hey guys Spirit of the law here in this video we're going to investigate the new
autofarm placement added in the April patch this is something I didn't mention in my patch preview
video as well as the change to auto scout which we'll touch on as well since these were late
additions to the patch notes so you may or may not have heard these things were coming there's a few
things to look at here including not just how the new farming placement works but we'll cover some
tips and then talk about the autofication of the game to start with the basics pretty simply the
change is that if you have a Mill built or have a foundation you can hold shift when placing farms
and clicking on the mill where the game will now automatically place them in ideal spots
it's a nice little feature that Age of Empires 4 has had since release and should lead to more
efficient and faster to place farms in the late game speeding up a repetitive task one thing to
keep in mind is that the actual farming rate benefit to this is probably smaller than you
expect if you have the tech hand cart Farms are capped in how quickly they can generate food
and with handcart most farmers are hitting that cap even what appear to be somewhat inefficient
situations to use this setup as an example they may look like pretty poorly placed Farms that you
get by just quickly shift clicking the old way but these farmers are collectively working at about
98% of perfect efficiency with quite a few Farms toward the middle actually at 100% and even the
worst Defenders here are still over 90% efficient compared to perfect placement worth noting is
there's also no upper limit to how far away the Farms can be autoplaced and will continue to fill
any space that you've already explored if if you had the 80 or 990,000 wood you could theoretically
cover an entire 1v1 map in farms based around 1 mil next though let's play around with exactly
how this works and put the new mechanic to the test first off here I have four Mills already
built and we're going to add Farms with the new mechanic now if I were to manually place a lot
of farms naturally we'd want to start around 1 mil but move in the direction of the others a
real player with a lot of time might come up with something like this so is the new mechanic able
to factor in the complete picture so to speak it turns out it doesn't as I place more Farms using
the new mechanic notice they just stack around that one mil and radiate outward without any
sort of bias toward minimizing distances to any extra Mills right away this suggests there may
still be some advantages to manually placing Farms yourself whether it be to favor a particular side
of the Mill close to a town center for protection sake or in situations like this one shown now you
might be thinking hold on a better way to approach this setup is to try to place Farms circling each
Mill one at a time though that also doesn't work super well in this example as it doesn't make any
attempt to fit the Farms nicely together and we end up with something not much better than you'd
probably get by doing it quickly yourself clearly it's not the smartest logic behind the mechanic
which you could argue is actually a good thing creating situations where being more intentional
with the direction you place new Farms such as the side of a mill closer to a town center could
be advantageous likewise you can do all of this around a town center as well but notice it has
no special regard for straggler trees a lot of the time it's a good idea to avoid removing stragglers
with your earliest Farms since they give newly created villagers something to work on temporarily
and again you could argue the mechanic not being very smart about this leaves room for player skill
and decision-making to give a slight Advantage now though let's get to some good tips to keep in mind
as you may have already caught something pretty inefficient going on here which can be avoided
notice if I have my villagers build a Mill and place a whole bunch of farms after the mill is
built all of the villagers go to that first Farm placed from the villager's perspective they're
just trying to follow my instructions in exactly the order I asked and they are smart enough that
after the first Farm is built they then spread out but there's really two problems here first
there's a lot of bumping and inefficiency with having them all pile up on one Farm but second
as they spread out they do that relative to the first Farm they built and not the mill you can see
a villager ended up three layers out for the mill when there's still a two- layer Farm available it
would help if I didn't overbuild the number of farms to this degree but there actually an easy
way to avoid this the trick is after I've shift queued a set of farms I can let go of shift and
right click the mill a final time before it's built if I do that they'll spread themselves
out much more cleanly with one villager going to each Farm prioritizing only the closest ones you
may know this is a trick that works in AoE4's version of the mechanic as well another thing
worth pointing out is while the Farms are placed in the same order every time with an isolated Mill
the mechanic is smart enough to deal with existing Farms that set it off off the template here I have
some not perfectly placed Farms done manually and notice that shift clicking the mill does a
good job working itself into the existing pattern without any issues a little tip when adding Farms
to a mill that you've already built splitting your villagers manually can be a nice way to help
them be a bit more efficient in getting started on their Farms now I've brought up AOE 4 a couple of
times as it used this mechanic first but one thing I like is ae2 has really improved on the mechanic
with much smarter villager behavior remember if we didn't right click the mill without shift then
all of our villagers piled up on one farm and then spread out pretty quickly we should appreciate how
smart these villagers are being here as in aoe4 if you shift queue a mill in a set of farms without
right clicking The Mill at the end the villagers actually walk around as a group and Seed every
single Farm without leaving anyone behind to work them which just delays any food production by a
long time as they literally follow your orders to the letter when it comes to queuing on the other
hand an arguably better way that aoe4 handles all of this though is when you hover your mouse over
the mil you have a bit of influence on which direction the next Farm is placed the new ae2
mechanic just places farms in the same pattern every time without that ability to suggest a
Direction so you can see how the same mechanic can be implemented in different ways so that's
the basics of the new autofarm placement and how it compares to any experience you may have had
with aoe4 before we finish I want to quickly touch on the bigger picture though and why this change
is somewhat controversial being part of a larger discussion yeah given the game is over 20 years
old now naturally some players can be wary of any shift toward automating routine tasks that could
change the feel of the game or remove ways to differentiate skill level between players there's
certainly a balance between keeping the Old Guard happy and making the game intuitive and modern for
newer returning players who if they play other RTS games might assume these sorts of quality of
life features are present while I think there is a red line when these things would be over automated
I don't think this crosses it or is even all that close only and I'd have said the same thing about
auto queuing Technologies and queuing villager tasks which have all been well received for me
an example of a red line would be if Town centers could Auto queue villagers which I know is a thing
in ag of Mythology and the Ottomans in ae3 or maybe we should call them the Automans which is
fine as those are designed choices made early on for both games in aoe2 though the ability
to distract an opponent during a raid from their macro and being able to manage that aspect of your
economy under pressure is one of the core skills and challenges of the game for me I would actually
say the second automated function added this patch is if anything a little closer to that line which
is that autoscout is now being given to all Scout line units not just your starting one playing
around with it it is a little suboptimal I've noticed with units sometimes clumping up together
and other times not while also showing some of the characteristic biases of Autos Scout in general
with units seemingly preferring the right side of the map to explore first arguably the fact it's
a little weird at scouting actually means there's still a role for player skill the two situations I
think this will be massive are first after a scout rush if you have a few injured Scouts you can now
use them to explore the map instead of manually tasking them the second is hussar exploring the
map at the end of the game to find hidden bases or units keep in mind this is not a Seek and Destroy
command as they don't actually fight any units they encounter for me this does open the door
to the devs eventually adding a see can destroy command which is something many RTS games have
to mop up defeated enemies on the map but ae2 has never included given its unusually high emphasis
on unit control the continued expansion of Auto Scout though makes me think that maybe something
added down the road and I'm kind of curious what you guys think of that of all the things being
automated that seems like the most likely to happen that to me brushes up against that line
of quality of life versus taking away an important skill specifically map awareness and unit control
I suspect in general the higher a player's APM the more likely they dislike all of this
continued automation as they might feel like it's taking away their Competitive Edge so far though
I think you could argue both the new autofarm placement and even The scouting behavior have
at least some trade-offs and situations you're better off doing things manually especially your
initial scouting and early farm placement that's probably a good way to compromise letting more
skilled players get small edges and is where the auto scouting gives me slightly more hesitation
as it truly will be the best way to scout the map with Lake game hussars in the past these sorts of
quality of Life Changes it has to be said I freed up even more time and attention for higher level
micro and arguably even more emphasis on strategy since you can't rely on high APM to out macro your
opponent quite as much again I'm curious what you guys think of the whole autofication thing that's
happening over time and if it's a necessary part of a thriving game or getting too far away from
the game's Roots that'll do it for this one though thanks for watching guys I'll see you next time