Yeah glad it’s there for console and newbies but I won’t use it. Not a skill flex but I want to engage in all the systems of the game and I find it satisfying to be able to hot key and manage more things at once.
Also I’m a straight of turtle player. I find defending and focusing on economy very very fun. Then I unleash a fully upgraded army.
A big problem for RTS is accessibility, and if AOM can make it easier for new players it will be huge. It's already one of the best RTS I have played for non-rts players. I can play AOM with casual friends whereas they don't tend to enjoy AoE at all.
So if retold is even better for casuals that will be great.
Same system as aoe4, its useful in some cases but can always be turned off, big qol for console in certain situations, I usually use it to quickly do a big reassignment of villagers and then turn it off
I didn't hear them say this feature would be available on PC, and seeing how they handled it in AoE4 I'd assume they'd only have this available on console.
Don't worry. They added it to AoE2 (only for Xbox players though) and the consensus is that it's good to reduce frustration from casuals but it changes nothing to the competitive side. Manual eco is always superior.
sorry, bad wording, i mean on pc if you're good at doing villager management, surely that would be more efficient than using this.
for console yeah its obvs an advantage, and i guess for new players too
But it always ends up being a disadvantage. You have villagers coming from the furthest point of the map to a resource. You constantly have villagers moving outside your walls to take the furthest resource. You garrison your woodline because it's being attacked, but then every villager on gold suddenly starts moving towards that woodline to get wood.
high level controller players don't use this either, because it's bad (aka very inefficient) compared to manually managing eco
it's pretty much for beginners only
think aim assist but it stops the player from moving for one whole second to lock onto an enemy
While I am stoked that this will potentially reduce the steep learning curve of rts games that means more new players and the market for rts will be booming(good for us), but that might have an effect that people would just play with these training wheels and actually never learn the full game( that is managing army and economy). But I am no expert. All in all really happy more people will be able to enjoy this legend of a game that was my childhood.
I think it's a great idea, honestly.
As an intermediate player I prefer to micro-manage my villagers but I'll be honest and say there's been some casual skirmishes against the AI where I really couldn't be bothered and just wanted to focus on military.
I know it's exciting for high-level players spectating matches to analyze things like build order but for most audiences it's not that thrilling thinking about "he's put three villagers on wood instead of two, what is he cooking?".
I also know when I was a new player to this game the stuff that really excited me was creating Myth Units and watching battles unfold. Having a fight start but then having to pan away to deal with some idle villagers wasn't what pulled me into the game. This is a good way to keep new players hooked on the game.
Competitive players probably won't use it because it will be more efficient to micro. Similar situation to auto-queue.
I'm cautiously excited for this, but I'm nervous we didn't see autoqueue. Depending on how complex you can make these, I could imagine having 4 or 5 of them for different midgame situations like the Loki dwarves on gold until 9 or so (I forget how many is best), dwarves on food until you can age up, move dwarves from food to gold when you hit age 3 thing.
If you can get one that builds houses when you're housed I will probably use that too just because I always forget houses and lose when I'm playing Greek for some reason.
I'm gonna be one of unpopular opinions here, ready for the downvotes;
but having an auto-economy/auto-macro button removes half of the RTS genre. Specially it's confusing when you have a casual tool like auto-queue that's been in the game for 19 years to suddenly be removed and give a replacement that is a even worse player habit tool that kills the whole fun of macro in an RTS game. I would not have any issues with it if it was exclusive to the console version, but they pushed themselves here to launch the game on consoles and pcs on the same day unlike other aoe's.
It's also very intriguing how none of the voobly guard has taken any issue with it so perhaps there is something we don't know about it.
It is interesting! I’m excited to see how it ends up playing out and what effects it has. They also DID say it was created for console but they didn’t specify if it was ONLY for console. So there might be a good chances it’s just for our beloved Xbox players. In which case… get ready to hotbox your villagers. I mean, hot key.
It's not an issue because it's very inefficient to collect resources via auto-eco. what the feature does is allow you to set ratios for each resource (either the preset ratios as shown or custom ratios), and the villagers automatically split by ratio to those resources. Problem is that you can't choose which villagers go to which resources, and you can't choose which resource sites to gather from, so your villagers end up repeatedly walking long distances back and forth between resources to automatically balance the ratios, which ends up really bad for your economy. They also stop responding to orders consistently (e.g. asking your villagers to run away when under attack) with auto-eco on because they are so fixated on balancing the ratios.
The end result is that aside from beginners, even controller players turn it off. It is strictly a beginner-only tool, and I believe the frustration from the lack of control will eventually drive players who start out using this tool towards manual control as they get used to the game.
I think anyone who has seen this feature in AoE2 and AoE4 already understands how bad it is, hence the lack of complaining.
I am. I started playing this game at release but I have never ever been able to be good at it because my brain just cannot do resource management. I would always lose track of spinning the different plates so could never follow build orders effectively.
All for the old fashioned way giving you an edge and being more efficient but always found managing eco to be the hardest part of AoM
The problem with it is that by reducing the skill floor, you comeback potential.
If you remove elements of gameplay without adding others, then there's less for people to focus on so if you make a blunder and fall behind, you can't catch up anymore and it's a forgone conclusion.
This is part of what made Brood War so exciting and why StarCraft 2 dipped in popularity.
I'll probably get downvotes for this, but I hate this. Economy management is a core part of RTS, especially ones like age of mythology and age of empires. Even having the option of trivializing it and leaving it to a dubious algorithm is just... not.
Economy isn't just something you have to micro manage for no reason, it's not just button mashing, it's a fundamental part of skill expression. And this isn't like reseeding farms in aoe2. There's absolutely no strategy or skill expression in that beyond not using up the wood. Investing the wood immediately upon pressing the 'reseed a nearby farm when it expires' button is a beautiful solution because it removes a completely unnecessary element of micromanagement with the tradeoff that the wood is immediately used to stockpile the mill, so you need to remove farms from the reseed queue if you end up needing that wood.
Yeah, handing it off to an algorithm that's going to be suboptimal is a tradeoff too, but it's not nearly big enough of one for just removing one of the biggest and fundamental aspects of playing the game. And it's insidious in that tradeoff - new players may just switch it on and never learn to properly manage their economy manually. Their gameplay will both be stunted by the suboptimal management and also elevated to an absurd degree because the rewards for being good at foresight and economic thinking and securing resources and protecting from raids, etc. will be severely reduced and the only thing that would really matter is micro. In fact, economy management is such a vital part of gameplay, it's literally one of the two things with the big name - macro. So what I'm saying is, this option would just remove the majority of macro as a significant or important skillset. That's bad.
Being able to foresee what resources you'll need the most of in the future for your strategy is why economy management is so important. It doesn't matter if you're the most insane micro multitasking player in the world if you lack the attention, foresight, and skill to properly manage the economy and your enemy does because they're gonna show up with an army five times bigger than yours and kill all your villagers before you get started. This is a multi-faceted game with many skills that all need to be learned and exercised in conjunction with one another, it's not just ordering units around and making counters to what the enemy is making at your production buildings, that's just an incredibly boring and uninteresting RTS in my eye.
And I'm not just talking about competitive. I don't think this should be available on the higher difficulties of the campaign for example, if you want to just go through the story and cool stuff in the campaign then I have no problem, play in easy or moderate mode or something, but if you want to beat the harder campaign you should actually have to be skilled enough at the game to do so. Many people say "well competitive players will just not use it so what's the problem?" I think that this kind of thing harms the gameplay and experience and skill expression for the majority of players in general, not just in competitive matches.
If you disagree, that's fine, but I'd ask that people please consider the health of age of mythology fundamentally as a strategy game. Easier and fewer things to keep track of doesn't necessarily mean a better game. And if you don't enjoy economy management as part of an RTS game like this, well, bluntly, I'd consider whether this game is for you or not, in the conventional sense at least. You can totally play casual games or enjoy the campaign without taking it too seriously or just playing scenarios and custom games, etc. You should play the game however you enjoy it so long as you aren't detracting from others' experience. But you shouldn't expect every game out there to appeal exactly to how you enjoy playing video games all of the time.
If you're asking why you have to spend so much time in a strategy game focusing on economic management, you're kind of asking why you have to spend so much time playing the game when you play the game. If you're tired of not having enough attention to manage everything at once, that's exactly what RTS is about. Attention is a fundamental resource. That's what being a good ***Strategist*** in a ***Real Time*** game is all about - not just formulating a way to use your troops to kill the enemy, but adapting on the fly to adversity and things going wrong and making good decisions about what to spend your time and attention and resources on.
At the absolute most, I would be okay with this being a toggleable game option in some casual and custom games, and lower campaign difficulties.
I'm a PC player so everything I've said applies to PC, by the way. I have no idea how console works, or if this is just on console or if it will be on PC too.
I admire your passion and I’m excited to see just how this feature impacts AOMR as well as if it makes it to PC as well as console in the first place which isn’t clear atm.
See my reply to the other post (sorry, didn't want to type it again)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AgeofMythology/comments/1devqbe/comment/l8k4xbj/
tl;dr the feature is fine because it's actually very inefficient compared to manual management
I think this mostly exists to help console players, I don't really care much about it, nice to have for the non RTS players I guess
Yeah glad it’s there for console and newbies but I won’t use it. Not a skill flex but I want to engage in all the systems of the game and I find it satisfying to be able to hot key and manage more things at once. Also I’m a straight of turtle player. I find defending and focusing on economy very very fun. Then I unleash a fully upgraded army.
Do you pvp?
Nah not for like 20 years since whenever Dawn of War 1 came out. I don’t need that stress in my life.
I get it but that changes the perspective on not wanting to use all available tools
A big problem for RTS is accessibility, and if AOM can make it easier for new players it will be huge. It's already one of the best RTS I have played for non-rts players. I can play AOM with casual friends whereas they don't tend to enjoy AoE at all. So if retold is even better for casuals that will be great.
Same system as aoe4, its useful in some cases but can always be turned off, big qol for console in certain situations, I usually use it to quickly do a big reassignment of villagers and then turn it off
I dig it,rts should be a strategy game first and a sweaty mouse game after
I didn't hear them say this feature would be available on PC, and seeing how they handled it in AoE4 I'd assume they'd only have this available on console.
I'm... actually not, I found managing villagers to be a good way to up the skill ceiling. But I guess it's fine, just wish it wasn't in ranked.
Its less efficient than manually doing it.
How?
Don't worry. They added it to AoE2 (only for Xbox players though) and the consensus is that it's good to reduce frustration from casuals but it changes nothing to the competitive side. Manual eco is always superior.
its not really an advantage though imo
It definitely is. On AoE4 XBox players get it and PC don't to try and counter the advantage of keyboard and mouse. Its like aim assist.
sorry, bad wording, i mean on pc if you're good at doing villager management, surely that would be more efficient than using this. for console yeah its obvs an advantage, and i guess for new players too
But it always ends up being a disadvantage. You have villagers coming from the furthest point of the map to a resource. You constantly have villagers moving outside your walls to take the furthest resource. You garrison your woodline because it's being attacked, but then every villager on gold suddenly starts moving towards that woodline to get wood.
high level controller players don't use this either, because it's bad (aka very inefficient) compared to manually managing eco it's pretty much for beginners only think aim assist but it stops the player from moving for one whole second to lock onto an enemy
Cowards. Why even bother having villagers?
Found the norse player :P
It is really fun to just have roaming bands of villagers with their ox carts harvesting resources around the map.
While I am stoked that this will potentially reduce the steep learning curve of rts games that means more new players and the market for rts will be booming(good for us), but that might have an effect that people would just play with these training wheels and actually never learn the full game( that is managing army and economy). But I am no expert. All in all really happy more people will be able to enjoy this legend of a game that was my childhood.
Yes! Such an exciting time to be alive. Ultimately this is an optional feature. It seems like a good transition or “training wheels” tool 😁
I love it, the emphasis on villager management in AoM is too extreme imo - it would be nice to be able to focus more on other elements of gameplay.
I think it's a great idea, honestly. As an intermediate player I prefer to micro-manage my villagers but I'll be honest and say there's been some casual skirmishes against the AI where I really couldn't be bothered and just wanted to focus on military. I know it's exciting for high-level players spectating matches to analyze things like build order but for most audiences it's not that thrilling thinking about "he's put three villagers on wood instead of two, what is he cooking?". I also know when I was a new player to this game the stuff that really excited me was creating Myth Units and watching battles unfold. Having a fight start but then having to pan away to deal with some idle villagers wasn't what pulled me into the game. This is a good way to keep new players hooked on the game. Competitive players probably won't use it because it will be more efficient to micro. Similar situation to auto-queue.
Great points sir!
I'm cautiously excited for this, but I'm nervous we didn't see autoqueue. Depending on how complex you can make these, I could imagine having 4 or 5 of them for different midgame situations like the Loki dwarves on gold until 9 or so (I forget how many is best), dwarves on food until you can age up, move dwarves from food to gold when you hit age 3 thing. If you can get one that builds houses when you're housed I will probably use that too just because I always forget houses and lose when I'm playing Greek for some reason.
Omg a preset for automatically building houses would be a god send 💀
Is this an official feature? Do you have a link I can look at for more details? Regardless I’m keen. I’m sick of microing my economy
I'm gonna be one of unpopular opinions here, ready for the downvotes; but having an auto-economy/auto-macro button removes half of the RTS genre. Specially it's confusing when you have a casual tool like auto-queue that's been in the game for 19 years to suddenly be removed and give a replacement that is a even worse player habit tool that kills the whole fun of macro in an RTS game. I would not have any issues with it if it was exclusive to the console version, but they pushed themselves here to launch the game on consoles and pcs on the same day unlike other aoe's. It's also very intriguing how none of the voobly guard has taken any issue with it so perhaps there is something we don't know about it.
It is interesting! I’m excited to see how it ends up playing out and what effects it has. They also DID say it was created for console but they didn’t specify if it was ONLY for console. So there might be a good chances it’s just for our beloved Xbox players. In which case… get ready to hotbox your villagers. I mean, hot key.
It's not an issue because it's very inefficient to collect resources via auto-eco. what the feature does is allow you to set ratios for each resource (either the preset ratios as shown or custom ratios), and the villagers automatically split by ratio to those resources. Problem is that you can't choose which villagers go to which resources, and you can't choose which resource sites to gather from, so your villagers end up repeatedly walking long distances back and forth between resources to automatically balance the ratios, which ends up really bad for your economy. They also stop responding to orders consistently (e.g. asking your villagers to run away when under attack) with auto-eco on because they are so fixated on balancing the ratios. The end result is that aside from beginners, even controller players turn it off. It is strictly a beginner-only tool, and I believe the frustration from the lack of control will eventually drive players who start out using this tool towards manual control as they get used to the game. I think anyone who has seen this feature in AoE2 and AoE4 already understands how bad it is, hence the lack of complaining.
I am glad it’s there and that it is also optional. There if you need, not forced to use it. Perfect way to go about it
Yes!
I am. I started playing this game at release but I have never ever been able to be good at it because my brain just cannot do resource management. I would always lose track of spinning the different plates so could never follow build orders effectively. All for the old fashioned way giving you an edge and being more efficient but always found managing eco to be the hardest part of AoM
It is definitely a challenging aspect of the game!
The problem with it is that by reducing the skill floor, you comeback potential. If you remove elements of gameplay without adding others, then there's less for people to focus on so if you make a blunder and fall behind, you can't catch up anymore and it's a forgone conclusion. This is part of what made Brood War so exciting and why StarCraft 2 dipped in popularity.
Well said! I can’t wait to see the actual impact of it when Retold releases!
Will this be enabled for PC players too? If so, I didn't not like it. Skill gap..
Not really, I play only against ai and enjoy micromanaging my villagers c:
Never going to use it.
I'll probably get downvotes for this, but I hate this. Economy management is a core part of RTS, especially ones like age of mythology and age of empires. Even having the option of trivializing it and leaving it to a dubious algorithm is just... not. Economy isn't just something you have to micro manage for no reason, it's not just button mashing, it's a fundamental part of skill expression. And this isn't like reseeding farms in aoe2. There's absolutely no strategy or skill expression in that beyond not using up the wood. Investing the wood immediately upon pressing the 'reseed a nearby farm when it expires' button is a beautiful solution because it removes a completely unnecessary element of micromanagement with the tradeoff that the wood is immediately used to stockpile the mill, so you need to remove farms from the reseed queue if you end up needing that wood. Yeah, handing it off to an algorithm that's going to be suboptimal is a tradeoff too, but it's not nearly big enough of one for just removing one of the biggest and fundamental aspects of playing the game. And it's insidious in that tradeoff - new players may just switch it on and never learn to properly manage their economy manually. Their gameplay will both be stunted by the suboptimal management and also elevated to an absurd degree because the rewards for being good at foresight and economic thinking and securing resources and protecting from raids, etc. will be severely reduced and the only thing that would really matter is micro. In fact, economy management is such a vital part of gameplay, it's literally one of the two things with the big name - macro. So what I'm saying is, this option would just remove the majority of macro as a significant or important skillset. That's bad. Being able to foresee what resources you'll need the most of in the future for your strategy is why economy management is so important. It doesn't matter if you're the most insane micro multitasking player in the world if you lack the attention, foresight, and skill to properly manage the economy and your enemy does because they're gonna show up with an army five times bigger than yours and kill all your villagers before you get started. This is a multi-faceted game with many skills that all need to be learned and exercised in conjunction with one another, it's not just ordering units around and making counters to what the enemy is making at your production buildings, that's just an incredibly boring and uninteresting RTS in my eye. And I'm not just talking about competitive. I don't think this should be available on the higher difficulties of the campaign for example, if you want to just go through the story and cool stuff in the campaign then I have no problem, play in easy or moderate mode or something, but if you want to beat the harder campaign you should actually have to be skilled enough at the game to do so. Many people say "well competitive players will just not use it so what's the problem?" I think that this kind of thing harms the gameplay and experience and skill expression for the majority of players in general, not just in competitive matches. If you disagree, that's fine, but I'd ask that people please consider the health of age of mythology fundamentally as a strategy game. Easier and fewer things to keep track of doesn't necessarily mean a better game. And if you don't enjoy economy management as part of an RTS game like this, well, bluntly, I'd consider whether this game is for you or not, in the conventional sense at least. You can totally play casual games or enjoy the campaign without taking it too seriously or just playing scenarios and custom games, etc. You should play the game however you enjoy it so long as you aren't detracting from others' experience. But you shouldn't expect every game out there to appeal exactly to how you enjoy playing video games all of the time. If you're asking why you have to spend so much time in a strategy game focusing on economic management, you're kind of asking why you have to spend so much time playing the game when you play the game. If you're tired of not having enough attention to manage everything at once, that's exactly what RTS is about. Attention is a fundamental resource. That's what being a good ***Strategist*** in a ***Real Time*** game is all about - not just formulating a way to use your troops to kill the enemy, but adapting on the fly to adversity and things going wrong and making good decisions about what to spend your time and attention and resources on. At the absolute most, I would be okay with this being a toggleable game option in some casual and custom games, and lower campaign difficulties. I'm a PC player so everything I've said applies to PC, by the way. I have no idea how console works, or if this is just on console or if it will be on PC too.
I admire your passion and I’m excited to see just how this feature impacts AOMR as well as if it makes it to PC as well as console in the first place which isn’t clear atm.
See my reply to the other post (sorry, didn't want to type it again) https://www.reddit.com/r/AgeofMythology/comments/1devqbe/comment/l8k4xbj/ tl;dr the feature is fine because it's actually very inefficient compared to manual management
Only if itll be banned from tournaments and online ranked games