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Go to opptions and click something along the lines of 'easy military gather or something. So when you click and drag- the mouse only picks up the military guys while the villies keep on owrking.

Correct, the easy drag option allows you to grab only military units if they are selected in a group along with Villager units.

Currently there is no visual indicator that the Mill or Plantation is full. That does sound like a good idea though.

/Wibble

[This message has been edited by Wibble (edited 10-17-2005 @ 00:14 AM).]

First, if you assign a villager to a mill/plantation which is full, it will make a sort of "Error" sound and a text message will appear saying it.

Second, you will see and idle villager.

Third, hovering your mouse over a mill/plantation says how many gatherers are currently working on it.

Easy solution, don't mess up like that I agree though, a flag or something would be a simple and useful feature.

With experience, you'll probably naturally keep track of how many vils you have tasked on a mill as well.

[This message has been edited by Fwiffo (edited 10-17-2005 @ 00:45 AM).]

Yes, it'd be nice if a flag appeared on the top of the building or something when it is being operated at capacity.

If you can't count to ten theres something wrong with you

Hehe, but not everyone has time to count up everything in the middle of a hectic game. A flag would be a simple way to tell the player, "Hey, this joint's full, go farm elsewhere" without having to waste time.

Also, I was wondering if there are cards to increase the number of gatherers you can have at a mill or plantation? That would be really nice and could help out high-level HCs who focus on economy.

Why on earth would you want to have to count 10? This is doubly true when you have the option to select military units only by default. In the heat of battle, a simple visual cue is very useful.

If you select one of your unit and press alt, you see the stats for this unit.

Same with buildings. Select a mill or a plantation and press alt. You'll see the stats for the building including the number of vils currently working there.

No need to improve anything, it works just well.

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lol I never knew that!

If you have a group of mills bunched together, just grab all of your villagers and right click on a single mill and all of the villagers will spread out and fill up all of the nearby mills. just click the idle villager button a moment later after eveyone has settled down to grab all of the extra vills and retask them

>Also, I was wondering if there are cards to increase the number of gatherers you can have at a mill or plantation?

You're limited to 100 villagers on the map total out of your 200 population max. A boomer strategy is getting to Age 3, building 3 town centers, and micro-ing them together so you can build 3 vils at a time. Let's say I highlight the 3 town centers and then press cntl-1 to micro them together.

First build a mill. Press 1 to activate all 3 town centers. Now click the villager button and click the destination flag on the mill. Wham --that's 3 villagers counting down at once to your new mill.

From here you first build 3-4 mills for food, then build 4-5 plantations for coin. Keep your trading posts making wood so you can build the plantations. Keeping doing this while maxing out your villager population at 100 as quickly as possible.

Now that you've got the gold of 4-5 fully upgraded plantations cranking out, you can afford all the artillery in the world. The main problem is fitting all your force into the remaining 100 population slots.

Problems:
1) You're building vils in multiples of 3, and 10 is not a multiple of 3. You will waste a lot of time shuffling villagers back and forth to make sure all plantations and mills are filled.
2) Town Centers also produce all the Home Shipments. So any troops, cannons or when the fort and factory cart are shipped, you have to go to the latest Mill/Plantation being built and sort them out from the vills scrambling around like mad ants in a busy hive. Which often leads to...
3) You think you're double clicking on the group of soldiers that just got sent from the Home City. Instead you double clicked on all the villagers. You just off-tasked 80-100 villagers, crap, and now have to re-assign them in nice neat groups all over again.

You misread my question

I meant, "Is there a card that lets you task more settlers to a mill or plantation - like 15 or eventually 20?" This would be a good reward card for high level HCs, I think.

I don't know that I agree Innovan. Some of those problems seem like simple aspects of gameplay and the benefit of being able to multitask under pressure.

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Well you could just as easily send a fourth shipment and then use the idle villager key to assign the extras to other mills or plantations. If these buildings are in relative proximity to each other then you won't lose much gathering time. The first problem with you raising this point is that you haven't even provided us with your opinion on how things should work differently.

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Isn't there an option for the Town Center to specify individually where villager and military output goes to? I'll admit I haven't messed with the feature much myself. This is part of the game honestly. AoE is about the ability to balance all these various elements at once. Automate these tasks too much and I think you lose the AoE feel of gameplay.

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Double-clicking a unit has always selected every single unit of that type. I'd be a bit miffed if they changed that aspect of behaviour honestly. One change that might work for you would be if they made shift-box select or some similar key combo select all the villagers in the box instead of all the military units when that option is enabled.

>The first problem with you raising this point is that you haven't even provided us with your opinion on how things should work differently.

I'm not sure that there isn't a solution already, one that everyone else knows but me. But I doubt I'm the first ham-fisted mouser in history. The ES staff may use a different solution.

Having your nation's flag appear/not appear at the top of Mills and Plantations when they're "full" would be my first suggestion for changing the UI, one I'm guessing would be cheap to implement.

I have noticed that when you click off 100 villagers from their tasks, when you click back the 100 vils to one Mill they all seem to flow to first all open Mills then Plantations slots. That would be my second UI request: When assigning a group of villagers to a Mill, have them first fill all open Mill slot on screen, then flow to fill all Plantation slots. While clicking a group onto Plantation would flow the opposite: First open Plantations slots, then Mill.

It's also been pointed out that when you task 1 villager to build a Mill/Plantation and then fire 3 sets of 3 vils from your 3 Town Centers to the same you get 1+9 = 10, maxing it out, and that this may be intentional.

[This message has been edited by Innovan (edited 10-17-2005 @ 04:13 PM).]

The flag would be nice.

Another thing I'd like to have is a specific gather point for all mill/plantation idles. I mean, if you task a villager to a full mill, he should go stand in the top right corner or something, that way I could grab all the extras together rather than having to pick them off, which is annoying.

I agree. Flag it when it is full. Or, when it is not full, have a sign planted in the ground that says "Now Hiring."

Another nice touch would be that if you task a villager to a full mill or plantation, he would just wander over to a site that has space for him.