How would you increase emphasis on macro in aoe2?

[mamo139]

aoe2 is probably my favourite game. However one of the aspects I dislike is that a lot of dull execution is required to improve your game. I do not get any satisfaction from the micro aspect of the game, but i love the decision making and macro aspects of it.

If I had to draw a parallel with chess: to me macro is thinking your moves, while micro is grabbing your pawn and physically moving it from one square to another. the fun part is thinking the move, not physically moving the pawn.

Question to you: if you were tasked to take aoe2 in its current state and make big or small changes to reduce execution/micro importance and increase the importance of strategic decisions/macro, what would you do?

I honestly would not know where to start, but i feel that there must be scope for improvement in this aspect.

A lot of good stuff was added in DE, but what else is left to do?
For instance auto producing units from any production building (including TCs), similar to farms functionality, seems to me a 100% improvement on the game with no drawbacks.

Thanks in advance for your input!!

 

[Dr___Mundo]

Yeah micro sucks! Lets convert aoe2 into turnbased game, easy! Nomore boring micro, only skill!

 

[HyunaOP]

There is one thing I agree with on DauT

Remove Ballistics from the game and have its effect applied from the Dark Age.

Other RTS do this now. So AOE2 should too!

Kappa

Let's see how many disagreeing posts and angry reacts come forth

 

[marco47]

You can always play more Arena and I don't mean this as a joke.

 

[Biz]

keeping production going across lots of buildings is macro, not micro. you might view it differently, but that's not the standard definition

semantics aside, if you want to reward decisions more than execution, you'd have to balance a lot of the things to be less universal

for example, double-bit axe is too cheap for what you get, so you just get it every game and it isn't really a choice

i'd look at 3 general areas to fix
1) make the economic investments less forced and more about planning
2) make it harder to instantly switch from booming to military. so many defensive units are effective without any/many upgrades
3) specialize the buildings. it's too late to fix aoe2, but a different RTS might not want the land economic expansion building to also be a fortress. or the extra dark age TC to also make warships. every RTS needs booming, but a good one wouldn't make it as free as it is in aoe2. you even get walls for free with all the house spam.


a lot of the military compositions are also not much of a choice, but it's tough to fix that (especially for team games). idk what the power creep would even have to look like to add an answer to xbow+knight. maybe the only answer is to nerf both

 

[zuviss]

bring lag back so there's no micro nerds and may daut reign supreme

 

[Paint]

My Archers being useless because I am playing against a little micro kid makes me feel old every day.

 

[USC_kiky]

There should be an option to set the latency at the start of a game. e.g. increasing the latency to 1 minute will make it a completely strategic game: no micro is needed.

 

[fluppets]

For balancing micro vs macro I would:
- remove quick walling.
- remove ballistics but add 'shoot to ground' for all ranged units.
- limit shift-click to three waypoints.
- remove auto-scout.

 

[Dr___Mundo]

Now more serious reply to the topic. Your chess example is completely flawed. AOE2 is RTS and chess is TBS, you cannot seriously compare the 2 games like that, for TBS that kind of micro managing is pointless but for RTS it is universal across most titles. And then your definitions of micro, macro and decision makings seem so confusing to me that its completely impossible to actually reply any further. And about the auto-producing units... noway that would make aoe2 better game. It would actually on the contrary make it all about micro if you removed all the effort needed to make good eco. (Now your definition of micro seemed to be lot different but that's not really my fault.) The beaty of aoe2 is managing your economy while controlling your army while making the right decisions. Even autoscouting is almost too much, the amount of scouting it can provide when activated at right time is almost cheating.

 

[mamo139]

Now more serious reply to the topic. Your chess example is completely flawed. AOE2 is RTS and chess is TBS, you cannot seriously compare the 2 games like that, for TBS that kind of micro managing is pointless but for RTS it is universal across most titles. And then your definitions of micro, macro and decision makings seem so confusing to me that its completely impossible to actually reply any further. And about the auto-producing units... noway that would make aoe2 better game. It would actually on the contrary make it all about micro if you removed all the effort needed to make good eco. (Now your definition of micro seemed to be lot different but that's not really my fault.) The beaty of aoe2 is managing your economy while controlling your army while making the right decisions. Even autoscouting is almost too much, the amount of scouting it can provide when activated at right time is almost cheating.

Mhh I admit I probably did not use the micro/macro terminology correctly, although there seems to be some widespread confusion on the topic online.

How does enabling auto-production from buildings remove effort to make a good eco?
To me having a good eco means allocating the right number of villagers at the right resources to make sure you have enough to sustain production of the units you want. Not spam-clicking the production/building hotkeys at regular interval of times.
Where is the strategic thinking in that? It's just muscle memory training.

Same with producing villagers in dark-age:
- strategic thinking: you want to produce villagers continuously
- execution: every 25 seconds you need to spam click HA (or whatever your hotkey is)

Don't see any fun on clicking HA every 25 seconds.
Where do you see the fun in that? Time is a limited resource, the more you free up your brain from these repetitive tasks, the more space you have to look at strategic spots on the map, plan your base and your strategy.

 

[IYIyTh]

You can always play more Arena and I don't mean this as a joke.

To be fair, walls have been nerfed five times since DE was released (dark age hp laughably nerfed recently despite not being a problem recently,) it's reasonable to say that if the trend continues walls will simply cease to exist.

 

[Sticky Ice Cream]

I think it would take completely redesigning certain game mechanics to have a full solution to increasing macro and decreasing micro. And this is assuming the archaic AGE engine could support every change.

o Remove quick walling.
o Rebalance the long term wood production vs. short term wood savings of Lumbercamp vs. Mill upgrades so that wood armies want Lumbercamp upgrades first and food armies want Mill upgrades first. Still a forced decision depending on what military you want. But I think this would increase the number of build orders in the game, if only slightly.
o Redesign towers to be weaker individually yet more affordable, so that they may be more common in base defense and give defensively minded players the option of choosing Stone Mining vs. Gold Mining for improving production of base defenses.

 

[arizonatears]

The fact that AoE has the balance between micro and macro as it does is one of the reasons it has survived this long. It requires the player to make the high-level decision of how much time to allocate to army management vs eco management - which is, in it of itself, a facet of the strategic decision making you would like to see rewarded more. After all, what would an "increase[d] emphasis on macro" look like? Just booming until you can offer your opponent a leveraged buyout?

I think the only thing related to this topic that needs adjusting is improving vil pathing so I don't need to check all my woodlines and mining camps every 30 seconds to ensure there aren't vils completely idle because I small-walled them.

 

[harooooo]

One small step that could be taken for further balancing quickwalls is to make foundations of every building have 0 armor (not just foundations of walls/gates). Would help a lot with the recent meta of dropping a Market foundation and completing it only 20% to close a 4x4 space, blocking out a full group of archers even. And house quickwalls also would be reduced in strength.

Maybe exclude it for foundations of castles/town centers, since those buildings are important and not really used as quickwalls.