I suppose if you are one of those players who plays Warcraft 2 by just typing on the keyboard.
There are a lot of them out there. And they would call us casual for not doing it.
Age 2 actually feels less micro intensive than Starcraft to me since Age doesnāt have a catalogue of game-winning spells you have to use or counter at nearly any particularly time. Thereās a particular combination of archers vs mangonels thatās probably the most micro intensive thing in the game.
Butā¦ to play at higher difficulty levels you absolutely must use hotkeys. Even if itās nothing more than cycling through town centers and mashing A to build the next villager, without doing this it would be basically impossible to keep up. I regularly see ānewerā players only have 70 villagers vs. 120+ for āmoderateā players, and iām sure hotkeys are playing an important role in that.
Fortunately Age 2 has some of the best hotkey defaults you can have in a game, which are arranged by order in the control bar rather than scattered around the keyboard.
The one hotkey combination that i find useful though is to rebind the idle villager key and the build farm key to some convenient place on the keyboard so that you can rapidly build farms without thinking too hard about it. Even if youāre just cycling and the villagers are idling waiting for you to assign them to do something itās better to build them sloppily and have them ready to make farms while in combat than to not have them at all.
The hotkeys are okay, but as long as it doesnāt have a key that takes you to the next building with an unresearched tech available, I would prefer Rise of Nations.
Anyway, you bring up an interesting point, but needing to constantly check all your town centers, which is why a small, but sizable minority on the forum keeps arguing for the ability to set up Loop Queues, like in Rise of Nations. As @roguefrog said, fewer micro chores.
Man I suck at Black Forest.
I really donāt know how to deal with castle/treb pushes. Whenever a player does that iām 100% dead. The problem seems very Sun Tzu though - it feels like theyāve already won the game at that point. When iām getting trebbed the enemy already has a giant army behind them. Despite building 0 military and booming out of 3 TCs, I canāt keep up. I need to watch some replays to figure out what these guys are doing.
It doesnāt help that in team BF games one even slightly weak player sinks the whole team.
Itās an interesting insight, and I guess you are right. All the hot keys I learned where for building farms and houses and villagers.
I can see it making balance issues more visible, but Iād think the solution would be to try and fix balance not blame AQ for ruining the game. Given that he himself said the MP population for AoM massively dropped off a couple months after release, and well before Titans released it would seem people had issues with something else.
I can see how it impacts things since a large part of these games is about you are only able to focus on so much, and so other things suffer. I wonder how much it impacts someoneās ability to stage a comeback. Production wouldnāt suffer nearly as much when your attention is directed elsewhere, but you would still need to be directing vills to their tasks (I think, idles donāt eventually start grabbing a resource after a while do they like RoN?), and would still need to be messing with unit comp coming out of production buildings. I use it all the time whenever I comp stomp in Ashes of the Singularity. I might try some AoM comp stomp and play around with it there to see how it feels. I donāt think Iāve ever noticed it, or used it before there.
Anyone know of other examples besides the TA(?), SupCom, Ashes, PA style games? AoM and RoN?
Given the outcry over auto-scout I imagine they will riot in the streets over aq.
Dark Reign Future War had it, and it was legendary.
But I donāt get how AQ is fundamental different from what has been done with Farms and Fish Traps already.
And I think Auto Scouting goes further then AQ does.
I think it just flattens the skill curve some. Iām not sure what, if anything, it does to the high end.
And yet, people are really resistant to anything that doesnāt allow them to retain their status.
Did anyone complain about them adding shift queue for actions?
Of course some do, but not many. The forum is not happy with anything that might give new players a fair footing.
Did robo join discord, mention hidden cup, and then ride off into the sunset? :)
I guess.
Itās always nice to have a few more RTS players in the mix.
Speaking of which, I have some catching up to do on Hidden Cup.
For folks overwhelmed by the 30+ civilizations now in Age of Empires 2, Age of Noob has created a tool that does a decent job comparing Civilizations:
Iām am going to take a look.
https://www.twitch.tv/t90official
Hidden Cup 3 is pulling 35k already.
COVID19 might be helping with that though.
Itās insane that AOE which never managed a tournament scene in its release window is now pulling the same viewership as Starcraft (IEM last month pulled ~40k).
More Age of Empires tournaments on the way:
T90 managed to get over 50k viewers during the final day of Hidden Cup 3.
Day9 is playing AoE2 on his stream today.
Latest patch adds another unique unit for the Tatars:
Timurid Siegecraft: Now makes the new Flaming Camel unit available when researchedāa fast-moving Petard with bonuses vs. mounted units and elephants.