unit movement is terrible

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I'm sure all of you know what I am talking about.

-You tell a villager to go repair a wall while he's on the safe side of it. What does he do? Somehow finds that the long way around path that includes walking out the front gate to repair it from the other side is the optimal route........what??? this was a problem I saw in beta that I assumed they would have fixed by release. Apparently not.

-Secondly, recalling forces back out of a hot zone. If you move an entire spread out group out of an area, the ones that are lagging occasionally walk ABYSMALLY slow like they were in the front waiting for their group to catch up, making them easy pickings for pursuers.

-I can't even use the attack move feature because they always target the most non-hostile thing first i.e. a villager or wall over an archer or soldier. At the very least, give them attack priorities or better yet, give us the players better controls over groups of units, not just a stand ground feature (which doesn't do what it says it does) and aggressive (which usually means they will pursue them all the way back into their village filled with towers). What I would like to see is 2 things in this department: 1. formation controls. And to add to that, formations that they actually follow while your at it. it gets pretty retarded having to move them all back and forward about 6 times just to get them all to properly fall into formation. 2. more than two stance settings. aggressive and stand ground are just simply not enough to work with. One I would like to see is a stance that targets only hostiles, ignoring walls, non-hostile buildings and villagers entirely(unless engaged by one). Maybe another one that causes them to clear an area of everything standing once all hostiles are dealt with i.e. what aggressive is supposed to be (kill eveything in sight and chase runners)

Other suggestions:

- walls can be somewhat of a pain to place next to trees. Maybe some kind of visual indicator so show holes in a local area that infantry can work through, rendering walls useless as a deterrent.

-an auto-repair mode for villagers. Many other RTS games have this feature, which reduces the monotonous micromanagement, not demands additional skill. I used to in PREVIOUS AOE games place a villager near all wall sides to auto repair any damage caused to that wall. Now I can still do that in this version but I have to manually target the wall AND have to watch them repair due to the fact that villagers have the quirkiest pathing of any AOE game( see problem 1).

Some of these simple fixes will and suggestions will take most of the pain of this game out of it, in just about any playstyle a players chooses (PVP, quest, etc).Granted, I have not played any PVP games yet really so I cannot really comment on that aspect.but reaping harsh consequences or even failing/losing games over mistakes made entirely on poor unit decisions is just frustrating. I've lost walls after failing an offensive and trying to fall back due to the fact that when they hit my walls trying to get into my town on a counter attack, my villager decides to path out from behind the wall and gets killed, leaving my walls unrepaired and vulnerable. Once they get through the walls, my whole town, with limited forces now is under complete siege, simply because my villager is stupid is as stupid does. Fix at least the issues that should have been completed before release and I will consider purchasing premium. Without it, this isn't what I would consider a worthy game of being paid for as it's predecessors had most of these simple features. Not quite sure how a game can jump backwards but this is what this game tends to feel like sometimes.

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First of all, I really like this game. I believe it has a potential to be great and I hope the devs can see it.

At the same time I agree with everything you say. It amazes me how unit handling and pathing like this got through beta.

bump

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I agree, this stuff was all better in previous AoE games then it is now.

I would just like to add a small point, something that also infinitely annoyed me in Supreme Commander 2 (GPG):

When a group of units is selected they form a formation,the entire group waits for the unit that might lag behind.
Traditional rts games fixed this by making the unit that was behind move a bit faster than the rest instead of slowing down or downright stopping the entire formation.

"-Secondly, recalling forces back out of a hot zone. If you move an entire spread out group out of an area, the ones that are lagging occasionally walk ABYSMALLY slow like they were in the front waiting for their group to catch up, making them easy pickings for pursuers."

Isn't that because of the snare thing? I find snare to be annoying but I guess it has some gameplay value.

Anyway, even with the current flaws in it I still likeAoEO alot, hence my effort in suggesting improvements.

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"-Secondly, recalling forces back out of a hot zone. If you move an entire spread out group out of an area, the ones that are lagging occasionally walk ABYSMALLY slow like they were in the front waiting for their group to catch up, making them easy pickings for pursuers."

I agree, I understand that a unit, or two get snared, but the whole group doesn't need to slow down.

|||There's a trick to repairing walls. You click to repair the thinner wall sections of them, not the wide post sections. The posts are the issue, I'm guessing there's something wrong with their geometry. Since I've started doing that I've never had a villager be an idiot about repairing them unless there was legitimately something in the way.
|||the problem is that groups always move at the speed of the slowest unit, so if a unit is snared into being the slowest, there you go. there should be a way to move a group while ignoring differences in movement speed. like double right clicking causing the units to all move at their own speed rather than the slowest.|||Well, the unit movement is not perfect, but it is not terrible.