Advantages of Automation
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I have more strong opinions about Age of Empires II than I do hotkeys.
As a long-time member of the AOE2 community, I believe that the addition of automation features will not have a significant impact on the competitive scene.
I think these features will help to bring new players into the game and make the experience more enjoyable for them.
I also believe that features such as “select all” and “shift-q” have had a much greater impact on the competitive scene than automation will ever have.
Finally, I think it is important to keep an open mind and not be too quick to criticize every new feature that is added to the game.
Anyone concerned about the new automation should watch Spirit of the Law’s latest video.
It does not give any competitive advantage and is in many ways a disadvantage.
It is not automatic build order.
It doesn’t build camps or mills.
It doesn’t build production buildings.
It doesn’t auto Q.
It won’t be useful in competitive above 500 ELO.
I assume anyone who cares about the game enough to visit this sub is more than skilled enough to never have to worry about it giving you a disadvantage.
I’m trying to sift through all the fluff in your post and actually find what “the case for automation” actually is.
as best as i can tell, you’re saying “previous QoL features were first denounced as heresy, and now they are loved by all”.
How is that an argument for auto farm placement?
or auto-vil queue?
or auto army queue?
or any the other automation ideas people are throwing around?
sidebar: auto-scout is bearable because it’s limited to your starting scout, which most skilled players will use manually until its death in feudal 99% of the time.
I haven’t played on PC in a while myself.
I was excited to see it was coming to Gamepass(which I recently got).
I remember learning how to play tho.
I didn’t start the game gracefully at all.
For a long time I just cheated against the AI, unaware of the games following.
I found this community looked at pro matches learned build orders on yt etc.
I remember it taking a good chunk of time to do.
I never used hotkeys efficiently, I would constantly have idle villagers, so on so forth.
Either way I ended up getting pretty okay at the game but it was definitely a journey.
Reason being, I have always played on controllers; every single game.
I played on controllers my older brother showed me AOE2 and I just thought it was cool because he did, but then it was fun.
So when it came to something like a keyboard(I still have to look at the keys when I type) I was down right intimidated by the idea of remembering what buttons did what thing.
It’s not that I can’t play a game at an “okay” level on a keyboard, it’s that it’s easier on a controller.
In this version I am having a lot of fun with switching around Villager Priority(VP) in the match in order to keep up with the economy(really big weakness of mine in the PC version.) While I focus on armies, looking for relics, looking for resources, etc.
Good post bud!
Added after thought: I did notice in my short time on DE that it was super super easy to break 10k food.
Which is fine if you’ve been playing for a bit but.
This is a new version pretty much entirely.
I imagine if some true bamfs pop up and start playing on Xbox they might find a way to exploit this…
But idkfs.
Basically, as long as automation does not feel like plain cheating (all things considered), and while taking full manual control is superior (even though it takes more skill), it should be all good – and helping new players get a grasp of it all at their own pace can just help the community grow further.
Not everyone is a hardcore gamer, either.
It kind of reminds me of another game, “Pro Evolution Soccer” (PES, also known as “Winning Eleven”), where simulation reached another level a long time ago – and being confronted with it all as a beginner does not really make for a very fun experience, unfortunately…
Because of that, there’s a “simplified” control scheme (so to say), where passing/shooting behaves in a semi-automatic way, simply targeting a fellow player (or opponent’s goal) in desired direction.
But once you start being familiar with it (or even at the very beginning, if that’s what you prefer), you can progress to more manual controls, being harder to master but once there allowing for unrivaled creativity and freedom, opening possibilities just not doable with simplified approach.
The fact of the matter is this: automation transforms the game into something else.
That’s fine for new players – that’s not what I came to this game for.
Potentially playing against players implementing automation and AI assistance while I rely on brute apm because that’s how I’ve played DE since it’s release kind of ruins the competitive experience in my opinion, not at the pro level at all levels.
Even assuming what you say is correct, why is it ok to mess up the experience for non high level players.
I just don’t like busy work micro.
Never have, never will.
I don’t care if it’s more “skillful”, I don’t like getting carpal tunnel from a single video game match.
Let me focus on other things!!!
Been loving this game on a controller so far lol.
You can expect top players to use any feature that gives them an advantage.
If you add infinite queue to the game, they’ll use it.
If you add auto-eco management to the game, they’ll use it.
If a new feature is situational, they’ll use it when the situation calls for it.
The only reason they wouldn’t use new features, aside from being set in their ways, is if the features have nothing to offer.
What anti-“auto everything” people tend to overlook is that the time you save on busywork can be used on strategy and tactics.
When the game is smarter, you spend less time wrangling it and more time playing it the way it’s supposed to be played.
Rise of Nations was replete with quality of life features.
Assigning 5 vils to a wood line meant you reliably got 5 vils’ worth of wood income.
They didn’t trip over each other or get stuck or decide the tree they want to chop is on the other side of the wood line.
Any effort the devs make to reduce the barrier between what people want to do and their ability to do it does reduce the amount of skill involved, but that’s fine.
At least 95% of people who play this game are nowhere near the skill ceiling.
The top 5%+ will have no trouble adapting to noob-friendly features that raise the skill floor.
just like attack stances, you could have a “shoot and go back” stance, where archers shoot and arrow and proceed back, and shoot again and proceed back.
This is automation which will be considered broken.
Actual TL;DR.
And yes, this subreddit needs to be force-fed changes before they’ll accept them.
I’m not sure if your argument of “most of the new players will never play competitively or care about ranks because that’s not what I was like as a teenager” is solid.
Like you said in another post, the internet sucked 20 years ago but nowadays when a teenager buys a game with a big online community they will probably wanna play online, too.
As this is a thing and pretty much standard today.
That’s not to say, there won’t be teenagers who just want a kind of “story mode”.
There will be for sure, and for what I care there could be an “automate economy option” for single player.
But arguing to make a really important aspect of the game easier so that new players can enjoy the game more (and applying this in ranked context), doesn’t make much sense to me.
If they don’t like the economic part of this game enough to actually try and learn it, then this game just isn’t for them.
I just wrote this without noticing your post:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/10r41n4/xbox_version_could_have_more_automation_features/](https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/10r41n4/xbox_version_could_have_more_automation_features/)
Many of us are thinking about this right now 🙂
Based Essay Writing Chad tbqh wp
I have very little skin in this game so I will instead point out some failures of your autocorrect.
> Low and behold
It should read “lo and behold”.
It roughly means “hey guys!
check it out.”
> Shift-q
Did you mean “shift-queuing”?
Or if you want to eliminate excessive silent letters “shift-quuing”?
> idol
I believe you meant idle. (Something that is doing nothing.
Versus an object used in worship in the stead of the actual entity or idea being worshipped.)
> haunch
That word roughly means to squat.
I believe you mean “hunch”, which means “a feeling or guess based on intuition rather than known facts.” (Taken from google search results.)
Like I said, I have very little skin in the game.
Mostly because I know that if they do get an advantage the ladder will eventually place them where they will be fighting against people their skill level.
The funny thing is that at low levels the automation will be a lot more helpful that shift queuing and select all 11
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