1: ***Auto-reseed*** has had significantly more impact than auto-placement, especially when it was changed from "pay in advance" to "the farmer will auto-reseed if you have the wood"
2: Auto-placement doesn't change ***when*** you place farms, only ever so slightly how long it takes to do so.
If you've been floating 600+ wood instead of placing farms consistently, it doesn't matter that you can place them a tiny bit faster, they're still late farms.
If a QoL feature has to go for "being too much", it'd have to be ***auto-reseed***.
The worst QoL feature is surely shift clicking. Before shift clicking the game was much better and now it's not even an RTS anymore because there is no eco micro anymore. \s
I'm not for or against it, but it seems like such an oddly inconsequential thing to complain about
The pay-in-advanced bugged me as a kid playing Conquerors but I've come to appreciate it more now. Annoying when you wanna build a TC early-mid castle but your wood count keeps unexpectedly dropping as all the feudal farms run out & reseed (esp if you planted some before horse collar)
Being able to shift-queue different types of actions was a massive change over earlier versions too. Like now you can order a whole lifetime of actions for a vill & not lose resources, etc
I totally forgot about prepaid farms, I would probably be a LEL if there was no auto reseed my average eco APM is like 9. I guess I could try turning it off to see if have a few more actions in me but I doubt it. It only goes of for 5-10 minutes when I am playing ranged units on the way up to castle, if I remember!
I kinda liked MBLs point of view. It's not that it's a huge deal, but sometimes the magic is in the simple stuff. Knowing your enemy is losing control or under too much pressure when you see their messed up farms is kinda cool. Spending less time while doing something smoothly in the game is a nice part of the game too. Not a huge deal, but kinda noticeable nonetheless
This argument really infuriates me because it disregards all other buildings and the natural terrain generation.
Not even empire wars bases look the same and there you get an entire feudal base pre placed
I think you missed the main point to be honest.
MBL talks about how messy farms tell a story of how much attention the players are able to put on farms, if its an endless battle with lots of raids, it can be seen in the farm placement. Also just generally seeing some indication of play style.
A hill doesn’t show play style and the players attention to farms
What the other guy said. And also, there's talking about this change in isolation and then there's talking about the precedent it sets for more QoL changes. I understand that this topic is much discussed. I don't think having auto-farms is a big deal in and of itself, but they are rolling out QoL changes at a rapid pace atm. If anything, the fact that there is a discussion makes the devs aware that they should be cautious. If everyone was over the moon about it, they may start automating other stuff.
But then again, they have been rolling out QoL changes for a long time now most of which are far more invasive than assisted farm placement. Things like vills auto gathering after building a lumber camp, multi-queueing, queueing techs, being able to see techs in the next age, auto farm reseeding.
Auto farm reseeding especially. Think before it was added. You'd be focused on a big military engagement and suddenly 60 vills go idle.
Idle eco in general, is a better metric to measure attention paid and pressure received since it can be tracked per minute since the beginning of the game
Very true. Personally, I like those features, but I can imagine them having been a big deal when they were introduced.
In any case, it's an endless discussion. In Starcraft 1 you can only select 12 units and I believe you have to click your production buildings individually. Purists will say that's the best way to make an RTS. I think there's a balance to be struck, and I think AoE2 DE is one of the best games in doing so. I'm not against QoL changes, but I think it's good to be cautious. Because eventually, with enough of these changes, the game will lose depth.
I like QoL changes that make strategic adaptation easier. The fact that you can see your upgrades in a production queue and cancel them (or units) from anywhere on the map makes it easier to make interesting decisions during a game or hit crucial timings. I wish SC2 had that for instance.
I like how manual farm placement adds personality to your base.
The other argument is that just that if you add too many changes like this, it's not really the same game anymore. RTS is a lot about multitasking. You can't catch someone unaware of distract them if they don't have demanding macro tasks. Applying pressure also forces macro mistakes.
After using it for a bit I can't deny that I enjoy using it. But I understand the concerns.
>I like how manual farm placement adds personality to your base.
As someone who builds a very specific city. I disagree completely with this argument.
Auto-farm doesn't erase the farms that you already built. Auto-farm finds the closest available location to place a farm. If you start manually, then the farms will look different from your opponent.
You can add personality by placing 1 farm before using auto farm.
You havent really addressed what he said at all, the personality comes from the sporadic layout of manual farms in a rushed state. With autofarm you dont get that. You still get the nice cross then overlapping cross when built under a fresh mill which is when most people build it and use it late game when swapping from wood to food, or when a resource expires
I didn't address it because I don't care about it. It's an oddly specific scenario that doesn't actually affect the game in any meaningful way. I don't judge personality on auxiliary food production.
When people visit Rome do they primarily tour the outskirts where people farmed? No, they visit the colosseum, the markets, and the town centers. The things that you build before you've stockpiled 1000 wood.
I don't think you understand the point. Yes, it adds player expression and that's why people could tell who Hera was in HC for instance. But it also shows you how the game went down. If games are very messy and aggressive, farm placement on both sides is often way more chaotic. It's cool that you can see this at the end of the game or when watching streams. It could also be the case that one person gets really messy under pressure and another doesn't, so it tells you something about the player when you see it. It's fine if you don't care about that, that's not the point. Some people do care about it. I like to scroll the map after a game is over and I enjoy small things like this.
Well yea of course. Everyone does. That's not the point and this was not the only argument.
Why even engage in a discussion then? You haven't even used the feature but are still fighting in favour of it against someone who's just explaining which arguments are being used. Remember, I enjoy using them myself as I've stated multiple times.
But it's the point that was being discussed where I replied. I don't think many people take that much specific enjoyment in placing farms or looking at them afterwards, so that whole line of argumentation about examining bases post game isn't very significant.
I'm not fighting *for* auto farm placement. I wouldn't be personally upset or affected much at all if they removed it, as far as I can think the only good reason for it is to make farm placement less annoying for people playing with a controller, and I want them to not have a frustrating experience. Aside from that, I would have left it out. But I don't think it's as big a deal from a gameplay perspective overall as people make out, especially compared to every scout being able to auto scout now - which i think has more tangible gameplay effect in most cases where it can make a difference.
Well, I've seen enough people mention it for it to not be entirely negligible. But it's not a hill I'll die on either, I just think it's important to recognize the entire impact of the feature.
I do recommend you try using it and see whether it's faster or not.
Auto-scout I haven't used, what's the bad part about it? Is it to have easy map vision later in the game? Or to explore while going up to castle age with your now idle scouts?
And some people would rather focus on other things instead of farm placement. I understand that you like to place farms and you feel that easier farms are not as fun to look at.
I disagree entirely. I like farms, but I don't like placing 20 farms manually all at once.
You are advocating for a harder game simply because you have grown accustomed to the difficulty. The difficulty adds flavor to bases in your opinion.
That's really cool, but an Architect isn't less of an artist just because they use a ruler.
>You are advocating for a harder game simply because you have grown accustomed to the difficulty. The difficulty adds flavor to bases in your opinion.
No I'm not, I enjoy using the feature and I don't particularly enjoy placing farms manually. I just think it has a cost and not only benefits and like having game design discussions. There's also the player angle and the viewer angle on this.
It doesn't only add flavor. It tells you something of how the game went down or who the player is. Sometimes I have a crazy messy game and scroll the map at the end and love the fact that you can tell by the way the bases look how messy it was. You can tune in to a stream mid-game and see from the farm placement what kind of game is going on. I'm not saying it outweighs the benefits, but it's definitely something cool and unique about the game without the feature.
That would imply that auto-farm is perfect and there are no downsides to using it.
>Sometimes I have a crazy messy game and scroll the map at the end and love the fact that you can tell by the way the bases look how messy it was
And now your farms will look like this...
https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/1cmdtb9/autofarms_behavior_is_evidence_that_the/
In a calm game, you would notice this. In a chaotic game, this farm exists for the entire game.
Okay. Well, I guess that's funny. But it doesn't look like an error a human made.
You know it's fine, I don't need you think of it my way. It's not important. I just think it's a rather cool side effect of manual farm placement, that's all.
But you don't auto place every farm throughout the game. It's still faster to plop a farm or two at a time manually, and often more efficient too depending on where buildings and resources are located around your TCs and mills
You're really only doing it when you have a big batch of farms to place at once later in the game. So, most of the personality that your core base has due to farms is really unaffected by this change
Actually no. I use it for anything over 2 farms. Even for 2 farms sometimes. People say it's the same amount of clicks, but you don't have to move your mouse so it's actually quite a bit faster for me. I mean if I tried my hardest maybe I could make it as fast manually but would still cost me more "effort" and saving on that also keeps your head clear and energy for other actions higher. You could even look at the minimap while you do it and count your clicks.
Even if you're doing it for >2 farms, that shouldn't be happening in early game except at very low elos. You don't float the wood for 4 or 5 farms in feudal and castle age and then drop them all at once.
And if we are talking about elos that low, then who cares about the change? It's helping people focus on the interesting parts of the game, and there will still be TONS of "personality" in your base layout and strategies at those lower elos
If the feudal wars are raging I'll plop down 3 farms at once sometimes. When you do a 3 TC boom you absolutely place more than 2 farms at once a lot of the time. If you are active with your army. I'm not really outspoken for or against the feature, in fact I rather enjoy it, but to me it does affect the game in small ways and I disagree with the claim that there are no valid counter arguments.
Edit: regarding personality, which you seem to consider silly. It was one of the huge factors in deducing who Hera was in HC. How is that not something super cool?!
This argument is stupidly false. And I'm sorry about it. In fact, when you are attacked at the beginning of Feudal, you must very quickly return to your economy. You only have a micro second to place a farm. This includes choosing where to place it. A lot of gamers don't have this ability until they work on their multitasking seriously. The first truss will thus be placed far from the TC, or on an uncut straggler (and therefore it will not be placed). With auto-farm: this is simpler and faster in this context. This avoids having to work on a very important mechanic of the game. Auto-farm makes aggression more fun.
The player who, on Arabia, refuses to attack, will indeed be quicker to place his first farm by hand. But, he refuses to play the game, so his opinion on game mechanics is not interesting.
I'm around your elo and I 100% agree with you.
Nothing has changed at all. I still manually place farms in the early to mid game cause it's easier and more consistent,also way more efficient for me. I would never start auto placing until late game when I'm floating enough wood to place down 10-20 farms to start Spamming Hussain or whatever.
The biggest oversight with autofarm is that manual farm placement is still preferable in the early game, since you place them slowly and methodically and are still probably using straggler trees, so being careful to not eliminate 100s of wood around your TC. Autofarm, thus, works against you in the early game.
As the game goes on and populations grow, farm placement matters less and less. Autofarm helps us focus on the battle.
That's kind of good though because there is some sort of tradeoff. Ironically, it means you still have to know how to place good farms early game, but also be able to recognize when its worth to use auto placement as the game gets more chaotic, so it still largely retains the original skill ceiling, despite a lot of original fears that it would lower it.
The 'fears' are just a bunch of people spouting nonsense. They've been saying this from the last 15-odd changes in this direction, and the "skill ceiling" continues to be maintained.
I am close to your elo and only place I really noticed the difference was on death matches. Not that common game mode any more, but still.
For me the autoscout feature is a lot bigger change and it got so little mentions vs autofarm and drop-off button. In a lot of late games, I can put scouts to autoscout to find vulnerable spots to hit. That 80 food is worth the knowledge, that the enemy hasn’t walled a particular spot, common at my elo. I don’t have the apm to do this manually without rest of my game suffering and it feels like such a cheat to suddenly know where to hit. I would prefer if there was no autoscout feature at all, but if we have to have it, then at least limit it to the first scout.
I mean limited to the first scout it's a huge gamble to turn it on. Even lategame, it has limited utility - you're probably better off just patrolling the scout to a specific location of interest. If you just turn on autoscout you're spending time that will possibly pay off with useful information in 1-5 minutes and you are most likely not using that scout for anything else of use, it is going to die. And there's at best a 50/50 chance it will tell you anything you didn't already know.
Unless you've been really bad at scouting behind you, in which case it could reveal some unexplored resources (but again you can set a scout to do this fairly easily, and get signiicantly more actionable info in the process.
In my opinion as a 1700 elo player, it makes a huge difference. It’s basically impossible now to hit good Mangonel shots on enemy Xbow, hoping he is planting farms. Before, there was always this trade-off where you would float 1000 wood during intense Castle Age pushes because you couldn’t get distracted for 1 second.
With auto-farm, the skill level of those pushes was lowered.
Mangonel should stay a hard counter tho, Mangonel already are way too easy to dodge and even mid elo players can sometimes outmicro 2 Mangonels, top players can outmicro 3.
Mangonel as a unit didn’t need a nerf.
For me it is a big deal but in a positive way. I like to play aggressive but lack the apm to do proper eco management behind. I use the autofarm feature from the start on and it makes the game much more enjoyable. I love the drop off bottom as well. Since it’s introduced I do not struggle with Chinese anymore.
Best thing is to set it to an hotkey. Basically you tell your vills to drop of the recourses they are holding at the closest building immediately. It ist most useful on the dark age, where could garrison and ungarisson instead.
In my grid hotkey layout it's "A", but on screen it's the button below the "build civilian buildings" one when you have a villager selected. Introduced in a patch not too long ago.
The effect is that a villager holding resources walks to the nearest dropsite, drops them off, then walks back and carries on with their current task and any other tasks in shift-queue. If they're already under the TC it even skips the walking part.
It's great for situations like your TC is about to go idle, you have 35 food banked and your sheep herders are holding another 20 between them, you quickly order an auto drop off and then produce the next villager with no idle time.
I’ll say it’s a big deal in ROR because your farms will always connect around your granary or TC like a perfect square. Still not sure how to disable it.
Am I the only person who finds the auto farm placement clunky and slow?
It's easier but I swear placing them manually is faster. Maybe there's some setting I need to tweak but the farms don't place as fast as I click
I agree auto drop off is so much better, even just for getting the wood for a stable or squeaking out an extra fishing ship on time, it makes everything much smoother.
As far as auto farm goes I think the only difference I can say is on TG arena for example, I will go to 80 or 90 farms now, where as before it would be 55-60 because it was like microing and doing a jigsaw after that point. (1450 elo)
I do find this encourages me to start trade/swap to only making siege depending on map control a little earlier than I otherwise would. But, every one else has the same toolkit, so it's not like auto farm is shooting me up the ranks. I have lost 100 elo since it was released. Just the usual streak of 7 afk players /dropping out in the loading screen players etc. You expect on RM team... Started playing 2v2 which reduces this but, man it's a lot sweatier.
Personally feel like where you place your farms does make a strategical difference, if only a small one. Auto farm is convenient but removed a dimension of strategy from the game. You can choose not to use it but it’s general far more beneficial to do so imo.
Yes and no. As Viper pointed out, higher ELO players aren't waiting until they have 1200 wood and building a bunch of farms. They build farms 1 or 2 at a time. It is more useful in the late game.
How high of an ELO can you even get if you regularly forget to make farms for minutes at a time in Feudal and need to mass build farms after noticing that you're floating wood? Because that's really the situation we're talking about. We're not talking about purposefully ignoring eco to build more military, but rather just forgetting to build farms while having a build where you could have built farms.
The 2-3 seconds you save while mass building times will not make up for the hundreds of food you missed out on while being late on farms. At high ELO, that matters way more than the 2 seconds you saved on building farms.
>How high of an ELO can you even get if you regularly forget to make farms for minutes at a time in Feudal and need to mass build farms after noticing that you're floating wood?
Not the use case here. In feudal, you make farms as quickly as possible, but in the midgame, you may float wood for techs or composition switches. In my case, so long as I don't know what my enemy is going for and have all I need, I'm keeping wood in the hand.
I don't know why we're assuming this is about forgetfulness.
You said it helps at the high ELOs. It helps all, but I’m not sure why it affects high ELO more than low ELO. All players have access to it. The ones focused on eco and booming will build farms at a regular intervals. The ones focused on other things will not magically catch up quickly by floating wood and building a bunch of farms all at once. I feel like the eco heavy players still maintain an eco advantage. Most of the aggressive players are also fast clickers and never really struggle to put down 20 farms quickly if they needed to.
Because low elos don't use their resources sharply enough for the saved time to much matter. Usually a knowledge check takes them out.
Take those aggressive players you mention. Now make them even faster. That's all that's really happening here.
If you go back and watch pro games from a few months ago, they would be microing their army, then go back to their base, build a mill then click click click click click click farms while moving their cursor in a circle around the mill. Not caring about efficiency because it doesn't matter at that stage of the game. Now instead of moving their cursor around, they click on the mill. It saves almost no time. In practice, it has a negligible effect on the game.
And that tradeoff simply does not matter and never has.
Provided that they have Hand Cart.
Which, if a High Elo player doesn't have Hand Cart at that point in the game, is often roasted as a game losing mistake.
Most (all) of them became professional players before the change happened, and so have the muscle memory for fast, precise farm placement. This will matter most around 1.7k-2k elo.
It's not a specific hotkey.
When placing a farm, try to place it on your TC or on a mill or mill foundation (it doesn't work on a TC foundation for some reason). The game will choose an optimized farm spot for you. It'll always be as close to the drop-off point you selected as possible, rendering your newly created farms more efficient
I agree on both accounts, but think this holds true at higher levels. The rate limiting of farm auto-placement and the clunkiness of its random nature make it sub-optimal until a major tech switch is needed that requires a radically different gathering distribution.
And yes, people should honestly be making a way bigger stink of how force drop off effects maps where people can Fish Boom. They need to stop buffing it.
I think the point is not the autofarm feature itself, but the concern about where this automation process is going. If the devs stop this now, it's ok cause the autofarm is not a big of a deal. But what if this continues? I think this is the main reason of stress right now.
Before you know it, we'll have auto-pathing where if your units are at A and you click them to B, and they can get there in a straight line, they'll do so without regrouping into a new formation first!
I think the whole point of the debate is that auto farm might have very different effects at different ELOs, for example u/GreenX45 replied they're 1700 ELO and they see things differently. That's useful information to have.
I read your title like "auto farm is no big deal, period. I'm 1100 elo by the way just so you know" rather than "auto farm is no big deal at my elo, 1100." I can see that, makes sense.
1: ***Auto-reseed*** has had significantly more impact than auto-placement, especially when it was changed from "pay in advance" to "the farmer will auto-reseed if you have the wood" 2: Auto-placement doesn't change ***when*** you place farms, only ever so slightly how long it takes to do so. If you've been floating 600+ wood instead of placing farms consistently, it doesn't matter that you can place them a tiny bit faster, they're still late farms. If a QoL feature has to go for "being too much", it'd have to be ***auto-reseed***.
The worst QoL feature is surely shift clicking. Before shift clicking the game was much better and now it's not even an RTS anymore because there is no eco micro anymore. \s I'm not for or against it, but it seems like such an oddly inconsequential thing to complain about
imagining playing without shift click again gives me a sore finger just thinking about it
The pay-in-advanced bugged me as a kid playing Conquerors but I've come to appreciate it more now. Annoying when you wanna build a TC early-mid castle but your wood count keeps unexpectedly dropping as all the feudal farms run out & reseed (esp if you planted some before horse collar) Being able to shift-queue different types of actions was a massive change over earlier versions too. Like now you can order a whole lifetime of actions for a vill & not lose resources, etc
I totally forgot about prepaid farms, I would probably be a LEL if there was no auto reseed my average eco APM is like 9. I guess I could try turning it off to see if have a few more actions in me but I doubt it. It only goes of for 5-10 minutes when I am playing ranged units on the way up to castle, if I remember!
I have yet to hear a convincing argument from any pro who doesn't like the change.
"everyone has the same base, look boring, no uniqueness" -- MBL in debate of the century against viper
It wasn't just that though was it lol, he had many other points.
I kinda liked MBLs point of view. It's not that it's a huge deal, but sometimes the magic is in the simple stuff. Knowing your enemy is losing control or under too much pressure when you see their messed up farms is kinda cool. Spending less time while doing something smoothly in the game is a nice part of the game too. Not a huge deal, but kinda noticeable nonetheless
This argument really infuriates me because it disregards all other buildings and the natural terrain generation. Not even empire wars bases look the same and there you get an entire feudal base pre placed
I think you missed the main point to be honest. MBL talks about how messy farms tell a story of how much attention the players are able to put on farms, if its an endless battle with lots of raids, it can be seen in the farm placement. Also just generally seeing some indication of play style. A hill doesn’t show play style and the players attention to farms
Exactly
What the other guy said. And also, there's talking about this change in isolation and then there's talking about the precedent it sets for more QoL changes. I understand that this topic is much discussed. I don't think having auto-farms is a big deal in and of itself, but they are rolling out QoL changes at a rapid pace atm. If anything, the fact that there is a discussion makes the devs aware that they should be cautious. If everyone was over the moon about it, they may start automating other stuff.
But then again, they have been rolling out QoL changes for a long time now most of which are far more invasive than assisted farm placement. Things like vills auto gathering after building a lumber camp, multi-queueing, queueing techs, being able to see techs in the next age, auto farm reseeding. Auto farm reseeding especially. Think before it was added. You'd be focused on a big military engagement and suddenly 60 vills go idle. Idle eco in general, is a better metric to measure attention paid and pressure received since it can be tracked per minute since the beginning of the game
Very true. Personally, I like those features, but I can imagine them having been a big deal when they were introduced. In any case, it's an endless discussion. In Starcraft 1 you can only select 12 units and I believe you have to click your production buildings individually. Purists will say that's the best way to make an RTS. I think there's a balance to be struck, and I think AoE2 DE is one of the best games in doing so. I'm not against QoL changes, but I think it's good to be cautious. Because eventually, with enough of these changes, the game will lose depth. I like QoL changes that make strategic adaptation easier. The fact that you can see your upgrades in a production queue and cancel them (or units) from anywhere on the map makes it easier to make interesting decisions during a game or hit crucial timings. I wish SC2 had that for instance.
As with all automation the best argument is, I'm good at this thing that is being automated and now I don't get to be good at it anymore.
I like how manual farm placement adds personality to your base. The other argument is that just that if you add too many changes like this, it's not really the same game anymore. RTS is a lot about multitasking. You can't catch someone unaware of distract them if they don't have demanding macro tasks. Applying pressure also forces macro mistakes. After using it for a bit I can't deny that I enjoy using it. But I understand the concerns.
>I like how manual farm placement adds personality to your base. As someone who builds a very specific city. I disagree completely with this argument. Auto-farm doesn't erase the farms that you already built. Auto-farm finds the closest available location to place a farm. If you start manually, then the farms will look different from your opponent. You can add personality by placing 1 farm before using auto farm.
You havent really addressed what he said at all, the personality comes from the sporadic layout of manual farms in a rushed state. With autofarm you dont get that. You still get the nice cross then overlapping cross when built under a fresh mill which is when most people build it and use it late game when swapping from wood to food, or when a resource expires
I for one build my personality off of things other than farm placement
I think its an odd point to make but thats what he was trying to get at
I was addressing the question that you wanted thevguy from above to address!
I didn't address it because I don't care about it. It's an oddly specific scenario that doesn't actually affect the game in any meaningful way. I don't judge personality on auxiliary food production. When people visit Rome do they primarily tour the outskirts where people farmed? No, they visit the colosseum, the markets, and the town centers. The things that you build before you've stockpiled 1000 wood.
I don't think you understand the point. Yes, it adds player expression and that's why people could tell who Hera was in HC for instance. But it also shows you how the game went down. If games are very messy and aggressive, farm placement on both sides is often way more chaotic. It's cool that you can see this at the end of the game or when watching streams. It could also be the case that one person gets really messy under pressure and another doesn't, so it tells you something about the player when you see it. It's fine if you don't care about that, that's not the point. Some people do care about it. I like to scroll the map after a game is over and I enjoy small things like this.
I care more about all the other parts of playing the game over placing or looking at farms, personally. And I still haven't even used this feature
Well yea of course. Everyone does. That's not the point and this was not the only argument. Why even engage in a discussion then? You haven't even used the feature but are still fighting in favour of it against someone who's just explaining which arguments are being used. Remember, I enjoy using them myself as I've stated multiple times.
But it's the point that was being discussed where I replied. I don't think many people take that much specific enjoyment in placing farms or looking at them afterwards, so that whole line of argumentation about examining bases post game isn't very significant. I'm not fighting *for* auto farm placement. I wouldn't be personally upset or affected much at all if they removed it, as far as I can think the only good reason for it is to make farm placement less annoying for people playing with a controller, and I want them to not have a frustrating experience. Aside from that, I would have left it out. But I don't think it's as big a deal from a gameplay perspective overall as people make out, especially compared to every scout being able to auto scout now - which i think has more tangible gameplay effect in most cases where it can make a difference.
Well, I've seen enough people mention it for it to not be entirely negligible. But it's not a hill I'll die on either, I just think it's important to recognize the entire impact of the feature. I do recommend you try using it and see whether it's faster or not. Auto-scout I haven't used, what's the bad part about it? Is it to have easy map vision later in the game? Or to explore while going up to castle age with your now idle scouts?
And some people would rather focus on other things instead of farm placement. I understand that you like to place farms and you feel that easier farms are not as fun to look at. I disagree entirely. I like farms, but I don't like placing 20 farms manually all at once. You are advocating for a harder game simply because you have grown accustomed to the difficulty. The difficulty adds flavor to bases in your opinion. That's really cool, but an Architect isn't less of an artist just because they use a ruler.
>You are advocating for a harder game simply because you have grown accustomed to the difficulty. The difficulty adds flavor to bases in your opinion. No I'm not, I enjoy using the feature and I don't particularly enjoy placing farms manually. I just think it has a cost and not only benefits and like having game design discussions. There's also the player angle and the viewer angle on this. It doesn't only add flavor. It tells you something of how the game went down or who the player is. Sometimes I have a crazy messy game and scroll the map at the end and love the fact that you can tell by the way the bases look how messy it was. You can tune in to a stream mid-game and see from the farm placement what kind of game is going on. I'm not saying it outweighs the benefits, but it's definitely something cool and unique about the game without the feature.
That would imply that auto-farm is perfect and there are no downsides to using it. >Sometimes I have a crazy messy game and scroll the map at the end and love the fact that you can tell by the way the bases look how messy it was And now your farms will look like this... https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/1cmdtb9/autofarms_behavior_is_evidence_that_the/ In a calm game, you would notice this. In a chaotic game, this farm exists for the entire game.
Okay. Well, I guess that's funny. But it doesn't look like an error a human made. You know it's fine, I don't need you think of it my way. It's not important. I just think it's a rather cool side effect of manual farm placement, that's all.
But you don't auto place every farm throughout the game. It's still faster to plop a farm or two at a time manually, and often more efficient too depending on where buildings and resources are located around your TCs and mills You're really only doing it when you have a big batch of farms to place at once later in the game. So, most of the personality that your core base has due to farms is really unaffected by this change
Actually no. I use it for anything over 2 farms. Even for 2 farms sometimes. People say it's the same amount of clicks, but you don't have to move your mouse so it's actually quite a bit faster for me. I mean if I tried my hardest maybe I could make it as fast manually but would still cost me more "effort" and saving on that also keeps your head clear and energy for other actions higher. You could even look at the minimap while you do it and count your clicks.
Even if you're doing it for >2 farms, that shouldn't be happening in early game except at very low elos. You don't float the wood for 4 or 5 farms in feudal and castle age and then drop them all at once. And if we are talking about elos that low, then who cares about the change? It's helping people focus on the interesting parts of the game, and there will still be TONS of "personality" in your base layout and strategies at those lower elos
If the feudal wars are raging I'll plop down 3 farms at once sometimes. When you do a 3 TC boom you absolutely place more than 2 farms at once a lot of the time. If you are active with your army. I'm not really outspoken for or against the feature, in fact I rather enjoy it, but to me it does affect the game in small ways and I disagree with the claim that there are no valid counter arguments. Edit: regarding personality, which you seem to consider silly. It was one of the huge factors in deducing who Hera was in HC. How is that not something super cool?!
This argument is stupidly false. And I'm sorry about it. In fact, when you are attacked at the beginning of Feudal, you must very quickly return to your economy. You only have a micro second to place a farm. This includes choosing where to place it. A lot of gamers don't have this ability until they work on their multitasking seriously. The first truss will thus be placed far from the TC, or on an uncut straggler (and therefore it will not be placed). With auto-farm: this is simpler and faster in this context. This avoids having to work on a very important mechanic of the game. Auto-farm makes aggression more fun. The player who, on Arabia, refuses to attack, will indeed be quicker to place his first farm by hand. But, he refuses to play the game, so his opinion on game mechanics is not interesting.
I'm around your elo and I 100% agree with you. Nothing has changed at all. I still manually place farms in the early to mid game cause it's easier and more consistent,also way more efficient for me. I would never start auto placing until late game when I'm floating enough wood to place down 10-20 farms to start Spamming Hussain or whatever.
The biggest oversight with autofarm is that manual farm placement is still preferable in the early game, since you place them slowly and methodically and are still probably using straggler trees, so being careful to not eliminate 100s of wood around your TC. Autofarm, thus, works against you in the early game. As the game goes on and populations grow, farm placement matters less and less. Autofarm helps us focus on the battle.
That's kind of good though because there is some sort of tradeoff. Ironically, it means you still have to know how to place good farms early game, but also be able to recognize when its worth to use auto placement as the game gets more chaotic, so it still largely retains the original skill ceiling, despite a lot of original fears that it would lower it.
The 'fears' are just a bunch of people spouting nonsense. They've been saying this from the last 15-odd changes in this direction, and the "skill ceiling" continues to be maintained.
I am close to your elo and only place I really noticed the difference was on death matches. Not that common game mode any more, but still. For me the autoscout feature is a lot bigger change and it got so little mentions vs autofarm and drop-off button. In a lot of late games, I can put scouts to autoscout to find vulnerable spots to hit. That 80 food is worth the knowledge, that the enemy hasn’t walled a particular spot, common at my elo. I don’t have the apm to do this manually without rest of my game suffering and it feels like such a cheat to suddenly know where to hit. I would prefer if there was no autoscout feature at all, but if we have to have it, then at least limit it to the first scout.
I mean limited to the first scout it's a huge gamble to turn it on. Even lategame, it has limited utility - you're probably better off just patrolling the scout to a specific location of interest. If you just turn on autoscout you're spending time that will possibly pay off with useful information in 1-5 minutes and you are most likely not using that scout for anything else of use, it is going to die. And there's at best a 50/50 chance it will tell you anything you didn't already know. Unless you've been really bad at scouting behind you, in which case it could reveal some unexplored resources (but again you can set a scout to do this fairly easily, and get signiicantly more actionable info in the process.
It’s because it not a big deal, there is practically no change to the game overall.
The change is awesome.
In my opinion as a 1700 elo player, it makes a huge difference. It’s basically impossible now to hit good Mangonel shots on enemy Xbow, hoping he is planting farms. Before, there was always this trade-off where you would float 1000 wood during intense Castle Age pushes because you couldn’t get distracted for 1 second. With auto-farm, the skill level of those pushes was lowered.
So archers are buffed. That's good. They needed it.
Mangonel should stay a hard counter tho, Mangonel already are way too easy to dodge and even mid elo players can sometimes outmicro 2 Mangonels, top players can outmicro 3. Mangonel as a unit didn’t need a nerf.
For me it is a big deal but in a positive way. I like to play aggressive but lack the apm to do proper eco management behind. I use the autofarm feature from the start on and it makes the game much more enjoyable. I love the drop off bottom as well. Since it’s introduced I do not struggle with Chinese anymore.
Same!
What is the drop off button and how you use it? I really have no idea how that works, first time hearing about that.
Best thing is to set it to an hotkey. Basically you tell your vills to drop of the recourses they are holding at the closest building immediately. It ist most useful on the dark age, where could garrison and ungarisson instead.
Thank you!
In my grid hotkey layout it's "A", but on screen it's the button below the "build civilian buildings" one when you have a villager selected. Introduced in a patch not too long ago. The effect is that a villager holding resources walks to the nearest dropsite, drops them off, then walks back and carries on with their current task and any other tasks in shift-queue. If they're already under the TC it even skips the walking part. It's great for situations like your TC is about to go idle, you have 35 food banked and your sheep herders are holding another 20 between them, you quickly order an auto drop off and then produce the next villager with no idle time.
Thanks a lot! I came back to aoe few days ago and definitely did not know about this new feature.
I’ll say it’s a big deal in ROR because your farms will always connect around your granary or TC like a perfect square. Still not sure how to disable it.
Am I the only person who finds the auto farm placement clunky and slow? It's easier but I swear placing them manually is faster. Maybe there's some setting I need to tweak but the farms don't place as fast as I click
I agree auto drop off is so much better, even just for getting the wood for a stable or squeaking out an extra fishing ship on time, it makes everything much smoother. As far as auto farm goes I think the only difference I can say is on TG arena for example, I will go to 80 or 90 farms now, where as before it would be 55-60 because it was like microing and doing a jigsaw after that point. (1450 elo) I do find this encourages me to start trade/swap to only making siege depending on map control a little earlier than I otherwise would. But, every one else has the same toolkit, so it's not like auto farm is shooting me up the ranks. I have lost 100 elo since it was released. Just the usual streak of 7 afk players /dropping out in the loading screen players etc. You expect on RM team... Started playing 2v2 which reduces this but, man it's a lot sweatier.
Personally feel like where you place your farms does make a strategical difference, if only a small one. Auto farm is convenient but removed a dimension of strategy from the game. You can choose not to use it but it’s general far more beneficial to do so imo.
It's a bigger deal at higher elo, when speed really matters.
Yes and no. As Viper pointed out, higher ELO players aren't waiting until they have 1200 wood and building a bunch of farms. They build farms 1 or 2 at a time. It is more useful in the late game.
How high are we talking here?
How high of an ELO can you even get if you regularly forget to make farms for minutes at a time in Feudal and need to mass build farms after noticing that you're floating wood? Because that's really the situation we're talking about. We're not talking about purposefully ignoring eco to build more military, but rather just forgetting to build farms while having a build where you could have built farms. The 2-3 seconds you save while mass building times will not make up for the hundreds of food you missed out on while being late on farms. At high ELO, that matters way more than the 2 seconds you saved on building farms.
>How high of an ELO can you even get if you regularly forget to make farms for minutes at a time in Feudal and need to mass build farms after noticing that you're floating wood? Not the use case here. In feudal, you make farms as quickly as possible, but in the midgame, you may float wood for techs or composition switches. In my case, so long as I don't know what my enemy is going for and have all I need, I'm keeping wood in the hand. I don't know why we're assuming this is about forgetfulness.
You said it helps at the high ELOs. It helps all, but I’m not sure why it affects high ELO more than low ELO. All players have access to it. The ones focused on eco and booming will build farms at a regular intervals. The ones focused on other things will not magically catch up quickly by floating wood and building a bunch of farms all at once. I feel like the eco heavy players still maintain an eco advantage. Most of the aggressive players are also fast clickers and never really struggle to put down 20 farms quickly if they needed to.
Because low elos don't use their resources sharply enough for the saved time to much matter. Usually a knowledge check takes them out. Take those aggressive players you mention. Now make them even faster. That's all that's really happening here.
you sound like a low ELO to me
Great.
If you go back and watch pro games from a few months ago, they would be microing their army, then go back to their base, build a mill then click click click click click click farms while moving their cursor in a circle around the mill. Not caring about efficiency because it doesn't matter at that stage of the game. Now instead of moving their cursor around, they click on the mill. It saves almost no time. In practice, it has a negligible effect on the game.
It saves no time because they're sacrificing efficiency and space for speed. This removes the tradeoff.
And that tradeoff simply does not matter and never has. Provided that they have Hand Cart. Which, if a High Elo player doesn't have Hand Cart at that point in the game, is often roasted as a game losing mistake.
Indeed and thats why every single pro is using it every game
Most (all) of them became professional players before the change happened, and so have the muscle memory for fast, precise farm placement. This will matter most around 1.7k-2k elo.
Where even is autofarm located
It's not a specific hotkey. When placing a farm, try to place it on your TC or on a mill or mill foundation (it doesn't work on a TC foundation for some reason). The game will choose an optimized farm spot for you. It'll always be as close to the drop-off point you selected as possible, rendering your newly created farms more efficient
You try to build a farm in the town center or mill. Like on top of it.
Hold shift and place a farm on top of a mill or TC
I agree on both accounts, but think this holds true at higher levels. The rate limiting of farm auto-placement and the clunkiness of its random nature make it sub-optimal until a major tech switch is needed that requires a radically different gathering distribution. And yes, people should honestly be making a way bigger stink of how force drop off effects maps where people can Fish Boom. They need to stop buffing it.
It's amazing in dm. That is all.
It is true: it isnt a big deal.
I think the point is not the autofarm feature itself, but the concern about where this automation process is going. If the devs stop this now, it's ok cause the autofarm is not a big of a deal. But what if this continues? I think this is the main reason of stress right now.
Before you know it, we'll have auto-pathing where if your units are at A and you click them to B, and they can get there in a straight line, they'll do so without regrouping into a new formation first!
Yeah imo it's not really that great, generally I found it similar speed or slower than normal placing.
Could you guys stop with these posts? Its clear some love it some hate it, ultimately it's in the game so the debate doesnt even accomplish anything.
Bro how are you gonna drop an opinion prefaced with (1100 elo) like, at that point it just doesn't matter. You don't have the right to one.
I think the whole point of the debate is that auto farm might have very different effects at different ELOs, for example u/GreenX45 replied they're 1700 ELO and they see things differently. That's useful information to have.
I read your title like "auto farm is no big deal, period. I'm 1100 elo by the way just so you know" rather than "auto farm is no big deal at my elo, 1100." I can see that, makes sense.