I don't think this is an argument to win or lose because people value different things. MBL is right that many people enjoy uniqueness and the creativity of placing farms. Viper is probably right that most people don't, and that streamlining that will improve the experience of most players. MBL is right that it sucks for certain skills to become obselete. Viper is right to point out that skills have been trimmed all the way back to AOK and that we don't really want to go back.
the lumberjack analogy is not correct and is a false equivalence, not replacing a lumber camp has a pretty sizable impact on your eco, whereas in the late game good farms barely give much return especially with hand cart, see spirit of the law's video on this, this change will basically only help in making farms look better with bases and save some time making farms
@@izyanjamal7717 but one could argue that its the little differences that matter. I liked the part when T90 was talking about how quick his editor could now place the farms, and hence able to micro the army more. So my thought was 2 things. 1. there is no trade off on deciding to place perfect farms meaning getting better efficiency and microing your army. It is a decision you had to make of either focusing more on eco, or more on army. Build perfect farms or protect and micro my mangonel. 2. which leads into the 2nd point. This is making the game actually more micro intense for the army. I'm not sure I would like the game to be more micro focused. because you focus less on eco, and more controlling the army. I think this is a buff to Hera (could be wrong), where he now is even less likely to make a mistake with his army and high elo in general. So it possibly lowers the ceiling of skill and decision making (only very slightly) in the game, less mistakes happen, less potential for comeback, less entertaining to watch (again hard to quantify how much it will impact, and may be very small, but its already played at such a high level the smallest of differences is so big these days e.g. 1 vil dying at the start is basically a gg). The only question is, does it make the game better? and I'm just not sure. Better for some, worse for others I guess.
@@izyanjamal7717 It absolutely is, it's not a anology for style but for CONVENIENCE, now that we have auto farms, auto scout and auto reseed, why not make lumbercamps more convenient, fishtraps, hell, even mining camps. The game is supposed to be a little difficult to manage both economy and army. If you automate everything and focus only on fighting it isn't aoe 2 anymore. If you want to have that type of gameplay, play aoe3
Caring about pointless things is what makes gaming relevant, AOE2 has no practical impact but people caring about non-practical things is keeping ti alive
@@majungasaurusaaaa No they're not. There has never been a correlation between "accessibility" and attracting new players. Marketing is the only consistently successful method of doing that.
@Kidneyjoe42 I know that the primary reason I chose AOE2 over SC2 is the QOL features of AOE2DE, specifically the building selection hotkeys. AOE was simply more pleasant to play since the game gave you better tools to quickly do what you wanted to do. Playing chess with your hands may be technically the same game as playing chess with your feet, but if you had to play chess with your feet and could play go with your hands, I think you would find quite a few more people switching to go.
MBL's argument reminds me a bit of this one game I watched Hera stream, I was still very noob at that point and I had put a lot of time into trying to optimise the first 5 minutes of the game: getting those houses built asap, optimising the initial scouting, scouting with sheep, making sure to kill the sheep under the TC etc etc, anyway Hera starts this game and someone asks a question in chat and he says "I'll read that now, let me just quickly get this start out of the way". And that sentence kinda broke my heart a little, because I still saw the start of the game as something that involved a lot of skill and decision making and creativity and where I could get an advantage over the enemy by finding new innovative ways to optimising things, but I realised at that moment that for the pros, they were entirely on autopilot, there was "a correct" way to do the start, and they just needed to "get it out the way" so that the "actual" game could start. I feel similarly about the farming. I also spent quite a lot of time learning how to place farms correctly, how to make sure that the villigers dispersed instead of all building the first farm etc, how to fill gaps when you need a few farms but don't have space for another mill and so on. And part of me still wants to see it as something that involves skill and decision making and creativity. I know that for the pros it's been basically auto-pilot anyway. But for the noobs, it's something that felt like a puzzle to solve, that's now just gone :/
I share Nili's opinion that it is a feature which is getting as close to the line as possible without crossing it. Let's give this 2-3 months and see how it goes. Trial and error guys. If Microsoft want the best, then give them an objective opinion after a few thousand games have been played. Let's have a couple of tournaments and see what this extra micro time does and if it wrecks the game in any meaningful way.
no point giving it a 2-3 month trial as the only people this is gonna affect are the lower level players who's games arent gonna be seen, this wont affect the games of top players, or will affect it very minimally
But why not discuss it as such then... say we are coming out with 'features within the game' that are going to test the lines & limits of things, They will be on a 2 or 3 or 4-6 month review time, then explain it & reveal its intended purpose. That's how this should have been done, alongside the auto-scout option & a few others actually.
MBL has a good point. From the spectator perspective, its nice to see the farms. However, when I'm playing a game and I do auto farm I get this "Oh that's such a nice feature" feeling.
New employee at Forgotten Empires implements cool, self-contained feature as a starter task, promptly causing the whole fanbase to erupt in flames. Also, pathing breaks
I completely agree with MBL on this. The art of placing farms involves multi-tasking, precision, attention, focus, memory, and creativity. The allocation of where you choose to utilize those skills is a strategic decision.
Yes but in return we're getting a nice QoL change for everyone so we can spend more time actually microing our armies which is why most people enjoy aoe 11
@@SirQuantization People enjoy the game differently. Many players like the building placement aspect and the strategic freedom of skill expression. I empathize with the idea that new or casual players are frustrated with the multi-tasking element. I also used to be a new player. However, it's a part of learning how to play the game. Most of the players arguing from the position of being able to spend more time controlling armies have not learnt or setup hotkeys properly. I know this because I enjoy watching people play and offer coaching for newer players. The vast majority of players today still occasionally click for a building or upgrade. EDIT: Additionally, when you finally achieve a massive army or upgrade to Paladin it feels good being rewarded for placing so much effort into economy management.
I mean auto farm does not remove the strategic aspect of farm placement. It is an agnostic system, and in several situations it makes dubious and straight up bad farm locations, for example when you are attacked on one side of the base, the tool suggests to put farms right next to the frickin enemy siege, or when you have TCs next to wood lines or other resources, it sometimes suggests to put farms on the other side of the woodline. Its far from perfect, you still have to use your criteria to recognize in which situations auto farming is beneficial and in which ones manual farming is better.
@@ParamecioLord It does remove strategic aspects though, e.g. the time you spend to place farms well in stressful situations. Is being able to judge when you need to place farms extremely quick vs when you can get away with more efficient placement not a strategic aspect of the game?? It also removes the skill required to accurately move your mouse and place good farms quickly.
I 100% agree with Mbl. One of the most brilliant parts of Aoe2's design is that Farms are 3 tiles, but the Mills and TCs where you drop the Food are 2 tiles and 4 tiles. It forces you to spend time thinking about how you design your base.
@@danielchauvin9317 Well that's exactly my point. They're designed to be inconvenient. Just like Houses. The Polish Farms have another focus: you need to place them within the square around the Folwark. They double down on emphasizing Farm placement. The Khmer Farms do the same thing in a different way. They make the base unique since you can place them anywhere. Suddenly you see Farms near Gold mines or woodlines so the Villagers don't have to walk anywhere. It adds to the specific civ's uniqueness by changing how players position their Farms. The bonuses that focus on Farm placement generally are well-liked.
I really struggle to understand this line of argument, even though I agree with the beginning (that the non-matching grid sizes makes things a bit non trivial). Consider e.g. T90s legend of dark elf, the person that separates the male and female villagers and has a geometrically beautiful little town every game. It is about how all the different sized buildings are placed with respect to eachother, and then how they line up with the farms. Autofarm is generally not going to replicate that, even if you have already pre set up the geometry of all the other buildings. Something like this still has to be set up manually. This idea that you can no longer play manual sim city in aoe is bonkers. All it does is let people who don't care about sim city to quickly place farms and now it is a bit more pretty and a lot faster for them than it was before, but it doesn't turn them in to dark elf. You raised the point about the different grid geometries creating interesting decisions. Autofarm takes none of that decision making away. That mostly comes in the form of deciding where to place the TC, mills, houses etc. And then if you use autofarm, it won't necessarily give you the result that you 'wanted' because it doesn't really account for the geometry of the rest of your base, the farms it gives you might be a bit offset than what you were hoping for. It raises the floor, in that autofarm is almost always nicer than random farm, but it doesn't change the ceiling. And if I'm a player like dark elf, I don't see a reason to be disappointed when now I look at my opponents base and it is more pretty than used it to be, because it still isn't as pretty as mine.
@@CaptainJackStudios One of the key aspects of Aoe2 imo is how it blends together the competitive and base-building aspects. It's not just about making a base "pretty," but about how subtle differences in building location influence how a game plays out, (how you need to defend when raided, etc). Autofarm isn't something you can ignore if you want to play competitively, since it's so much more efficient in certain situations. That's forcing gameplay situations where you end up removing control from the player. It's not just about prettiness or automation, but about control. And this makes it different than something like rotatable gates imo, where it makes it easier for the player to perform the action they want, whereas autofarm choose the action that is performed.
Thanks for your extra thoughts! It's possible I misunderstand your argument, or that I am seeing two distinct arguments where you see two sides of the same coin. I do see the argument about the change impacting APM and concentration balance between eco and military, that there are decisions to be made about how much time and concentration to spend placing farms Vs microing military etc. If this is the kind of decision you are referring to, then I agree that it is relevant and I understand the argument. But then there is, separately from the decision making about time and concentration allocation, the decision making about base building. What is the best way to arrange your base either for beauty as a low elo legend, for efficiency, or for safety. Should I place this building here or there. But I maintain that here in the first and second cases the interesting decisions to be made are all about the building placement and not the farm placement. If you are making spread out farms with big gaps, it is not because you decided that was a better arrangement than compact farms, it is because that is faster and you decided that it is better to save your time to use it elsewhere. Therefore it is a decision making of the kind from the previous paragraph. And in the latter case, autofarm is not optimizing for safety and so it does not remove any decision making from that case. E.g. it doesn't know not to build a farm on the left side of your mill because the enemy placed a tower there. It simply means that, once you have made the decision "I want to roughly optimise for space in a non-global way", it gives you a tool for enacting that decision efficiently.
Autofarming is conceptually perfect QoL feature, because it is not strictly better than manual placement. Thanks to that, you can also view it as increase of game depth while simultaneously reducing its mechanical complexity.
Farm placement is a unique thing in AoE. In lower elo all bases/farmplacement looks different. I think its pleasing for the eyes and you can see alot of informations how to game was going, when the player was under pressure or in a difficult situation.
If you place a TC on a woodline, the function will happily place a farm on the other side of the woodline, if you don't have enough space inside your base.
I think it’s not “about the farms” it’s about difficulty. To place the farms during a stress situation it’s part of the game. It’s not about the uniqueness of the bases, it’s about the uniqueness of the player and how he deals with details. And Viper is saying that you are not going to use it a lot, so why bother.
Honestly speaking. I think it's even more simple then that. People don't want changes, regardless of them being good or not. There was a bit of push-back against multi-queue as well.
I agree, but also, multi queue doesn’t do anything for you. You have to plan ahead. This is the first “qol” change that do things for you. The other ones weren’t automatisations, if you don’t consider re seed farms.
Thank you MBL! Before AOE2, I played AOE1 and Starcraft 1 which do not even have formations. You have to manually group your guys together and put the melee ones in front of the range ones. Maybe we can start a petition together to have that in AOE2 so everyone's units moving around will take more skill and have more differences.
Wasn’t expecting to actually get convinced by mb. Placing farms quickly in high pressure situations is for sure a skill that becomes more important as you become better at the game. Now, pros and beginners can place farms equally fast pretty much, and makes the game easier for sure. Autoscout is definitely different than this because for one, it sucks, it randomly starts scouting corners. And secondly you might have your scout on autoscout, but you’re not paying attention to what it actually scouts. The reason you use your scout actively is to learn what your opponent is doing. Autoscout doesnt do this for you.
at some point, when every way to possibly get an edge by prioritizing economy is automated... the civ with the stronger units will win, not the player.
It's surprising to me that t90 and mb have an issue with autofarm who are known to have inefficient farms whereas viper is fine with it who is known to make ocd farms.
The one thing I have noticed especially for me is since me and my friend mainly play age on Xbox is I feel more comfortable with being able to focus on the main aspect of age which is the combat because you don’t win games with having the better looking farms. Before I was trying to place them manually being perfect I focused too much on the placement so I would use the AI to sort my villagers to do the jobs but with this I have stopped using the AI sorter and became more efficient with my eco vs that I didn’t focus on them before so if anything I was getting more effort in building than when I was using the AI sorter. But this is because compared to pc players they have more control with a mouse. So to me I would rather be able to use this so I can be able to work on my actions per m and not focus on making things look “perfect”
@@clumsykoala3699 The pros don't use it. The math has even been done on it and it really doesn't make any real meaningful change. Those are the 2 major points that refute your claim.
IMO, autofarms will influence competitive games, as MBL explain when a player is stressed out its farming efficient will be reduced. Also scouting bad farms is a sign that your enemy is being having a tough time.
Hm, it definitely seems like this is a openness problem, because it seems that people who don't care about art like autofarm whereas people who like art hate autofarm. Non-creative people only care about the numbers, not the looks.
in voobly you could actually see how many villagers you had on each resource. you just had to change the map view to economic view and it would be displayed instead of the score. Now it is an inferior way to do this, and it did mix up gold and stone miners as just "miners", but that feature was there. Also, screw auto farm placement!
I strongly agree with MbL. I hate what this does for competitive play, and I lean very heavily on auto farm placement, because my farm placement has always taken far too long. It removes some of the expressiveness of play, because it’s such a strong boost to your game that you can’t not do it. And it removes a dimension of skill.
Mbl opening the gate for new buttons on lumbercamps to autobuild a new one zero-one-two tiles deep. Thanx for the idea mb! OTTO OTTO EVERYTHING! --- Everything.
this situation is almost entirely analogous to the Broodwar scene when it was remastered. Blizzard asked if the player base wanted a remaster of the mechanics, smoother micro, better unit collisions, high unit select count, to which the player base said NO! all of that "jank" is more than just jank, its HOW the game is played. Its part of the skill cieling OF Broodwar. Your units are SUPPOSED to be hard to manage because it forces you to get better at micro to such a degree that dictates entire differences between player leagues. i dont like the idea of mechanics being automated in aoe2. it reduces the skill cieling. even if all we're talking about is 1.5% decrease from autofarm placement. it really is the principle of the matter for me. i dont like the idea of turning a blind eye to the skill cieling being dropped, ever. i want aoe2 to have MORE deciding factors that separate players by acquired skill assets over time. not less.
My argument, is Auto reseed must be removed, this takes out the edge off some players how constantly remember to place/stack more farms in mill. I understand MBL, it's like we can now retire that one skill.
I think its the fact that people had fun doing this as kids and have done farms the same way since, build a million farms and you're abit attached to them in a personal way. Not everyone like change. Maybe the reason why you play AOE2 in the first place. Another thing bringing you back to childhood ruined
lumbercamp argument made sense in a way.. but farm is placed at the moment, lumbercamp placecement is a future event you don’t know when exactly gonna happen.. Anyway I agree with mbl, it’s stupid to automate everything
Hugely disagree that this won't impact competitive play. Obviously useless in the early game, but it's completely trivializing late-game farm expansion and relocation, which indirectly nerfs already underpowered slow compositions meant to crack bases. Prior to this, there were very few players who could spare the attention to gracefully relocate 60 farmers while their main economy is being pushed. You and Hera are the first two who come to mind. Now it takes about three seconds to select villagers, place a few mills, and spam-click. It's one step removed from having the villagers automatically build a farm in the nearest available position when tasked to a mill. It would use the same logic as reseeding. Almost everyone thought autoscout wouldn't be used competitively. Concerns about Auto-Everything were maligned as a slippery slope fallacy. As it turns out, the slope is quite slippery.
Playing on Xbox with controller is a nightmare to begin with but with this auto farm feature makes it almost impossible to place farms manually now do to this stupid Auto farming. Now I’m forced to Auto farm which completely ruins the experience trying to outplay MK players with controller. I just want to play AOE while laying down 😢
For me at lower/mid Elo its this thing of APM that T90 talked about. Before you really had to focus to make good farms, taking away from your offensive actions. Now, farms are way too fast to place and way too efficient. It takes away strategically from the game because now you can play agressive and have really good eco, not just one of the two.
How dare people want to play a war game instead of babysitting vils and farms. May as well remove auto working vils from AOC instead. Enjoy your dwindling pool of nostalgics while new players stay away because of lack of 21st century conveniences expected from a standard game.
I would be way more inclined to support this feature if we didn’t have auto farm renewal as well, or perhaps if the automatic farm placement layout was inefficient enough to make it of questionable use in competitive play, such as is the case with auto scouting.
It is honestly pretty inefficient. It may look flawless, but the placement gets really wonky when buildings are around. People actually need to remember that a perfect mill or tc, with a completely open area around is pretty rare. You are sliding into that logic yourself a little and the argument makes perfect sense in theory, but not in praxis. You would be so open to raids if you used this tool for peak efficiency. Also, it doesn't really change that much in the actual gathered amount.
I think one of the main things that make aoe exciting is those situations where you need more apm than you can easily perform. This feature eliminates some of that. So, yes, it will make the game more accessible to new players, but it will be less fun.
the balance between combat and economic is very important part of the game. This does not ruin that balance, but it is a step in making the economy less impactful part of the game.
@nathangamble125 It does move that scale, the balance, towards economy being less of a player's time, thus a less impactful part of the game. Even if only slightly, this change does certainly make economy less impactful
@@nathangamble125 why do villagers go to work after building a lumbermill? If we truly want eco to be important. All villagers should be babysat and they should remove many of the comfort QOL changes. No more shift queue tasks. It changes the balance and should be removed.
Isn't it cool that we know how it was 20 years ago? How it changed step by step? For that reason only, I'm glad that mbl is defending the last style so hard. It reminds us of the suffering.. And I agree, there is a fun part of it that's now gone. The last version of the game will just be a black screen. Perfect.
He placed the mills like perfectly always having exact 6tiles for 2 farms, bad players would place the mills randomly like maybe having 5 tires, like this 2 farms will not fit or having others structures that makes the autoplacement rly rly bad. I always place them manually.
I have to agree with MBL in this one to be honest. Sometimes the magic is in the simple things I also think it's nice that we could see if a player was stressed based on the farm placement. It's good info
im only 6 minutes in but my own unbiased opinion is that it definitely undermines quality, where someone maybe used to have an advantage due to efficient placement and planning is now freely granted so the better macro player get's this buff for nothing where his downside used to be running slightly behind on econ to support his plays. now ill continue watching :P
I can't believe that viper doesn't see how much is being compromised with this feature. I agree with everything MBL said. Just to give an example: after each game when i look at my opponent's base I know if i was beaten with ease or my opponent was trying hard by seeing how neat his base looks especially farm placement.
Think about a player who's enjoying auto farm placement, and then he has to manually place farm. Your farm admiring fun is at his expense. He has to suffer placing farm manually for your enjoyment, why?
@@TonyButter9 you have to decide how many farms you can place before looking back at your army. Many times I would place extra farms and try to put them in a way that would optimize the space in my base because not every map is a vast meadow, but then I look back at my army and it's gone. In other words placing farms is a strategic decision and requires decision making and not just a chore.
@@ggnmsn Yeah, I actually got really frustrated watching it, not that I agree with MBL, but the viper either completely misses his points or twists them to make them less rational.
@@vaziklikoykoda9377Mbl keeps yelling and says the same point over and over, if the argument wants to be constructive, each person has to take a pause and let the other think. He keeps talking so fast like that Viper is not gonna think straight and just say the first thing he has in mind, which is he doesn't care about farm looking ugly or pretty
I learned to play this game competetively on Voobly. I had to manually que farms, I had to circle between military buildings to que Units, I was not able to que techs, I didnt have the amount of villagers I had on ressource X or Y displayed on the screen. I had to be careful not to click on the wrong ressource when my villagers had food in their hands. Over time, I also learned some neat little tricks like scanning with farm foundations for enemy units, the good old mangonel delete trick or hopping through towers over the corner of a wall. Of course I do know why it is good that some of those things have changed (I hated the hopping over wall corners on arena for example). Anyways: Those are things I learned from spending hours and hours on the game, some I figured out myself, some I found out watching pro players. I was a little proud about my knowledge of the mechanics of the game aswell as my mechanics when it came to macro as a player. Nowadays not only the "little tricks" have been removed, but many of the mechanics I spent hours on getting into my brain actually give me a disadvantage: - I find myself circling through military buildings instead of shift-queing sometimes - I still use old waypoint behaviour which takes an extra click and feels a bit weirder especially for shift-queing - I find myself dropping of food from a sheep before commanding my villagers to attack a Boar I am sure there are more examples like this, and I probably have some of those "negative mechanics" that I dont even know of. Every time such a "quality of live" feature comes out, I have to un-learn something I have absolutely automated into my brain and instead learn something new, which is exhausting and not fun at all, just to KEEP my level as a player, not even to improve. I imagine if I stayed away from the game for 6 months for whatever reason, and I heard that 5, 6 or 7 new QoL features were introduced, it would absolutely scare me away from starting to play the game again.
MbL has a point: it is the small things. principaly when we dont talk about competitive matters, the little subjects of our base, our game, our tactics. Look at AoE4 great game and i love it, but the automatization makes him a little less unique than aoe 2.
I mean auto farm is only one step away from auto eco and then half the game is gone. Viper's argument "its just farms" well yeah but what happens when its just lumber camps, just mining camps? The inclusion of auto scout and then auto farms shows that there is a trend to automate non-combat parts of the game. I understand that the devs may see combat as the "exciting" part of the game and want to find ways to keep players engaged in more combat and less eco, but it is an RTS. The whole point of an RTS is seeing who is the better multitasker. They are basically turning a game of chess into tic-tac-toe which is stupid
