where you want to make them constantly, not sc2 or games where you make just a few handfulls, also we are stopping at villagers, is that not clear?
@@SoonTW Re “where do you stop” - simple, my razor is “does this gameplay element create interesting strategic choice for the player”. Military production, base planning, etc. it involves strategic choice. Villager production doesn’t. If vills were less resource efficient, to the point where you’d actually think about not making a villager in favor of something else, then it would make sense to make it manual.
Not sure why my comments keep getting deleted, but anyway. I think you misunderstand the place of macro in the strategy bit of "real-time strategy". Villager production is not there to reward you if you remember to do it right. It's there to reward your opponent if his strategy succeeds in making you forget to do it right. If you introduce auto-queue, you're making the game less strategic.
I'm not deleting any comments mate. I explain in the video already: 1. You have no idea if your opponent didn't make villagers. In fact, this feature actually clouds your ability to understand the game state and make relevant strategic choices. 2. As much as you can raid/distract your opponent, you can't actually directly impact whether or not they make mistakes. You can only hope. And as mentioned before, you can't act on that hope because you have no actual data to work with. 3. It disproportionately punishes noobs. Top level players are far less affected.
@@ChillyEmpire Not saying it was you. It just happens. TH-cam sometimes seems to be annoyed by certain comments but I still don't know what triggers it. 1. Yes you do. If you are applying pressure to your enemy, you can tell how big his eco is compared to yours because you have vision of his base. Not to mention his score will most likely be lower and his age up notification will appear to you later. Plus, if you're worried about lack of knowledge of the game state being a detriment to your strategic decision, fog-of-war is a much worse mechanic to the game than villager production. It punishes noobs and requires execution as opposed to pure strategic thinking. 2. This is only true if you're playing against a (very well implemented) robot. Humans make mistakes all the time, and most of the times very predictably so. If you apply pressure to your opponent, he will be distracted and forget to do something else. And even if he doesn't, it's still better than not doing it. You can watch high-level games to verify what I'm saying. Every pro will have idle TC time even if he's not under pressure, and that time will increase drastically if he's distracted by something else (due to external factors or because he's trying to do more things that he can manage, which is a STRATEGIC mistake). Sure, maybe you cannot directly see your opponent's idle time and eco size number and assess the damage you've done to his build order, but assuming that didn't happen would be simply insane. Additionally, saying that it isn't guaranteed it will work makes no sense because pretty much every game works based on assumptions you can't guarantee are true. Like I said, fog-of-war makes so that you can't really know what's going on. Strategies usually work because your opponent doesn't know what you're doing, and you can't guarantee they will work because you can't know if you're opponent will know how to respond. 3. Let's ignore for a second that noobs play against noobs, not against top-level players: that's the point. Noobs are punished BECAUSE they're noobs. It's part of LEARNING. If they performed as well as top-level players, there wouldn't be any reason for them to improve.
@@MrShadowThief Hey mate, thanks for spending the time to reply. Although, I'm recognizing that you're not arguing in good faith, so I don't think I can really convince you on this. I know you're not arguing in good faith because you tried to pretend like you can tell when your opponent isn't making villagers. This simply isn't true in any real competitive game. In fact, I'd challenge you to play a game and tell me exactly all of the times the opponent accidently stops making vills. You won't accept this challenge because you know it's impossible. At best, you can "assume" that they're losing out on villagers because you're distracting them. But villager count and villager production are not free information. You can only try to guess. And this ultimately means that your strategic decisions are less informed. I don't think it's productive to discuss this further unless you concede to this point. Are there arguments in favor of not having auto-queue? Yes. But this is not one of them.
@@ChillyEmpire Like I said, sure you can't tell exactly the size of their eco like you can using CaptureAge, but if you have vision of their base (which you should if you're applying pressure), then you can estimate the size of their eco and how much damage you're causing. Plus, there are other ways of estimating how their eco is doing, like score, age-up time, army size, army quality, etc. Yes, it's not perfect, because the nature of the game is that of limited knowledge about the state of the game (mainly due to the fog-of-war), but that's what allows much of the strategic thinking to happen, and gathering all these pieces of info to infer how your opponent is doing is part of that process. Let's assume for a second that we can reach a compromise: no villager auto-queue, but you have a direct indication of how many vills your opponent has (in Age2 this actually exists in the form of the price of the Spies tech, but it requires a castle and it's generally not worth it unless you're really curious). Do you think knowing exactly the size of your opponent's eco makes the game more or less strategic? Personally, I'd say less, since gathering info about the state of your opponent's game requires strategy and is usually part of your overall strategy to win. Giving you more info for free might help you making these strategies, but it results in overall less strategy being made. Regardless, it seems that your problem revolves mostly around fog-of-war, not manual villager production itself. Yet, you argue against the latter and not the former. I'm willing to discuss whether fog-of-war makes the game more or less strategic (personally, I think it's more, but I can see why it could be less), but since your problem is clearly not about the possibility of villager downtime itself, I agree with you in that there is no reason for any further discussion on that. Finally, I wanted to say that simply refusing to further discuss it by saying that an argument that disagrees with you is in "bad faith" because you can't answer it without recursively mentioning yourself is, in my view, bad faith.
@@MrShadowThief Think about it like this mate - in Hearthstone, I can't see the enemy's cards (fog of war) but I can see their mana - so I have some sense of game state/ramp and I can react accordingly. In AOE, you can't see either. If you don't have an understanding of ramp, then it'll hamper your ability to make informed strategic decisions based on game state. Yes, you also cant make informed decisions due to fog of war, but fog of war is something you can address through scouting. Villager count cannot be scouted. Villager queue mistakes cannot be reliably scouted. The best you can do is infer. The point of all of this is to say, even if you're raiding and distracting your opponent, it doesn't necessarily have a clear effect on their ability to ramp. Let's say you kill an enemy villager. Very clear impact. It's visual, it's visceral, it's entertaining. Now let's say you distract the opponent enough to get them to forget to queue a villager. Very nebulous impact. It's not necessarily clear what caused it. You as a player won't know if it happened or not. Spectators won't realize it happened until much later. It's not entertaining. Beyond this, let's just agree to disagree.
Zerg are an example of a race where choosing to make drones vs military units was an interesting choice because they both emerge from the same eggs.
Exactly! That’s a perfect example of bringing interesting strategic choices to something like vill production.
Great point!
@@ChillyEmpire It's actually pretty good strategy with Loki because you convert villagers into berserkers for free,so it's a great solution when you're out of gold,I use it with bragi because dying berserkers give you favour
There's always going to be a balance between quality of life features and skill expression, and I think it depends on the game, honestly. For example: in Blizzard RTSes there is actually a strategy to choosing when to cut worker production because of the way macro works in those games. A lot of high-level build orders in Brood War and SC2 involve getting to a specific number of workers, or otherwise simply saturating a specific number of bases, then cutting worker production to put all resources into military. Stormgate is like this too: you often don't want to be continuously making workers for the whole game because if you fall too far behind your opponent in military it's incredibly difficult to not just lose the game to an attack. It's far easier to get new players on board with manual worker production when they only have to remember to do it for like 5 or 6 minutes before focusing more on military production and combat. Macro in Blizzard RTS is also incredibly straightforward so I think manual worker production is justfied in those games.
The problem with Age of Empires is not just that there's no point where cutting worker production makes strategic sense, but moreso that worker production has to be maintained for potentially 30-40 minutes, and newer players will absolutely forget about their worker queues at some point during that time. And I think macro in AoE is complicated enough that it doesn't need manual worker queues to be interesting
100% agree.
My razor in RTS games is “does this feature create interesting strategic choices for the player?”
If choosing to make vills actually involved strategic cost/benefit analysis, then yes, it would make sense to make training vills manual.
I wish I brought this up in the video but here’s an example to reinforce my point:
The Town Center in Age games for the most part only produce villagers, so the strategic choice there is obvious.
Imagine if we instead had a civilization that produced all of its military in the Town Center as well. Now all of a sudden things are interesting. I can’t only spam villagers because I eventually will need to make military. But when I choose to make those units is where the “fun” and skill expression is. (The examples you gave also perfectly illustrate this)
I despise queuing my villager, but I despise Auto-queuing more. That feature sums up the next generation of game, where it minimizes your Attention Span & make decisions for you.
And any Age game can't be compared head-to-head to Blizzard RTS, Age game doesn't have complex Unit Skills where you Blink, create Roadblocks, or positioned your utility unit that have Shield Generator buff. Most of Age skills involves purely on target-casting and aura buffs. So... yeah, Blizzard have simpler worker mechanic because it focused more on the enemy engagement.
TLDR: Manually queuing workers in Age games is a skill expression, it involves coordination & discipline. It can truly what distinct a good player and a bad one.
"I forgot to produce more villagers, It's so frustrating" is what a complacent player with a minimum attention-span would say.
I agree! AoE2, AoE4, and AoM all have very cheap and very fast training villagers, so they pay off very quickly and even if you lose a villager 1-3 minutes after training it it was likely still worth it.
Another option would be to design a system where making villagers actually IS a choice with pros and cons. AoE3 did this a little differently where villagers were actually quite expensive and the train time was longer (which also means you don't have to queue as frequently), and it usually led to a few moments in each game where it was better to stop training villagers in favor of a military unit or technology for a brief period. It doesn't quite achieve the goal of making it a decision, but it's closer.
SC2 also has this to an extent since you can saturate a base, and then more workers becomes inefficient. But sometimes oversaturating can be good so you can more quickly saturate a future base. Tricky to design something like this for Age of Empires, but a fun thought experiment :)
Exactly!
Don't say that too loudly the players that think APM is important will come out and riot!
I think its like playing chess on a computer. Pressing the clock button should not be a skill check.
playing rts with high apm requirements is like playing chess blitz
@@meepo1862 no, chess blitz is mostly about making the right desicion fast, and only after about clicking and premoving on the last 10 seconds - you need to survive to this stage whole 3 minutes lol
Wait what, It's the opposite... Training villagers requires you to be on your toe, it involves spending resource & population. Not mentioning the amount of coordination & discipline. It is what distinct good & bad Age player.
In chess, autoqueuing is like "I don't press the clock button because everyone should know I stopped my time when I move my piece".
you see? It's complacency
@@fbi9965 without autoeverything ,you have to make right decision fast , because of the multitasking, there's no time to think, so yea it's exactly like playing chess blitz
@@meepo1862 nah, you can't compare pressing button(which is done automatically online), with casting magic spell on 400 apm. Did you see beastyqt streams? It's ridiculous, it's not about macro or micro, it's just some clicker simulator
Factorio mode should honestly be a gamemode in many of the Age of Empires games. You not only have to gather raw resources, you must also bake bread from wheat, cook meat from animals, turn wood into workable lumber, and your resources are physically at the drop off site you place, so you must collect it from there to move it to the next site for construction. It would complicate the game greatly, but also reward players who can manage base building. And it would be a gamemode of its own, so no worries about the base game.
That's basically Knights&Merchants or the Cultures series
I think both villager queue, and military queue are valid - and even enhancing - features.
RTS should always be about executing players decisions over players performing those decisions, and turning on auto-queue is one of those.
Aoe1 had no unit queue, and much like being able to queue up some units makes the game more about decision making and ultimately more interesting, auto-queue does the same.
I don't see it as a slippery slope at all - auto-everything mentality has got it wrong.
People seem to forget that there are many instances where you don't want auto-queue - such as when your rushing to the next age, or if you leave it on and make too much of the wrong / countered unit / or don't spend your population efficiently in late game. People seem to treat auto-queue as some sort of cheat code, when really its just another tool, bringing the skill ceiling higher - and that's always a good thing.
Its also not like your enemy has it and you don't.
Its the same with placing farms in an area, the decision is I want farms tightly packed here, once that decision is made, it shouldn't be hard to execute mechanically - its just placing farms.
(Honestly they should change that so you hold down shift when placing a farm it simultaneously ghosts for placing N farms according to how many villagers you have selected.)
Military autoqueue is where I draw the line, because my razor is “is this a strategic decision”.
You always want to make vills. You don’t necessarily always want to make that specific military unit.
@@ChillyEmpire that's the point tho. If you use auto queue to accidentally make the wrong unit, that's on you. Dumb dumb. It's a tool it can be used for the wrong reason. Hence why it's never hurt the pro scene, and why it's a perfectly valid feature. Noobs can use it for better or for worse.
Totally agreed with everything you said, keep spreeding the word so we can bring back the glory days of rts with new elemments, new mechanics, focus on battles and in the fun!
It's annoying that I have to continuously hit q on my TC every single game because players want to include a limitation that was done back in the 90's.
It's just a QoL feature.
Yes building villagers continuously is a skill... but in terms of gameplay it adds 0 to the fun or strategy - It's not even a choice!
If you didn't have to worry about it because you had autoqueue, you could literally spend that time/effort on the more high value parts of the game that are more fun to play and watch.
The game has such a high skill cap it will make no difference to high level play at all.
I never hear people arguing to remove multi building select. Why is that an OK QoL feature and Auto-Queue isn't?
Auto-queue is not a quality of life feature, because it directly impacts gameplay as opposed to a minor change such as reorganizing the user interface and making things clearer to see. It's incorrect terminology and needs to be referred to as a 'gameplay feature'. Same for multi-building select, that is a gameplay feature and not a QoL feature which implies insignificant gameplay impact.
@@mnmmnmm you're being extremely pedantic. You're talking semantics.
I don't agree that's it's not a QoL. QoL can include gameplay features that make the game more convenient to play.
@@TheIceSaffron Making villagers is a skill you have to master, and its called macro.
If you play vs someone who knows how to constantly build them, and you cannot, you will lose duo to having less economy.
As an example: At one point in SC2, the devs decided to change a similar mechanic to be an auto cast.
What ended up happening?
Platinum league players started playing like low masters, because suddenly they could make a much bigger army way faster then before, which skewed the balance since other races mechanics didnt get a similar touch up.
Im against doing that as building vills constantly (part of the overall macro) is 1 more skill you can get good at to give you an advantage, rather than the game becoming "who has better micro" and only that.
haha how it does not add to the strategy? U literally have to make vills while u micro units to win a battle but also to win the macro economic war, so that's why u see lot of players with a really good micro but dying easily with players with a better macro, and that's very difficult to do. And u just dont do vills when u need to make upgrades or go next age, hitting just a button to autoqueue is just a dumb idea. And if u dont like making vills, Deathmatch exist, its an aoe 2 mode where u start in imperial age and u dont make vills at first till ur waste ur high resources, just units and it never was so popular like RM mode. Aoe 2 need lot of improvments but auto vills is not the way
As someone who has been playing RTS since a little boy, i agree with you. Constant making villagers was never the most engaging part of theses games, but the good decision making. Should i upgrade my army and advance in age or make more units ? Should i harass my opponent or defend? The right answer to this questions gives the most satisfaction to the player like no other game in my opinion.
I've played RTS games since I was 5, and the biggest appeal has always been the combination of decision making and mechanical execution. More automation takes away from the mechanical execution that brings more chaos to the gameplay. While I personally don't like Auto-queue villagers, I think it's fine since there's little reason to not keep producing them in the Age games (compared to other games where there's actually situations where you need to stop making workers), but military auto-queue is too much because of the macro that it takes out of the game for people that enjoy macro gameplay as opposed to micro gameplay.
Limiting workers like SC2 was a brilliant move because they want you to focus more on showing off your prowess in unit skills.
Age game on the other hand, is always about the fundamental blueprint of any RTS formula. And auto-queuing shouldn't be mandatory because it just tells you that you lack endurance & discipline.
If auto-queuing is a welcome feature, then Instant Building should be a feature as well.... Hell, Instant Unit production should be as well, because apparently that is where the fun is right?
I personally despise it, I played AoM when I was 7yo, and what makes me love it other than other RTS is because the fundamental formula is there, just as it was, just the way we all like it when gaming is at its peak.
I also agree that building vills is effectively a non-choice in rts games that use workers/builders. I feel like if there was more of a balance to it perhaps by giving military units economic functions or allowing an option to automatically harvest resources at a slower rate (like Malians in AoE4) could make vill production into a strategic decision but as it stands it's just a barrier to entry.
The game you described is the exactly the game I wish for my whole life
That’s awesome. I’d love to hear in more detail about the game you’ve been wishing for.
i agree. i want auto vills
I honestly believe AoM is tackling the RTS difficulty issue in the best way possible. Vill auto-queue, military auto-queue outside of ranked games, and auto-grouping makes it infinitely more fun and comfortable to play. Saying this as someone who's been playing RTS since Starcraft.
It's not about taking features away like Battle Aces, it's about making them not be a nuisance while allowing you to focus on the *strategic* choices.
I don't agree with BeastQT's solution to it, because it's basically making auto-queueing useless, it defeats the whole purpose.
They should just make a different queue for like the 3 sweats that are totally against auto-queue and let the rest of the people enjoy the game.
Thank you, finally somebody brings the point that it's not an option not to make villagers, didn't hear that any time during the hours long discussions of other creators. I come from aoe2 to aoe4 and now to aomr, and this feature makes the game so much more fun and friendly to me and my friends that play it casually.
I dont think you are a casual if you start talking ranks, i just play the campaign once in a while and do some skirms with boths or my friends
It's an issue in general within gaming. There's this weird group of gamers who insist they're "casual" cuz they "only" have a rank of X or whatever.
Gamers seem to think that unless you're top 0.1% you're a filthy casual for some reason....
@@kakalukio100% agree with you. I love playing ranked games, and just because I’m gold or plat it doesn’t mean I’m a casual player…
I greatly agree with your arguments here and especially liked the point about auto-queueing opening up opportunities for new, actually strategic skill expression like AoE4's influence system offers.
Personally I think the more automation like this strategy games have the better.
There is this thing called "macro cycle" you do in games like sc2 or wc3 which consists of you going through all your production stuff and ensuring it produces something. You essentially just train a habit to do this regularly. I don't think this is the kind of skill expression most people are looking for in their rts games.
And really, production automation can not possible detract much from a skill expression in the rts game because it just frees up your apm to do a lot of other stuff. It's a real time strategy game, there's always something you can micromanage (aside from earliest minutes of some games) and people that excel at it or have higher apm will still be able to express themselves through it.
This is exactly what I don't want to see as someone passionate with actively playing RTS games and greatly enjoys macro-based gameplay. If I wanted to play a strategy game with little mechanical expression, I'd play a turn-based strategy game, a 4x strategy game or something like Battle Aces (no base management at all and all about micromanging units). RTS is the combination of strategy and mechanical execution, not just strategy only.
@@mnmmnmm there're still plenty of ways to express your mechanical skills, there always will be, it's a real-time game. If anything, macro-cycles detract from mechanical expression by tying up your apm in mindless tasks. You could be using that apm to actually express your skill.
There is a new meta forming in the aoe2 community where one idles the tc to make certain unique units that cost wood and gold. Just throwing it out there
Best video and argument about this topic so far!
maccro is the funniest thing sometimes, but why not for this feature
This is absolutely the best argument for Autoqueue I've heard. I just can't stand the monotony involved in most RTS games despite always being interested in playing multiplayer strategy games. Age of Mythology is a breath of fresh air in a sea of long dead RTS's that barely get off the ground.
I do wish AoE4 also had Autoqueue, it's such a good and modern feeling game but with AoM out now I don't think I'll ever go back. It's just so much easier to get into
If there's anything from AoE4 I'd like to see added to the game it's the roads and decorative objects that appear in the base, giving it more detail and makes it look lived in and detailed.
I love this take. I want every RTS to have villager or worker auto queue.
Personallly, I don’t think military should be auto, but villagers always. I say this as a guy who has played thousands of hours of RTS over my life. The genre needs to be more welcoming to people not like me, but towards new people.
When you said : "It seems like there are more engineers playing RTS games"
I think it's more : "RTS games are pushing kids towards engineers careers" lol
Easily the best feature and even made me consider ranked play. I never cared for APM nor any gameplay requiring I do a line of cocaine before playing.
No one is forcing you to use streamlined features of modern games like short combos in fighting games or aim assist in console shooters but you can't force normal pplayers not to use them.
I think autoqueue is a fine feature for players to have available. But I really think people are too attached to it. I've seen many players refund or boycott the game because of no military autoqueue in ranked... Which is stupid.
I generally dislike autoqueue (as a pretty bad player myself) but I'm fine with it existing overall... I'm just sick of the 'discourse' around autoqueue which often devolves to nothing more than bad faith shouting matches unfortunately. And yeah, autoqueuing Villagers as opposed to military is a very different thing and I agree that if it's good for the community and newer players overall, it should be at least seriously considered as an option for players.
Military autoqueue is different though and I'm just not a fan of it outside of casual environments, and villager priorities are a whole different beast.
As someone who hates playing aoe2 multiplayer, I think the villager queue is what did it. I’ve played a few ranked games in retold now and, even if I lose, I feel like I did my best and it was enjoyable. I think the villager auto queue gives me the time to focus on the fighting
Fully agree. Producing vills is about the least fun in the game. Smartly building your base, how you distribute your vills, scouting and chosing units and strategy accordingly, big battles... Basically everything is more fun than building vills.
And it at least for vills, this will not really impact tournament lvl gameplay since nobody there forgets building vills.
It's a little different but Stronghold already have villager auto queue. They even go a step further and every building gets assigned a villager to work there when it's built which to an extent also eliminates idle workers being a hurdle for new players.
As a very very casual player it really does make the game more accessible so I can get to the fun combat stuff faster and not once did I ever think "Man I really wish I can manually control villager production"
Look I do understand what you are saying here and I do think these are very valid reasons to support auto queue, but the problem is that it won't stop with only villager auto queue, military auto queue is already a thing, and there also has been the proposal of having tech auto queue (and if I'm not mistaken the Xbox version of AoM Retold also has an option to make your villagers automatically distribute themselves amongst the different resources), auto scouting is also a thing now. And yet again, this things are not actually bad by themselves, and I do understand the reasoning for having them into the game, you don't wanna waste your time dealing with this tedious, repetitive tasks every single time, and instead wanna focus on "the real fun" which is engaging your army in epic battles.
But the thing is, the players that have this mindset and want these kind of mechanics added to the game don't actually want to play and Age of Empires game anymore, they want to play something like Battle Aces, and I don't say it as an insult or anything, I'm being completely serious, that's exactly what that game is about, it takes away all the macro, and instead puts all your focus into microing your army, it is a very solid gameplay loop and the genre that it is pioneering is very fun I'll admit, but that is not Age of Empires anymore, its a new genre, a Fast-Phased RTS as the devs of that game have referred to, it is not a traditional RTS.
The way I see it, the fun in a traditional RTS comes from mastering the art of multitasking, is reorganizing your villagers as your start needing more of less of each resource, is deciding when is the most optimal time to research every tech given their cost and the time it takes for them to pay of, actively using your army to either defend or attack, never idling any soldier, make more houses as you need it, scouting you opponent to react to what he's doing, and being able to do all of this things one after another, without forgetting to do anything, while reacting to what your opponent is doing, who is also dealing witch the exact same matter, and yes, remembering to queue up new villagers, is part of that dance.
Being all honest I can agree with you that villager auto queue can be accepted in the genre of traditional RTS, as like you mention in the video, there's never a reason to not be constantly making new villagers, unlike troops and techs which do have their time to be made and not made, but I just don't see a way that introducing this mechanic will ever be ending on just that, it is going to cooperate to the already ongoing process of automation that has being in act with all the Age games, with auto scouting, the aforementioned automatic villager recourse distribution, the game Age series is slowly losing their original identity.
What's next, will villagers now automatically make new houses as you get close to hit the population cap? Will the units now have a Seek and Destroy command so that you can just select 10 horsemen and tell them to go around and do the raidings for you?
This is not the game that I want to play anymore, I don't want to play a fast-phased RTS, I want to play a Classical RTS, and if you don't, that is completely respectable and I don't have anything against you whatsoever, but just go play Battle Aces instead, show your support to that genre so that it gets more recognition and more games of that nature are made, but don't try to make the Age series to convert into Battle Aces. Live and let live ya know, I just don't think is fair for us old folk to see the game that we enjoyed to slowly disappear just to get new audiences that are not even interested into what the actual deal of the game used to be, to hop in to the game.
blah blah blah, just grumpy ass oldtimer complaing
Completely agree with you. And when I saw the option of automatically allocating your villagers (it's in the PC version as well) I was kind of shocked. What then is even the gameplay anymore? This is turning into an auto-battler of sorts (I've never played Battle Aces)...
Thanks for the well thought out post.
In my view, designing with a specific razor solves the concern you raised. My razor is “does this aspect of the game create interesting strategic choices for the player”. If not, cut it.
Villager training in AOE games is something you should almost never not do. So automate it.
Military and tech autoqueue doesn’t fit with this razor. You shouldn’t always be making military or researching techs. The player’s choice to do so IS an interesting strategic choice.
I’m not a fan of battle aces. I’m not all about the battle micro. I also love the base building aspect. It’s why I like Age of Empires. My point is that base planning and resource management can be given more complexity to compensate for the autoqueue. Base planning IS player expression, it’s visual (so esports friendly), and it’s fun.
This is absolutely true. I've followed both RTS games and many other genres of games for a long time, and the reality is that introducing these kind of features isn't going to bring new players into the game, because they just aren't interested in the how the genre itself plays. People that don't enjoy managing their macro or micro just aren't people interested in traditional RTS gameplay, and instead just play games like Total War where it's entirely based on decision making with little depth in mechanical execution of gameplay. Not saying those kind of games are bad at all, but they're a different kind of games with a different audience.
People continue to say that increased automation of 'boring gameplay' will bring new players in, but really it's just appeasing one side of the already existing RTS audience in favor over the other, not attracting people that don't even play RTS games. The RTS genre just isn't popular because of the trends of gaming in general, with many people preferring less complex gameplay for something that's trivial to learn and play on the same day they pick it up. Same reason why MMO and MOBA games are much less popular than they used to be, despite still having active competitive scene, it's because they take too long for current gamers to learn how to play before they get bored or frustrated enough to move onto something else.
Dribbling also performs an essential role of creating a measure of vulnerability for the player with the ball, as someone else can swipe it from them. Without dribbling, basketball would be decided purely by grip strength alone. Villager production however doesn’t have such an impact. Not in any way that is changed by making it auto-queue-able at least
I think a game that has opened up a lot of qol features but expanded more on strategy is BAR. That game has so many nice features that free up apm whilst at the same time making base building, eco management, and tech much more interesting and in depth.
I think a lot of people come to BAR and are surprised by features... that are over twenty years old because they were already in Total Annihilation and later Supreme Commander. It's just a different tradition of RTS design.
@@doppelrutsch9540 that is true
I think beasty's stance is the best on this; using auto queue being less efficient then a skilled player doing it manually
My issue with this position is that it doesn’t follow proper design thinking. You’re punishing noobs for being noobs basically.
And it disconnects newer players from understanding what pro players are actually doing. Making the esports scene less relatable.
Beasty also emphasized that he liked the macro elements of AOE. My point here is, add autoqueue because villager production isn’t creative/strategic anyways , but also add new basebuilding and resource management mechanics.
@@ChillyEmpire I see your point, I was just thinking it this way would be more like how the autoscout works
7:45 in regards to aussiedrongo never saying, "oh my god he remembered to build his villagers." Sure thats true, BUT in the end game analysis its very common to check the villager graph and thats where we see true skill expression of people being able to continue making them under pressure. I've seen mid/pro games where that pressure is enough to make the difference and the opponent pulls a win.
Auto Q is terribly bad and takes away from the constant "remember to make" from new players and will translate to them failing "remember to keep pumping army" I believe the constant pressure to make villagers makes a better player (muscle memory and APM) practice. I can also touch more on why auto Q is bad, but I don't want to write a whole essay lol.
Good to see you pudge.
Yeah I mean you’ve seen my streams, you know I also like checking villager graphs post game.
I agree that auto queue is not a perfect solution. My point is that with auto queue implemented we can start moving towards more interesting base planning/macro features. (Like factorio style algorithms)
The point is that what makes you win in a strategy game should be based on the strategic choices you make, rather than mechanical habits.
@@ChillyEmpire You don't want to improve the Age series. You want to play a different game.
That's perfectly fine, just don't try to ruin what works for other people.
I am not totally sure tbh. I did get a rush on lower ELO AoE2 matches where you are able to counter rushes by simply keep making villagers. For beginners there is this difficulty where playing aggressive makes you forget your villager creation and in that stage defending and doing your villagers is actually a fun way to win eventually. I think those games are actually my best memories on competitive AoE. But it's very technical in a sense. I do like how auto-queuing emphasizes different aspects that should be more important: strategizing, decision making. I think this is a very healthy decision cause it's also making AoE2 and AoM competitive scene totally different and making sure AoM is not just an AoE2 clone in a different setting. I'm not totally sure I like it more than AoE2 then, but it's great to have both!
Couple of years ago... I thought that aom was a slow game.... Then I realized I only trained 30-40 villagers -_-
If they argue that autobuild 1 villager then another and so on is bad for RTS, then it should also be true that having the options to que 2 or more villagers is bad for rts. You should press once, after it ends you need to go back and press again.
Yes, queuing 15 units is bad cause you lock resources, but forgetting to deactivate autobuild is also bad. This mentality is why LoL is more popular than Dota, I want to have fun in a game not to work. I want to harass my opponent when he tries to kill my minion I don't want to kill my own minion and deny his Kill & Rewards.
Generally i have friend who cant get into aoe cause of how the intense the eco is. But the auto que actually has one of them interested. Frankly i love it on military to cause you can still screw yourself if your waisting your resource on units that wont help you win. There are ao many other thing to worry about along with auto q still being less efficient as it it doesn't need to have a nerf attached to it
Edit: The video's title has been changed, so my criticism is no longer valid, but below is my original comment :)
I completely agree specifically for the Age series. However, I don't think this should extend to "every RTS game where you make villagers and build buildings", because in a game like StarCraft 2 for example, auto-queue would be pretty detrimental.
The big difference there is that Age matches tend to be long. Very long in comparison. And remembering to produce villagers over the whole game is hard. You mess up with villager production at the 10 minute mark, and suddenly you're way far behind and you get crushed. You also have more resources to think about, because your villagers need to mine gold, chop trees, gather food, and sometimes even produce favor, on top of building construction.
In Starcraft 2, by minute 5 the players have already been poking at eachother for a while, trying to find a weakness, maybe preparing to send unit drops into the enemy's base, etc. You only have to saturate 2 resources and each base has an exact maximum amount of effective workers, after which there is no reason to make them anymore. The villagers are close to the base at all times, and the opponent cannot hide villagers out on the map without building a whole new base there. There are also many instances in the game where a player WILL in fact choose to build more army instead of workers. You have to find a good balance between the two. The game also isn't designed to go on too long, and when it does, matches often reach a point where the players sacrifice their own workers on purpose to free up supply. In a game where most matches end before the 7-8 minute mark, I believe remembering to produce workers is one of the things that can make macro that much more engaging, rather than just focusing on producing your military units and attacking.
So, while I generally agree with your point, I believe there's an important distinction to be made that not every game with villager macro would benefit from this.
Oh 100%. I should rename the video.
In the video I emphasize that it’s “any rts that’s like aoe”. And that aoe specifically is balanced in a way that villagers should always be produced.
We got a short and a video ? Hell yea
every time i see comment like "what's next, making the game play itself " it takes another year off my life.
"oh, they have a godpower that let's you send meteors? what's next, a godpower that just corrupts your opponents hard drive?"
be serious. you sound like a child.
I didn't play game with auto-queue yet, but I like the "fantasy" of focusing more on micro. I remember few battles in AOE4 where I played engagement really well and destroyed enemy. Even though. :D It happened rarelly.
But I am 100% sure that game needs to choose if it always allows to use it or only in SP and unranked. Because... if you get used to it and then you reach certain rank and you are forced to produce manually, you are fucked.
So, I've never hit the auto queue button for villagers. I've never played a ranked game, but I think I'm pretty good in RTS. I've done all the campaigns in Titan level and am currently going through the ones in Retold in Titan again.
I think the reason why I've never done it is because I think I need to control my villager dispersion and allocation. I tried the auto "priority" option in Retold and lasted all but 5 seconds and I don't think I'll ever use it again. Like, I have my plan for each villager at the moment they're spawn and I don't like having villagers being constantly created because then they take up population for nothing.
However, I 100% mourn the auto queue button for the warriors, I've always used it for when the game reached it's pinacle and I'm launching my big offense. Not having it will force me to rewire my brain so that I end up with no back up army when I'm so consumed by the offense.
I do see your point though. I think it's a very valid way of playing and I do agree that for new players, especially new RTS players, it's a welcome option. I really wonder why they took it out. Maybe if we complain enough, they'll put it back? The Dev definitely seem to be listening to our opinions and critics.
I've never learn that way because I simply never grew up with it. I started playing Age of Empire I when I was 8 or 9 and I've stuck with it for as long as I could. Age of Mythology is the only RTS game I've ever played that even offers it.
that's a you thing but in general autoqueue is the correct way for rts
@@raptorhacker599 In general - autoqueue is not the way to go for rts. It removes a huge chunk of the game and it's one of the most enjoyable ones as well.
Military auto-queue is available in the campaign.
Yeah, totally agree, and bounced off villager priorities just as hard. The fact that all of my existing allocated villagers just stopped and ran off to do something I didn't tell them to do irked me so hard I turned it off immediately. It's the minute-to-minute micromanaging that is what I enjoy about the Age games, and the illusion that my decision to make that next villager is what made that particular scenario or skirmish play out the way it did. I can see the argument for these being QoL features for new players who don't want to deal with that sort of stuff, as auto reseeding was in 2DE, and fair play to them, but having it on either by default or as the only option is not the way I want to play an RTS as a single-player main and would probably turn me off the genre forever.
@@Chili_Bass Yeah it remove a chunk, the boring chunk, you might enjoy going to your tc every 30 seconds to do something that's not an option and that could be automated but I'd rather spend this time on my micro and strategic decision making. It's the reason I bounced off age of empire but really enjoy age of mythology.
Age series are games that promotes macro play above micro (compare to starcraft). More TCs, bigger eco, more vils (when you play defensive you usually have smaller idle time). Its a part of the game. Even as older player you can play smarter and beat kid with insane micro (look at Daut). Autoque kills this idea and makes game more closer to starcraft.
Beasty explored this topic and he makes valid points there.
With the villager AQ there is still a lot of macro in the game and on top of that in AoM it fits more because the game is more frenetic than other AoE.
Automating something where you have no choice of where and when (tedious task in general) is a good thing for the genre as there is more skill on the other hand.
It’s not clear you watched the vid
@@ChillyEmpire i did, i like it. I just prefer the Beasty point of view as its more conservative. AoE2 has the biggest playerbase maybe even in entire RTS right now and game flourish. I really like how both AoE2 and AoE4 plays out and i;m biassed in those direction. In AoE2 recently there was a huge debate about autofarming feature and many, many arguments there could be moved into AQ debete here. Overall if you remove all tedious tasks only thing is remains is micro and fights which isnt great imo.
I get your point and i guess from all games AoM fits the best with the autoque
Although Stormgate is not doing well for other reasons, their devs were right about what needs to be done to enlarge the niche in RTS games: Greater accessibility and a competitive team scene.
Any RTS released today needs to emphasize team games. In fact, I’d argue that they should be balanced around team games specifically.
RTS dinosaurs (even like myself) are a dying breed.
Nah it's the same as saying whether or not we need to remoce box area unit selecting(just shift + lmb select bruh) or ctrl + numbers grouping😂😂😂 it's just QoL feature. That kind of stuff should not be argued😂
100%. this is supposed to be a strategy game not fps where apm is about clicking on vill make button every 20 second or so lol
Thank god someone gets it, thanks chilly
it isn't just a arbitary "click a key to make villager/unit" there is strategy in it as well. The problem lies in the significant resource benefits of auto-queing, instead of paying all at once for a bunch of units, your paying one at a time. this removes decision making in the game. Should I expand and tech up? or should I build an army and be aggressive. With autoqueue your getting both at the same time essentially. this would be most apparent in military autoqueue, but it would also be seen in villager autoqueue to some extent.
The solution would be that when you autoqueue, you immediately load up the queue of at least 5-7 units that refills as you get them. even if you don't have enough resources, you would load up all the villagers you can afford and then it would siphon your resources as you get more until the queue is full. this means that it's still useful to manually queue up villagers in the early game, but autoqueue them when it gets tedious in the middle and lategame
no there isnt any strategy to this at all. it's as meaningless as this wall of text u made.
oh yeah, the strategy of clicking the villager button for 30 min, really fun
I agree that military autoqueue doesn’t make sense. I’m not a fan of having military or technology autoqueue. That’s where my line is drawn.
Chilly has a design background?!
Apologies in advance for the rant and the negativity, but what you described is kind of exactly why I'm apprehensive about them adding it for everything (or rather putting it on by default/potentially mandating it, since right now you can simply choose to keep it off if you want). Think people focusing on the strategy vs skill dichotomy aren't hitting something very important to me.
Before, back in the blissful ignorance of just playing against AI in skirmishes and doing campaign shenanigans, "not building villagers" absolutely 100% was (still is, really) a viable strategy. You can arbitrarily choose to build some more villagers, Age up, get a food-heavy myth unit like a Hydra, get a few more units to fend off a raid. Leaving villager autoqueue on is "objectively" a better use of your resources if you are in a safe situation, but it's such a meta/pvp-focused mechanic that I feel like it sucks the joy out of skin-of-your-teeth shenanigans that AoM is the absolute pinnacle at. More than once in skirmishes in the beta I'd end up with a blob of idle villagers because I simply had no idea the game was making them by default for newly built TCs - thanks, but I built those TCs to get more pop space for military units, not for more eco production.
Tbh, the "time to fun" concept just straight up does not apply for me. I'm a guy who spends hours looting knives and forks in Skyrim because they'll go into my LotD safehouse kitchen collection. For me, clicking the button to decide between a villager and a military unit is in fact the fun, as well as partaking in hour long matches and researching everything possible, not the optimisation or getting more games in faster. If you really wanted to get rid of things that the player doesn't choose and maximise utility, then why build a starting base at all? You never need to think about that. That's what a build order is for, just select it at the start of the match and pop into the game with it fully made, with the "influence" placement already min-maxed to perfection. Empire Wars maxed out.
I worry too many RTS devs, content creators and pros think too much about the meta, skill depth, and philosophy of the mechanics when it comes to pvp, whereas the vast majority of players never even touch multiplayer, are true "casuals" like myself, and are just in it for the moment to moment enjoyment of whatever they're doing. It's less a matter of skill and more a matter of believing that what you do matters a lot. That illusion is broken when autoqueue just does it for you, in the same way I'd argue an auto-build order would. There's ofc a matter of QoL, but there does come a point where it stretches too far. Villager priority was that for me. Toggled it off as soon as I tried it.
Yes, I am indeed an engineer. Electrical & electronic, to be specific :)
Hi thanks for watching the vid and writing up this response.
I think I"m unclear on your argument. Are you saying that there are people such as yourself who don't like autoqueue because it's too overwhelming?
I think you also tried to make a point about how not building villagers is a viable strategy. This is simply incorrect. The way the game's numbers work out right now, building Villagers is something you 99% want to do.
The case you described where you save food for a Hydra is the textbook case of why autoqueue is so important. I mention this in the video in fact. Because of manual queue, there new players, like yourself, who end up learning how to play the game wrong. These players are tricked by the illusion of choice with regards to training vills, and end up learning really bad habits - like saving food for Hydra instead of a villager. In reality, there is no actual choice here.
Even in campaign. Yes you can get through campaign on moderate without making vills. But as you play higher difficulties, and if you want to get through the campaign more efficiently and faster, you should also be making vills.
@@ChillyEmpire My argument is predicated on autoqueue taking away the fun of being in the moment playing the game, by taking that element of the game away from you. I don't really care if I'm playing "poorly" if I'm having fun.
In terms of "a viable strategy" I mean of course if you're not playing competitively. I don't mean making absolutely no villagers either, ofc, I just mean that you don't have to immediately bump up to 100 vils in order to get what you want done, in any skirmish or campaign scenario. I've been rolling with about 60 villagers for any given campaign the whole time, Titan difficulty and all.
Basically, it's not about whether or not TC idle is a bad habit or suboptimal play, it's about enjoying the agency (or illusion of it). To be clear I'm perfectly aware that you should always be queueing up villies, and that's what I do if I'm playing "seriously". I just feel like in your argumentation you're tantamount to saying "if you're not playing the correct way you shouldn't be playing this game at all". Which is why I point out that most casual RTS players games don't touch multiplayer or play ranked or anything. It's not important to us. We do have a choice on whether to make that villager or make that hydra.
tl;dr - I am fully aware that turning on autoqueue (or simply always queueing villies to 100+) would make me a better, more efficient player. That's simply not important to me. I play video games to have fun, and I have fun micromanaging my base and economy, and *feeling* like every decision matters.
@@rioplats I see, to rephrase in the way I’m understanding you:
Some players, especially new players, prefer to be able to control the speed of their ramp. Allowing them manual queue of vills lets them set the game at the pace they’re comfortable with.
It’s an interesting take that I hadn’t considered.
@@ChillyEmpire That's about the gist of it, I think. All about picking your own pace, not going 100% all the time.
I totally understand what you mean, don't get me wrong - for anyone looking to up their game and improve their skill and strategies, autoqueue is nothing but a boon that frees up attention for other things like microing army, and it's something so trivial that it doesn't use brainpower or planning anyway.
But I just prefer to play at my own rhythm, one action at a time, one vill at a time. It's how I unwind and kill time after a long day at work; efficiency doesn't factor into the equation. So as long as I get the option to stick with that approach and not use the feature if I don't want to, I'm happy for y'all to do what you like with autoqueue :)
Sorry about the paragraphs, I just feel strongly about there not being a "right" answer to this because in the end, it's what you personally find enjoyable about the game.
100% agree! Brilliant idea :) I really enjoy having it on military units too and choosing when to enable and disable it is quite an important decision or what units to pump. I'm a very casual player and I played it as a kid, very fun. How old are you chilly?? I'm 36, I feel like that's about average for RTS these days especially age games.
yeah i agree.....i prefer autoqueues cause my brain must be focused on battles or strategy......even battles are automanaged by game engine.....when your army clashes wih another army it's game engine that manages pathfinding of units.....pathfinding of units is all automanaged....vills autosearch for deers.....now scout autocollect deers.....monks autoheal....ecc....
I was fully expecting the title to be sarcastic and to hear more 'skill issue' and 'just make the whole game play itself'
Nah me unironic
Look, there's just no strategy in micro, its not interesting, its binary. If I have spearmen horsemen, and my opponent has spearmen archer, its objectively correct 100% of the time for them to attack my horsemen with their spears, and my spears with their aechers and vice versa. There is no interesting decision making, just awful sweaty apm skill check (which is apparently a bad thing in a competitive game). Also, I'm bad at micro. Therefore, I think we should have automicro where units attack the unit they counter automatically to get rid of this tedious, repetitive task that lacks any meaningful decision making and has no place in RTS. This would free up the player to do things that ARE fun, like queuing villagers and deciding what military units to build :)
facts 🤣
The "fun" aspect is kind of a non-arguement in some spots, you assume a lot of things about whether something is fun or not, but if clicking villagers isn't fun, then neither is clicking the tech buttons, or creating military. Hell, I don't think clicking my age up gives me any dopamine either, and so on and so forth. May as well automate everything if clicking buttons isn't fun.
What I do agree with, however, is that these options should always be available for people who are new to the series. But, only in the campaign or in AI games, where newer players are more likely to go for their first experiences in an RTS. Or, I do agree that if it's going to be put in multiplayer, it needs to be nerfed heavily. An example would be like in Street Fighter 6. Combos are important, just like villagers, but if people use the easy mode, they're doing less damage overall. If they want to do the most damage, they have to learn the combo. Making auto queue villagers, or even using the new "AI Villager" mode should be an option, but an obviously worse option, to incentivise people to learn how to make villagers and manage their civilization. It's a key feature of the game. People should know and learn how to juggle their economy along with their military, it's just part of the game experience.
your just aking way too far, talking about automating villager production in a game where you always want to be making them isnt equal to autoing everything, i think it should exist everywhere including ranked, its just boring monotonous tasks, everything else is fine, also without any penalty, its not like they dont learn how to play, its just less annoying, i rly dont get your far reaching argument at all
I could’ve been more clear in the vid - my razor for fun in an RTS is “does this aspect of the game drive interesting strategic decision making?”
Making vills isn’t actually a decision. You should always be making vills. Which is why it should be automated.
Things like making military IS a strategic decision, which is why it shouldn’t be automated.
Keep in mind I’m also advocating for more interesting base building and resource management. These aspects of macro ARE interesting strategic decisions.
@Noximillien-LHorloger I'm reaching far as a dramatic example. Auto scouts, auto farms in aoe2, auto military queue in these games, the list goes on for all the real automation examples already in the games. Don't get me wrong, I do think some of these options should exist, but not when it interferes with the core gameplay. It's already kind of happening with AI Villagers, so 'what's next?' is essentially what I'm getting at. If we automate these essential actions, then the game should also automate military for you. After all, it's pretty essential to kill your opponent to win, and it's fairly monotonous just clicking on the military button every time. May as well give us AI Military as an option too, etc. You can probably imagine I don't actually advocate for that, it's just an example of what I mean.
@@ChillyEmpire Then micro shouldn't be in the game, since you should always micro.
If you only care about decision-making and not about execution, you should play a board game.
@@MrShadowThief Does there exist a spectrum of execution?
Like, even you have to agree that some executions are more compelling than others right?
Building a base is interesting execution. It's visual, it's creative.
Microing your army is interesting execution. It's visual, it's creative.
Queueing vills is one of the LEAST interesting executions in the game while SIMULTANEOUSLY being one of the most important.
Not only that, but it also cuts out new players from getting into the game. The choice couldn't be more obvious.
The only compelling argument I see for not having auto queue is if you believe the only audience available to RTS is the legacy old-head audience who grew up playing these games.
I honestly dont want beasty and crew to stay in this game and ruin it lol
Interesting. Auto-Queue wasn't a feature I even remembered or was aware of until the recent discussions.
And now I'm surprised everyone says it's the most important feature and they can't even play without it and stuff.
Just look at another controversial: auto-placement buildings.
Before you had to place the building exactly where the cursor at.
Now you can simple over a building with shift and place buildings around automatically with the best space possible.
AOE1 we didn't have a queue.
We had to manually select the building and produce.
Then queue was invented.
Now it's auto queue.
Games evolve!!
Great point
Older RTS such as Supreme Commander even dawn of war 1 have auto que or auto build units from factories so i don't get why people are against it. Even if there was military auto que theres still a degree of knowledge and skill need to use those units not point having 5 buildings pumping out units if they just die one by one or their rally point is set up badly.
and those games are dead
@@meepo1862 They have smaller communities for sure and haven't got revamps unlike the age of empire series
Next feature needs to be, implementation of ChatGPT so that it can also take away the decision making. Also yes, queuing vills is no exciting as Beasty said it, it is remembering to do it while doing 10 other things at the same time.
You can't hit Conq in AoE4 and be casual. (:
Conq 1 players are in like, the top 5% of RANKED players. I'd say if you are playing online ranked, you some degree of competitive.
So anyway... Congrats on hitting Conq! Thats a big achievement!
I think its a really good idea for custom games or casual games, would help me a ton with getting my friends to play more😁 but imo keep it out of ranked, i think apm is the hidden resource in rts
Also think it should be 2-3 sec penalty to incentivize trying to play without it and finally try out ranked que. Once we have them malding in ranked que we got them boys🤓😁
@@teeedeeeee no just normal que time and no penalty whatsoever, few people actually think doing a repeating task every few sec is strategic or engaging
There are a good Apm in AoM even with villager AQ.
if I wanted apm checks I can play action games. apm checks in rts should be about battle micro or quickwalling not a braindead spam vill autoqueue that I bet pros even have programmable mouses for and that casual players like us don't care to even set up.
do yo know what real-time in RTS stands for? rts is not paradox strategy games
Its probably so controversial I wouldn’t add it to any existing games. It’s a political decision, ignore the merits. (AoE2 freaked out when farm placement was added. Which is just a duh QoL move). I agree that it’s probably the best decision
I disagree with your last bit. I don’t think QoL is holding RTS back. QoL is something already existing RTS players consider when choosing their game. Players new to RTS? Yeah that’s a huge topic but I don’t thing QoL features is part of the discussion.
I suspect rts is a generational game genre. I struggle seeing younger gamers enjoying them. This may just be my 30 year old showing but I think kids these days would feel like they’re being punished if they played an RTS game.
Anyways. Love your channel chilly
I 100% agree and I am never going back to playing rts games that dont have vill autoqueue. I would say it's the greatest addition to age series especially competitively.
5:25 u are totally mistaken here, if u are raiding or having micro battles with ur enemy u can really know he is struggling with making vills, I mean this happens to everyone even the pros, the skill is in who has the better macro to take the game, I mean it's obvious unless u are so bad at the game to see it. Maybe u are talking to much in general, but in aoe 2 at least is not a must and is not the way to make the game better, what's next? Auto micro units?
The "what next" question doesn't apply. I clearly define the design razor in the video. My line is - "does this lead to meaningful strategic choices". Microing units IS a meaningful strategic choice, so no, I would not automate it.
To reiterate my other point - there's absolutely no way you know exactly how many vills your opponent is losing out on due to your raids distracting him. It's just guesswork. EVEN if you had his entire base under vision you'd have a near-impossible time keeping track of how many vills he has. In essence, manual villager queueing needlessly complicates understanding your opponent's ramp level.
@@ChillyEmpire It does apply, it only helps to lazy players who wants everything easy, auto farm, auto scout, auto vills, auto production. It was a joke anyways, clearly an auto micro is nonsense like auto queue vills too. I only talk about aoe 2 but I dont see how microing units is strategic for you but making vills and not making it are not, making vills is clearly a strategic choice for going all in strats, go 1 2 or 3 town centers, only produce army or outboom ur opponent. Actually the "no making vills strats" and market abuse are very broken in this game but also there are plenty of examples where the macro players destroy the micro players by outbooming them, the top elite players they all have the best macro, but not always the best micro.
But I don't understand why u need to know exactly the numbers of vills of your opponent? For what? In any game u should always consider he never stopped making vills, and u make a guess from that, from ur production too and by exploring him, which all of this requires skill. Even if auto vills is a thing and u kill lot of vills from him, u would never know exactly his number of vills and u dont consider he will be raiding u too in the case is an even match. By knowing the exact number of vills of your opponent it will just make players to quit earlier if they know they are so behind in vills and possibly army too. There are plenty of competitive games out there, where one player having way more eco and vills but less army made them lose the games, and opponents with less vills and more army made them won, but both weren't fully aware of this which helped the second player with less vills, if they know exactly their vill number, u kill that type of situation. Players will just quit earlier with less eco and won't even try. Or players with more eco will just hold their advantage and will extend the game. Like I said at least in aoe 2, sure there are plenty stuff to make it better game but auto queue is not the way
It is okay but if you enable it you cannot play another RTS, it screw up your muscle memory.
And I cannot outmacro my opponent because the AI did it for my opponent as well, sorry, NO, I don’t like it. Because when you raid your opponent he is more likely to panic and forget to build villa by the moment, it should be your advantage.
It is like a car racing but you don’t need to pedal gas, it is wrong, you are supposed to be know and skilled doing it. If they also enable ranked option disable Vill autoqueue I am happy to disable it, I rather we compete fairly instead of the AI doing our basic skill.
There are many ways to do the macro beyond the automatic villager queue.
The games I've seen in AoMR where a player has spent resources best by constructing the right buildings at the right time, producing military units efficiently, moving idle villagers to the right resources, researching the right economic technologies and raiding opponent have been several.
As explained in the video. This is a silly argument because you can’t actually tell whether or not your opponent failed to produce vills.
@@ChillyEmpire so let it be fair, you don't click TC and Q, you lose, it is a basic skill, and blockading this basic skill who cannot do it under stress, should be awarded.
When you say you come from game design, you mean card/board ge design, right? This whole argument is basically just an argument to turn aoe into a card game. If all you care about is strategy then that's the logical conclusion. Aoe is real time strategy. The whole point is we play it because we don't just enjoy the strategy. We enjoy the execution. We enjoy, can you believe it, having to click villagers. Yes you mention army micro. But again you're confused about what ge you're playing. Aoe 2 is specifically an rts with an economic emphasis. It is not, and does not want to be, starcraft. Its designed for people who enjoy having to "micro" their economy. It's the only one like it, and I'd argue it's exactly why it's the best one.
Well yeah, I completely agree with what you're saying - I also love the age games because of the economy micro. But my point is that the economy micro can be more fun and interesting than just simply clicking on villagers. I point out how AOE4 does a great job with the "influence" mechanic that makes you think more carefully about how you lay out your base. That's super fun in my opinion because it involves strategic decision making. I'd personally welcome more features like that - to the point where planning out your base becomes something closer to programming a factorio-style factory - rather than just simply clicking the train villager button.
@@ChillyEmpire Again, base planning is has no execution factor to it. It's pure strategy. The influence mechanic could be implemented on a board game. From what I can tell, APM is not important for Factorio at all. Age of empires 2 is not a strategy game. It just isn't. Having APM-dependent non-strategic actions involved is a core part of what it is. You could make the argument that counter strike should just have aim bots built into the game, because "clicking on the enemy is just an execution thing it isn't strategic". You could say that positioning, timing, how many players to send down each passage, those are the "real" strategy elements and being able to click on the enemy is just a skill barrier. And I would say you have a real point. And I would say, if you want to make a game like that, a "strategy only" FPS, it would be a great game and I would probably play it. Seriously. However, if you said counter strike should change and become that, they'd all tell you to get lost. And rightly so. Because that isn't what counter strike is. Counter Strike is a combination of strategy and technical execution. And some of that technical execution is not about how fast you can execute a strategy. It's literally just can you click fast enough on the screen. No strategy to it. And that's how they like it. That IS what they find fun about it. The combination of mindless skill and deep strategy is the game. AOE2 is no different. If you want to make a strategy-only RTS where APM doesn't matter much at all and strategic decisions are all that matters, go for it. I'll probably play it. But aoe2 is not that.
@@ChillyEmpire To add further, while I'm perfect fine with people being different to me and enjoying different things, I really do think that you're missing out on the beauty of this game with your thinking. You say that there's nothing impressive about spectating someone who remembers to queue up villigers. I could not disagree more. To me, the most amazing feeling as a spectator, is watching an enormous fight with monks and mangonels and archers all dancing around an being in utter awe at how they're managing to control everything, and seeing one player gain a slight advantage with better army micro, only to look down and realise that at the same time as all this has been happening, the other player has kept their TC working constantly, built more farms, added 5 houses, and launched a sneak attack at the same time as well, and realise that the player with the advantage in the battle who you thought had godlike control was actually the one slumping. Those moments to me are the absolute peak of spectatorship. It's the same feeling as when you're watching a movie and the good guy is getting beat up but then you realise they were actually a step ahead the whole time and it was all part of the plan. Things happening "off screen" doesn't detract from the viewing experience. It makes it better. It means you're constantly being surprised by how much better the payers actually are than you think they are. How much more they're doing that you aren't even thinking of. And, in a similar vein, some of my best moments playing are when I engage in a scout/spear vs scout/spear fight in Feudal where I struggle like crazy to keep up on the battle, but then notice my score rising, and realise the other guy is putting 100% of his focus into it while I'm still adding farms and houses and have no idle TC. That feels incredible.
@@neildutoit5177 To be clear - I've trained myself to do the Villager macro. I personally do appreciate when I see pros perfectly manage their villager macro despite all the big battles happening.
But again, this isn't visual. This isn't "apparent". It's inferred.
I don't deny that there is fun in learning this stuff. Once you get good at villager macro you feel really proud of yourself for remembering to queue up vills. It's definitely a mark of skill. I'm very much a part of the "old guard" that enjoys this stuff.
But look at the growth of RTS (or lack there of). Look at the player count. Look at the average player age.
The people who like these mechanics that you're arguing for will soon be dinosaurs. And the genre as a whole is quickly just becoming nostalgia bait (ie. Stormgate, AOM Retold).
Every new player I teach falls off because of the Villager macro. That's why I feel strongly that this is an area to fix up.
Also, you come from AOE2. I don't have strong opinions on AOE2. From what I can tell the community is entirely made up of stuck-in-their-ways old heads that practically beg for more complicated bullshit in their games. I recall ya'll really didn't want automated farm placement either.
If AOE2 insists on being old school that's fine, the game is old and the community is there for nostalgia reasons. I'm more referring to AOE4, and whatever comes after that.
@@ChillyEmpire okay so you do understand. Yes, we are stuck in our ways dinosaurs who beg for more complicated bullshit. That is exactly what we are and what we want. And yes autofarm was a big mistake and one of many that has made the meta in aoe2 de so much more stale than aoe2 aok. The more they simplify the game, the less variation we're seeing and the more forum posts about how boring the strategy is becoming. Unsurprisingly.
Is it just nostalgia? I would argue it's more to do with it being a classic. You don't fix what isn't broken. Would you call chess nostalgia bait? It hasn't changed in hundreds of years. Yet somehow it still tops twitch charts. For all the improvements and innovation in game design, people, even young people, still prefer a thousands of years old game. Not everything has to evolve in order to stay relevant.
So actually, we almost certainly aren't all dinosaurs. There are certainly many young pros entering the scene.
You can point at player stats but it doesn't prove anything. All the new RTS games (with their flashy new mechanics) do worse than aoe2. So sure, aoe is small. But that doesn't imply that changing it would make it bigger. This might just be the best you can do. These new games all tabking supports that argument. But you cannot know either way just based of stats.
More importantly though, the goal of a game isn't to be the most popular. If it was, we could all just get 30 seconds and call it a day. Games should fill different niches for people with different tastes, even if it limits their growth. Same way I like the fact that I have a local steakhouse to stay the way it is even though it could be more popular if it became a McDonald's franchise.
I'm glad you're not focused on aoe2. Title seems bizzare then though.
Auto everything!!
3:50 'tarp'?
Tarpit
Auto vill is an L take one step closer to auto everything
HARD DISAGREE!!! Games are supposed to require skill, part of why people like Viper isnt winning everything anymore is that other mechanically good players like Hera also imporved in strategy. I don't want AOE to be a strategy game purely, it ought to be about execution as well. You dont win war with tactics and sticks. You win it with tactics and military technology
oh no, somewhere is crying BeastyQT who will lose 30% of his advantage, oh no, this game won`t be about clicking and abusing meta, nooooooo
It seems to me you just want a different type of RTS games and I'm surprised people want auto-queue as much, based on the comments. I don't like it, I've never used and I never will. It automates something that is a strategic choice. When and how you build villagers, where you allocate them etc. That was always then a difference between the pros and casuals - that even during the heat of battle they could sometimes even allocate worker units, make new ones, build something...
And if your argument is basically just - "oh I have to click it again, omg so boring", then what's even the point of playing? Oh shit, your favorite commentator never mentioned villagers being produced, must mean that's boring. What are you on about? The auto-queue teaches players nothing and adds nothing to the game, except making it WAY easier and removes the tactical aspect of it. And if your argument then is: "oh but it's tactical because you can always stop making units by disabling auto-queue" - no you just like your games to be way too easy and you don't want to engage in all aspects of the game, you want to prioritize just on the "action" parts which are engaging the enemy when you already have an army and that to me defeats the purpose of RTS games.
The only "strategy" on non-stop villager production is if you have 1 or a few more in queue.
If in an RTS, being some time without producing villagers, it works for you to do an all in, then I would agree with you, but it is not like that and on top of that it is a heavy task and not much fun for many players.
I think my video didn’t do a good job of conveying my message to you.
1. My issue with autoqueue isn’t that it’s boring. My razor is “does this create interesting strategic choices”(it’s a strategy game after all). In AOE, because of the way the vills are balanced, it’s almost never something you’d want to not do. As a result, automating it is a good solution for now.
2. You mention resource allocation and base building under pressure. I agree 100%. That is good. I’m not advocating for auto allocation.
3. What I’m really advocating for is any choices in the game that are strategically interesting. Base planning, resource management, these are strategically interesting areas of the game. I’d love to see these emphasized.
It is still moronic that Esport-ifying RTS games has made it so that their acumen is not Strategy but having to handle a quagmire of tactical minutiae.
What did you say about my mother?
You don't play the game.
It's ironic because that's kind of my problem with this whole debate. People are arguing to get rid of manual queueing specifically *because* it frees up your attention for more tactical minutiae, for more electrifying e-sports action. Whereas I specifically want to manually decide to create each and every one of my vils and choose where they go because that's each time a moment dedicated to thinking about my economy.
What is so bad about losing and having gaps at top and lower levels honestly? If you cannot build villagers while microing admit that you are bad at the game instead of saying that the game needs auto q or practice. This is like the journalist demanding a easy difficulty for the souls games.
Boo hoo players dont want to play anymore because they cant be asked to learn to build villagers constantly. Of course the game must lower its standards to get more players who being casuals abandon the game anyway.
Yes it is absolutly fun to keep an economy rolling while microing fights.
Not knowing if the enemy is producing villagers is not a reason to have auto q. This is the dumbest take by far. Yes I can tell if the enemy is not producing villagers but even if I couldnt there is still the chance that overwhelming him will cause his macro to weaken, auto q will remove this.
Skill issue if you cant finish a game in 1 hour mark. Not everygame needs to be 20 min sweet spot. Ironically noobs love long games. Just quit if you dislike the game to be that long and play something else.
Commentators make note everytime a player forgets to build villagers there is even a stat that tracks tc idle time in Aoe 2 spectator. Aussie has commentated on low elo games and there are players who choose to stop building villagers. Yes that means they are bad dont then go and ask for the game to play itself for the poor poor noobs who probably enjoy the game more than you do as it is.
Jesus Christ at the end you just admit you want a different game. Asking for auto q because then than will somehow make the devs make other things more difficult is literrally asking for another game. Age of Mythology does not have more difficult macro or micro because it has auto q. You say you come from game design. What have you actually designed? Aoe 4 does not need to be more like factorio wtf. You want less apm play Homeworld, Total War (specially shogun 2), Men of War Assault Squad 2 or that garbage company of heroes where the time to kill allows a child to retreat.
absolutely furious, and for what?
If people like you were the only ones who played this game, it would die in a month and then you'd have *no* game at all. Casuals are the lifeblood of any game, stop trying to scare them off, not every game has to be do-or-die. This is coming from someone who was successful in this game before auto queue.
I am against any auto queue in any AoE game. Full stop.
Why?
Good for you I guess.
@@Haigotron just my taste
Then it should be in all of them. You would still be free not to use it.
Auto Queue is useles! Only beginer use it!
Ive been playing aom since 2010 but just know auto queue feature it useless for me even if im still new to the game i want every thing under my control that how you get good without auto this and that
that's like saying every FPS games should have aim assist
You are free to use no auto que . But the game should have this feature. I don't see any strategy behind high apm players, most of them are idiots .
Every fps should have the option for it yeah
Did you actually watch the video or are you just trolling 😅
No it is more like saying, that FPS games should have crosshairs. They aren't needed as well, but they do help some people.
what does apm(vill queues) have to do with skillshots(aim assist)? just another clueless idiot commenting about something he has no idea about!
No. Auto q is no good. If you cant produce villas constantly then you don't need to be playing.
It should be a feature but it should give a debuff like auto combos in SF6 that deals 20% less damage, 10-20% increased production time to help new players but to not remove skill ceiling it is the perfect help for new players but for people who actually want to become good and competitive have more skill depth
Edit I dislike the younger audience take because coming from SC2 where there are still a lot of new players also younger ones coming there is nothing they like more than having to click a lot and fast so removing the macro cycle does not make sense.
I would as I said take the Street fighter approach make it accessible but with a debuff.
Hard disagree.
Villager queueing fundamentally isn’t fun and isn’t a strategic decision. There’s nothing here to defend. It’s a legacy feature that old heads cling on to for no reason. And that stifles innovation in the genre.
@@ChillyEmpire I love macro skill expression in SC2 innovation was well known due to having perfect macro hitting every worker hitting every military unit having perfect resource management etc.
Fun is very opinion based I love having these cycles a lot for me that is part of the fun of RTS having to manage multiple things and cycles but removing it / making it suboptimal not do it yourself is imo awful.
Then where do you stop with the automatic things a lot of my friends dislike the base building for example because they only want to fight and micro. So you remove that as well?
What if people dislike micro because it is not fun to lose because you cant micro as well as your opponent and its not fun for them to micro units like focus firing or splitting whatever?
I think adding auto feature is fine definetly but it must come with a downside.
Once you shave enough away it is not a RTS anymore imo and more Battle aces style game.
@@SoonTW SC2 macro is too simple that it feels skillful.
Making villagers is too basic that it is just a chore
@@SoonTW again you also really just try and push it too far, were only talking about villager production in a game where you want to make them constantly, not sc2 or games where you make just a few handfulls, also we are stopping at villagers, is that not clear?
@@SoonTW Re “where do you stop” - simple, my razor is “does this gameplay element create interesting strategic choice for the player”.
Military production, base planning, etc. it involves strategic choice.
Villager production doesn’t.
If vills were less resource efficient, to the point where you’d actually think about not making a villager in favor of something else, then it would make sense to make it manual.
Not sure why my comments keep getting deleted, but anyway.
I think you misunderstand the place of macro in the strategy bit of "real-time strategy".
Villager production is not there to reward you if you remember to do it right. It's there to reward your opponent if his strategy succeeds in making you forget to do it right.
If you introduce auto-queue, you're making the game less strategic.
I'm not deleting any comments mate.
I explain in the video already:
1. You have no idea if your opponent didn't make villagers. In fact, this feature actually clouds your ability to understand the game state and make relevant strategic choices.
2. As much as you can raid/distract your opponent, you can't actually directly impact whether or not they make mistakes. You can only hope. And as mentioned before, you can't act on that hope because you have no actual data to work with.
3. It disproportionately punishes noobs. Top level players are far less affected.
@@ChillyEmpire Not saying it was you. It just happens. TH-cam sometimes seems to be annoyed by certain comments but I still don't know what triggers it.
1. Yes you do. If you are applying pressure to your enemy, you can tell how big his eco is compared to yours because you have vision of his base. Not to mention his score will most likely be lower and his age up notification will appear to you later. Plus, if you're worried about lack of knowledge of the game state being a detriment to your strategic decision, fog-of-war is a much worse mechanic to the game than villager production. It punishes noobs and requires execution as opposed to pure strategic thinking.
2. This is only true if you're playing against a (very well implemented) robot. Humans make mistakes all the time, and most of the times very predictably so. If you apply pressure to your opponent, he will be distracted and forget to do something else. And even if he doesn't, it's still better than not doing it. You can watch high-level games to verify what I'm saying. Every pro will have idle TC time even if he's not under pressure, and that time will increase drastically if he's distracted by something else (due to external factors or because he's trying to do more things that he can manage, which is a STRATEGIC mistake). Sure, maybe you cannot directly see your opponent's idle time and eco size number and assess the damage you've done to his build order, but assuming that didn't happen would be simply insane.
Additionally, saying that it isn't guaranteed it will work makes no sense because pretty much every game works based on assumptions you can't guarantee are true. Like I said, fog-of-war makes so that you can't really know what's going on. Strategies usually work because your opponent doesn't know what you're doing, and you can't guarantee they will work because you can't know if you're opponent will know how to respond.
3. Let's ignore for a second that noobs play against noobs, not against top-level players: that's the point. Noobs are punished BECAUSE they're noobs. It's part of LEARNING. If they performed as well as top-level players, there wouldn't be any reason for them to improve.
@@MrShadowThief Hey mate, thanks for spending the time to reply. Although, I'm recognizing that you're not arguing in good faith, so I don't think I can really convince you on this.
I know you're not arguing in good faith because you tried to pretend like you can tell when your opponent isn't making villagers. This simply isn't true in any real competitive game.
In fact, I'd challenge you to play a game and tell me exactly all of the times the opponent accidently stops making vills. You won't accept this challenge because you know it's impossible.
At best, you can "assume" that they're losing out on villagers because you're distracting them. But villager count and villager production are not free information. You can only try to guess. And this ultimately means that your strategic decisions are less informed.
I don't think it's productive to discuss this further unless you concede to this point.
Are there arguments in favor of not having auto-queue? Yes. But this is not one of them.
@@ChillyEmpire Like I said, sure you can't tell exactly the size of their eco like you can using CaptureAge, but if you have vision of their base (which you should if you're applying pressure), then you can estimate the size of their eco and how much damage you're causing. Plus, there are other ways of estimating how their eco is doing, like score, age-up time, army size, army quality, etc. Yes, it's not perfect, because the nature of the game is that of limited knowledge about the state of the game (mainly due to the fog-of-war), but that's what allows much of the strategic thinking to happen, and gathering all these pieces of info to infer how your opponent is doing is part of that process.
Let's assume for a second that we can reach a compromise: no villager auto-queue, but you have a direct indication of how many vills your opponent has (in Age2 this actually exists in the form of the price of the Spies tech, but it requires a castle and it's generally not worth it unless you're really curious). Do you think knowing exactly the size of your opponent's eco makes the game more or less strategic? Personally, I'd say less, since gathering info about the state of your opponent's game requires strategy and is usually part of your overall strategy to win. Giving you more info for free might help you making these strategies, but it results in overall less strategy being made.
Regardless, it seems that your problem revolves mostly around fog-of-war, not manual villager production itself. Yet, you argue against the latter and not the former. I'm willing to discuss whether fog-of-war makes the game more or less strategic (personally, I think it's more, but I can see why it could be less), but since your problem is clearly not about the possibility of villager downtime itself, I agree with you in that there is no reason for any further discussion on that.
Finally, I wanted to say that simply refusing to further discuss it by saying that an argument that disagrees with you is in "bad faith" because you can't answer it without recursively mentioning yourself is, in my view, bad faith.
@@MrShadowThief Think about it like this mate - in Hearthstone, I can't see the enemy's cards (fog of war) but I can see their mana - so I have some sense of game state/ramp and I can react accordingly.
In AOE, you can't see either. If you don't have an understanding of ramp, then it'll hamper your ability to make informed strategic decisions based on game state. Yes, you also cant make informed decisions due to fog of war, but fog of war is something you can address through scouting.
Villager count cannot be scouted. Villager queue mistakes cannot be reliably scouted. The best you can do is infer.
The point of all of this is to say, even if you're raiding and distracting your opponent, it doesn't necessarily have a clear effect on their ability to ramp.
Let's say you kill an enemy villager. Very clear impact. It's visual, it's visceral, it's entertaining.
Now let's say you distract the opponent enough to get them to forget to queue a villager. Very nebulous impact. It's not necessarily clear what caused it. You as a player won't know if it happened or not. Spectators won't realize it happened until much later. It's not entertaining.
Beyond this, let's just agree to disagree.
A video made by a noob for noobs that only noobs would ever agree with
What rank are you?
@@ChillyEmpire top 1% in aoe2 for the last 8 years or so. Not super impressive or anything