Rumor is, the next update will sound a loud alarm if you're building military buildings on a tiny uninhabited island...

I cant wait for this 20 minute educational video on modern agriculture!

Nice specs. Your opinion feels more authoritative with the new glasses.

It seems to me that they are decreasing the width complexity to allow for greater complexity in depth. Placing farms isn't a fun part of the game and isn't something that new players can care about, but being better at it gave you an edge and now that edge is being taken away a bit. The autosystem doesn't do things perfectly, so at the high end it can be a trap, but it allows allows for a focus on other parts of the game, which is vital for new players.

Omg the way camera zoom in to T90 😂

I get it, T90, but I remember playing Age of Kings when you couldn't even queue farms, and had to manually reseed each one. When Age of Conquerors added the reseeding queue it was the greatest thing ever, and when Definitive Edition added the auto-reseed button I genuinely celebrated. I agree auto-ization can be a problem, but at the same time I remember when you had to wait for a research to be finished before clicking a new one. That change ABSOLUTELY affected how people play and, especially in the case of blacksmith research, it's become almost necessary. And I remember not only when you had to click Cartography, but when it cost gold instead of being free and automatic. What keeps me coming back to AoE2 is the victories, the battles, the losses, the near scrapes, the joy of a perfectly executed ambush and the despair of being blindsided by the obvious. Farms are just the thing that lets me afford the food cost for all those moments.

I like the farm feature but boy do I agree about the lack of other features missing for 5 years that is baffeling they did not fix yet. As someone who always plays multiplayer with friends, I'm kind of tired of the whole inviting everyone through steam, set up call on discord etc. At least we don't have to direct connect IP anymore

I'm trying not to have an opinion until I play w this new addition, but I remember when they changed a farm reseed queue to auto reseed if there is enough wood. I didn't like that change at first. Now I can't imagine going back.

Well. Let's revisit this topic in 3 and 6 months.

As someone with a compulsion to always place farms neatly, I am very pleased with this addition to the game.

Highly doubt Dark Elf will use this feature

Fully expecting rage against me for this, but I’m not sure I agree with everything you said here, T90. I *DO* agree that an in-game friends feature would do much to improve the community. I also think an option to turn off in-game chat censoring is worthwhile. For the record, I’ve been playing since the George W Bush administration. I love this game a lot. Very much. On the daut v. lierry dichotomy, I’d say I’m more of an eco player. So any disadvantage to eco-leaning players is something I would be willing to get upset about. But I’m not upset by it, and here’s why: The mechanic itself isn’t that great. Granted, I’ve only had the chance to try a few matches since the feature was released, but I learned pretty quickly the mechanic has its limitations. Sure, it’s speedy, but you can realistically only place 6-7 farms before the next suggested farm placement is in Narnia and you’d be better off moving your mouse to a nearby TC or another mill. One house or tree line where the game would like to place the most efficient farm would throw it off such that you’re better off finding another drop off building and auto placing there. The mechanic does not account for farms already placed around other buildings. Farm placement still takes attention, albeit less than it formerly did. Sure, the time to place 20+ farms is cut dramatically, I’d suggest to you that situations where you need to place 20+ farms at once are rare in competitive play. You’re placing the highest number of farms once you run out of food from animals/berries, otherwise you’re grabbing a few vills off wood lines to get more food income. It’s not like you train 20 vills and have them idle until you have some magic number so they can all build farms. At least when I play, I place a few farms at a time. If your eco is so imbalanced that you’re placing 20 farms at a time, something else is wrong. Now, I would agree with you more if they made this change game breaking. If you didn’t have to click for each farm you want to place (meaning, if you selected a villager then right clicked a mill and the villager would find the right spot for a farm on their own), we’d have a problem. We’d also have a problem if the mechanic was “smarter”-for example if it took into account the most efficient drop off point regardless of the building you’re hovering over. There might be something to be said about losing some of the clumsy mechanics that come from the original game, but I think it’s worth pointing out how far we’ve come. I put in my AoC disc a few months ago, and realized very quickly how accustom I’ve become to DE’s quality of life improvements. Remember selecting each military production building then having to queue each unit? Or having to cycle idle villagers one by one? Or having to periodically add farms to the reseed queue? Heck, I remember a time where you’d have to cycle through idle farmers and right click the farm to reseed. (I became very fast at pressing the scroll wheel to cycle through sound events, then right clicking the exhausted farm) Or not being able to do research until a building was done with its queue? These things are all improvements along the same line as this, but I think this here is the line itself. I wouldn’t want to see automated vill/unit queues, or anything more.

It really doesn't matter. In early game you are unlikely to float enough resources to spam a bunch of farms at once, the feature doesn't compensate for straggler trees around the TC, and you would want to place farms manually at locations that are less likely to get picked off by raids; In the late game when you have 60 farms and handcart the efficiency disadvantage from poorly placed farms is negligible, even when your farms are all a few tiles away from the mill they are still 98%+ efficient.

I agree with the precedent argument. I don't agree that this particular feature is a problem. Farm placement is such a minuscule part of what makes eco tick in AoE. Villager production, resource balance, eco building placement, quick walls/eco protection, managing villagers under fire are all so much more important than where/how farms are placed.

I strongly suggest anyone to watch spirit of the law's video on this. There he shows how limited this feature actually is, and explains how in many cases being able to place farms manually will still yield way better results. Regarding the trend in general, I think I can see the devs' reasoning: the AOE2 core fanbase isn't getting any younger. They don't want to alienate older players who want to play AOE2 as a *strategy* game.

I'm going to argue that being able to queue buildings and research changed the game way more than the ability to spam your farms down a bit faster, especially since I doubt people build more than 100 farms a game (I probably hardly ever make more than 30 (not counting reseeding)). Also auto queueing villagers probably will just screw new players as they'll end up with a bunch of vills standing around doing nothing and no food to go to the next age.

All i will say is that playing DE then playing HD make you realise just how much better DE is for having the QOL features. 100 x better. I think auto-queue vills/units like in age of mythology is when we should get out the pitchforks. Not now.

I have a neuro degenerative condition that makes using a mouse accurately painfully slow and sloppy at times. The auto farm addition is an absolute godsend for me and I hope they keep it.

The only feature I want is setting unit attitudes when they leave production. Ie, patrol to x Not ignore being hit and walk to your doom.

Maybe this is a take you've already considered, maybe not: This puts food eco micro closer to that of wood/gold/stone. In fact, they could go a step farther and make it so when you put the TC rally point on a mill, the vil will autoplace a new farm when it gets there, if there isn't one ready to farm. Then it would be on par with micro on the other resources. But then it would auto-consume wood, causing beginners to starve on wood without understanding why, so they won't do this. (okay, auto-reseeding undercuts my argument...) For that same reason (starving due to auto-production), they will not do auto vil-queueing. No other unit/tech/building does this.

"May your hobby go mainstream" What joy.

What made me love age 2 was not placing farms perfectly

I think you're forgetting how frustrating this game can be when you feel like you can't control it. Using hotkeys makes the experience completely different. Once you learn how to use hotkeys to make villagers or to place buildings (or hotkeys for any number of things) the game becomes a much smoother experience. It takes a while for beginners to learn hotkeys and during that time the game is a lot less fun and involves a lot of hunting through menus and unnecessary clicking. I've introduced a lot of my friends and the ones who got far enough to learn the hotkeys stuck with it and all the ones who didn't quit. The majority of frustration with being able to actually feel like you're controlling the game is wiped out by hotkeys. This change just wipes out a bit more. Maybe they can make some compromise, but for the community to grow I think new players will need to feel like they can actually control the game earlier in their journey. Edit: I'll take this argument even further. You say the game is more fun when you get to make choices, but by the game's nature, the lower your apm the fewer choices you get to make. Choosing to focus on military vs. choosing to focus on eco is a meaningful choice for you because you can control the game. Whereas when a beginner has already made the choice to make 15 farms they don't get to make any more meaningful choices. When it takes 3 clicks per farm it can take up to a minute before that new player gets to make another strategic choice. And fewer choices means less fun. Clicking repeatedly to execute a choice that you've already made isn't fun, it's a procedural barrier to the parts of the game that are fun.

Honestly, I think the auto scout feature is far worse than the farm placement. It's so much in terms of actions and inputs that is being automated. Before you had to make deliberate decisions if, when, and how you want to scout the map but now you can do that with just a couple of scouts, put them on auto scout and they'll flush out all the sneaky stuff your opponent might try to hide. I'm specifically thinking about the late game and how placing outposts everywhere can be incredibly useful and how otherwise you had to manually scout for what your opponent is doing. Now you can achieve a very similar effect by simply auto scouting. And why not put 5 Hussars on auto scout if you're spamming them anyway?

OK. So what about auto farm reseed? What about built-in range indicators?

Age had not feel the same for me since QoL changes. This is over the line. It makes wanna quit :(

Individual units getting command queues is more game-changing than auto-farm placement ever will be.

I think as this is such a widely divisive issue for the playerbase, we could have a great new format on our hands: get some guys from the community together that have different (but reasonable) views on the topic and have a discussion. i don't think there is a clear wrong or right answer here but having both standpoints debated passionately could really help take the edge out of it.

I guess automatically re-seeding farms, switching to chop a new tree, or mining a new tile kill skill expression.

Strong disagree. Shift queue doesn’t ADD something for the player. It lets them manage the game in a more time efficient manner (they don’t have to remember to go back and click those units to the next task at the correct time) Queuing technologies doesn’t ADD something for the player. It removes the important aspect of clicking the technology at the correct time to reduce downtime. Farm reseeding doesn’t ADD something for the player. It removes the need to manage your mill’s farm stock and wood income. Attack move doesn’t ADD something for the player. It removes the mechanic of making sure your units don’t complete their patrol and return to your base (or that you engage properly when you spot an enemy. All of those changes lower the amount of unnecessary micromanagement and inefficiency. You don’t tell your lumberjacks which trees to cut. If you want the actual line in the ground, it would be a feature letting you set your gather point to the mill and having villagers automatically gather the closest food resource, then switching to auto building their own farms if there is no food within the mill’s line of sight. That would be crossing the line.

If you look at Starcraft Broodwar vs Starcraft 2 I think that's a case study in Skill Expression (I beleive as things stand AoE stands in the middle). SCBW had many /QoL/ deficiencies (capping unit selection at 12), poor path finding at ramps, no hot keys to select production buildings; the list goes on. Starcraft 2 was a hyper-optimized game, where path finding is probably the best of any RTS, you can tab through unit types in a selection to grab spells. In the former you have a unique mechanic of "Action Economy" where as a player you can flex your skill to micro units in combat, build units at home, and massage knots in choke points. These forms of skill expression allow players to make tangible discrete improvements in their play. In the latter gameplay is more so focused on strategy than technical skill expression, it may be more accessible to newer players, but that doesn't mean it will have more staying power. I don't think one game is objectively better than the other, but I do think there are 2 subgenres of strategy games, one where you're wrestling with the game as a commander/general would to micromanage troop formations, and the other where you're playing senate to finance troop compositions that will /autonomous/ fight for you. Patching in this class of changes risks alienating the current player base because of the dramatic shift in game identity.

building placement is also an important aspect of aoe2. farm position impact building placement very much

I think this QoF are fine but they are close to the line, if more are implemented that affects eco drastically (like the auto vill toggle) those would be better for only campaigns and vs machine, but not for online play, and not for ranked at all

Sorry T90, I generally think that your analysis is spot on but I think this is you with a bad case of Old Man Brain. 1 - You talk about why people play Age of Empires and (essentially) talk about skill expression, and that because autofarm makes placing farms much easier that it will narrow the extent of skill expression people can demonstrate. My question is - when you think about Age of Empires, like, the parts of the game you love so much as a player, caster, and spectator, how much of it is watching farms get placed? Not eco management, because this doesn't affect your decision-making in eco management basically at all, but the act of placing farms around a mill. I don't know about you, but for me I have not once given more than a passing thought to it. One of the reasons for that is because there is an (almost) objectively best way to place farms - for me this is much less of a deal than autoscout because there is actually different scouting strategies you can pursue that get eliminated by using that feature. Consider also that people probably said the same thing about autoqueueing farms and back in the day - is the game more fun or less fun now that we can spend more time strategising and microing and not having to make sure that every single building is producing. Perhaps some people miss those days, but I don't think it makes the game a better experience. 2 - Precedent setting and something like autoqueueing villagers. You phrase it like it was a bad thing. Did autofarming ruin the game? Or did it allow high APM players to more fully express their skill? And did it add a layer of strategic complexity where a 1000 elo pleb might autoclick and forget but a pro player might turn it off in some circumstance? It's the same principle. I think the difference between the way you view the game and I view the game is that you want to maintain the difficulty because you appreciate the nuances and the little skills that contribute to a player reaching "baseline" play... but those things are not fun for most people who play the game, in my view, and it is very uncommon that a quality of life feature like this (yes, it is a quality of life feature) is implemented and then retconned because most people like it most of the time. See also: multiqueue, autofarming. Even autoscouting is usually inconsequential.

agreed on the QoL/UI vs adjusting the core gameplay of the game for people who already enjoy it, I dont think a change like this will add new players to the game, nobody is not going to play because farming is too hard. And if you keep adjusting the gameplay and making it easier than the people who already play and enjoy the game will be affected. The community aspect of the game needs to be improved. The most loyal people to the game usually belong to a community such as t90's. Great points in this video

Sorry for the wall of text, just was bored and felt like throwing my two cents in. I want to preface this with saying that I don't play AoE 2 anymore so this change does not affect me at all. However, I will still state my personal opinion on this anyways. I will say that y'all are blowing this way out of proportion. It isn't that big of a deal. Adding quality of life changes to bring it in line with more modern rts games just makes sense. Doing so will make it easier for new players to pick it up and enjoy the gem of a game that it is. Notice i said NEW players, not low to mid elo players. There is a big difference here. This game has an extremely sharp difficulty curve in the sense that there are just so many minute details and hidden mechanics to learn for new players that it can become completely overwhelming. example: Skirmishers do more damage to archers, but just how much more? As a new player it isn't intuitive, all you see is Archer has 4 attack, while skirmisher has 2, so from that perspective obviously archer = better than skirm. The end result is a new player being confused as to why his ball of archers just got wiped by a handful of "weaker" units. But then when they try using skirms against the opponents archers, they lose anyways due to the hill damage bonus. My point is not to complain about mechanics, but to point out how there are a lot of things that will cause brand new players to become annoyed and step away from the game. Now, regarding the argument that the game is so popular because of how hard it is, I strongly disagree. It has been my experience that the game is popular mainly from a nostalgia perspective, not a difficulty one. Of course it's hard, it's an rts after all. But most new / younger players aren't looking for a hard game, making it difficult to even get them to try the game in the first place. A lot of the popularity comes from people who go "oh yeah, I remember playing that game when I was younger! *installs game to play*" rather than people going "What is this game? I've never seen it before." *installs game to play*. Of course that is a vast generalization and it's much more complex than that but I hope you get my point. Ok, enough with the random tangent, back to the topic at hand. Back to the auto farm placement issue. Personally, I feel this literally changes nothing for veteran players. "But it takes away some of the strategy in the game, directly hurting eco focused players and artificially boosting players who have a harder time with eco." Uh, no? It's literally going to be available for everyone, eco focused players included. Which means those eco focused players will be able to, get this, have an easier time focusing on eco. example: let's say pre auto farm placement player 1 collected 250 food in a given amount of time while player 2 collected only 125 in the same timeframe. Now with auto farm placement, player 2 is able to gather 325 food in the same time, clearly out collecting the more eco focused player. Except this ignores the fact that player 1, using this same feature, now collects 450 food in the same time meaning that overall literally nothing changed. Now obviously these numbers are completely made up and, let's be honest, make no sense at all. They are just to make the point more clear. This was the same reaction the community had when auto farm reseeding was implemented. "This is terrible, it takes away some of the strategy! Having to reseed your farms is part of the game." I'd like to ask if anyone would like to go back to the days of farms not auto reseeding. The only thing this will change is making it a little bit easier for brand new players to enjoy the game. I expect that in a few months time this outrage will have past and things will be exactly as they were. You are fee to agree or disagree with my humble opinion, just please keep things civil!

nice glasses t90

I respect and appreciate the perspective from a caster and a top player. You obviously know things way more than I do, but I somewhat disagree. I can understand where you come from, and 100% expected pros to not like this change. But, a game is more than it's top 5% players, right? They have to add things for players outside of this group. I think this is a feature that tiptoes on the edge, and I do think overall adding this is a bad thing for the game overall but for slightly different reasons. I believe if you can manage your farms properly you'll be better off than the auto long term, but this will make people never develop that skill. But the worry of what it could lead to I absolutely agree. Auto-villagers would be REALLY bad for the game. That removes ALL skill needed and not just some.

I don't think that this change is too different from other quality of life features. "Those micro oriented players [...] who already weren't spending a high percentage of the time looking at their economies anyways, they now don't have to". From my own experience at least this is also true for auto-reseed (mostly in the later game), the global queue thats shown at the top left and gives you some overview over how many vills you have queued, multi-queue allowed you to spend less time on creating units, queuing up techs also allows you to put less focus on your blacksmith or tc (e.g. as far as I remember queuing up loom after feudal was not possible before). All these changes allow more focus on micro and other things. Having said all that I do agree with two points T90 made: 1. This reduces individuality of farm placement and base layout, which certainly is a negative. It can also lead to worse farm placement because you focus on it less (farms to far to the front etc., but that is just a personal thought) 2. I wouldn't say it sets a precedent since I disagree that it is too different from other changes but I do agree that we as a community and also the devs need to be careful how far automation goes. Economy management is a vital part of the game and when it gets automated/simplified too much then this does disadvantage macro/economy players and shifts the core of the game. Edit to 2.: Of course at the same time you can argue that it continues a line of precedents.

I agree with the concerns you have over the automation of the game. I have had 10 or sp games with the farm gimmick and found i still prefer to place the farms where i want them until late castle age when i start relocting woodlines that are getting too low or moving groups of stone miners that have finished their piles. I used it then and liked it. Only saved 10-20 seconds of my focus and i think my placed farms are pretty efficient anyway so no huge farm boost. The scout change bothers me more than the farm change this patch as it changes the value of that initial scout - now im LEL at 950ish elo. But the joy I get from deciding to hit and run or go for a vill snipe or try to deny a range going up while my archers come forward feels dulled now i know that this scout is replaceable. It felt like a more important decision whether to engage with the scout that can reveal the map once its hp runs low. I know that this is a silly thing to be hung up on, but its just something i dont like.

I like the new feature. It's not really auto-farm. You still have to remember to make the farms and click a number of times. As a casual player I find it quality of life feature.

I disagree. Auto farm is a good feature. Auto scout is wrong. Auto farm is cool.

I think this comes down to how you define RTS. I like controlling everything, but at the same time, the more micro-intensive stuff you have in a game, the less overall strategy you can execute. For example, dodging balistics is essential the higher you go, but it begs the question of whether this contributes the RTS aspect. I have been playing abunch of broodwar lately, and I question sometimes whether broodwar is a strategy game, considering how much time I spend trying to make my army move straight.

I'm halfway through this video, and it seems a middle ground would be adding a toggle in the options that would at least allow both players and tournament holders to de-activate this if the impact does go awry.

disagree. I want auto retaliate toggle on vills. fight me

With all due respect there was outcry when auto refreshing farms was introduced. This legit does not make a difference. Spirit made a vid and he as well sees how this is mostly a late game feature. I do however agree with setting a precedent

Damn he even adjusts his glasses after he makes a point. Glasses smurf confirmed

honestly i dont think this change affects the eco game that much. eco is a big bunch of things (vill production and tasking, wood/stone/gold camp emplacement, etc. and most importantly, balance) and the way a player places farms can only affect a very minor % of all that. the introduction of auto-seeding impacted much much more, and it was well received. another point is, where does that player attention go? its no longer neccesary to use some focus in a task that is ,frankly, very dull, and it can now be used in a more interesting part of the game. true, it takes away some of the player agency (or identity maybe?) but i believe it can bring so much more of it in other aspects of the game.

"shift queueing is okay because you can choose whether or not to do it" Okay, then auto-farm placement is also okay because you can choose whether or not to do it. I don't see what the problem is. We had these same kinds of arguments back when farm queueing was added. And then again when auto-reseeding was added. I don't really have any problem removing tedious and repetitive things from the game.

I'm a big fan of t90 but this is weird. There's no way this small QoL feature has anywhere near this amount of affect on the game as he's suggesting. If the argument was "fix pathing and bugs before introducing new features" I could get on board.

From a game design perspective, this effectively puts farms closer to equal footing with all other resource gathering. Only with farms are you required to place the dropoff point and explicitly define every worker's resource location. All other resources are placing a dropoff point and letting workers automatically gather the closest of that expected resource. There's efficiency sometimes in manually designating every worker's resource, but players usually don't do that unless they think there is a strategic advantage to it. This auto farm placement essentially enables the same flow for gathering food from farms. The major difference in resource collection that remains is that farm locations don't have to change as the resource runs out. We may need to look past how this changes the way things previously worked, to thinking about how the game works holistically as an experience. In which case, this just makes all of your eco processes consistent.

i like it. If more menial tasks get streamlined people can use the time elsewhere... like playing the actual game for instance (ie strategy, tactics, exploration, timings, micro ...). Im up for autoqueue also.

T90 outta touch with this one. He in elite 1% of high elo players. This is good for the game. You're an old man screaming at clouds. I respect this is how you feel but you're wrong and I think youll come to see that.

Overall I see it as a good thing personally, but placing farms one by one for me has always been more fun.

This is the sort of feature that there isn't really any going back either. People will quickly become dependent on this and taking it away will be like reinstituting solid farms on AOE1. Tons of players will just rage quit.

I would assume AoE2 has an older playing base as the game is 20+ years old. The average, casual 40 year old player probably has a lower APM compared to a 20 year old pro gamer. I don't feel strongly either way regarding auto farming, just a thought.

How about some kind of middle ground: you can drag farms (just like walls) to place multiples in a line. Let’s you place neater farms without taking it to far

you kinda are overexaggerating this. placing a farm while raiding isnt going to change anything. for your example of the raiding/home eco meme. regardless of if they can make farmsd faster or not if they forgot to do it, the automatic wouldnt change that. the rss balance in early game will still be a thing. you will need x farms to produce vills per x tc. you will need to assign workers to different jobs still. the only thing that changes is a slight mouse movement. this is the kind of thinking that halts progression. its the nostilgia (i grew up with this so it should stay the same for everyone) and honestly there is too much of this. still love ur content so no hate

Fairly , they could finally ban some of those automatic functionalities in Ranked, or just let players choose to enable it or not in room settings.

I agree with the slippery slope arguments closer to the end of this video about more and more auto/convenience features making their way into the game. I am worried that they'll eventually make a big mistake with these additions. However watching this video after Spirit of the Law's video on the subject leaves me with the impression that this video doesn't account for the inefficiencies or limitations of this feature, much like auto scout isn't the best way to scout (although auto farm admittedly has far more use than auto scout). In the very first example of auto farm in this video, there ends up being wasted space around the town center and villagers exposed waaaay on the other side of the mill when they could be in much safer positions around the town center, as an example. If someone does this type of placement without thinking, they could easily be setting themselves up to be punished for it. Players using this feature would be better off sometimes using it and sometimes not, and if you do use it, sometimes you might micro alternate locations for some villagers right afterward anyway. That's the player control and micro still existing right there. I'm not saying I like the feature (I don't think it was really necessary), but analysis of this feature is probably incomplete without considering the factors I mentioned. The other thing is I'm not sure how this is a feature to help new players so much. New players use auto scout because when they click the scout they can easily see it as an option on the UI. Auto farm is a shortcut that you have to look for (unless it's taught in the tutorial now or building description or something). I'm not even a new player and I only know about it because of it blowing up in the AoE2 community on KZfaq. And to really make full use of it you have to be aware that villagers spread out to farms evenly after building a mill, another piece of obscure AoE2 knowledge I only know from AoE2 community videos decades later. If I was a new player just playing the game without being addicted to KZfaq videos on the subject, I probably wouldn't know about any of these features for ages, if ever. People have to be aware that when talking about new/beginner players, under normal circumstances very few hotkeys and shortcuts and tricks are being used in play because they just don't know.

I think the rationale exactly the wrong way around! This is a buff for eco players: if you spent more time and skill on eco your relative rpm will get a boost because the individual actions are cheaper now. The aggro player who spends less time on eco will get less of that boost, pushing him or her into being a bit more eco focused. I like eco only games. For me this is a great addition!

Auto micro, auto macro, auto build, auto auto everything! ♫

Pretty soon you can pick which build you want to follow at the start of the game and it'll all be automated based on your deck build

The auto farm placement is actually a bit clunky to use if you aren't floating wood and trying to make several farms at once.

Suggestion: Make a Hardcore Mod and hold some tournament there The mod should disable Auto scout Auto farm reseed Auto farm placement Etc And add any else you would like.

MbL predicted this.. Auto everything!

had this vid in the background as i played a game. It is a handy feature, grated I'm a LELO guy but it seems like a more efficient shift+build feature.

I think this is still fine, but I'm afraid they will add auto villagers at some point and that is a bit scary.

"This game survived because it's hard" - what a bold generalisation, depth and strategic complexity ≠ inconvenience and outdated gameplay mechanics.

I think the devs should listen to the pros on this on principal. That being said, I don't know if I would agree this changes the dynamic as much as the reseed mechanic for example. I agree that the apm division between eco and military is part of what makes aoe unique though. Look at starcraft players for example, they don't even look at their base 90% of the time it seems. Relative to other rts I still think aoe will feel heavily slanted toward eco management just from having to balance FOUR resources, TONS of technologies, multiple resource sources/rates etc. From that perspective this change seems frankly miniscule, though I do respect that the line has to be drawn SOMEWHERE (arguably with the farm reseeding, as that has a much greater impact imo) TBC I like farm reseeding and would probably enjoy this change as well but from a perspective of maintaining the purity of AOE as a unique experience, these types of changes should be avoided.

I see your point that this change may be a “nerf” so to speak to eco focused players…however I wouldn’t say this is unprecedented. There have been other changes in the past that I would argue had a larger effect than this one in terms of simplifying eco (for example, auto reseed on farms probably had a much larger impact on the amount of APM required for a good eco than this does). And it’s not like there haven’t been changes that have simplified micro over the years. I think things like auto-scout, improvements to attack move and pathing (eh maybe not pathing 😂), etc could be argued as things that simplified micro to make it easier for the eco focused players (thus “nerfing” the military focused players). Despite the many, many changes like this that have been made over the years, the core of AOE2 has remained the same beautiful game. A second point I would make is that I agree this definitely frees up APM for players across the board. That being said, the eco focused players will likely use that extra APM to improve other parts of their eco. So I think in a lot of ways they will be able to get an even better eco advantage than they previously would have had. I think for most elos (less so at a high level), the problem military focused players run in to is forgetting to place farms in the first place until it’s too late, or not knowing how many to make in order to balance their eco properly. I think these have a much larger impact on those player’s performance than the time it takes to click around a mill vs the time it takes to click on the mill. Anyway, I’m just 1200 elo, no expert, just my thoughts. Thanks for the great content and keep up the good work!

I understand the concern about how having auto farm is a sign of bad direction towards automated everything. However, I don't feel that auto farm itself is that bad a thing, sure there are cons to it like what T90 mentioned such as loss of individuality, but personally, the key factor on how I view someone being better than me in the game is never how well or fast they can place farms but rather how consistent they are on creating vills, army control, situation awareness, game knowledge, etc. etc. You can give someone the sharpest kitchen knife but it would still be worthless if that person never cooks! As such I would imagine the impact of auto farm would not be much of a concern for the low elo, where learning to actually farm is more crucial to their growth. I can't say for the higher elo as I'm not one myself but I'd like to imagine there isn't that big of a gap in farm placing skills, hence the impact of the change to each individual should be more in line to regular buffs and nerfs to civs/units for the pros... is what I would like to think (a boon when they buff your fav civ, a bane otherwise). Regardless of the varying opinions, the passionate gatekeeping from the community to prevent the game from straying down the wrong path is a welcoming sight. If the day automated villager Q tries to pass, I hope we will all stand together and deny that one at all cost.

I think a feature like would be nice to have as an option - but not in ranked, tournaments, etc.

Even as an OG, I can see that adding automations (QOL) is saving this game. It is growing more rapidly than ever, and with better gameplay. Now players can have even more time to micro their units and focus on fighting, as opposed to screwing around with villagers more cumbersome mechanics. Being good at placing 20 farms is not a skill we should have to work at. It is not a task we should waste our time on. We already have to select the 20 villagers and put them on a mill, why should that be 22 clicks instead of 2? Just think about how good these kinds of QOL automations are.....The skill ceiling lowers slightly on eco, but instead of any skill being removed from the game, the skill ceiling on army unit controls just got higher. I look forward to more QOL improvements that will allow for more focus on microing of armies. To me that is the most fun part of the game, but you only get to experience it in short bursts and with divided attention. You attention should be divided in AOE, dont get me wrong, but there are levels to this

Having played several games over the last few days I disagree. I'd say it's exactly like the shift queuing example given in the video. I was aware something changed regarding farms due to the green squared outline, but I was still placing farms as I normally do. Just like shift queuing it's something you CAN do, but are not required to do. That's my take from what little experience I have with the new feature.

Usually, things done in order to draw in a larger crowd ie "easier for noobs" is usually the death of the game in the long run. I remember in WoW, the reason it was so popular was that, while a skinner box, it also had a lot of ways to play. It was complex but rewarding, figuring out the best talents, the best rotations and then figuring that out for pve and pvp, it was all great and fascinating. Over time, blizzard implemented things like simplified talent trees and essentially making rotations fixed and creating addons that basically play the game for you. WoW is a shell of it's former self because they saw numbers going up and wanted those numbers to increase ever more and around cataclyms when they tried to "balance" things, which is essentially making all the classes more or less the same, it all went to shit. The new people who join don't stay for long and these things kinda just spit in the face of those who have been loyal fans for years.

I have the same opinion as T90. I love placing farms. Especially if you have the poles with the perfect mill. I think its very satisfying to make +50 farms in lategame for the husar spam. It's a core mechanic and to see that so many publishers make silly decisions nowadays, just to attract new customers is quite hurtful. If you think the game is to hard, play against Ai, in the lobbybrowser or in Quickplay. Whats wrong with that?? Nobody forces you to be good or be the fastest farmplacer. If you don't enjoy managing the eco the game isn't right for you.

I think the discussion about this feature is kinda cringe. Like when Star Craft pros discussed not having to select every worker unit anymore in Star Craft 2.

I think this change is going to be mostly in player mental, but it will have a big impact. I'm a pretty low elo player, and realistically if I just spam farms with very poor placement, they'll be about the same speed and like 95%+ as efficient. But I don't do that because it feels bad to have awkward gaps in my farms. This is realistically not much better than that attitude of low quality spam click, but it will change the mental allowing players to make that sacrifice without worrying about it. If you watch players like Hera with incredible APM you often see very messy farms in the later stages of the game, because he knowns that with eco upgrades it doesn't make much if any of a difference. That is a sacrifice that is almost always worth it, but many players don't have the confidence/ judgement to make and that is what's being removed imo.

I agree with end point. More focus on multiplayer lobby and Elo than on auto features in multiplayer

I'm a noob at 780 elo (played like 12 ranked matches recently), and even I think its a horrible idea. It'll make the feeling of my skill progress alot less satisfying, I was going to focus on improving my eco skills first, but this makes it so easy that it feels unnecessary. I've seen alot of good games ruined by '"QoL updates" or making it easier by making the player stronger, its a shame and why so many people flock to older versions of games these days. It's why I'm starting to play AoE ranked now (instead of where I used to just kinda build as a kid playing AoE2).

Agree about it setting a precedent, but this particular change is much ado about nothing. Those eco-oriented players? Some of them, no doubt, are that way because they cannot stand having anything less than perfectly-placed eco, so this just frees them to focus on their military, which is the thing some of them wanted to do in the first place. They'd *rather* have their screen over with their army, but big bad T90 and Spirit and whoever other content creator are always posting the forgot-to-look-at-my-eco memes, so they're just like "aaa if I'm not micromanaging my eco every 10 seconds, I'm a bad player aaaa," and for *them,* this is nothing but allowing them to play the game they want to play. Plus, you know, does anyone really enjoy placing farms? It's kind of a chore, and ultimately it does not matter very much at all because the efficiency drop isn't even that severe. You go from 100% down to like 97% in any reasonable scenario. Some changes that would be more egregious are auto-replacing lumber camps (hello, mule carts!) or a villager auto-queue, but this is not that. It's just removing what's basically a "hang nail" on the game -- tiny, annoying, but "part of the experience" if you really want to split hairs. If you -- the reader -- are somehow someone who enjoys the process of spam-click placing down 20 farms around a mill and coming to terms with all the little gaps between the farms because you've achieved your inner zen and such things don't bother you any more, then you have my condolences for your "loss," but this specific change is just... *such* a tiny deal. It's the tiniest deal. What it represents should be guarded against, but this specific change is just so incredibly tiny.

totally makes sense for console. but for PC ranked this makes it so you rarely have to look at your base when raiding

if it's a change that makes sense but affects the game balance it should come with trade-offs, say auto farm feature has an animation delay or something like that

I understand where T90 is coming from, but this change is so minimal... I understand the concern regarding too much automation, and that's valid, but I also remember when they made so that one sheep would always be scouted if you started on a regular map and some people freaked out because of that. Auto farm ignores other buildings, ignores stragler trees, plants them on top of broken trees, so there's a "tradeoff", there's situations where you shouldn't use the feature, but there's situations where you can simply use it and it won't change a lot. If food eco really depended on farm being placed perfectly I doubt I would like this feature, but it doesn't, the rates are almost the same, that's why most pro players simply spam farms, because it doesn't matter that much. I think you are overreacting a bit, but the video is well put together and you managed to present your points very clearly, I just disagree with them. Anyways, you have my like, I hope you continue to post your opinions, even if I don't agree with them!

Viper completely changed my standpoint on this feature. The strategy is what makes this game interesting, not APM.

I totally get your pointy and I agree that this somehow takes some aspects of the uniqueness of player bases etc. But me personally as a ~1350 elo 2v2 only player kinda like this change. Placing farms in lategame often times cost me my army or took so long, that i just didnt do it for some time. But I also think it won't have such a huge impact on player performance and balance overall. High elo players were already so fast, ghat it wont make a huge difference. In the end it's qol feature and not using it will put you at a slight disadvantage, that is true, but the difference will most likely be barely noticeable on higher elos in most games (there certaibly will be exceptions, where players have to rebuild their whole base and a huge amount of farms is necessary etc.) Lets see first how this pans out after a few weeks before we come to a conclusion. But I agree that criticism is definitely useful to show the devs there's a red line they cannot cross (like auto queue villager's).

100% agree, thanks for making it. What brought me to the game was team games and what kept me was the high skill ceiling. Not having persistent ranked teams or "divisions" and medals or seasons like league of legends has is really disheartening as if im playing the game the wrong way and i should play single player or quick play.

Rts games rely on the fact that the players have more many different actions to perform than they can humanly do at any given point. After this change this is still the case.

While I do understand your points on ebb and flow of the game, surely people who are better at eco will be even further ahead with this function no? I don't see it handicapping them as you still need to resources and villagers to build the farms. I think its a good addition, but I've yet to test it myself. One thing that always bugged me was having to manually place individual farms and spend less time on troops so personally I like it.

We can't leave because finding sheep = pure dopamine bliss

Great points, thanks for the video

I agree it will just be one more thing that removes the uniqueness of a player. Even Viper can make T90 farms at endgame when he's managing tasks. With this feature it will just be one more thing you won't see anymore.

Totally agree with T90. This feature takes away so much for a little bit of convenience. Base neatness is a sign of confidence and calmness, now you can't tell if the player that beat you was trying hard or just winning casually.

When I saw that auto-vill queue, i immediately thought of Stronghold. i feel that with those features around autofarming and the auto vill queue, AOE2 becomes another stronghold. the considerations when it comes to eco-management are simply where to put x amount of buildings, providing auto spawning vils via only building houses. In stronghold the main focus of apm is on battle. in AOE2 it was always that balance that made these two games so different. kinda sad microsoft studios seems to want to kill that difference for the ease of new players. i agree with your thoughts about all those features.

This is a positive change imo. Anything that reduces time needed on menial tasks so that players have more time to spend on higher level strategy or focusing on army action is good.

I was a little hesitant about auto farm placement. And you've really opened my eyed on why. Its going to take away a lot of personality and expression from players.

This just show's how good this game is now, when you can complain about little details in game play. I started playing AOE 2 around 2000-2001 and i'm over the moon how this game has evolved. I'm still kind of simcity player, but i have learned some new tricks thanx to T90, Hera, Viper and many other player youtube content.

Complexity and difficulty add to enjoyment. The feeling of working toward something and achieving said goal is the pinnacle of human satisfaction. Taking away from the expression of skill in a game not only harms the individual player base it also harms the viewership. If there is less skill expression in any game then there is less for fans to be impressed at when watching pro players. Please listen to the fans and meet the people (who are currently playing this game) at the table. Take the time to listen and grow with the community, not beside it...

T90 you are absolutely correct! I am also a StarCraft fan and this 25 year old game has such a great comeback at the moment BECAUSE it has so many things the player has to control.