Oh a fellow computing engineer 👋

This is the most straightforward interpretation for sure! Next question is: when there are more walls than villagers, or more villagers than walls, how does the indexing work for the overflow?

Is it concurrency programming ?

@@RebekahParkhurst The villagers are evenly distributed along the wall. Try it!

@@MikeWasteland ok let's say 5 villagers along an 8 tile wall. How do you distribute?

This is interesting to remove dependency on ordering and certainly efficient but if I understand it right stable marriage algorithms wouldn't necessarily minimize overall walked distance. Taking as an example two villagers and two wall pieces on a grid when villagers don't exactly face the wall but are shifted on one side: ----------- Villager A ---- Villager B | | | Wall C -------- Wall D ---------- In this case the "stable" solution sends A to D and B to C which is overall longer than sending A to C and B to D. It gets worse with more villagers and wall pieces because the last villager (on the right) is always sent to the first wall piece (on the left). In this kind of problem it would probably make more sense to try to minimize the maximum distance walked by one villager to reduce the time needed to build the whole wall. Keeping the marriage model there must exist algorithms which solve this problem and try to avoid making the "worst" marriage.

@@yalassa1 I think you can solve that by making the distance weighting penalty quadratic - so that two medium distances is better than a small and large distance.

@@nottud yet you often might want the wall to start being built faster and not care about efficiency for the whole building process. Generally better algorithm isn't necessary better in specific use case. Imagine you're building a wall from right to left. Half of your workers are right at the start of the wall and other half is at longer distance at your base to the right. We would prefer those close ones to start building the closest walls in hopes they would finish before the others even come to help.

I'd guess that calculating the distance of every villager and every wall would be very slow, the algorithm could be optimized but still needs computation. Sticking to the array matching sounds a bit faster. We also should take when the game came out, PCs weren't the monsters of today. Some vector calculations might not be that fast on those old processors. I might be wrong tho.

11

If drag-box is the selection method, yes. Control groups and double-click do not order the selection simply from North to South nor from left to right.

That doesn't seem consistent to what I observed when I tested it. At any rate, I might make a second video about selection order where I test out double-click more

@@Hjoerleif could it be that it selects first the unit you clicked on then the closest ones to that unit?

@@gomul13 The first unit being the clicked one is correct. But at first it seemed that the southern-most is the second, followed by a North-South order for the rest. But this assumption didn't hold consistently as I tested it repeatedly. So I didn't see anything conclusive enough to state in this video

No, even if you drag the box from down to up, the selection will still be ordered top-down. I realise now I should have demonstrated and told this too since originally I assumed the same as you but I didn't think to include it in the video

@@Hjoerleif It's ok, that's why we have comments section here, right? ;) Thanks for your accurate explanations!.

@@Hjoerleif 3:15, you selected them from right to left, bottom to top, and wall in the same direction and worked.

@@Beliserius1 I did. Probably subconsciously due to the assumption I held earlier that that's necessary. Or more likely, footage from a time where I believed that was the case. I even had it in the script that it depends on which way you drag the box until I realised that's actually not the case when I recorded to demonstrate that it will fail if you place the walls in the other direction from which it dragged. But it worked all the same, showing that drag-box will order them North-South either way. Unfortunately, I just scrapped that part instead of addressing the (apparently insignificant) role of which way the box is dragged. I will go into more of what I didn't focus on this video in another video soon. If you're too impatient for that and own a copy of AoE2DE, it should take no more than a minute to check for yourself in the scenario editor whether a line of villagers behave differently depending on which way you drag the box selection.

I don't know what difference the selection order could make with military units. There is an option to only have military units be caught by drag-box selection but there is not a setting for the inverse that I'm aware of.

@@Hjoerleif it is... in options, i made regular dragging only select military and alt+drag only select viligars

@@weirdfunnyvideos1289 I think Alt+drag is the default for that. Making regular drag only select military units sounds useful for mid/ late-game. I'll have to try that

they have added this option in DE right before the Indian patch

ALT for vills only and CTRL for military only

I just have default health bar settings I think. They might appear small when I'm zoomed out a lot

Not quite. It seems at least that villager 1 is always the unit that was clicked but I was not able to determine how exactly the others are ordered. I will look into this more to hopefully settle it in another video

I thought it redundant since it's already in the beginning of the video. I've also uploaded it as a separate video: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/l7uUfsahrJ22fZc.html

@@Hjoerleif Thanks!

Honestly, this would never realistically come up in an actual competitive match so this is quite trivial knowledge. But if you do decide to do it, all you need is a terrain grid, you can enable it in the game options. Then you place one villaget in each tile of a row of tiles.

@@Hjoerleif I think it is still good to keep in mind to always: - Select with group selection with mouse - Build all walls from top-to-bottom - When having few vills, it might be helpful to build the wall up in "smaller sections" as action (not strictly needed, but if you have apm.....) On avarage with my testing it works better this way than double-click and all kind of other quickwalls so this is still useful lore in practice as far as I see from my tests...

@@u9vata indeed. I'm still not convinced it's worthwhile to place one villager per tile in a perfect line if you're playing eg. ranked though 11

I would expect so, yes. But I'm not entirely sure. I will check that for the next video

I think AoE4 is a bit like how you describe

@@Hjoerleif it's annoying when all people ever spam is scorpion and trebuchet

@@billlam7756 the best way to avoid having to deal with that is probably attacking them earlier. Scorpions and trebs are quite a late game composition

11 thank you for watching all the way through to enjoy my outro and also leaving a comment!

Which cheat can we use to guide our villagers to the closest wall tile?

aegis